Abstract:
This article is concerned with the Poles who left their homeland voluntarily and trouble-free in the period between the fall of communism in Poland in 1989 and some years before the eastern enlargement of the EU in May 2004. It concentrates on people who were young at the time of their arrival in Germany (i.e., not older than 30 years) and therefore constitute a group of a ‘new’ or ‘young’ generation of the Polish immigrants in Germany. An attempt is made here to describe some framing conditions that disturb the immigration process and/or enhance the development of the trajectory of suffering, i.e., to illustrate and analyse various social and biographical circumstances that make the immigration process difficult or that result in interactional anomy and enhance the trajectory dynamics. Those frame conditions emerged from very scrupulous analysis of autobiographical narrative interviews with young Poles in Germany.
Keywords:
Autobiographical narrative interview; Polish immigrants to Germany; Trajectory of suffering; Marginality