Between Heimat and Hatred

Between Heimat and Hatred

Author: Philipp Nielsen

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-04-15

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0190930675

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In the decades between German unification and the demise of the Weimar Republic, German Jewry negotiated their collective and individual identity under the impression of legal emancipation, continued antisemitism, the emergence of Zionism and Socialism, the First World War, and revolution and the republic. For many German Jews liberalism and also increasingly Socialism became attractive propositions. Yet conservative parties and political positions right-of-center also held appeal for some German Jews. Between Heimat and Hatred studies German Jews involved in ventures that were from the beginning, or became increasingly, of the Right. Jewish agricultural settlement, Jews' participation in the so-called "Defense of Germandom in the East", their place in military and veteran circles and finally right-of-center politics form the core of this book. These topics created a web of social activities and political persuasions neither entirely conservative nor entirely liberal. For those German Jews engaging with these issues, their motivation came from sincere love of their German Heimat-a term for home imbued with a deep sense of belonging-and from their middle-class environment, as well as to repudiate antisemitic stereotypes of rootlessness, intellectualism or cosmopolitanism. This tension stands at the heart of the book. The book also asks when did the need for self-defense start to outweigh motivations of patriotism and class? Until when could German Jews espouse views to the right of the political spectrum without appearing extreme to either Jews or non-Jews? In an exploration of identity and exclusion, Philipp Nielsen locates the moments when active Jewish members of conservative projects became the radical other. He notes that the decisive stage of the transformation of the German Right occurred precisely during a period of republican stabilization, when even mainstream right-of-center politics abandoned the state-centric, Volk-based ethnic concepts of the Weimar republic. The book builds on recent studies of Jews' relation to German nationalism, the experience of German Jews away from the large cities, and the increasing interest in Germans' obsession with regional roots and the East. The study follows these lines of inquiry to investigate the participation of some German Jews in projects dedicated to originally, or increasingly, illiberal projects. As such it shines light on an area in which Jewish participation has thus far only been treated as an afterthought and illuminates both Jewish and German history afresh.


The Heimat Abroad

The Heimat Abroad

Author: K. Molly O'Donnell

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2010-02-22

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0472025120

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Germans have been one of the most mobile and dispersed populations on earth. Communities of German speakers, scattered around the globe, have long believed they could recreate their Heimat (homeland) wherever they moved, and that their enclaves could remain truly German. Furthermore, the history of Germany is inextricably tied to Germans outside the homeland who formed new communities that often retained their Germanness. Emigrants, including political, economic, and religious exiles such as Jewish Germans, fostered a nostalgia for home, which, along with longstanding mutual ties of family, trade, and culture, bound them to Germany. The Heimat Abroad is the first book to examine the problem of Germany's long and complex relationship to ethnic Germans outside its national borders. Beyond defining who is German and what makes them so, the book reconceives German identity and history in global terms and challenges the nation state and its borders as the sole basis of German nationalism. Krista O'Donnell is Associate Professor of History, William Paterson University. Nancy Reagin is Professor of History, Pace University. Renete Bridenthal is Emerita Professor of History, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.


An Imperial Homeland

An Imperial Homeland

Author: Adam A. Blackler

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2022-08-19

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 0271093803

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At the turn of the twentieth century, depictions of the colonized world were prevalent throughout the German metropole. Tobacco advertisements catered to the erotic gaze of imperial enthusiasts with images of Ovaherero girls, and youth magazines allowed children to escape into “exotic domains” where their imaginations could wander freely. While racist beliefs framed such narratives, the abundance of colonial imaginaries nevertheless compelled German citizens and settlers to contemplate the world beyond Europe as a part of their daily lives. An Imperial Homeland reorients our understanding of the relationship between imperial Germany and its empire in Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia). Colonialism had an especially significant effect on shared interpretations of the Heimat (home/homeland) ideal, a historically elusive perception that conveyed among Germans a sense of place through national peculiarities and local landmarks. Focusing on colonial encounters that took place between 1842 and 1915, Adam A. Blackler reveals how Africans confronted foreign rule and altered German national identity. As Blackler shows, once the façade of imperial fantasy gave way to colonial reality, German metropolitans and white settlers increasingly sought to fortify their presence in Africa using juridical and physical acts of violence, culminating in the first genocide of the twentieth century. Grounded in extensive archival research, An Imperial Homeland enriches our understanding of German identity, allowing us to see how a distant colony with diverse ecologies, peoples, and social dynamics grew into an extension of German memory and tradition. It will be of interest to German Studies scholars, particularly those interested in colonial Africa.


Revenants of the German Empire

Revenants of the German Empire

Author: Sean Andrew Wempe

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-05-22

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0190907231

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In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles stripped Germany of its overseas colonies. This sudden transition to a post-colonial nation left the men and women invested in German imperialism to rebuild their status on the international stage. Remnants of an earlier era, these Kolonialdeutsche (Colonial Germans) exploited any opportunities they could to recover, renovate, and market their understandings of German and European colonial aims in order to reestablish themselves as "experts" and "fellow civilizers" in discourses on nationalism and imperialism. Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations tracks the difficulties this diverse group of Colonial Germans encountered while they adjusted to their new circumstances, as repatriates to Weimar Germany or as subjects of the War's victors in the new African Mandates. Faced with novel systems of international law, Colonial Germans re-situated their notions of imperial power and group identity to fit in a world of colonial empires that were not their own. The book examines how former colonial officials, settlers, and colonial lobbies made use of the League of Nations framework to influence diplomatic flashpoints including the Naturalization Controversy in Southwest Africa, the Locarno Conference, and the Permanent Mandates Commission from 1927-1933. Sean Wempe revises standard historical portrayals of the League of Nations' form of international governance, German participation in the League, the role of interest groups in international organizations and diplomacy, and liberal imperialism. In analyzing Colonial German investment and participation in interwar liberal internationalism, the project challenges the idea of a direct continuity between Germany's colonial period and the Nazi era.


