The “German” Presence

The German presence in Latin America during the nineteenth century was neither unitary nor uniform, nor was it especially numerous when compared to the waves of immigrants from other parts of Europe. Moreover, it paled in comparison to the flood of Germans that coursed into North America during the nineteenth century. Before World War I, some 3.5 million Germans emigrated. Ninety percent went to North America, while most of the remaining ten percent traveled to Latin America.Footnote ¹¹ After World War I, however, emigration to Latin America from Germany increased considerably, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the total number of German emigrants. The high point was during the worst of the German inflation, between 1919 and 1925, when “about 100,000 (1/3 of all emigrants) went to Latin America.”Footnote ¹² Even in places where they were concentrated, however, their relative numbers were small. Thus, while some 40,000 Germans arrived in Brazil and Argentina between 1880 and 1897, more than 1.3 million Italians accompanied them.Footnote ¹³

Scholars have nevertheless emphasized that despite these small numbers, Germans played critical cultural, economic, and scientific roles in many parts of Latin America. Their influence, as Albrecht von Gleich argued in his 1968 report for the RAND Corporation, stemmed from “the concentration of German immigrants in just a few countries and regions, in their predominantly closed mode of settlement, and in their preservation of the lifestyle and culture they brought with them.”Footnote ¹⁴ He explained that about fifty percent of German emigrants who headed for Latin America went to Brazil, twenty-five percent to Argentina, and the remaining twenty-five percent to other countries, primarily Chile.

Within those states, however, the settlement patterns were varied and differentiated. Germans also tended to settle in these different states in segregated waves. Indeed, according to Anne Saint Sauveur-Henn, from 1835 to 1914 most of the Germans who arrived in Latin America went to Brazil and Chile. Afterward, however, they increasingly headed toward Argentina. The numbers rose radically during the Weimar era, and during the Nazi period about twice as many Germans went to Argentina as to Brazil, and four times as many as to Chile. Uruguay, Bolivia, and Mexico gained German immigrants as well, but the numbers lagged far behind.Footnote ¹⁵

In Brazil, most of the Germans traveled to the southernmost states and into rural conditions. In contrast, Buenos Aires absorbed the vast majority of the Germanophone immigrants who arrived in Argentina, although rural settlements also developed in Misiones, which shares a border with Brazil's three southern states, and in other parts of Argentina, such as the Chaco. In Chile, the high point of immigration was during the middle of the nineteenth century, where Germans became important in the cities of Valdivia, Osorno, and Puerto Montt in south-central Chile. The concentrated character of those settlements allowed some uniformity: as von Gleich explained in his report, “in Chile the descendants of the immigrants preserved their German language and culture longer and to a greater extent than in other South American countries.” That was largely because “they achieved economic well-being more rapidly and to a higher degree than their former countrymen in Brazil and Argentina.” They also faced much less pressure toward naturalization than in Brazil during the early twentieth century. “Therefore assimilation proceeded more slowly.”Footnote ¹⁶

For the postwar era in which Gleich's RAND report was written, “assimilation,” acculturation, integration, and contributions to states and metropolises by “Germans” were the critical problems that governed the immigration history in which politicians and scholars placed these people from German-speaking central Europe. Indeed, during much of the twentieth century, the tendency in the scholarship was to measure the relative amount of “Germanness” transported with these groups and individuals and then nurtured, retained, or lost as these people were “absorbed” into ostensibly unitary Portuguese or Spanish-speaking cultures and states.

To some degree, this focus on assimilation derived from Cold-War analysts' wonder at Germans' continued presence across the Southern Cone; but it was also a product of their method: tracing unitary categories across time and space. In this narrative, “German” influence began when Hanseatic cities such as Bremen and Hamburg tried hard to break the Iberian trade monopolies on the continent, and then moved quickly, following the revolutions against the Spanish empire, to be among the first to recognize the national independence of the emerging new states.Footnote ¹⁷ Asserting themselves into the new markets that opened up through those political ruptures, they, along with the Prussians, competed successfully with the French and British, and achieved “a strong economic position” in many of these new Latin American states by the middle of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸

Those trade networks created a legacy, and by the time the German nation-state emerged in 1871, the ability of “the Germans” to develop and maintain economic advantages in Latin America were often tied to their cultural influence and international connections. This was not only true for Germans.Footnote ¹⁹ As J. P. Daughton reminds us, the French state and its officials went to great lengths to spread French culture across Latin America, particularly in states such as Argentina, which appeared by the outset of the twentieth century to be poised to take its place alongside Canada and the United States as one of the leading economies of the western hemisphere.Footnote ²⁰ Thus “German immigration to Argentina,” Daughton writes, “emerged as a potential threat,” because although the Germans remained “relatively few in number, German immigrants wielded disproportionate influence due to the fact that many held positions as professionals, academics, engineers, and scientists.”Footnote ²¹

From the perspective of both nineteenth-century French officials and Cold-War analysts, this was a unitary “German culture” on the make. As Stefan Rinke has taught us, however, we should be cautious about confusing the presence of Germans with a “German” presence. For the “Germans” who led those efforts were the local elites who had established themselves on the ground in places such as Buenos Aires and Santiago, not agents of the German state.Footnote ²² Indeed, by the time the national state became a player with the emergence of Weltpolitik in the 1890s, those efforts were already well underway.Footnote ²³

Ronald Newton, who dominated for decades the studies of Germans in Argentina, stressed the independence, influence, and international agency of German immigrants as well.Footnote ²⁴ Their center of gravity, he explained, was “a large and occupationally diverse middle class” that began as cosmopolitan merchants who often worked with English firms, and included “artisans, free-lance soldiers, and failed agricultural colonists who drifted into Buenos Aires in the 1820s and 1830s.” Most of the merchants had Hansa connections, a few came from the Rhineland, and because of the polycentric character of German-speaking central Europe at the time, “their mercantile activity was . . . conducted along networks of commercial and familial connections among all the trading peoples of the North Atlantic Basin.” These “bearers of a cosmopolitan culture,” as Newton termed them, engaged in international partnerships reinforced by judicious marriages, and the German community that emerged was in constant flux. Between 1843 and 1845, for example, Bremen, Hamburg, and Prussia established permanent diplomatic relations with the government of Juan Manuel de Rosas. Many Germanophones remained transients in this community, but many also “began to identify themselves with the new country.” Some acquired land; married into local, Argentine families; or both.Footnote ²⁵ Yet they remained attuned to events in central Europe. Thus as the earlier Consuls of the Hansa age gave way with the arrival of representatives from the North German Bund, a transnational German-speaking community took shape that persisted and developed through the local and international transitions.Footnote ²⁶

What Newton began to portray for us in his volume on Germans in Buenos Aires was the ways in which Germans who became Argentinean remained connected to Imperial Germany and tied, regardless of whether they liked it, to its fate in the world. At the center of this community, a Germanophone elite emerged that was conscious of its importance and that “worked purposefully to maintain the image of a unified, solidly prosperous and irreproachably respectable bourgeois community”—precisely the notion that concerned the French. As this elite saw it, their community was “infused by the German virtues of order and industry,” which had to be “scrupulously non-political in its dealings with Argentine officialdom” and which remained “self-sufficient, through its communal institutions, in attending to its own social welfare and self-governance.”Footnote ²⁷ Much of this applies to other Germanophone communities in states such as Chile, Brazil, and Mexico as well.Footnote ²⁸

