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The Granddaughter’s Dissertation: Some
Thoughts on Knowledge about Migration in 1960s
Switzerland
AUGUST 10, 2017 ~ KIJAN ESPAHANGIZI
While studying the scholarly literature on immigration in post–World War II
Switzerland, the personal dedication in a 1964 dissertation about the “assimilation of
foreign workers” caught my attention: “In memory of my paternal grandmother
Antonietta Zanolli-Recati, who in 1905 moved with her family from Belluno to Zurich,
the land of Pestalozzi.”1 This dedication interests me because it points to the ambiguity
of “migrant knowledge,” a concept that has been introduced only recently to academic
debates at the intersection of the histories of migration and knowledge.2 The case of
Satuila Zanolli, the author of this dedication and the study it accompanied, invites a
closer look at the interrelation of two different aspects of the broader problem of
migration and knowledge formation: (1) knowledge possessed by the migrants
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themselves, that is, migrant knowledge in the truest sense of the term, and (2)
knowledge about the phenomenon of migration, that is, migration knowledge.3
Not until the early 1960s did scholars face up to the immigration that had been taking
place in Switzerland since the end of World War II. These scholars came mainly from
the fields of economics, cultural anthropology (Volkskunde), psychiatry, social
psychology, and sociology. Between 1948 and the mid-1960s, hundreds of thousands of
mostly Italian foreign workers had come to Switzerland in order to work in factories
and workshops, in hotels and restaurants, in fields and on construction sites.4 They
fueled economic growth throughout the three-decade-long boom, the so-called trente
glorieuses. Switzerland’s official rotational model of seasonal migration meant that
workers were not supposed to settle there or bring their families—but they did.5 Around
1960, different actors and institutions in Switzerland began to realize that immigration
was not only an economic necessity but already a social reality, one that consequently
required scholarly research. In 1961, the Swiss government set up a federal research
commission in order to meet the emerging Foucauldian will to know and study what
was popularly perceived as the “problem of foreign workers.”6
It was in this context that Satuila Zanolli’s academic advisor at the University of Zurich
proposed she write a dissertation on the seemingly urgent topic. In a telephone
interview I did with her in January 2017, Satuila Stierlin, née Zanolli, emphasized that
one important reason behind her decision to follow this advice was that it resonated
with her own biography as a third-generation immigrant of Jewish-Italian descent.
In general, the interaction between
Interior view of foreign worker barracks in
Switzerland, ca. 1965. Source:
Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv,
Sozarch_F_5002-Fx-025 (used by
permission).
scholarship and personal experience can be
examined along two lines. On the one hand,
there was the impact of research on the
personal development and family
constellations of the “migrant” academic
actors. The psychoanalytic sessions that
Zanolli attended four times a week while
pursuing her research in the early 1960s point
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in this direction. She still remembers vividly
the effect of her work on her father, who was
born in Switzerland but struggled with
feelings of rootlessness. He took pride in his
daughter interviewing the male Italian metal
workers, with whom he identified, in their
barracks at a leading machine factory in
Zurich. In the recollections she shared on the
telephone, Satuila Zanolli’s academic pathway
figures as one thread in the rich texture of a
family history that unfolds around a strong
migration narrative. The story begins with the
decision of a woman at the beginning of the
century—her paternal grandmother—to take destiny into her own hands. Antonietta
Zanolli-Recati leads her family from Northern Italy to the land of Pestalozzi, hoping for
a better education and life for her children. Her story in Zurich encompasses the small
fashion boutique she opens and the vibrant social life it attracts due to her charm and
fascinating personality; the anarchists, artists, and pacifists that frequent the family’s
residence during World War I; the return of her husband to Italy; and her death shortly
after her granddaughter Satuila is born in 1934. The German-Italian-Jewish
grandparents on her maternal side have to emigrate from Torino to Switzerland with
the outbreak of World War I. Their story is one of refugees that never manage to
assimilate in Switzerland. It was against the backdrop of this social memory of
different migration and assimilation experiences that Satuila’s research in the early
1960s gained personal significance in the form of familial introspection and selfreflection.7
From an epistemological perspective, on the other hand, the analytical focus shifts
away from the dramaturgy of Satuila Zanolli’s academic work in the context of her
family history. The question instead becomes how this particular migrant experience
shaped the scholarly knowledge about migration that it brought forth. No doubt, due to
her cultural knowledge, language skills, and migrant knowledge, Zanolli had both a
personal incentive and privileged access to her migrant research subjects. Moreover, it
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is noteworthy how she overcame the
provincial scope of the debates in
Switzerland at that time with regard to
the epistemic framework of her study.
