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This chapter establishes how Germans, in many ways, have served as America's “other” since the founding of the English colonies in the seventeenth century. For the first half of American history, Americans largely interpreted Germany through the waves of German settlers coming to the New World. As the largest non-Anglo ethnic group before the Great War, German Americans served as a convenient point of contrast for understanding Americans and Americanism. After the establishment of the German Reich, mainstream Americans looked to the German nation for a better understanding of Germans and Germanness and were impressed with German culture, education, efficiency, and productivity during much of this time period. At the same time, however, as the emerging foil against the United States in both world wars, the German Empire furthered America's continued conception of itself as the defender of freedom against militarism and authoritarianism. The chapter shows how the arrogant public diplomacy of the Wilhelmine and Nazi regimes failed to capitalize on the former impressions and often reinforced the latter. Still, the ongoing debate during the Second World War as to the nature of the German people failed to arrive at a clear consensus by the end of the war.

This chapter sketches a portrait of Alfred Krupp. It describes how Alfred Krupp perfectly fits the mold of the heroic entrepreneur. Profoundly skeptical of joint-stock companies, banks, and capitalism in general, but also of big-scale science and modern research methods, he was a genius at extending to its utmost limits the possibilities of the craft entrepreneur. He developed an extraordinarily successful business model that allowed the principles of the small workshop to be extended on a gigantic and global scale. Moreover, the chapter credits him with a social philosophy which eventually created a community of Kruppianer, workers bound to the enterprise and the community by pride in the product of their labor.

This chapter presents a short historical (rather than legal) discussion of state ‘sovereignty’. The concept is problematic and much energy was invested in dealing with the problems of such a binary concept in a federal system. In the end, the concept of sovereignty was abandoned. Although it does not feature in any strong sense in the Basic Law, it does feature in the case law of the Federal Constitutional Court.

Those enclosed in cells adopted a different form of ascetic withdrawal to those anchorites who valued freedom of movement. This set them apart, to the point that they eventually constituted a separate category. Chapter 3 charts their rise and the clarification of their identity, initially in the German Empire, then in England. It examines the terminological shifts by which writers defined them, evidence that their proliferation was a Western European phenomenon, the types of settlement where they are recorded (often at minsters or rich urban churches), and the sorts of people who sponsored them. The rise of the recluse is interpreted not only in relation to developments in the Empire, but also in light of concerns on the part of wealthy gentry and burgesses to establish spiritual advocates in nascent parishes and towns. The chapter ends with some archaeological insights.

This chapter looks at the latter part of the nineteenth century when film makes its appearance, and at which point old multiethnic empires such as the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian, or the Ottoman competed with the colonial powers of France and Great Britain, and new rising powers like the German Empire, for world domination. The moving image that entered into the medial apparatus intimately connected to questions of nationalism and imperialism. The chapter focuses on the historical development of cinema from the early silent to early sound eras. It seeks to revise that history by considering the relationship of the cinematic apparatus to the imperial and national social configuration, while underscoring the production of interzones in those relationships.

The introduction states the aim of the book—to give a critical account of the role of Shakespeare in Germany’s intellectual tradition of the political Right from 1871 to the post-Second World War era—and provides the necessary background information: the historical origins of the formula ‘Germany is Hamlet’ and the reasons for its periodic rejection; an overview of German Shakespeare reception up to the mid-nineteenth century and an overview of the development towards national unity from the Napoleonic Wars to the foundation of the German Empire. The introduction also proposes a set of criteria common to positions of the intellectual Right from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt and gives a brief outline of the chapters of the book.

Germany attempted to define its sphere of influence in East Asia with the occupation of the area around Jiaozhou Bay and the establishment of Qingdao city from 1897-1914. The leasehold, ceded by the Qing government for a period of 99 years, was under the sole control of the German Navy. Early Qingdao was highly militarized and subject to rigid control over urban space, an effort that was marked by violence and racial inequality. However, despite the demonstration of firm colonial power, Germany eventually had to accommodate a growing Chinese population and its needs.

The chapter investigates the connections and interdependencies between the discourse of German constitutional law and the colonial ventures of the German Empire at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. In doing so, it describes certain epistemologies that have accompanied, stabilized, legitimized. and helped to enforce colonial claims at the time. As a result, the chapter shows how a dual legal system based on arbitrary racial classification was established and enforced in the colonies by an omnipotent administration. This German colonialism was not simply an expansion of the metropolitan political state to overseas possessions, but a political form sui generis in which the political and liberal achievements of Europe were completely denied to the colonized. Finally, the chapter describes how the colonial experiences of the periphery have in turn affected the German constitutional law.

This chapter provides a chronological overview of peacemaking after the Great War according to a constructivist interpretation of the “agent-structure problem.” Agents are simply the characters of the story; structures, that which determines the plot. Peacemaking began with the armistices of 1918, as recognizably realist states sought a new realist structure for security. However, Wilsonianism provided a radically new discursive structure which the allies and Germans accepted at the time of the armistice. Accepting Wilsonianism as the ideological foundation of the peace had real consequences, whatever the intentions of the statesmen who had done so. Wilsonianism legitimized the successor state, a new ethno-national agent that would seek to unify ethnic and national boundaries. Great Powers guided by Wilsonianism had created an identity they could not control. Successor states would do much to demarcate the authority of the conference in Europe and in the domains of the defeated empires.