Indeed, as Jürgen Buchenau argued in his stunning family history, Tools of Progress, one of the reasons such elite communities held together is that their members arrived in Latin America with a different set of goals and purposes than many uprooted immigrants who were poorly educated, lacked property and skills, and were thus more willing to give up ties to their places of origins and their languages within a few generations.Footnote ²⁹ In many ways, the “rural ethnic enclave that once characterized German settlements in rural Argentina, Brazil, and Chile,” and the “trade diasporas in Latin American cities,” he argued, often “followed the ancient Greek and Jewish model; their members immigrated voluntarily to improve an already privileged economic position, and not to escape persecution.”Footnote ³⁰ They brought with them skills and benefits for these new lands, and thus they were welcomed and allowed to integrate without acculturation or linguistic or religious assimilation. This was certainly the case before World War I, and it helps to account for the striking longevity of many of the most isolated communities.Footnote ³¹

It is, in fact, tempting to continue on with such characterizations, pursuing a similar narrative for all of Latin America, one that sketches out the distribution of an ostensibly unitary German population (represented by those elites) across the continent and measures “its” influence and graduated “assimilation” in different states. In the wake of recent work on the regional diversity of German emigrants' origins and their cultural and political heterogeneity, however, such narratives and analyses are untenable.

Fractured Communities

Recently, historians such as Anne Saint Sauveur-Henn have cautioned scholars exploring the history of the German presence in Latin American countries not to let groups of elites or their self-appointed position as representatives of Germanophone communities stand in for all “Germans” in places such as Buenos Aires. Even the very term community, she warns, might be misleading. For, as Dirk Hoerder also has argued in his work on German emigration, the fractured character of German society and culture in central Europe—divided as it was by class, confession, region, cultural particularities, and political persuasion—ran through these German-speaking populations in Latin America as well.Footnote ³²

In Buenos Aires, for example, there was considerable antagonism toward the upper-class organizations among much of the German-speaking population; the Turner club, which later became the Deutscher Club, was not for all Deutsche: it was class exclusive. Newton recognized those divisions early on, but that did not alter the thrust of his narrative. Indeed, in 1977, he underscored the divisions in the community, which were captured, for example, by the local German press. The leading newspapers had diametrically opposed political positions: the Deutsche La Plata Zeitung strongly supported Bismarck, Imperial Germany, and the ideals of the local elites, while the Argentinischen Tageblatt championed a more liberal line. Those divisions persisted through World War I, the Weimar era, and into the age of National Socialism, integrating their positions into the concomitant conservative, fascist, republican, and socialist ideologies that emerged, and leading to the rhetoric of “two villages,” two “German” communities within the city and the state.

Yet as Saint Sauveur-Henn underscores, there were many more divisions. The character of the “German” immigrants arriving in Argentina (and by implication in many other locations in Latin America) were always fractured, and they changed over time. Indeed, by the early twentieth century, and especially following World War I, there were more laborers, but eventually also more women, more families, and a higher average age as exiles began arriving. Moreover, these new refugees, often poorly prepared and impoverished, had little in common with either the rural communities or the urban capitalists. During the 1930s and 1940s, there were also large numbers of German Jews from diverse regional origins.Footnote ³³ Many of those people purposefully separated themselves from other Germans, particularly those who embraced conservative, fascist, or racist views, leading to the creation of a German-Jewish newspaper, the Jüdische Wochenschau, which focused on this subset of Germans.Footnote ³⁴ Founded in 1941, it ultimately outlived the other German-language publications.Footnote ³⁵

Moreover, class mattered. Rapid industrial developments in Buenos Aires begot a labor movement that was supported by the German association Vorwärts and the newspaper it produced with the same name. Newton recognized Vorwärts as a player in this political landscape.Footnote ³⁶ Yet scholars have only recently begun to acknowledge its implications for a more transnational German history as well as a history of Argentinean political movements that reaches beyond Spanish sources. That is due, in part, to its acquisition by the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin, which has made it more accessible to historians of Germany, and to the publication of a volume edited by Sandra Carreras, Horacio Tarcus, and Jessica Zeller, which presents, in both German and Spanish, an account of the newspaper's origins and history, some background on German socialist activities and social divisions in Buenos Aires, and samples of articles from the newspaper on some of its central themes.Footnote ³⁷

Die deutschen Sozialisten und die Anfänge der argentinischen Arbeiterbewegung. Anthologie des Vorwärts is a fantastic volume. It reminds us that Germans of all political shades arrived in Latin America at the end of the nineteenth century, and given the anti-Socialist laws in Germany, a good number of the people who came to take part in the booming industrialization in Buenos Aires were politically savvy workers and socialist activists, who transferred their activism from German metropolises to the Southern Cone, focusing on local problems while channeling the political positions they developed in central Europe. Indeed, most of the essays and articles in the Argentinean newspaper carried on the party traditions developed in Germany, even as they were applied to support German workers and condemn German industrialists in Buenos Aires. Moreover, much of what workers read in the paper was about events in Europe itself or theoretical discussions and polemics that were grounded there. Frequently their authors drew on those events to shed light on local conditions, but the paper's intellectual origins and political perspectives remained closely tied to German Social Democracy.

The selection of newspaper articles that make up the heart of this anthology exposes the radical flux of an industrial city at the turn of the twentieth century, in which all wealth derived from the pampas and the industry meant to process their raw materials for a global market. These essays thus remind us of the tenuous working conditions those industries offered Germans and other workers, and it introduces us to an often overlooked area of German Social Democracy.Footnote ³⁸

Augusto Kün and a handful of other German socialists founded the association in 1882. Their basic political position was much different from that of Newton's elites, and it would hardly fit the characterizations of the unitary Auslandsdeutsche of the era. Vorwärts argued that Argentina was an excellent place for capital, but a bad place for labor, and thus continual immigration from Germany, the editors explained, benefited the capitalists but not the workers: it kept wages low and working and living conditions poor. The paper's editors also made it clear that German solidarity across the classes was absent, and that emigration to Argentina would not set German workers free of the conditions they faced at home: they would remain part of a global market system in which their labor was directed to the most profitable places.

For those Germans who had already arrived in Argentina, the editors had a message that certainly went over poorly among elites in the German Club: they encouraged German workers to learn Spanish, gain citizenship, and agitate for improved conditions.Footnote ³⁹ How much influence Vorwärts had on Argentine socialism and its importance in that history was debated during the early twentieth century, and it continues to be discussed today. The transnational character of its actions, however, the ways in which the association's members remained oriented toward Europe and European, and especially German, Social Democracy, and the fractures it reveals in the Deutschtum that elites hoped to cultivate in Buenos Aires and across the Southern Cone remain critical to our understanding of a re-spatialized German history. It reminds us again that Germans' conglomerate character necessarily traveled with them, as did their political divisions.

