Abstract
It is surely the case that transnationalism is a powerful tool for breaking out of conceptual (and real) confines not only of the nation-state, but also of intensely local, self-limiting perspectives. In certain fields of enquiry, emphasizing the transfers, linkages, interactions, and temporal as well as spatial flows between two or more national processes, events, or sites clearly defies the previous expectations for the discipline.1 Moreover, moving beyond the confines of the nation-state can provide the practical potential of encouraging interdisciplinary, comparative, and collaborative research and opening windows for new audiences for that work.
The concept for this volume began with a panel series at the German Studies Association’s 2010 conference: we are grateful for the GSA’s support of cross-disciplinary lines of enquiry. We would like to thank Eric D. Weitz and Jack Zipes, editors of the Studies in European Culture and History series with Palgrave Macmillan, for their encouragement during all stages of this volume’s preparation. We are also indebted to the insights gained from Palgrave Macmillan’s anonymous review process, and to Palgrave editors Chris Chappell, Jeff LaSala, and Sarah Whalen for their highly skilled stewardship of our book. Our thanks are also due to Rob Welch (University of New Hampshire), who compiled the volume’s index.
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Notes
Germany’s national borders excluded peoples who spoke German and shared features of German culture in the Austrian empire and Switzerland; and at the same time, the borders included peoples of different ethnicities, such as Poles, and French speakers in Alsace and Lorraine. Germany’s national borders also did not refer to the massive emigration of north-eastern Germans to the United States, where during the third and largest emigration wave, from 1880 to 1893, Germans became 30% of the foreign-born population. The labor shortage created by the emigration of so many Germans from the north-east fueled the “east-to-west push” into that part of Germany by Eastern European migrants, including Poles, Jews, and white Russians—the Gastarbeiter before the Gastarbeiter, as Saskia Sassen has indicated—with up to half a million in 1914 entering Germany alone. Moreover, Germans had long been busy migrating in the other direction, as well, to the east: by the end of World War I, up to 8.5 million ethnic Germans lived beyond Germany’s borders across eastern Europe. See Saskia Sassen, Guests and Aliens, orig. 1996 in German (New York: The New Press, 1999), 56, 57; and
Denis Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes, “Preface,” in Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005, ed. Göktürk, Gramling, and Kaes (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 7.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London, UK and New York: Verso, 2006).
Philipp Ther, “Beyond the Nation: The Relational Basis of a Comparative History of Germany and Europe,” Central European History 36, no.1 (2003): 45–74, 71, 61–62.
Göktürk, Gramling, and Kaes, “Preface,” in Germany in Transit, ed. Göktürk, Gramling, and Kaes, p. xvii. See also Timothy S. Brown, “‘1968’ East and West: Divided Germany as a Case Study in Transnational History,” American Historical Review 114, no.1 (February 2009): 69–96;
Ruth Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008);
Ayhan Kaya, “German-Turkish Transnational Space: A Separate Space of Their Own,” German Studies Review 30, no.3 (2007): 483–502;
Ute Frevert, “Europeanizing Germany’s Twentieth Century,” History and Memory 17, no.1/2 (2005): 87–116;
Ayse Çaglar, “Constraining Metaphors and the Transnationalisation of Spaces in Berlin,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27, no.4 (October 2001): 601–613; and
Michael Geyer, “Historical Fictions of Autonomy and the Europeanization of National History,” Central European History 22, no.3/4 (1989): 316–342.
Russell Berman, “Colonialism, and No End: The Other Continuity Theses,” in German Colonialism. Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany, ed. Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 164–190, 165.
See Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1994); Michael McGerr, “The Price of the ‘New Transnational History’,” AHR Forum, American Historical Review (1991): 1056–67, 1064; and
Peter Jackson, Philip Crang, and Claire Dwyer, “Introduction: The Spaces of Transnationality,” in Transnational Spaces, ed. Jackson, Crang, and Dwyer (New York and London, UK: Routledge, 2004), 1–23, 9–10.
See Pierre Hamel, Henri Lustiger-Thaler, and Margit Mayer, “Introduction: Urban Social Movements—Local Thematics, Global Spaces,” in Urban Movements in a Globalising World ed. Hamel, Lustiger-Thaler, and Mayer (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 7. See, for example,
Arjun Appadurai, “Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger,” in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2010), 138–43, 139, 140.
Many of the processes of industrial modernity can be understood as an agon between (global) technological uniformity and (local, regional, and national) cultural distinc-tiveness. Port and capital cities of European empires, for example, became sites for both the globalizing and nationalizing developments underway in modernity. On several levels, that agon is still being played out. See Mikael Hård and Thomas J. Misa, “Modernizing European Cities: Technological Uniformity and Cultural Distinction,” in Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities, ed. Hård and Misa (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 1–20.
See Ian Tyrrell’s praise for the ethnographic gender history practiced by Patricia Grimshaw, “Comparative and Transnational History,” Australian Feminist Studies 22, no.52 (2007): 49–54; and Jürgen Kocka and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt’s discussion of the ongoing blending between comparative and transnational (“entangled”) histories, in “Comparison and Beyond: Traditions, Scope, and Perspectives of Comparative History,” in Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, ed. Haupt and Kocka (New York and Oxford, UK: Berghahn, 2009), 1–30, 20–21.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (orig. 1974), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 86 (emphasis original). See Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, “Introduction: Tracking the Global/Local,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Wilson and Dissanayake (Durham, NC and London, UK: Duke University Press, 1996), 3–4.
See Michael Peter Smith, “Translocality: A Critical Reflection,” in Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, Connections, ed. Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2010), 181–198;
Michael J. Watts, “Mapping Identities: Place, Space, and Community in an African City,” in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Jaeger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 63–65; and
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 192.
On the public history-making of urban vernacular sites and minority communities, see Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
For an illustration of how “local and regional history feeds into the negotiation of sometimes diverging local political and religious identities,” see Hauke Dorsch, “Integration into What? The Intercultural Week, Mental Borders and Multiple Identities in the German Town of Bayreuth,” in Heidi Armbruster and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, eds., Negotiating Multicultural Europe: Borders, Networks, Neighbourhoods (New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 119–40, 129. See also
Maiken Umbach and Bernd Hüppauf, eds., Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 183.
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Diefendorf, J.M., Ward, J. (2014). Introduction Transnationalism and the German City. In: Diefendorf, J.M., Ward, J. (eds) Transnationalism and the German City. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137390172_1
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