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In this special issue of German Studies Review, we examine how communities in the so called "German diaspora" have imagined and maintained a sense of Germanness in their various host communities. The experience of Germanness in any given immigrant community has followed a different historical trajectory from Germanness in the core German ethnoterritory in Central Europe, a region roughly coterminous with the territory presently administered by the Federal Republic of Germany and the Republic of Austria, but which also encompasses much of Switzerland and various lands directly adjacent to Germany and Austria.
Speaking of "collective identity" or "German identity" poses terminological problems. Inga Scharf argued that "German national identity appears to be too impossibly contradictory or paradoxical to be spoken of with any ease,"1 and the problem lies not only with the complexities of Germanness, but also with the word "identity." In an influential article, Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper have shown that some scholars use the term to discuss both individuals and collectives; to discuss both something claimed for oneself and something externally attributed; and to discuss both something fluid, contextual, and contingent, and something solid, immutable, and enduring.2 Confusion results from the use of the same word for both halves of so many mutually exclusive binaries, though some scholars apparently underestimate the danger. Hans-Jochen Gamm's study of "German identities," for example, declared that "collective identities are apparently natural and for this reason require no further explanation," though Gamm also offered several "clarifications."3 While we have used the term "identity," we take Brubaker and Cooper's criticism seriously. We treat Germanness as something collective rather than individual. While we and our contributors examine Germanness both as something self-proclaimed and as something externally ascribed, we mostly emphasize self-understandings. Finally, we see Germanness as neither immutable nor ephemeral, but durably constructed within a given social and historical context. Informed by Brubaker's analysis of "groupism,"4 we place our emphasis on "Germanness" as a "category of practice," that is, as historical actors imagined and experienced it.
The content and significance of Germanness gradually evolves over the decades as historical actors contest its meanings, but its flexibility in a specific time and place remains limited. Our ambition is to examine how social practices and institutions help construct or maintain a...