Unitary Characteristics

Despite the diversity of characteristics, contexts, and locations, many of the Germanophone communities that took shape in Latin America benefited from Germans' more general reputation (deserved or not) as competent, hardworking bearers of superior material and immaterial culture, and Germany's reputation during the nineteenth century as a leader in education, industry, and science. Regardless of whether they were being recruited to help to populate rural areas in Brazil, Chile, or Venezuela, or welcomed as professionals across the continent, most of these German speakers benefited from the fact that many Latin American elites' first association with Germans was Alexander von Humboldt.Footnote ⁴⁰

Argentine President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1868–1874), for example, believed that Humboldt embodied the best of those German characteristics. He also believed that those characteristics continued to be nurtured in Germany's extensive university system, and that he and others should harness them to serve Latin America.

The polycentric German university system, which enjoyed such a strong, worldwide reputation by the end of the nineteenth century, produced an abundance of scientists and academics who traveled widely. A striking number took up residence in Latin America under the auspices of Sarmiento and others like him, living and working in a transnational world of German science that traversed a variety of political and geographical borders, across the fractures in German communities, and remained, until the Nazi era, closely attuned to the production of knowledge coming out of Germany.

As Sandra Carreras has shown in a number of essays, and as the holdings in the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin make abundantly clear, those networks and connections were extensive. For example, after Sarmiento appointed the Halle naturalist Hermann Burmeister director of the Provincial Museum of Buenos Aires in 1862, Sarmiento sketched out a plan for creating a natural sciences faculty at the University of Córdoba. Then, in 1868, he gave Burmeister the task of recruiting a German staff for this institution. Burmeister did that with vigor, assembling an impressive group of scientists that included Max Siebert and Paul Lorentz and that continued to renew itself from German sources for decades. Similar faculties of mathematics, physics, and others followed, so that by the outbreak of World War I, hundreds of German scientists lived in Argentina, working in the major museums, universities, and industries, concentrated in the areas of anthropology, chemistry, geology, mineralogy, mining, physics, and zoology, and pursuing research projects across the land. Indeed, by 1914, Argentina's Deutsche Wissenschaft Verein boasted 403 members, and the scientific connections between Argentina and Germany had become incredibly thick.Footnote ⁴¹

Those networks also crisscrossed Latin America and flowed through other Latin-American institutions, where people such as the Berlin-born zoologist, botanist, and paleontologist Rudolph Philippi in Santiago drew on an extensive network of Germans in Chile to fill his museum.Footnote ⁴² Indeed, Germans, it seems, could be found most everywhere, mapping rivers, contacting indigenous peoples in remote corners of the continent, taking geological measurements in vast deserts and pampas, and scaling peaks in Patagonia or the Andes. As Mark Carey has recently pointed out, German scientists, though small in number in states such as Peru, often had tremendous and long-lasting influence on the ways in which natural resources were managed and developed.Footnote ⁴³ Members of the German Alpine Society, for example, helped to open up Alpinism in Peru, and they set the tone for the Cordillera Blanca environmental and natural resource management in ways that belie earlier interpretations of scientific expeditions as primarily imperial endeavors. Instead, scholars such as Carey have begun to “illuminate vast scientific networks and ‘commodity chains’ that demonstrate how a host of social groups—on local, national, and international scales—were in dialogue with each other and thus participating in the production and consumption of commodities, natural resources, and landscapes.”Footnote ⁴⁴ That was not only true for the age of cosmopolitan science but also for much of the twentieth century.

Continuities through Ruptures

If the United States' entry into World War I destroyed the transnational world many ethnic Germans had cultivated in North America, the character of its ending radically altered ethnic Germans' subject positions across Latin America as well.Footnote ⁴⁵ With Imperial Germany's demise went the prestige on which so many German elites had capitalized. That loss reverberated across the banks, industries, trading houses, scientific institutions, and universities. Being a “German” firm, for example, shifted from an asset before the war to a serious limitation during and immediately after it. German academics and scientists, such as the ethnologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, who had made careers in Latin America and imagined retirement or better positions in Germany, saw those visions shattered together with the transnational networks and European economies destroyed by the war.Footnote ⁴⁶

At the same time, anti-German sentiment in some Latin American countries had produced what Frederick C. Luebke termed a “siege mentality” among their Germanophone residents—including both the Reichsdeutsche (those who retained German citizenship while living abroad) and the Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans who did not hold that citizenship). That mentality ultimately facilitated the unification of disparate German-speaking groups around an objective identity of “German” in response to discriminatory practices during the war, and thus to the creation of broad-based German associations in Latin American states such as Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Paraguay.Footnote ⁴⁷

In part, those associations helped to prepare Germanophone communities for the shock of Imperial Germany's loss of the war and the concomitant economic challenges, in which their former connections to a world power lost much of their value and widespread inflation in Germany made renewing older trade relations difficult in the years directly following the war.

Trade relations, however, did renew. Despite Imperial Germany's demise, the leaders of many Latin American states were keenly interested in resurrecting German trade and investment to offset the influence that the United States and Great Britain had gained over their economies.Footnote ⁴⁸ Thus German investment in industry in places such as Argentina, while paltry during the inflation years, grew steadily after that. This was possible, to some degree, because German investments in Latin America did not suffer the same fate as those in Europe. German banks in places such as Buenos Aires, for example, were able to maintain much of their capital into the interwar period and then return to their investment strategies with their capital more or less intact after the inflation.Footnote ⁴⁹

Moreover, for many Germans in the Weimar Republic, Latin America also remained a place where they could not only seek work and ply their trade, but it was also a location in which they could still engage in colonial-style economic actions after the loss of German colonies. It remained, as Stefan Rinke reminds us, open to German investment and immigration, and thus many regarded it as an area that could help the German state regain its place as a world power and Germans could regain their economic foundations.Footnote ⁵⁰ The result was the return of vibrant trade relations between (a new) Germany and many Latin American states by the end of the 1920s.

As German immigration to Latin America underwent a significant upswing during the interwar period and trade relations were reestablished and expanded, the Latin American Auslandsdeutsche grew in geopolitical importance.Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, these “Germans abroad” became critical players in Weimar Germany's economic renewal, and maintaining their communities and their links to the German state gained new importance for the German Foreign Office. In many cases, the same individuals and groups that had worked to preserve and enhance their connections to the German nation-state before the war nurtured these ties during the Weimar era. And once again, they did it for their own gain. Indeed, if, as Dirk Hoerder has argued, someone was “instrumentalizing” the notion of the Auslandsdeutsche during this period, it was the transcultural, self-proclaimed Auslandsdeutsche themselves, instrumentalizing the notion of a unitary German culture for their own particular, local purposes.Footnote ⁵²

The Auslandsdeutsche

During the first half of the twentieth century, politicians across the Americas often regarded the Auslandsdeutsches' strong ties to their former homeland as both a sign of their unitary character and their susceptibility to the plots of Imperial, and especially Nazi, Germany. Many scholars during the second half of the twentieth century followed suit.Footnote ⁵³ As Rinke taught us in his foundational Der letzte freie Kontinent, however, those evaluations failed to acknowledge the multiple impulses of the Auslandsdeutsche themselves or their considerable versatility. They assigned far too much agency and competence to the governments in Berlin, and they ignored the consistencies and continuities that ran through the Weimar period, when many of the associations of Auslandsdeutsche were consolidated and became more active in nurturing the connections their businesses and communities had with German industry in Europe.

