Discussions about intermarriage between foreign Muslim men and German Christian women from the 1950s to the 1970s shaped concepts of Islam, gender and difference found in more recent integration debates. Those insisting on inherent incompatibilities between Germans and Turks since the 1970s have drawn on these tropes developed decades earlier. Yet the post-war context differed from the later period in three important ways: the Muslim foreigners were students and interns, not guestworkers; it was German Christian women (not foreign Muslim women in Germany) who were the presumed victims of Muslim men; and it was principally national church institutions that formulated the language about difference.

In response to the mass globalization of the twenty-first century and associated migration, a recent boom in social-scientific research has analyzed various manifestations of 'binational', interreligious and interracial romantic relationships in the present and recent past. This special issue seeks to historicize this research by drawing on key case studies from around the world and across time and building on relevant historiography and theoretical literature. It seeks to chart how intermarriage and related relationships took shape: who participated in these unions? How common were they, and in which circumstances were they practiced (or banned)? With a global, diachronic and interdisciplinary perspective, we also aim to question some of the categories behind these relationships. Central to these issues, we argue, is the question of boundary formation. Here, we draw on social-scientific research that has emphasized multiple boundaries involved in the creation of identity and groups. We also highlight the intersectionality of those boundaries, meaning that notions about ethnicity, religion, gender and social class often overlap and intersect in various ways when it comes to relationships. Contributions to this collection tap a range of related questions, such as how did geographical boundariesfor example, across national lines, distinctions between colonies and metropoles or metaphors of the 'East' and the 'West'shape the treatment of intermarriage? What role have social and symbolic boundaries, such as presumed racial, confessional or socio-economic divides, played? To what extent and how were those boundaries blurred in the eyes of contemporaries? How have bureaucracies and law contributed to the creation of boundaries preventing romantic unions? Romantic relationships, we suggest, provided a key test case for boundary crossings because they brought into sharp relief assumptions not only about community and assimilation, but also about the sanctity of the intimate sphere of love and family.

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This article discusses the Alliance of German Women Married to Foreigners (Interessengemeinschaft der mit Ausländern verheirateten Frauen [IAF]) from its origins in 1972 until the mid-1980s. The IAF founders recognized that in Germany, women’s rights and foreigner rights were intricately linked; they worked to address both. Yet pursuing this dual-pronged approach over the next fifteen years, an increasingly hostile period for foreigners in Germany, exposed the challenges of working both for and with foreign men. The resulting tensions within the organization, highlighted in discussions over the inclusion of foreign men and women, ultimately led IAF women to broaden their organization’s scope and constituency. The IAF’s history reflects the gradual, and not always smooth, mutual recognition of Germany’s feminist and foreigner/citizenship rights advocacy communities. It also shows that in the 1970s and 1980s, it was not foreign but German women—specifically, those married to foreign men—who represented the confluence of these issues and grappled with their implications.

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