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By Kevin Connolly

When you are a migrant, timing is everything.

Sometimes that’s because you have to judge the moment when the time has come to leave your home, if you’re driven by war and disease or famine and poverty.

Sometimes it’s because there are opportunities in the country to which you want to move - a labour shortage, perhaps, or a relaxation of visa rules. 

When we think about movements of population, we tend to mean from poorer countries to richer ones in search of a better life.

Things are more complex if it’s between countries with roughly similar levels of prosperity.

The British and the Germans, for example, have been settling in each other’s countries in small but significant numbers for many years. The precise numbers have always depended on the prevailing historical circumstances. Joint membership of the European Union since 1973 has made it easier to move for work, but the UK also left armies of occupation in Germany after both world wars.

For nearly 200 years, Britain has had a royal family drawn from German nobility. All that shared history created plenty of shared roots as courtiers flitted between the two capitals, soldiers settled down with German wives, and workers took advantage of the EU’s freedom of movement to build new lives.

History created the framework and every settler chose the time that was right for them.

Shared history

Every wave of British migrants in Germany had lessons to learn of one sort or another - often at challenging moments in history.

It is unlikely that Prince Ernest Augustus of Hanover would have considered himself part of a 19th Century wave of British migration into Germany.

But as the fifth son of King George III, he does qualify - just about.

Ernest Augustus became King of Hanover

Ernest Augustus was born in England but returned to his family’s seat of power to take the throne in Hanover, because Hanoverian law in that period prevented the throne from passing to a female claimant.

His statue is the first thing you see when you emerge from the bustling railway station in the city.

He’s a reminder of how historical connections shape the modern world.

Perhaps it was because of that royal link (the House of Hanover ruled the UK from 1714 to 1901), that this region of Germany was assigned to the British Military Government at the end of World War Two in 1945.

The Hanoverians are a fascinating bunch.

George I was only 52nd in line to the British throne when he took the crown in 1714. He was widely reputed - perhaps unfairly - to not even speak English. But he was the principal Protestant contender and British law was designed to ensure that the crown wouldn’t revert to a Roman Catholic.

All that most people remember of the dynasty these days is the “madness of King George III” an incapacitating mental condition that saw one of his sons reign as Prince Regent. 

But there was much that was noteworthy about the others too.

George II was the last English monarch to lead his army into battle, at Dettingen in 1743.

Interestingly, the Hanoverian period found the British agonising about how deeply they should be involved in European affairs in very much the same terms as they agonise now.

The great issue of the early 1730s was whether or not the UK should take an active part in the War of the Polish Succession.

Sir Robert Walpole

Prime Minister Robert Walpole led the faction determined to keep the British out of European affairs, and was able to declare at one moment: “There are 50,000 men slain in Europe this year and not an Englishman amongst them.” 

Britain did find itself at war shortly afterwards but Walpole had succinctly made the abstentionist case.

And more importantly from our point of view Ernest Augustus and his fellow Hanoverians had helped to build a framework of relationships which would create links lasting long into the future.

The fortunes of the world in the 20th Century were shaped in large measure by the two great global wars.

But both conflicts also ended with the UK as part of a victorious alliance in each case leaving behind an army of occupation.

Those armies - particularly the second time around - put down deep roots and created Anglo-German families, which in some cases opted to remain in Germany when the father’s British military service was over. It’s just one more example of how global events shape individual lives and even help to explain patterns of migration.

The first task of the British Military Government in 1945 was to disband the Nazi army, restore stability and in many cases bury the dead. But the task quickly became more complex. Feeding Germany became a priority and some food that might have been used to improve the limited rations in the UK were diverted to that purpose.

Hugh Pierson, a former serviceman and liaison officer with British forces in Germany, says it took time for the attitude of some in the British forces to change: “There were definitely soldiers that had suffered. So there was resentment on the British part against the Germans, no doubt about it. But I think a lot of the British Army began to understand what had happened to Germany. 

“It’s one thing to see the odd newsreel of the damage. It’s quite another to live in the country which had been so devastated. And I think there was an element of thinking, ‘We need to help the people get back on their feet.’”