As Buchenau notes in Tools of Progress, the directors of Casa Boker in Mexico City made the “culturally determined business decision” to channel their interwar profits back toward their investors in Germany, allowing those German shareholders to profit during the interwar period rather than helping the business expand in Mexico.Footnote ⁵⁴ This had nothing to do with the German state. Moreover, during this period, the directors of Casa Boker showed great flexibility in dealing with political changes, and the trauma of war hardly slowed them down: their self-segregation was unaltered by nationalist calls within Mexico for greater assimilation, and their direct interactions with Germany, which had been the basis of their business for generations, persisted. The head of Casa Boker, for example, crossed the Atlantic twenty-four times between 1926 and 1938.Footnote ⁵⁵ His transnational business and connections continued to flourish.

Such case studies continue to reinforce the general conclusions set out by Rinke, that the Weimar period witnessed a foreign policy in which the German Foreign Office followed, rather than led, the actions and efforts of the Bürgertum in Latin America and Germany. Economic ties were reinforced and strengthened on the initiatives of various Germans and their associations in Latin America. In addition, such transnational individuals also drove the flowering cultural policy, which set out to strengthen German culture in Latin America by supporting German cultural institutions, ranging from choral societies to scientific associations and primary schools. Similarly, the ever-thickening interconnections in the realm of science and student exchange were greatly facilitated by institutions such as the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin—with state approval but without the state's direction.Footnote ⁵⁶

In all of these efforts, the Auslandsdeutsche facilitated the connections and exchanges between Latin American elites and the German Foreign Office. Indeed, for the Foreign Office, the key concern ultimately became to allow such relations to take shape and flourish while managing those that might tarnish the state's reputation.Footnote ⁵⁷

Thus the self-proclaimed leaders among the Auslandsdeutsche remained keenly interested in promoting, nurturing, and policing themselves. Newton noted this in his work on Buenos Aires after the war, where leading members of the Germanophone community sought to prevent the three to four generations of Germans who had taken root in Argentina, as well as the growing numbers of new immigrants, from “sinking” to the level of the fellow Argentines and losing those coveted characteristics long attributed to German settlers. Many felt they needed simultaneously to pursue a kind of “civilizing mission” among Creole elites as well.Footnote ⁵⁸

That was not unique to Buenos Aires. Many people penned books and articles about the goals and purposes of the Auslandsdeutsche during the interwar period. The war had forced ethnic Germans everywhere to reflect on their subject positions and the importance that their heritage and state affiliation(s) played in their lives. That, in turn, led to widespread discussions of the virtue and necessity of promoting Deutschtum in Latin America, which also entailed a parallel discussion of the challenges of avoiding assimilation into the broader Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking communities. Integration without assimilation remained the central goal in these discussions, which were pursued in a wide variety of locations, the most prominent of which were among the members of the Auslandsdeutsche associations and organizations in the various Latin American states, in the Deutschtumsverbänden in Germany, and within the churches.Footnote ⁵⁹

Nowhere, however, did these Auslandsdeutsche follow a coordinated policy. Indeed, Rinke emphasized that although many of these groups were in more or less close contact with the Ministry of the Interior in the German Reich and the German Foreign Office, the large number of organizations, their competition with each other, the lack of harmonization, and the heterogeneity of these actual groups made their working together all but impossible.Footnote ⁶⁰ Moreover, regional, class, and religious differences among the self-proclaimed Auslandsdeutsche also made joint actions on their part challenging at best. In places such as Brazil, for example, the “German” associations were almost all regional, not general—they were not organized across the different Brazilian states, rather within them. This was true in many other Latin American states as well.

The point then, is that while World War I ushered in a series of critical new geopolitical contexts that unsettled German interconnections with Latin America, much about these fractured Germanophone communities and their various transnational economic, cultural, and social connections persisted. So, too, did much of their politics and their diversity. Indeed, it is worth underscoring again that Germans' regionalism and their focus on locality, which has seen so much recent attention from historians of central Europe, appears to have traveled easily across the Atlantic to “new world” locations as well.Footnote ⁶¹ Moreover, within these ostensibly representative associations that grew after the war, traditional elites continued to dominate, and when different kinds of Germans (younger immigrants, skilled and unskilled workers, more women, people from diverse regional origins) arrived during the interwar period, they were not easily incorporated into these organizations. Factionalism persisted, and religion, too, continued to divide these arrivals: everyone recognized that German Catholics were much more easily integrated into their host societies across Latin America, and thus they tended, as they had in the past, to hold onto the vestiges of Deutschtum with less dedication than did German Protestants—unless, of course, holding onto it presented them with clear advantages. Footnote ⁶²

The German Schools

The challenges, hopes, and pitfalls of organizing Germanophone communities in Latin America are captured in the schools they created to provide their children with educations comparable to those in Germany. They were widespread across Latin America and grew to critical importance during the Weimar period. Many had originated to serve the families of merchants and consular officials in isolated locations, and many received direct support from the German Foreign Office before and after the war. Indeed, as the populations of German speakers grew toward the end the nineteenth century, so, too, did the size and number of schools that were created by German communities and staffed with teachers and administrators who were trained in Germany. Rinke estimated that eighty-two percent of the German schools that existed outside the German state in 1913 were in Latin America. By 1933 that percentage had risen to ninety-four percent, and the number of these schools there doubled.Footnote ⁶³

The economic conditions faced by school administrators during the first half of the interwar period make that growth particularly impressive. They also required the admission of many more students from non-German backgrounds to make ends meet. Changes in curriculum followed as well, some pressed from outside. Indeed, in states such as Santa Catarina in Brazil, German schools faced particularly strong laws meant to incorporate their exceptional organization, pedagogy, and staff within new nationalist principles by demanding the use of more Portuguese in their programs.Footnote ⁶⁴

Despite such difficulties, the German schools in the Southern Cone grew. So, too, did efforts among the self-appointed leaders of the Auslandsdeutsche to coordinate, standardize, and harness them for their own purposes. Wilhelm Keiper, for example, became a critical contact person between the German schools and the German Foreign Office during the 1930s and early 1940s, penning years of reports that argued in favor of using the schools to preserve and promote Deutschtum in Latin America.Footnote ⁶⁵ Keiper sought better organization and a centralized school administration, one that could send representatives into even the most remote locations to ensure consistency in the quality and character of the schools. He had great support on both sides of the Atlantic, but it never happened: there were too few funds, too many hurdles, and too much local resistance.

