ABSTRACT
The politically explosive question of Germans outside the Reich looms large in the Germanistik of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. When we think of the ethnic Germans, the Volksdeutsche, we are normally concerned with Germans in the East, in the Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Russia, etc. But there were substantial German populations in other parts of Europe, especially in Italy, Denmark, France and Belgium; in addition there were Germans scattered throughout all the continents of the world. One of the most powerful centres of German diaspora was the Americas, which consisted of both older established communities and the new immigrants who had been flooding to the American continent from the late nineteenth century onwards. But it was widely felt that the Germans of the United States were merging into main-stream Americanness and giving up their mother-tongue in the Yankee ‘melting-pot’. The Germans in the East were exposed to the threat of the extinction of their identity in post-Versailles Europe. They were country cousins abroad in need of support from the German state and its cultural institutions. Yet their very isolation, their position as ‘islands’ of Germanness lent them an air of purity, of being living cultural museums. To German identity-theorizing within Germany belonged a degree of self-hatred and doubt about the Germanness of Germany. In the Volksdeutsche, free of the corrupting influences of an artificial German state and largely rural in character, could be found preserved culture, language and the will to fight for survival. In this sense they could be seen as more German than the Germans within the political boundary of Germany, for that political boundary was itself a modern state with democratic institutions, cities, socialists, Jews, i.e. with all the ‘unnatural excrescences’ on the body social.