Nationalizing Empires

Nationalizing Empires

Author: Stefan Berger

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2015-06-10

Total Pages: 700

ISBN-13: 9633860172

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The essays in Nationalizing Empires challenge the dichotomy between empire and nation state that for decades has dominated historiography. The authors center their attention on nation-building in the imperial core and maintain that the nineteenth century, rather than the age of nation-states, was the age of empires and nationalism. They identify a number of instances where nation building projects in the imperial metropolis aimed at the preservation and extension of empires rather than at their dissolution or the transformation of entire empires into nation states. Such observations have until recently largely escaped theoretical reflection.


Metaphor, Nation and Discourse

Metaphor, Nation and Discourse

Author: Ljiljana Šarić

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2019-05-20

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9027262675

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This edited volume examines how metaphors and related phenomena (metonymies, symbols, cultural models, stereotypes) lead to the discursive construal of a common element that brings the nation together. The central idea is that metaphor use must be questioned to lay bare the processes and the discursive power behind them. The chapters examine a range of contemporary and historical, monomodal and multimodal discourses, including politicians’ discourse, presidential speeches, newspapers, TV series, Catholic homilies, colonialist discourse, and various online sources. The approaches taken include political science, international relations, cultural studies, and linguistics. All contributions feature discursive constructivist views of metaphor, with clear sociocultural grounding, and the notion of metaphor as a framing device in constructing various aspects of nations and national identity. The volume will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis, metaphor studies, media studies, nationalism studies, and political science.


The Nation as a Local Metaphor

The Nation as a Local Metaphor

Author: Alon Confino

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0807860840

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All nations make themselves up as they go along, but not all make themselves up in the same way. In this study, Alon Confino explores how Germans turned national and argues that they imagined the nation as an extension of their local place. In 1871, the work of political unification had been completed, but Germany remained a patchwork of regions with different histories and traditions. Germans had to construct a national memory to reconcile the peculiarities of the region and the totality of the nation. This identity project, examined by Confino as it evolved in the southwestern state of WArttemberg, oscillated between failure and success. The national holiday of Sedan Day failed in the 1870s and 1880s to symbolically commingle localness and nationhood. Later, the idea of the Heimat, or homeland, did prove capable of representing interchangeably the locality, the region, and the nation in a distinct national narrative and in visual images. The German nationhood project was successful, argues Confino, because Germans made the nation into an everyday, local experience through a variety of cultural forms, including museums, school textbooks, popular poems, travel guides, posters, and postcards. But it was not unique. Confino situates German nationhood within the larger context of modernity, and in doing so he raises broader questions about how people in the modern world use the past in the construction of identity.


Learning Empire

Learning Empire

Author: Erik Grimmer-Solem

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-09-26

Total Pages: 669

ISBN-13: 1108483828

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The First World War marked the end point of a process of German globalization that began in the 1870s. Learning Empire looks at German worldwide entanglements to recast how we interpret German imperialism, the origins of the First World War, and the rise of Nazism.


Photography in the Third Reich: Art, Physiognomy and Propaganda

Photography in the Third Reich: Art, Physiognomy and Propaganda

Author: Christopher Webster

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2021-01-07

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1783749172

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This lucid and comprehensive collection of essays by an international group of scholars constitutes a photo-historical survey of select photographers who embraced National Socialism during the Third Reich. These photographers developed and implemented physiognomic and ethnographic photography, and, through a Selbstgleichschaltung (a self-co-ordination with the regime), continued to practice as photographers throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich. The volume explores, through photographic reproductions and accompanying analysis, diverse aspects of photography during the Third Reich, ranging from the influence of Modernism, the qualitative effect of propaganda photography, and the utilisation of technology such as colour film, to the photograph as ideological metaphor. With an emphasis on the idealised representation of the German body and the role of physiognomy within this representation, the book examines how select photographers created and developed a visual myth of the ‘master race’ and its antitheses under the auspices of the Nationalist Socialist state. Photography in the Third Reich approaches its historical source photographs as material culture, examining their production, construction and proliferation. This detailed and informative text will be a valuable resource not only to historians studying the Third Reich, but to scholars and students of film, history of art, politics, media studies, cultural studies and holocaust studies.


Environing Empire

Environing Empire

Author: Martin Kalb

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2022-04-08

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1800734573

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Even leaving aside the vast death and suffering that it wrought on indigenous populations, German ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were futile for most. For years colonists wrestled ocean waters, desert landscapes, and widespread aridity as they tried to reach inland in their effort of turning outwardly barren lands into a profitable settler colony. In his innovative environmental history, Martin Kalb outlines the development of the colony up to World War I, deconstructing the common settler narrative, all to reveal the importance of natural forces and the Kaisereich’s everyday violence.