Nevertheless, as Rinke explained, Keiper's efforts, successes, and failures are telling. On the one hand, they reveal that the German Foreign Office was willing to be led by such groups and individuals, and that people such as Keiper could persuade the Foreign Office to provide the smaller, more vulnerable schools with financial assistance to support their broader school project and the development and preservation of Deutschtum in Latin America. On the other hand, Keiper's reports about German settlers easily turning to Spanish or Portuguese schools when they were more affordable than the German ones makes it equally clear that for many so-called Auslandsdeutsche who were not among the elites, the choice of whether to preserve their family's connections to German language and culture was often more practical than ideological.Footnote ⁶⁶

Despite the inability of Keiper and others to press through unified organizational reforms, the German schools came to have an important general propagandistic function. They further promoted respect and admiration for Germany and German culture in Latin America, and they strengthened intellectual networks and economic relations between Weimar Germany and many places within Latin America.Footnote ⁶⁷ They were most common in capital cities and economic centers, where there was intense contact between German and non-German economic elites, but they were not everywhere. Unlike the Southern Cone, there were not enough Germans to support pure German-language schools in Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. That was even true in Guatemala, Mexico, and Uruguay, which had larger German populations.Footnote ⁶⁸

Where such schools were most successful, their propagandistic potential became a subject of great debate. That ultimately undercut their success: they attracted the attention of state officials who wanted to nationalize them in order to reduce their influence—especially after the rise of National Socialism and the Nazi's pointed effort to instrumentalize the Auslandsdeutsche and their institutions.Footnote ⁶⁹

The Contentious Third Reich

As with so much of modern German history, the Nazis in Latin America have seen extensive scholarly attention. A search for collaborators could be expected: wedded as they had been to the prestige of Imperial Germany, few of the German elites in Latin America had welcomed the Weimar Republic, and many seemed eager to embrace a more assertive nationalist ideology under the Nazi state.Footnote ⁷⁰ Here, too, however, the most recent literature has underscored the independence and agency of a fractured Auslandsdeutschtum and the continued inability of the German state, even in its more authoritarian and ideologically aggressive incarnation, to control either the relations between Germany and Latin America or the behavior of the many ethnic Germans living there. The Nazis did, however, have an impact on both.

Jürgen Müller's Nationalsozialismus in Lateinamerika. Die Auslandsorganisation der NSDAP in Argentinien, Brasilien, Chile und Mexico, 1931–1945, is an excellent example.Footnote ⁷¹ His painstakingly detailed analysis of Nazi efforts to control the Auslandsdeutsche in Latin America through its own institution, the Auslandsorganisation, reveals a striking lack of success. Indeed, Müller characterizes this organization as a second-level institution at best, one that was almost always at odds with the Foreign Office, fighting for control over policy and jurisdiction.

Under the leadership of Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, and with the direct support of Joseph Goebbles, the Auslandsorganisation sought to promote and strengthen German industry abroad, enhance bilateral agreements, and unify migrating Germans while educating them ideologically. Beset by internal squabbles, however, the Auslandsorganisation had little luck in its unifying efforts, and it never gained a position from which it could dictate much of anything to ethnic Germans in Central and South America. As Müller points out, less than five percent of the Reichsdeutsche in Latin America joined the Nazi Party, and even those who did were not keen to be disciplined by Bohle. Instead, an array of Ortsgruppen sprouted up independently across places such as Southern Brazil and Chile, experiencing a wide range of successes and failures but never managing to create a unified position.Footnote ⁷² Much as during the Weimar Republic, local orientations trumped centralization efforts again and again.Footnote ⁷³

Moreover, efforts to organize the Auslandsdeutsche along Nazi principles met even less success once the Nazi state became more belligerent in Europe. The oppression of Jews did not play well in Latin America, and both German and non-German socialists in places such as Buenos Aries reacted aggressively against the Nazi seizure of power and its domestic and foreign policies. Consequently, Nazi party members and associations in Latin America spent considerable time engaging in damage control on a local level. They had little success countering the criticisms directed against Nazi domestic and foreign policies, and they were increasingly isolated by the heated reactions they faced in the streets of their cities, towns, and villages.Footnote ⁷⁴

In part, this was because Argentineans were well informed about Nazi actions in Europe, and they were quick to turn against them. In their contribution to Holger M. Meding and Georg Ismar's volume Argentinien und das Dritte Reich, Darío Brenman and Gustavo Efron explained that in 1936 there were 151 foreign newspapers and magazines in Argentina, produced in twenty-six languages. Those papers informed the diverse reading publics about the negative aspects of the regime: the camps, the deportations, even the crematoriums. La Prensa in particular was an active watchdog. It reacted quickly and negatively to the 20,000 Germans who gathered in the city to celebrate the Austrian Anschluss in 1938, and it denounced the ideologically driven transformations National Socialists tried to push through the German-Argentinean schools. La Prensa was not alone. As Brenman and Efron explained, by 1940 a critical consensus took shape in these diverse newspapers, as the Argentine press distanced itself from the Third Reich much sooner than the regime, which depended on good trade relations with Germany.Footnote ⁷⁵

Even in Chile, however, which also depended on those economic relations, and which unlike most other Latin American countries never banned the NSDAP, the Nazis' attacks on neutral states in Europe sent a shudder through the regime.Footnote ⁷⁶ Across Latin America, officials stood in awe of the Nazis' quick rise to power, and their ability to transform Germany from a nonthreatening economic partner to a military powerhouse in such a short time led to great concern.

Thus by 1937, those officials began to regard the ethnic Germans in their territories—regardless of their relations to Germany or the Nazis—with great suspicion. In many cases, the same people whom Latin American officials had recently counted as critical national assets became threatening potential members of a putative fifth column, and by 1939, even those ethnic Germans who opposed National Socialism found that their local positions were under scrutiny and threat.

Thus if World War I had brought a kind of “siege mentality” that integrated ethnic German communities across Latin America, World War II did something fundamentally different: it simultaneously reinforced fractures in those communities while encouraging the people who lived with and around ethnic Germans to follow the United States' lead, ignore the distinctions, and treat them punitively as a unitary group.Footnote ⁷⁷

As Uwe Lübken wrote in Bedrohliche Nähe. Die USA und die nationalsozialistische Herausforderung in Lateinamerika, 1937–1945, the United States government had long seen Germany as a rival in Latin America.Footnote ⁷⁸ Indeed, there were striking similarities between Germany and the United States' competition to gain markets and influence at the end of the nineteenth century and again during the late 1930s. The second period, however, was qualitatively different. The Roosevelt administration was awestruck by the speed with which Germany had gone from a weakened power that suffered military, economic, and political collapse to a raging powerhouse that quickly dominated Europe and easily defeated the military forces of many European states. Those successes, combined with the new technologies at the Nazis' disposal, made many in the Roosevelt administration fear that a transit from Africa to Brazil could be easily established, and that, in turn, would allow the Nazis to enter the United States' sphere of influence. Indeed, many feared the United States could be invaded.

