Migrants in the Mountains: Shifting Borders and Contested Crisis Experiences in Rural Germany

Abstract

When one million asylum seekers and other migrants entered Germany in 2015–2016, the situation was called a national crisis. This article examines the impact of an emergency reception centre on a small town, investigating how rural Germans debated crisis experiences, migration and borders. In the Harz Mountains, asylum seekers arrived in an area already suffering from decline. Accommodating newcomers became a specific challenge. The assumption of a European-wide emergency induced by the presence of foreigners neglects how contexts shape crisis perceptions. Social fragmentation occurred when some townspeople framed local developments as the Flüchtlingskrise covered by the media, whereas others used personal experience to critique the crisis concept. As new experts in emergency management, reception centre employees changed their political consciousness. The unsteady politico-spatial order, rather than asylum seekers as subjects, produced anxiety over marginalisation, since the reception centre shifted problematic border features – chaos and risk – into central Germany.