The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany)

337 Pages·2005·0.94 MB·English

by  K. Molly O'Donnell

Social History, PopularCulture, and Politics in Germany
Geoff Eley, Series Editor
Series Editorial Board
Kathleen Canning, University of Michigan
David F. Crew, University of Texas, Austin
Atina Grossmann, The Cooper Union
Alf Lüdtke, Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen, Germany
Andrei S. Markovits, University of Michigan
Justice Imperiled: The Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar Germany,
Douglas G. Morris
The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness,edited by Krista O’Donnell,
Renate Bridenthal, and Nancy Reagin
Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London: Resistance and
Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere,Keith Holz
The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in
Nineteenth-Century Germany,Michael B. Gross
German Pop Culture: How “American” Is It? edited by Agnes C. Mueller
Character Is Destiny: The Autobiography of Alice Salomon, edited by Andrew Lees
Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in
the Third Reich,Tina M. Campt
State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State,
Ulrike Strasser
Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire,
H.Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl, editors
Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany, Katrin Sieg
Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967–2000,Nora M. Alter
Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany, Andrew Lees
The Challenge of Modernity: German Social and Cultural Studies, 1890–1960,
Adelheid von Saldern
Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History,
Christhard Hoffman, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, editors
Languages of Labor and Gender:Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850–1914,
Kathleen Canning
That Was the Wild East: Film Culture, Unification and the “New” Germany,
Leonie Naughton
Anna Seghers:The Mythic Dimension, Helen Fehervary
Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic
Germany, 1813–1916,Jean H. Quataert
Truth to Tell: German Women’s Autobiographies and Turn-of-the-Century Culture,
Katharina Gerstenberger
The “Goldhagen Effect”: History, Memory, Nazism—Facing the German Past, Geoff
Eley, editor
Shifting Memories:The Nazi Past in the New Germany, Klaus Neumann
Saxony in German History: Culture, Society, and Politics, 1830–1933,
James Retallack, editor
Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic
Practices,Peter Becker and William Clark, editors
Social History, PopularCulture, and Politics in Germany
Geoff Eley, Series Editor
(Continued)
Public Spheres, Public Mores, and Democracy: Hamburg and Stockholm,
1870–1914,Madeleine Hurd
Making Security Social: Disability, Insurance, and the Birth of the Social
Entitlement State in Germany, Greg Eghigian
The German Problem Transformed: Institutions, Politics, and Foreign Policy,
1945–1995,Thomas Banchoff
Building the East German Myth: Historical Mythology and Youth Propaganda in the
German Democratic Republic, 1945–1989,Alan L. Nothnagle
Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany 1820–1989,Steve Hochstadt
Triumph of the Fatherland:German Unification and the Marginalization of Women,
Brigitte Young
Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German
and Austrian Imagination, Gerd Gemünden
The Imperialist Imagination:German Colonialism and Its Legacy,
Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, editors
Catholicism, Political Culture, and the Countryside: ASocial History of the Nazi
Party in South Germany, Oded Heilbronner
AUser’s Guide to German Cultural Studies, Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, and
Jonathan Petropoulos, editors
AGreener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the
GermanHeimatschutzMovement,1904–1918,William H. Rollins
West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in Germany in the
Adenauer Era, Robert G. Moeller, editor
How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming
Woman, Erica Carter
Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Public Sphere, 1923–1945,
Kate Lacey
Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity
in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914,Pieter M. Judson
Jews, Germans, Memory: Reconstruction of Jewish Life in Germany,
Y. Michal Bodemann, editor
Paradoxes of Peace: German Peace Movements since 1945,
Alice Holmes Cooper
Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930,Geoff Eley, editor
Technological Democracy: Bureaucracy and Citizenry in the German Energy
Debate,Carol J. Hager
The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia: Conservatives,
Bureaucracy, and the Social Question, 1815–70,Hermann Beck
The People Speak! Anti-Semitism and Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Bavaria,
James F. Harris
From BundesrepubliktoDeutschland:German Politics after Unification, Michael G.
Huelshoff, Andrei S. Markovits, and Simon Reich, editors
The Stigma of Names: Antisemitism in German Daily Life, 1812–1933,
Dietz Bering
Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after
Bismarck, Geoff Eley
Heimat
The Abroad
The Boundaries of Germanness
Edited by Krista O’Donnell, Renate Bridenthal,
and Nancy Reagin
The University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2005
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
cPrinted on acid-free paper
2008 2007 2006 2005 4 3 2 1
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise,
without the written permission of the publisher.
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Heimat abroad : the boundaries of Germanness / edited by Krista
O’Donnell, Nancy Reagin, and Renate Bridenthal.
p. cm. — (Social history, popular culture, and politics in
Germany)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn0-472-11491-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn0-472-03067-1
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Germans—Foreign countries. 2. Germany—Emigration and
immigration. 3. Jews, German—Foreign countries. 4. Population
transfers—Germans. I. O’Donnell, Krista, 1967– II. Reagin, Nancy
Ruth, 1960– III. Bridenthal, Renate. IV. Series.
dd68.h45 2005
305.83'1—dc22 2004025472
ISBN13 978-0-472-11491-7 (cloth)
ISBN13 978-0-472-03067-5 (paper)
ISBN13 978-0-472-02512-1 (electronic)
Acknowledgments
The editors owe thanks to many people who midwifed this project
along the way from its beginnings as a panel at the American Histori-
cal Association to this more comprehensive volume. Foremost among
these is Dr. Hanna Schissler, currently at the George Eckert Institute
for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig, Germany.
During her visiting professorship at New York University in 1998–99,
she organized a conference that brought together our ‹rst round of
contributors along with trenchant commentators. Among those who
enabled us to develop greater coherence for this project in its earliest
stages are Volker Berghahn, Alon Con‹no, John R. Davis, Hasia
Diner, Karen Eng, Benjamin Lapp, Daniel Levy, Robert Moeller,
Molly Nolan, Martin Schain, and Frank Stern.
In addition, we owe many insights to our German Women’s History
Group, which, in addition to its much valued sisterly camaraderie, pro-
vided forthright suggestions that immeasurably improved work in
progress. Ever rejuvenating itself, the group now consists of the fol-
lowing members: Bonnie Anderson, Dolores Augustine, Marion
Berghahn, Rebecca Boehling, Jana Bruns, Jane Caplan, Belinda
Davis, Lynne Fallwell, Atina Grossmann, Amy Hackett, Deborah
Hertz, Maria Hoehn, Young Sun Hong, Marion Kaplan, Jan Lam-
bertz, Molly Nolan, Katherine Pence, and Julia Sneeringer.
We are grateful to Geoff Eley for recognizing the signi‹cance of this
work for the ‹eld of German history and for his wise suggestions and
un›agging faith in its ultimate merit. We would also like to recognize our
respective institutions for their support of this project: for Krista O’Don-
nell, the Provost’s Assigned Released Time program at William Pater-
son University; for Nancy Reagin, Pace University, particularly the
Dyson Dean’s Of‹ce, for providing the course reductions that helped to
complete the work. We also thank the helpful staff at the University of
Michigan Press. We greatly appreciate the thoughtful detailed com-
ments of the two anonymous readers, who compelled us to rethink some
of our ideas. Any ›aws that remain are due to our own stubbornness.