These fears, Lübken argued, were not outlandish. Power relations had indeed shifted quickly and in an almost unprecedented fashion. Air raids were real, and there was no reason to suppose they must be limited to Europe if bases could be established on the other side of the Atlantic. Moreover, these widespread fears easily dovetailed with an ever-growing belief in the Nazi's own propaganda about the Auslandsdeutsche and its potential as a fifth column: many officials in the U.S. argued that German successes in places such as France could be partly explained by groups of Auslandsdeutsche in Europe who had worked successfully to undermine European states from within. There was also great fear of espionage networks in Latin America, which, as Friedrich E. Schuler showed in his contribution to Meding and Ismar's Argentinien und das Dritte Reich, did indeed exist, even if they did not prove decisive.Footnote ⁷⁹ U.S. officials believed that such networks could be turned to great advantage in the “weaker” states of South America, where many in the Roosevelt administration felt a propensity among Latin American oligarchies and dictators toward fascism would make them particularly good allies for the Axis Powers.

This was, in fact, the Roosevelt administration's nightmare scenario, and thus many in the U.S. State Department increasingly regarded Latin America as the United States' Achilles heel.Footnote ⁸⁰ The result was the United States' pursuit of a policy that put great pressure on the governments of Latin American states to demonize and persecute their ethnic German communities regardless of the individual members' own political positions.

As Max Paul Friedman has shown us in his stunning Nazis and Good Neighbors, these policies, often indiscriminately pursued, had a devastating impact on many individuals, families, and communities. Many lost their property, faced internment and extradition to the United States, and in some extreme cases, exiles from Nazi Germany, including German Jews, were extradited from Latin America and imprisoned in the United States together with the kinds of people they had fled Europe to escape.Footnote ⁸¹

How precisely these North American policies and the Nazis' efforts at Gleichschaltung played out, however, varied across the different Latin American contexts. Buchenau, for example, underscored that “the Mexican government was a reluctant and self-interested ally,” which “not only resisted U.S. entreaties to extradite Nazis,” but “also used the pretext of the Nazi threat to seize much of the wealth of the German colony.” They were not alone in that effort. Regimes across Latin America seized property from their citizens who were ethnic Germans, many of whom, such as the merchant family in Buchenau's study, had lived in those countries for generations.Footnote ⁸² Nevertheless, while fifteen Latin American countries handed over some 4,000 ethnic Germans to the Americans, Mexican President Avila Camacho (like the leaders of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile) refused to punish Mexican citizens by shipping them to the United States. Instead, he chose to intern them in Perote, in the state of Veracruz, where they were treated relatively well. This middle road irritated U.S. officials.

Nazi propaganda as much as U.S. prodding provided Camacho with sufficient reasons for action, as did the general support of the Nazi rise to power by a conservative elite within the German community in Mexico City and the ideological transformation of its institutions, especially the German school. But even within this relatively small and elite population, Buchenau notes, “the German colony in Mexico City remained divided politically: a right-wing majority that welcomed strongman rule confronted a small but vocal group of supporters of the Weimar Republic.” Mennonites, Austrians, and Swiss nationals stood in opposition to Nazi policies. Still, many of the merchants felt that opposing Hitler publically could undermine their businesses. Most accepted the school reforms, and few followed the lead of the Allemann family in Buenos Aires by speaking out vigorously against the Nazis with their newspaper the Argentinisches Tageblatt. Nevertheless, as Buchenau stressed, when Nazi sympathizers in Mexico City attempted to have the school renamed after Hindenburg, the recalcitrant members of the colony succeeded in having it named after Alexander von Humboldt in what was ultimately a clever act of public resistance.Footnote ⁸³

Persistent Patterns and Problems

While geopolitical conditions shifted radically during the Nazi era, altering both the contexts in which ethnic Germans in Latin America acted and the implications of those actions, much of what they did and the ways in which they were received built on older traditions and enhanced long-standing interconnections. For example, German scientists and explorers, such as the alpinist-scientists Mark Carey studied in 1930s Peru, continued to launch scientific expeditions into the wilds of Latin America. Until the outbreak of the war in 1939, they, too, were supported by the German (now Nazi) government and by the governments of the territories in which they moved. Thus until the war, much about these German scientific expeditions remained unchanged.

Jens Glüsing detailed one of the more striking examples in Das Guayana-Projekt. Ein deutsches Abenteuer am Amazonas, a journalistic account of his discovery and pursuit of a 1938 German expedition to the border of French Guayana, which left behind a large wooden cross with a swastika carved into it as a grave marker for one of its members.Footnote ⁸⁴ His pursuit of that marker led to his encounter with Rätsel der Urwaldhölle, a book published in 1938 by Otto Schulz-Kampfhenkel, the expedition's leader. It also led to his introduction to Christoph Jaster, who grew up in Brazil, studied forestry in Göttingen, lived easily in both states, and became the director of the national park, Montanhas do Tumucumaque, on the border of the French area. Jaster knew the book as well, which he regarded as one of the best sources available on the area he was hired to manage. He had found it in his mother's home in the German-Brazilian community of Rolandia in Paraná.

Glüsing's account bounces back and forth between a history of the earlier expedition in the 1930s and his own odyssey of tracking Schulz-Kampfhenkel through the national park in the early twenty-first century. It is also dominated by his consternation about the figure of Schulz-Kampfhenkel, who, Glüsing realized, was both a good scientist and a good Nazi.

By any scientific standard, Schulz-Kampfhenkel's expedition was a great success: he produced fantastic collections of plants, animals, and geological and ethnological observations from the area, and he documented his travels with extensive notes, photographs, and films. He worked easily with local peoples, gained the support of local authorities, and based on his materials, authored a book that was translated into English, sold more than 100,000 copies, and was the basis for a film that gained critical acclaim.Footnote ⁸⁵

In the wake of his expedition, Schulz-Kampfhenkel gained higher degrees and a university position, and worked for the SS as a scientist collecting information in North Africa. He also used his knowledge of both areas to fashion a plan for Germany's acquisition of Guyana (should Roosevelt's nightmare scenario actually play out). He underscored the potential of exporting black labor from Germany's African possessions into Latin American rainforests to exploit the jungle's many resources for German gain. After the war, he expanded on his scientific exploits in Latin America to build a career in science, removing the Nazi ideology (and ideas of conquest) from his films and texts so he could continue to market them during the postwar era. His biography was thus a perplexing mixture of continuities and particularities, a Nazi twist on a much older story.

Similarly, German emigration to Latin America hardly slowed during the interwar and Nazi periods, even if its character did change. As refugees became increasingly common, they fled into older ethnic German communities where, as in the past, some integrated while others kept aloof. In some cases, these new waves of German immigrants created rural colonies in a fashion similar to earlier German colonies in Latin America—they were recruited and supported by enterprising individuals and the rulers of Latin American states, who hoped to acquire with these people some of those characteristics long associated with Germans in Latin America: hardworking and skilled labor and farmers, efficient, apolitical, reliable, and white. And, just as in the past, some succeeded while others failed.