Zanolli had been in the United States for
two years before beginning her PhD
work. According to her own account, this
transatlantic migration experience and
Cornell University’s cosmopolitan
intellectual milieu at the time inspired
her deeply. Back in Switzerland, she
developed her analytical approach less
The grandmother, Antonietta Zanolli. Source:
Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, Ar 145.40.4 (used by
permission).
with regard to the Swiss debate than,
earlier than most of her Swiss
colleagues, in light of the international literature on assimilation of the 1950s, which
she was able to consult at the library of the International Labor Organization in
Geneva.8 This material included studies about Belgium, France, and Australia as well
as, most importantly for her, the work of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt on immigration to Israel.
Seen from today, Zanolli’s approach might appear assimilationist. It is important,
however, to note that Zanolli’s emphasis of the reciprocity of assimilation processes
between immigrants and the host society took up progressive approaches of the time
that paved the way for integrationist arguments in Switzerland in the 1970s and 1980s.
The case of Zanolli offers a vivid example of the interactions between personal
migration experience-cum-expertise and the history of migration research; however, it
provides no general answer to the question of how one shapes the other. Alone the
scholars involved in social research on migration in Switzerland in the 1960s and 1970s
evince a broad variety of personal migration backgrounds and of individual ways of
relating them to their research. There was, for example, the psychiatrist Michele Risso
from Northern Italy, who studied attitudes toward magic among foreign workers from
Southern Italy at a clinic in Lausanne (where he met Zanolli); Richard F. Behrendt, a
German-Jewish expatriate and sociology professor at the University of Bern, who was a
member of the federal research commission on foreign workers and whose progressive
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stance on mutual assimilation was an important influence for Zanolli; the Hungarian
refugee and psychiatrist Emil Pintér, who examined the mental health problems of
fellow countrymen with regard to their difficult situation in Swiss exile after the 1956
uprising; and the son of Polish immigrants in Germany, Hans-Joachim HoffmannNowotny, who moved to Switzerland in 1966 for his PhD research and who became a
professor at the University of Zurich and an internationally influential migration
sociologist in the 1970s.9 The possible tensions and contradictions between personal
experience and scholarly knowledge are illustrated in the life of the migration scholar
Hans-Joachim Hoffmann-Nowotny. As a scholar, he championed a structural
understanding of integration, but as an immigrant he never even applied for Swiss
citizenship.
All of these examples hint at the rich and diverse historical interrelation of personal
(post)migration experience and migration research. At the same time, they raise the
question of who should then be counted as a migrant researcher. At first glance, the
Swiss anthropologist and historian Rudolf Braun, another crucial figure in the nascent
Swiss migration research of the 1960s, does not seem to be covered by this analytical
category. A closer look at his biography, however, reveals that Braun’s research on
Italian workers in Switzerland was very closely related—on a personal and intellectual
level—to his academic stay of several years in the United States in the first half of the
1960s. Should his tenure at the University of Chicago be perceived as a migration
experience rather than an episode abroad?10 This example reminds us to be cautious in
applying sociological categories to history. Satuila Zanolli’s own migratory path led
back to the United States in 1965, where she started to work in the field of family
psychology, and then to Germany in 1974, where she still works as a renowned family
therapist. Zanolli would consider herself a cosmopolitan rather than a migrant—just as
I see myself, by the way, in spite of my own migration background.
It seems safe to say that the production of knowledge on migration in Switzerland in
the 1960s was motivated and shaped by the nation-state’s will to know and to regulate
immigration, as was the case in other countries.11 At the same time, the examples of
Satuila Zanolli and other migration scholars suggest that migration knowledge is
inseparable from migrant knowledge. Histories of migration knowledge must also take
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into account the impact of personal experiences with migration, integration, alienation,
and estrangement.
Kijan Espahangizi holds a PhD in the History of Science and is Managing Director of Zentrum
Geschichte des Wissens in Zurich, Switzerland.