There was - in the first months at least - a curfew, and a degree of de-Nazification. British troops showed films of the liberation of concentration camps to German audiences.

But it wasn’t long before the rules began to relax and, in their wake, the flourishing of personal relationships which led eventually to the creation of Anglo-German families and thus to a new wave of British settlement.

One inevitable tool of fraternisation, as it was charmingly known, was football. By December 1945, only six months after the end of the war in Europe, the German amateur side VfB Detmold was chosen to play against a British Army team - helpfully identified on the promotional poster as an Englische Soldatenmannschaft.

History doesn’t record the score but relationships were changing. Not long after that game my own father was playing in a German semi-professional team in Berlin, alongside a demobilised German soldier he’d been responsible for guarding.

More importantly from our point of view, personal relationships were beginning to establish against this most forbidding of backgrounds. These would form the seeds of another wave of British settlement.

In Bielefeld in 1945, a British soldier called Jeffrey Wall met his German future wife Ellis. They married in 1947.

Jeffrey and Ellis Wall's wedding in 1947

The Walls decided to return to the UK, but plenty of other similar couples eventually decided to make their homes in Germany.  Sometimes the children of those Anglo-German unions made the decision to stay for themselves.

Migration is one of the hardest subjects to analyse, because it’s both universal and intensely personal.

Many migrants move as refugees because war, famine and disaster drive them from their homes. Others are motivated by the search for a better life.

Movement between countries with roughly similar levels of wealth and development are even harder to analyse.

Top 10 countries

• The UK is among the world’s leading countries, both as a destination for immigration and as a source of emigration

• In 2017 the top 10 host countries accounted for half the 258 million global migrants

• The top 10 source countries account for a third of all migrants

_Source:

Sometimes migration is a matter of fashion - lots of Americans flooded to the Paris of the 1920s for example.

In the early 2000s, something similar happened on a smaller scale with British citizens who had an affinity with Germany, often because they’d studied the language at university.

Once again you have a sense of how migration is shaped by a combination of large global factors and small personal decisions.

In many parts of the EU, the precise scale of those trends has become hard to measure because movement between member states - in the theology of European integration - wasn’t seen as migration in the traditional sense. That is the essence of the policy of Freedom of Movement.

But if key chapters in history, like the shared Hanoverian monarchy and the British military presence, shaped migratory flows in the past, then it’s reasonable to assume that Brexit will provide another, similar moment of change.

The official estimate of the number of UK citizens living in Germany is a pleasingly precise 116,470. There is even a symmetry in the way that the number of Germans living in the UK roughly matches the number of British migrants who’ve travelled in the opposite direction - just over 100,000 in each case. 

The actual number may be slightly higher or lower because it’s not clear exactly how individuals with dual nationality are counted. Germany allows people to hold joint citizenship with another country as long as it’s an EU member state. That’s included the UK until now but may not after Brexit.

For that reason the number of British applications for dual nationality or naturalisation has jumped as Brexit looms - from 622 in 2015 to 7,493 in 2017, and what’s anticipated to be a higher number for the next 12-month period to be measured.

_{Source: Destatis (Federal Statistical Office of Germany)}

The effect of Brexit so far has been to create a mood of anxiety among British expatriates in other EU member states.

There is uncertainty over how access to state healthcare will be managed in the future and over long-term issues such as arrangements for paying pensions in one country, when they are based on National Insurance contributions in another.

Some will have to consider applying for a passport from another member state to protect their status as EU citizens, even if that means giving up British nationality, as it probably will in Germany.

Similar factors weigh on the three million or more EU citizens who’ve made their home in the UK.

In a field notoriously hard to measure and predict, it seems safe to say that migration between countries like Germany and the UK will continue, even if the legal and political framework around migration changes.

That’s because a small minority of people have always been ready to leave their homes and move between countries, and the reasons are often subtle and not likely to be swayed by the prevailing political climate. Often people are driven by a sense of adventure, by job opportunities created through language skills or simply because they fall in love.

The question for our age is what pressures will help to shape the movement of people between Britain and Germany and the wider world in the years to come.