One of the more peculiar examples, which has gained a great deal of recent attention, is the Sosúa colony in the Dominican Republic.Footnote ⁸⁶ This agricultural colony, which became renowned for its excellent and “typically German” meat and diary products, was composed of German Jewish refugees recruited by international Jewish organizations based in the United States and sent to Sosúa in the early 1940s. That process began after the dictatorial Trujillo regime surprised the world by stating during the famous Évian conference in July 1938, while representatives of other nations refused to accept any further Jewish refugees, that the Dominican Republic would be delighted to have them.

There were many twists. The Trujillo regime initially claimed that they would accept up to 100,000 people, but they never came near that number. Fewer than a thousand arrived. The regime also made it clear that it was uninterested in the poor, destitute, ill, or infirm. Trujillo wanted physically fit, skilled, young, and, if possible, propertied settlers. He wanted people of reproductive age who would build families as well as farms. Much like the governments in other Latin American countries during the late nineteenth century, the Trujillo regime wanted good eugenic stock to help to whiten the population, improve the landscape, and increase economic and especially agricultural productivity. That the Germans he hoped to recruit were Jewish was largely immaterial. They fit perfectly into the dictator's racial vision, which led him to support massacres of dark-skinned Haitians on his borders to prevent greater racial mixing, while seeking to gain white-skinned Europeans who were being persecuted by racists in Europe. That this led to representatives of international Jewish organizations screening Jewish refugees in Europe, seeking out biologically superior specimens to create Trujillo's new diary farms and whiten his population, is only one of the many ironies in this story.

Dirk Hoerder has noted that within the study of German immigration, German Jews have often been set apart—placed within a narrative of Jewish diaspora.Footnote ⁸⁷ This is certainly the case with Marion A. Kaplan's volume, Dominican Haven, which folded the story of this colony into the history of the Holocaust and sketched out a history of Sosúa that measured the degree of its Jewishness, which she underscored faded over time. Recently, she wrote, “Sosúa is a Dominican town in which only a few elderly Jewish settlers and some of their offspring remain and to which others return to visit.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In her narrative, Sosúa was a place that accommodated some Jewish refugees as they made their way to the United States and allowed others, a very small number, to integrate easily into life in the Dominican Republic. The point she most underscores is the lack of antisemitism and resentment among the rest of the population, including Dominicans who had worked for the colonists over decades.

In stark contrast, Hans-Ulrich Dillmann and Susanne Heim, who published Fluchtpunkt Karibik only a year later, placed the history of the colony into a broader history of German immigration to Latin America. They, too, noted the many ironies within the story of this German-Jewish community, particularly the bizarre racial factor and Trujillo's dispositions, but their narrative emphasized the Germanness of the refugees and the community they created. Here the focus was less on the persistence of religious services than the German language; the key markers were not the Jewish characterizations that accompanied the people, which they discussed as well, but the German ones, which makes Sosúa today not only a Dominican town, but one that has long been recognized by locals and tourist agencies as a German one. While the synagogue did not flourish, the milk and meat industry certainly did, and as Sosúa became a vacation resort during the postwar era, it was marketed as a German town in which German tourists, a few in the 1960s and masses on charter planes out of Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Munich by the 1990s, could find familiar foods and conditions in a Caribbean paradise. That “Germanness,” they explained, was “palpable” in the 1960s, even if it became diluted by the masses at the end of the twentieth century. The point, however, is that the particularities of this settlement project existed within the context of a much longer story of German connections to Latin America that not only predated and informed the political decisions that began this settlement project but also continued long beyond it.

The other critical point, which is too often lost in such accounts of migration and immigration, is that rather than narrating the history of such population transfers as a particularly “German,” “Jewish,” or “Dominican” history, the challenge remains to find methods of narrating these people's stories that not only integrate the different contexts and experiences but also underscore the ways in which the “German” and “Jewish” spaces these settlers created were also “Dominican” spaces, and how all the people who lived there came to move within those overlapping cultural spaces. That is true as well for the larger, fractured “German” communities.

Critical Structural Shifts

Viewed from the twenty-first century, World War II rather than World War I emerges as the critical watershed for German interactions with Latin America. In part, this has to do with Germany's fate, reduced and divided as it was into two states. Perhaps even more important, however, were the structural transformations that followed in the wake of nationalization policies in Latin America, the radical increase in the U.S. strength and presence in the western hemisphere, and the great economic and political instability brought on by a series of regime changes in Latin American countries. Cold-War politics mattered as well.Footnote ⁸⁹

There is no question that the nationalization of schools in Brazil and other countries gradually discouraged the use of the German language and limited its cultural impact after the war. Ethnic Germans' loss of property and the nationalization of German-owned industry, however, meant the loss of trade connections and the inability of independent ethnic Germans on either side of the Atlantic to rebuild those connections as they had after World War I. That made the critical difference.

In some states, such as Mexico, the transformation was halting.Footnote ⁹⁰ In states with larger Germanophone populations, or with a greater interwar reliance on trade with Germany, the impact, as Stefan Rennicke has argued about Argentina, “was catastrophic.”Footnote ⁹¹ While Argentina had waited until the last moment to join the Allied cause, the Peron government wasted no time in confiscating “German” businesses and selling off many of the smaller ones while nationalizing the larger ones after abandoning neutrality.Footnote ⁹² That short-term gain, however, had long-term consequences. Silvia Kroyer demonstrated this in her essay in Meding and Ismar's Argentinien und das Dritte Reich. As a result of state confiscations, a peaceful and friendly part of Argentina's population lost its material foundations and the state lost active investors and critical markets and connections. Indeed, there is good evidence that it also lost out on a significant boom in industrialization as a result, which led to long-term economic problems that persisted through the end of the twentieth century.

Moreover, as Julie Gibbings noted in her recent work on German coffee plantations in Guatemala, where smaller Germanophone populations played a key role in the state's economy, such short-term gains for oligarchies could lead to long-term national losses in smaller, less industrialized states as well. Today, those expulsions still have detractors.Footnote ⁹³

Thus during the postwar era, cultural and economic relations between the new German states and Latin American countries had to be newly fashioned atop the wreckage of old relations. That proved difficult. For example, once the Federal Republic was founded and well established, its diplomats attempted to revive economic and cultural relations that had been broken off for a decade. While doing that, they faced the challenge of convincing Latin Americans that they represented a new Germany—not simply a rump state. Moreover, their consuls faced serious challenges aiding Germans in Latin America: they had to deal with indemnification for Germans who had fled there during the war, with concerns about Nazis who had fled after the war, and with the claims of Germans on both sides of the Atlantic whose property had been confiscated in Latin America.