1. Satuila Zanolli, L’assimilation des travailleurs étrangers: Enquête sur les problèmes
d’adaptation de 100 Italiens ouvriers sur métaux dans une grande entreprise
zurichoise, (Zurich: Juris, 1964).
2. See Lisa Gerlach, “Report: Migration and Knowledge,” December 21, 2016, History of
Knowledge, https://historyofknowledge.net/2016/12/21/report-migration-andknowledge/; and Simone Lässig and Swen Steinberg, eds., Knowledge and
Migration, special issue of Geschichte und Gesellschaft 43, no. 3 (2017).
3. My research on Zanolli is part of a broader project I am undertaking on the history
of migration knowledge.
4. In 1970, approximately one million inhabitants of Switzerland were foreign
nationals. This number amounted to over 16% of the population, a share that had
been around 5% at the end of World War II. Etienne Piguet, Einwanderungsland
Schweiz: Fünf Jahrzehnte halb geöffnete Grenzen (Bern: Haupt, 2006), 30 and 40.
5. Jakob Tanner, Geschichte der Schweiz im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 2015),
333. See also Gianni D’Amato, “Historische und soziologische Übersicht über die
Migration in der Schweiz,” Schweizerisches Jahrbuch für Entwicklungspolitik 27,
no. 2 (2008): 177–95.
6. See Kijan Espahangizi, “‘Nötigenfalls müßte an die Einführung des ius soli gedacht
werden,’” Geschichte der Gegenwart, August 6, 2017,
http://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/noetigenfalls-muesste-an-die-einfuehrung-desius-soli-gedacht-werden/; and Kijan Espahangizi, “Towards a Knowledge History of
Postmigrant Societies: A Case Study on the Emergence of Migration and Integration
Research in Switzerland, 1960–73,” in Changing Landscapes: Switzerland and
Migration, ed. Barbara Lüthi and Damir Skenderovic (forthcoming).
7. The importance of family history for the Zanollis can be seen in how they handed
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family papers over to the Schweizerische Sozialarchiv in Zurich. See Ar 145 at
http://findmittel.ch/archive/archNeu/Ar145.html.
8. On the role of this NGO in the production and distribution of international
migration knowledge, see the dissertation project of Yann Stricker at the University
of Lucerne, “The Invention of International Migration in a Colonial World: Statistical
Knowledge Production and International Organization in the 1920s,”
https://www.unilu.ch/fakultaeten/ksf/institute/historischesseminar/mitarbeitende/yann-stricker/#c5174.
9. Michele Risso and Wolfgang Böker, Verhexungswahn: Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis
von Wahnerkrankungen süditalienischer Arbeiter in der Schweiz (Basel: S. Karger,
1964); Richard F. Behrendt, “Die Assimilation ausländischer Arbeitskräfte in
soziologischer Hinsicht,” Zeitschrift für Präventivmedizin 8, no. 6 (1963): 337–44;
Emil Pintér, Wohlstandsflüchtlinge: Eine sozialpsychiatrische Studie an
ungarischen Flüchtlingen in der Schweiz (Basel: Karger, 1969); Hans-Joachim
Hoffmann-Nowotny, Migration: Ein Beitrag zu einer soziologischen Erklärung
(Stuttgart: Enke, 1970); Hans-Joachim Hoffmann-Nowotny, Soziologie des
Fremdarbeiterproblems: Eine theoretische und empirische Analyse am Beispiel der
Schweiz (Stuttgart: Enke, 1973).
10. See Rudolf Braun Sozio-kulturelle Probleme der Eingliederung italienischer
Arbeitskräfte in der Schweiz (Erlenbach: Rentsch, 1970); and Espahangizi, “Towards
a Knowledge History of Postmigrant Societies.”
11. See, for example, Janine Dahinden, “A Plea for the ‘De-Migrantization’ of Research
on Migration and Integration,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39, no. 13 (2016): 2207–25.
Suggested citation: Kijan Espahangizi, “The Granddaughter’s Dissertation: Some Thoughts on
Knowledge about Migration in 1960s Switzerland,” History of Knowledge, August 10, 2017,
https://historyofknowledge.net/2017/08/10/the-granddaughters-dissertation/.
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