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.

With the end of the First World War, Germany became a "post-colonial" power. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 transformed Germany's overseas colonies in Africa and the Pacific into League of Nations Mandates, administered by other powers. Yet a number of Germans rejected this "post-colonial" status, arguing instead that Germany was simply an interrupted colonial power and would soon reclaim these territories. With the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, irredentism seemed once again on the agenda, and these colonialist advocates actively and loudly promoted their colonial cause in the Third Reich. Examining the domestic activities of these colonialist lobbying organizations, Empire in the Heimat demonstrates the continued place of overseas colonialism in shaping German national identity after the end of formal empire. In the Third Reich, the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft and the Reichskolonialbund framed Germans as having a particular aptitude for colonialism and the overseas territories as a German Heimat. As such, they sought to give overseas colonialism renewed meaning for both the present and the future of Nazi Germany. They brought this message to the German public through countless publications, exhibitions, rallies, lectures, photographs, and posters. Their public activities were met with a mix of occasional support, ambivalence, or even outright opposition from some Nazi officials, who privileged the Nazi regime's European territorial goals over colonialists' overseas goals. Colonialists' ability to navigate this obstruction and intervention reveals both the limitations and the spaces available in the public sphere under Nazism for such "special interest" discourses.

This collection brings together international scholars pursuing cutting-edge research on spatial identities under National Socialism. They demonstrate that the spatial identities of the Third Reich can be approached as a history of interrelated dimensions; Heimat, region and Empire were constantly reconstructed through this interrelationship.

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) was one of the most influential southern writers, widely considered to rival his contemporary, William Faulkner—who believed Wolfe to be one of the greatest talents of their generation. His novels— including Look Homeward, Angel (1929); Of Time and the River (1935); and the posthumously published The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940)—remain touchstones of U.S. literature. In Look Abroad, Angel, Jedidiah Evans uncovers the “global Wolfe,” reconfiguring Wolfe’s supposedly intractable homesickness for the American South as a form of longing that is instead indeterminate and expansive. Instead of promoting and reinforcing a narrow and cloistered formulation of the writer as merely southern or Appalachian, Evans places Wolfe in transnational contexts, examining Wolfe’s impact and influence throughout Europe. In doing so, he de-territorializes the response to Wolfe’s work, revealing the writer as a fundamentally global presence within American literature.

The first comprehensive account of the memory of colonialism in Germany from 1919 until the present day.

This book examines the history of Belgium’s annexation of the former German territories of Eupen and Malmedy during the interwar period. Focusing on Herman Baltia’s transitory regime and Belgium’s ambivalence about the fate of its new territories, the book charts the strained relations between Baltia’s regime and Brussels, the regime’s path to dissolution, and the failed retrocession of the territory to Germany. Through close analysis of primary source material, Vincent O’Connell investigates the efforts of Baltia’s provisional government to assimilate the region’s inhabitants into Belgium. The ultimate failure of that assimilation, he argues, may be traced back not only to incessant pro-German agitation, but to flawed Belgian policy from the outset. Framed in the context of a post-Versailles Europe, the book offers an interesting case study not only of the ebbs and flows of international politics across the frontier zones of Europe in the interwar years, but of how populations react to changes in national sovereignty.

Explores how religious migrants engage with the phenomenon of nationalism, through two groups of German-speaking Mennonites.