This took decades, and even in small Germanophone communities such as Mexico City, the people who could claim the consul's services ranged widely. By the 1970s, they included individuals from older families with a fierce loyalty to a Germany long in the past. There were Nazi sympathizers as well as Nazis who had fled to Central America, refugees who avoided both the old conservatives and the Nazi sympathizers, people who had lived through the Third Reich as children and then faced a radical reorientation as adults, and recent immigrants from the Federal Republic who arrived as engineers and middle managers for companies such as Volkswagen, and cringed at the sentiments of the more conservatively nationalist Germans they encountered there.Footnote ⁹⁴

Those new immigrants also arrived with fundamentally different attitudes about Latin America. In general, they were much more interested in the virtues of its multifarious cultures. That stemmed, in part, from postwar conceptualizations of Latin America as part of the “third world” and new attitudes about the illegitimacy of western imperialism that took shape after the war. These new immigrants' attitudes, however, were also shaped by their access to new kinds of information, especially the waves of Latin American literature that became available to Germans after World War II. As Hans-Otto Dill remarked in Die lateinamerikanische Literatur in Deutschland, the flow of information between Latin America and German-speaking Europe changed dramatically after the war. Indeed, despite the long-term interconnections between German and Latin American states, there was strikingly little literature from Latin America available in Germany before World War II.Footnote ⁹⁵ Travel literature abounded; so, too, did political and economic reports, but few Latin American texts had been translated into German. After the war, however, several waves of interest in Latin America swept over Europe, leading to concerted efforts to translate and publish Latin American texts.

That happened earlier in East Germany, where Cold-War politics predisposed the leaders of the German Democratic Republic to regard many Latin American states and their citizens as victims of American imperialism.Footnote ⁹⁶ That, in turn, led to solidarity programs, outreach, a greater interest in promoting information about those places, and a concomitant increase in translated texts. Indeed, between 1945 and 1960, forty translated volumes of Latin American literature were published in East Germany, as many as had been published during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich combined.Footnote ⁹⁷ Only after political change swept West Germany in 1968 and a large percentage of West Germans adopted a more critical attitude toward American imperialism did publications in the Federal Republic begin to catch up with those in East Germany.

The flows of people between Latin America and the two Germanies were also different, and this also accounts for the East Germans' greater interest in translating and reading Latin American literature. As Jens Kirsten stressed in his Lateinamerikanische Literatur in der DDR, academics and exiles from Latin America played a critical role in this process.Footnote ⁹⁸ As their work was translated, and as exiled writers interacted with the East German public, that public continued to look for more. They were also drawn into the blossoming interest in magical realism, which made books such as Gabriel García Márquez's 100 Years of Solitude a blockbuster on both sides of the border and around the world. As East and West Germans embraced these authors, they sought more, leading to the success of other Latin American authors, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda, in the German markets.Footnote ⁹⁹

One striking characteristic of the current scholarship on such German interconnections with Latin America during the postwar era is the degree to which it emphasizes the mutually influential relationships between people and communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Notable, too, is the emphasis it places on the circulation of people and ideas rather than their unidirectional transmission from Europe to Central and South America. Peter Birle and Friedhelm Schmidt-Welle's volume Wechselseitige Perzeptionen. Deutschland-Lateinamerika im 20. Jahrhundert, is a perfect example.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Heinz Krumpel's contribution, for instance, underscores the ways in which German philosophy from the age of the Enlightenment, stemming from luminaries such as Immanuel Kant, was appropriated and used by Latin American philosophers in a particularly Catholic context in which romantic theology and philosophical rationalism were happily combined, and Kant and Herder were avidly debated.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Horst Nitschack demonstrated that such appropriations of the Frankfurt School, and particularly Walter Benjamin, were common as well. Many Latin Americans harnessed them to explore their own modernities in the late 1960s, and many continue to do so today.Footnote ¹⁰² Moreover, as Dario Rodríguez and Javier Torres make clear in their study of Niklas Luhmann's work, philosophical ideas were harnessed on both sides of the Atlantic. Luhmann was clearly reading and using the work of the Chilean biologist and philosopher Humberto Maturana.Footnote ¹⁰³ Combined, these contributors underscore the “reciprocal” uses of philosophical ideas across a long period of time.

The World of Today: Fluid Transnational German Spaces

As scholars turned to the circulation of ideas, people, and things at the end of the twentieth century, a striking pattern emerged: they began to portray a transnational world that contained marked similarities with one characterized by Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday (1943).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ We can see this in part in the renewed scientific exchanges and academic networks of the last few decades, and the energy placed on managing bilateral and international economic relations, but it is especially evident in the persistence of what Kerstin Hein has dubbed “hybrid identities.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Hein's analysis was based on a group of people like her—German-Chileans who attended one of Santiago's German schools—and it explored the ways in which they lived hybrid identities. During her research, she determined that many of the characteristics leading Latin American officials had assigned to Germans during the nineteenth century continue to be applied to Germans in Latin America today. Those characterizations created and perpetuated what she described as “positive” stereotypes and a “Minderheit” (minority) of German-Chileans that is not regarded as “minderwertig” (of less value), as many minorities are. Rather, Chileans generally regard “Germans” (that is anyone who can be designated a German because of associations with German culture or the German-Chilean community) as especially orderly, reliable, effective, and efficient. That has many benefits. Among other things, it is much easier for them to gain and retain employment, positions of authority, and even leases on coveted apartments.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Because of the continued importance of the German schools, even children who were not descended from Germans, but who spent time in Germany with exile families or other expatriots before attending a German school in Santiago, were quickly drawn into the “German-Chilean” category.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Which individuals can be included in that category, in other words, is flexible and has more to do with cultural associations than passports.

Indeed, the number of passports obtained by Hein's subjects is striking.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Many have taken advantage of the fact that they, like their parents and grandparents, are the product of multigenerational German networks that crisscrossed Latin America. Such migrants, she notes, did not simply go from point A to point B; in many cases, they remained in motion, and that motion was an identity project. They were, in fact, part of a diasporic community that was not necessarily located in specific spaces or around a homeland. Rather, they were and are transnationals who live in multiple places and who have drawn on that movement and their heritage to make claims on documents from multiple states. That is, German biculturalism is not unusual in Latin America, even if it may be in Germany.

Thus, much like the people Tara Zahra has studied in the Bohemian borderlands, Hein has located ethnic Germans living in the heart of Chile who move within multiple cultures and languages (German among them), who evidence a kind of “national indifference” that Zahra and others have located in Europe during Zweig's era. Such German-Chileans, she argued, pursue lives that reveal significant cultural flexibility and a striking degree of agency.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ They engage in “ongoing cultural navigation” through the overlapping cultural spaces that have long been there. Many develop a “mobile Zuhause” (feeling of home) within “a transnational German-Chilean space.” That space, she explains, is informed, but never limited, by political borders or the fact that these individuals might also carry Peruvian or Bolivian passports, much as borderland Koreans at the end of the nineteenth century might have carried Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and/or Russian ones.Footnote ¹¹⁰ That has led to the production of a German-Chilean culture that is the result of these ongoing individual negotiations of the cultural, political, and social structures that occupy the spaces they inhabit. Within these conditions, which developed over generations, “it is possible to possess a Chilean ancestry but be socialized within the space of a German national culture,” because “groups of people and cultures can be localized in multiple places,” in multiple, overlapping, cultural spaces.Footnote ¹¹¹

Those theoretical insights have great implications for the writing of German history. They offer up the potential of re-spatializing that history around such national cultures as well as the formidable challenge of narrating a history of disparate German cultural spaces over a longer period of time. For historians of central Europe and particularly of Germany, this is a worthy challenge indeed.