Book Reviews 119

linked refugees with bonded blacks in the United States, they drew dis-
tinctions. Rather than designating their civil and social organizations
“black” or “colored” as in the United States, refugee organizations usu-
ally adopted “African.” This terminology in cultural terms underscored
a powerful affinity with Africa for recent arrivals and descendants
alike. In political terms, it distinguished black refugees as subjects of
the Crown from the status of bonded blacks and thereby laid a founda-
tion for equal rights in the empire. The struggle in Nova Scotia and
elsewhere in the Atlantic world would remain a major preoccupation
of black refugees and their descendants.
douglas m. haynes
University of California, Irvine

The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness. Edited by

krista o’donnell, renate bridenthal, and nancy reagin.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 336 pp. $75.00
(cloth); $29.95 (paper).

This book takes up a theme not common among historians of Ger-

many: it argues that Germans living far away—around the world, in
places as far away as North Dakota or China—played a role in Ger-
man history that was as important as that played by Germans living
inside Germany, and in some cases more so. It raises the question that
has baffled us for centuries: What is Germany? What does it mean to
be German? It is an immensely learned book, top heavy with detail.
Though professional historians will find faults in it, the book runs over
with insight, truth, and even excitement.
Its seventeen essays, each written by a different author, recount the
experiences of Germans living abroad. It displays the frustrations, ten-
sions, and joys of these men and women as they interacted with the
inhabitants of the host countries and sought to retain a special rela-
tionship with their Heimat. The relatively relaxed and mature arrange-
ments for cultural exchange in much of the period covered by the book
(1871 to the present) made easy the movement of individuals along
and across borders all over the world.
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, “The Legal and Ideo-
logical Context of Diasporic Nationalism,” is addressed to the claims
of citizenship that erupted into controversies over laws “and the estab-
lished legal context for constant exchange” (pp. 9 –10). Senior officials
of the German government saw Germans after Bismarck’s fall (1890)
120 journal of world history, march 2008

not as conducting and enacting a great experiment but as fulfilling a

predetermined destiny. This view has its origins in the messianic con-
victions of William II. He saw in the fact that so many Germans had
moved outside Germany a journey of the elect to salvation beyond
history. From this it was only a short step to believing that Germans
had inherited the Old Testament concept of the chosen race. Howard
Sargent cites several striking examples of the intensity of this feeling
among prominent figures of the decade prior to 1914. With time, of
course, this view became secularized. Nationalistic fervor, that conten-
tious hysteria of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society,
gave it a far wider currency than it had ever before enjoyed. Strength
was lent by the growth of powerful associations—lobbies, factions, and
special pressure groups of one kind or another that fostered the notion
that Germans abroad were to be supported, encouraged, and strength-
ened. What this produced was a widespread impression, supported by
patriotic emotion, that the Almighty had contrived a nation unique in
its virtue and magnanimity.
Section 2, “Bonds of Trade and Culture,” takes under scrutiny four
German overseas settlements and their relationship to the mother
country. The involvement of governmental and domestic institutions
in strengthening German identity had its counterpart in the outposts
themselves. German diasporas in Mexico City, Chicago, and Brazil
were bound to Germany by personal interactions of family and friends.
In most cases, they maintained their identity as Germans. Cultural
and economic bonds linked them to the German state. In an excel-
lent essay, Thomas Lekan traces the relationship between Germans
overseas to the Eifel region of Germany and the powerful leagues it
produced in the American midwest. Though trying to assimilate with
their hosts, the task of remaining close to their homeland had, in most
cases, the first claim on the diasporas’ resources, even as they tried to
assimilate with their hosts.
Part 3, “Islands of Germanness,” is addressed to the effect of German
settlements in central and eastern Europe—how they developed, were
maintained, and strengthened over the period prior to the outbreak of
World War I and the contemporary world of today. These efforts were,
not surprisingly, strongest during Hitler’s time. The German chancel-
lery issued a directive in 1938 that defined “Volksdeutsche” as people
“whose language and culture had German origins though they were
not citizens of Germany” (p. 267). But they were part of Germany’s
destiny. Essential to the Nazi outlook was a narcissist withdrawal from
history—a phenomenon that reached its apotheosis, as the author
Doris Bergen observes, during the holocaust years. “In contrast to many
Germans in the fatherland, [the Volksdeutschen] were not separated
Book Reviews 121

from shooting pits and killing centers of the Holocaust; they lived next
door. . . . [They] were witnesses to and beneficiaries of genocide; other
sources present them as perpetrators and, less frequently, as resistors”
(p. 268).
The editors conclude with a reminder that whereas once Germany
sent emigrants abroad, it now takes them in—a move that has, as we
know, set off fierce political debate in the country over what, again,
it means to be a German. Their views, therefore, argued with a com-
prehensiveness and historical authority to which no summary can
do justice, thus come before the public at a particularly appropriate
time. Whether the process of integration can successfully withstand
the tensions and strains now surrounding it is a question I am able to
answer optimistically only — one might say— on the brighter days. But
in this political world, where artificially created images are considered
more significant than the realities, the unexpected is just as likely to
assume favorable forms as unfavorable ones. It is always possible, then,
that the irrational can provide hope where rationality perceives little
reason for it.
david wetzel
University of California, Berkeley

Pathways to the Present: U.S. Development and Its Consequences in

the Pacific. By mansel g. blackford. Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2007. 288 pp. $48.00 (cloth).

In this well-researched and tightly organized study, Mansel G. Black-

ford considers the importance of economic developments and environ-
mental issues in areas of the Pacific owned or controlled by the United
States after World War II. The Hawaiian Islands, Guam, American
Samoa, the Philippines, and parts of Japan fall within its purview. So,
too, do the coastlines of Alaska, California, and Washington. In all
of these areas, the presence of the American military loomed large.
Military spending created jobs and higher standards of living, but also
threatened traditional lifestyles and natural resources. Individuals and
groups opposed military and business initiatives on environmental
grounds, and in doing so blazed new “pathways to the present.”
The book’s opening chapter explains that World War II was a major
turning point in the Pacific world. The war not only broke up colonial
forms of government but also affected the way people understood and
dealt with environmental issues. Environmental concerns accompanied
many postwar developments in the Pacific, and prompted many local