Reflecting on the Diaspora: The Transylvanian Saxon Self-Image and the Saxons Abroad
Reflecting on the Diaspora: The Transylvanian Saxon Self-Image and the Saxons Abroad

Summary/Abstract: Communities both shape and are shaped by their geographical contexts, the spaces of social, economic and environmental interaction in which they are found. These spaces are fluid and contingent, reflecting and influencing changes in the community that gives them significance. This is true also of ‘spaces of imagination’, the geographical context in which the myths and self-representations of the collective are formed and given meaning. The late formation of the German nation-state, and the exclusion of many ethnic Germans from its borders, resulted in a fractured German nationalism in which local (Heimat) identities played a prominent role. This was particularly true for so-called ‘Germans Abroad’ [Auslandsdeutschtum]; German minorities living outside of Germany, mainly in scattered settlements in Eastern Europe. Far from simply reflecting the nationalism of Germany, Germans Abroad embraced understandings of Germanness that reflected their local circumstances and histories. While Heimat communities were local in origin, migration from Europe to the Americas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed them into transatlantic communities. But what meaning did local identities have in a transnational context, and how did transnational ties of localness relate to Germans’ growing sense of German nationalism?

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