German anthropologists did not cease their intellectual endeavors despite the loss of Germany's colonial empire following the Treaty of Versailles. This chapter analyzes how the tremendous backlog in material culture and ethnographic information gathered during the expedition age in German New Guinea maintained the discipline following the colonial loss. Similarly, Germany's sudden entry into a “postcolonial” age provided an additional stimulus for anthropologists. When practitioners turned to crafting their monographs, their salvaging attempts along the ethnographic frontier were influenced by postcolonial demands to exonerate the German administration from potential abuses against the indigenous populations in German New Guinea.

This chapter explores the family history of Ta’isi, the course of his marriage, the birth of his six children to Rosabel and the bringing into his family unit of his first born daughter, Lucy. It tracks the economic rise of Ta’isi as a businessman in the Sāmoan Islands and the prominent role he took to as an interlocutor with German administrators about the running of German Samoa. It then tracks the seismic effects of World War One and its aftermath on Sāmoa. World War One brought an abrupt end to German rule that was replaced by a New Zealand military occupation in 1914. The effects of the Great War were both enormously beneficial to Ta’isi as a businessman, but it also brought the devastating aftermath of the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed over 20% of Samoa’s population, including Ta’isi’s mother, sister, brother, sister-in-law and his beloved only son. This chapter traces these events and their effects on Ta’isi, showing how they led him into an activist role within Sāmoa.

Concepts of a German people (Volk) long predated Germany as a nation-state. Because of the centrality of Volk in Schlink’s vision, this chapter uses conceptual history to trace the development of the term and explore its various contemporary meanings. During the Protestant Reformation, the idea of the German people was primarily in linguistic terms, as the result of Luther’s Bible translation. Despite diversity of citizenship among them, German speakers developed a common culture by the Romantic era, in which many thought of themselves as possessing a shared spirit and destiny. This idea intensified in the German nationalism that erupted during the German Empire. Increasingly during the Weimar Republic and especially during the Third Reich, some saw Germans not merely as an ethnicity but also as a race, embracing racism as a dominant ideology. By the midtwentieth century, Volk could denote racial, ethnic, or national identity, or any combination thereof.

Chapter III examines the emergence of a “radical” form of statistical and cartographic science, investigating ruptures and continuities in demographic practice between 1860 and 1890. Here the work of the generation of “liberal” nationalist statisticians of the 1860s is compared to that of the activists of the 1890s, who often belonged to nationalist pressure groups such as the Pan-German League or the German School Society. This chapter shows that there was little methodological difference between the groups; what changed, however, was primarily the place where the research was being done (private organizations instead of state-run statistical bureaus) and environmental factors such as the increasing spatial specificity of census reports themselves.

The last chapter considers the impact of these alternative notions of national community on the people who produced them, looking at the various strategies of intervention they developed to translate national knowledge into political and cultural practice. Relying primarily on published material from nationalist journals, the chapter shows how these organizations’ respective “radicalism” was channeled into decidedly “normal” activities such as consumption, tourism, and charitable giving. For the most part, they were not interested in fantasies of building a racial aristocracy in a new Central European empire, but rather they tried to establish real connections with the populations they claimed as their German brothers and sisters. In this sense, the chapter argues, their nationalism was not considerably different than that practiced by more “normal,” liberal groups, who had long expressed concerns about the fate of Germans living outside of the black–white–red border posts of the German Empire

This chapter examines the administrative jurisdiction of selected states of the German Empire—Baden, Prussia, Württemberg, Bavaria, and Saxony—between 1890 and 1910. A short description of the development of administrative jurisdiction in the German Empire is followed by an overview of the courts included in the analysis and the applicable legislation. The analysed case law covers cases of exclusion of judicial protection (in particular discretionary decisions), questions of admissibility of actions, and procedural constraints. It is highlighted which procedural requirements were considered as ‘essential’ by the courts (eg the right to be heard) with the consequence that their violation would result in an annulment of the decision of the authority and which formal irregularities were deemed irrelevant.

This chapter traces the formation of the Union of Mennonite Congregations in the German Empire. Despite hopes that all Mennonites would grasp the necessity of supporting a national association, enthusiasm among rural conservatives proved elusive. In unionists' parlance, a majority of Germany's Mennonites exhibited “religious indifference.” Yet resisting incorporation into an aggressive national organization was not synonymous with irreligiosity. In fact, those most adamantly opposed to the Union counted among the country's most conscientious, strictly observant members. Invocations of indifference, then, represented less a dispassionate interpretation of religious mood than a normative claim about what it meant to be Mennonite. Like other nationalists, unionists aimed to collapse difference, obscuring a pluralistic field in which individuals practiced their faith in diverse ways.