ABSTRACT
Connecting the approaches in the books and articles surveyed in this chapter is the problem of German identity outside Central Europe. In the first section, concerned with “speech islands,” German identity resides in the retention of Germanness, that is, the musical practices that closely resemble German music prior to immigration to Eastern and southeastern Europe. In the second section, some entries reveal a persistent concern for the retention of Germanness, but others borrow from American theories of ethnicity to focus instead on German-Americanness. These various ways of constructing German identity are not just the result of different notions of ethnicity, but rather of ideological concerns over the core of German identity itself. Must German identity somehow retain a pure core, an unpolluted essence that unequivocally binds the history of a community or settlement outside Germany to a shared German past? Or can German identity assume new forms when in contact with other cultures, forms that nonetheless narrate a history of hybridization and cultural interaction? The entries in this chapter problematize and respond to these two questions in vastly different ways.
