Germanness beyond Germany: Collective Identity in German Diaspora Communities

Speaking of "collective identity" or "German identity" poses terminological problems. Inga Scharf argued that "German national identity appears to be too impossibly contradictory or paradoxical to be spoken of with any ease,"1 and the problem lies not only with the complexities of Germanness, but also with the word "identity." In an influential article, Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper have shown that some scholars use the term to discuss both individuals and collectives; to discuss both something claimed for oneself and something externally attributed; and to discuss both something fluid, contextual, and contingent, and something solid, immutable, and enduring.2 Confusion results from the use of the same word for both halves of so many mutually exclusive binaries, though some scholars apparently underestimate the danger. Hans-Jochen Gamm's study of "German identities," for example, declared that "collective identities are apparently natural and for this reason require no further explanation," though Gamm also offered several "clarifications."3 While we have used the term "identity," we take Brubaker and Cooper's criticism seriously. We treat Germanness as something collective rather than individual. While we and our contributors examine Germanness both as something self-proclaimed and as something externally ascribed, we mostly emphasize self-understandings. Finally, we see Germanness as neither immutable nor ephemeral, but durably constructed within a given social and historical context. Informed by Brubaker's analysis of "groupism,"4 we place our emphasis on "Germanness" as a "category of practice," that is, as historical actors imagined and experienced it. Several scholars analyze Germanness with reference to the state or states governing the core German ethnoterritory. Françoise Knopper and Alain Ruiz, for example, argued that the cold war division of Europe, and particularly the creation of the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany, illustrate "significant difficulties in defining the German identity."5 [Louis L. Snyder] thought Bismarck responsible for the "subservience, discipline, and respect for authority" that "when added to other characteristics, gave the German national character in the late nineteenth century a special quality of its own." He also declared that postwar West Germany embodied "the new German character."6 James Sperling similarly suggested that "American, British, and West German policy makers cooper