Daniel Joseph Walther, Creating Germans Abroad: Cultural Policies and National Identity in Namibia. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002.

Extract

Creating Germans Abroad is clearly inspired by the work of Benedict Anderson (1983) and written in the spirit of the work of Ann Stoler (1995; 2002). In this work, Walther suggests the idealization of the possibility of a German homeland outside of the European territory in colonial Southwest Africa. The emphasis on agriculture, climate, and landscape countered the increasing push towards industrialization in the Fatherland. Here, there was not just a nostalgic longing for an imagined German past that is pastoral as opposed to industrial (a longing used and manipulated by Nazi ideologues), but an actual place where the idealized Heimat (homeland) could be realized in practice. The problem, however, became the presence of so many non-Germans, in this case not only “Black” Africans, but also “White” Afrikaners. In this sense, an appropriate title for the book might also be “Creating Germany Abroad.”