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CHAPTER 9 When Is a Diaspora Not a Diaspora? Rethinking Nation-Centered Narratives about Germans in Habsburg East Central Europe Pieter Judson With this chapter I want to encourage German historians to broaden their understanding of the term German beyond a nation-state-centered concept that for too long has privileged the German state founded in 1871 as the social, cultural, and political embodiment of a German nation. I suggest that communities in Habsburg East Central Europe, popularly constructed by German politicians and historians alike in the interwar period as diasporas, could not possibly have seen themselves in these terms much before 1918. When such communities did adopt a more nationalist identity in the post-1918 period, they usually referred back to prewar ideologies for guidance, traditions that had rarely made their relationship to Germany a necessary component of community identity. As a consequence of the national humiliations imposed by the Versailles and Trianon settlements, Germans in Germany tended increasingly to characterize such communities as “lost diasporas,” eliding their fates with those of Germany’s lost territories in West Prussia and Silesia. Not until the economically depressed 1930s, however, did Nazi propaganda and offers of support (cultural, political, and ‹nancial) to these hard-pressed communities succeed in creating a new self-understanding among them as diasporas of the German nation-state. Nazi annexations (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Southern Styria) and attempted population transfers (Bukovina, South Tyrol) enabled these communities later and misleadingly to be remembered by community activists and historians alike as age-old diasporas, de‹ned primarily by their relationship to Germany. The use of this term German diaspora as an analytic tool requires a 219 critical acknowledgment of that concept’s twentieth-century derivation from the related concept of the territorial nation-state. Like the terms nation, race, or ethnicity, the term diaspora rests on historically shifting ideological presumptions. This does not mean that ideas of diaspora, just like those of race, nation or ethnicity, cannot produce material and social effects. But it does require the social scientist to distinguish carefully between the ways in which nationalist ideologists deployed the term diaspora (to argue for a necessary relationship between those communities and the German state) and the ways in which those communities understood their own identi‹cation as German . To use the concept German diaspora without interrogating its potentially normative and nationalist presumptions risks reading contemporary forms of self- and group identi‹cation back onto its innocent subjects, for whom such forms of self-identi‹cation may have held little meaning.1 For German historians in the twentieth century, the concept of German diasporas in East Central Europe seems to have embodied a common -sense logic. Substantial populations of German-speaking people living outside of the German nation-state in Eastern Europe formed diasporic communities that looked to Germany to reinforce a sense of their own cultural identity, historical continuity, and sometimes political in›uence. Such communities were often understood both by themselves and by Germany as the product of successive waves of German migration or colonization reaching back into the medieval period. Local rulers, so the story went, had invited communities of German artisans, merchants, and farmers to settle in particular regions of the East, often giving these settlers a privileged legal position vis-à-vis local Slavic populations. The concept of historic colonization underlying much of the rhetoric about diasporas in the East often functioned to reassure Germans in the new German state that their national identity could be de‹ned by a long history of economic success and cultural superiority.2 Other authors in this volume demonstrate that the ways communities around the world de‹ned themselves as German re›ected contingent and situational conditions that shaped their particular assertions of identity rather than some fundamentally authentic historic shared identity. We should remember this caveat as we examine Germanspeaking communities situated geographically much closer to Germany . Their very proximity to Germany made them useful pawns in the foreign political dreams of ideologists hoping to realize an expanded German nation-state after the defeat of 1918. In the post-1918 220 The Heimat Abroad political landscape these communities may have occasionally ›irted with a self-characterization as linked to the German nation-state. It was, however, their problematic place within new self-proclaimed nation-states, not their traditional ways of identifying themselves, that produced any such characterizations. As dif‹cult as it might be for us living in a globally nationalized world to imagine it, East Central Europeans...

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