Monarch (migrant worker)

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Monarch was a special term for migrant workers who were hired out at harvest time to earn a living, especially among the rural population of northern Germany between approx. 1890 and 1945 .

term

This term monarch has nothing in common with that of the monarch (as the sole ruler, see monarchy ), even if the view was repeatedly taken that it was a corruption of the same. Rather, it originally comes from the Yiddish vocabulary and is a combination of Makor (for comrade) and Nechor (for stranger) (after Wolf 1985.)

history

On the island of Fehmarn , one had to rely on a very large number of these helpers during the harvest months (Thomsen speaks of up to 3,500 people in 1982) in order to be able to cope with the workload on large farms. In addition to providing assistance in rural areas, monarchs also worked as railway workers around 1900 in the expansion of branch lines in the entire north-west of Germany and thus reached the south-Westphalian mountainous region and the Eifel . Since they were avoided by the local population along the newly emerging railway lines because of their rough manners and their perceived rude behavior, they often lived in emergency shelters and in some cases even sought shelter in smaller caves.

Through targeted campaigns by the National Socialist regime to apprehend so-called “anti-socials”, the monarchs were presumably (according to Ahrweiler 2011) together with other similar groups of people (such as vagabonds and vagabonds) transferred to the concentration camps in large numbers and killed there.

literature

  • R. Ahrweiler: On the social history of vagabond migrant workers between 1860 and 1945 and their probable connections to Westphalian “monarchs caves” . GRIN-Verlag, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-640-79125-5 .
  • EH Thomsen: Agricultural migrant workers and servants in Schleswig-Holstein 1880–1914. Dissertation. University of Kiel, Kiel 1982, DNB 830306536 .
  • S. Wolf: Dictionary of the Rotwelschen. German crooks language . Buske Verlag, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-87118-736-4 .