Contents
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
PART1. The Legal and Ideological Context of
Diasporic Nationalism 15
Chapter 1. Diasporic Citizens: Germans Abroad
in the Framing of German
Citizenship Law Howard Sargent 17
Chapter 2. Home, Nation, Empire: Domestic Germanness
and Colonial Citizenship Krista O’Donnell 40
Chapter 3. German-Speaking People and German Heritage:
Nazi Germany and the Problem
of Volksgemeinschaft Norbert Götz 58
PART2. Bonds of Trade and Culture 83
Chapter 4. Blond and Blue-Eyed in Mexico City, 1821
to 1975 Jürgen Buchenau 85
Chapter 5. Jews, Germans, or Americans? German-Jewish
Immigrants in the Nineteenth-Century
United States Tobias Brinkmann 111
Chapter 6. German Landscape: Local Promotion of
the HeimatAbroad Thomas Lekan 141
Chapter 7. In Search of Home Abroad: German Jews
in Brazil, 1933–45 Jeffrey Lesser 167
viii Contents
PART3. Islands of Germanness 185
Chapter 8. Germans from Russia: The Political Network of
a Double Diaspora Renate Bridenthal 187
Chapter 9. When Is a Diaspora Not a Diaspora? Rethinking
Nation-Centered Narratives about Germans in
Habsburg East Central Europe Pieter Judson 219
Chapter 10. German Brigadoon? Domesticity and
Metropolitan Germans’ Perceptions of
Auslandsdeutschenin Southwest Africa
and Eastern Europe Nancy R. Reagin 248
Chapter 11. Tenuousness and Tenacity: The Volksdeutschen
of Eastern Europe, World War II, and
the Holocaust Doris L. Bergen 267
Chapter 12. The Politics of Homeland: Irredentism and
Reconciliation in the Policies of German
Federal Governments and Expellee
Organizations toward Ethnic German
Minorities in Central and Eastern Europe,
1949–99 Stefan Wolff 287
List of Contributors 313
Index 317
Abbreviations
AA Auswärtiges Amt (German Foreign Of‹ce)
ADV Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League)
AHSGR American Historical Society of Germans from Russia
ALR Allgemeines Landrecht [of Prussia] (General Prussian
Legal Code)
BdV Bund der Vertriebenen—Vereinigte Landsmannschaften
und Landesverbände (Union of Expellees—United
Regional-Cultural Associations and State Organizations)
BHE Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten (Union of
Expellees and Disenfranchised) (later Gesamtdeutscher
Block-Bund vertriebener Deutscher)
BvD Bund vertriebener Deutscher (Union of Expelled Germans)
CDU Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic
Union)
CSU Christlich Soziale Union (Christian Social Union)
DAI Deutsches Ausland-Institut(German Foreign Institute)
DFP Dakota Freie Presse (Dakota Free Press)
DKG Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society)
DNP Departamento Nacional de Povoamento (National
Population Department)
DOD Deutscher Ostdienst(German Eastern Service)
DPO Deutsche Post aus dem Osten(German Post from the East)
DVM Deutsche Volksgemeinschaft in Mexiko(German
Volksgemeinschaft in Mexico)
EU European Union
FDP Freie Demokratische Parte: (Free Democratic Party)
FstR Forschungsstelle des Russlanddeutschtums im Deutschen
Ausland-Institut (Research Of‹ce of the Russian
Germandom of the DAI)
GDP Gesamtdeutsche Partei (All-German Party)
GSWA German Southwest Africa (now Namibia)
JCA Jewish Colonization Association