The Unbounded Nation? Education Networks and Migration between Germany and Argentina, 1890–1930

This paper examines the exchange that emerged between Germany and Argentina in an era of both high imperialism and mass migration. It highlights the aspirations of government officials and nationalist groups in Imperial and Weimar Germany and their inability to implement their goals. Focusing in particular on the transatlantic circulation of teachers between Germany and Argentina, the flow of financial support from Germany, and a system of offering both Argentine and German diplomas, it explores how German-speaking educators and parents in Argentina played off the German desire to maintain the children of emigrants in a territorially-unbounded nation.  

In describing both emigrant citizens and their children as “Germans abroad” (Auslandsdeutsche), people in Germany promoted the idea that the German nation transcended both political and generational boundaries. German emigrants and their children born in other countries, from this perspective, remained part of the national community. German-speaking educators and teachers in Argentina called on the German Foreign Office and nationalist groups for help, but they did not hold identical ideas about language, ethnicity, and the nation. They used similar language and emphasized the dangers facing Germandom (Deutschtum), particularly if children of German heritage could not attend German-language schools. Nevertheless, these European-born adults and to an even greater extent their Argentine-born children did not see themselves solely as Germans abroad, and instead struck their own balance between transatlantic connections and their local and national contexts.

This paper draws from extensive research using the records of the German Foreign Office in Berlin, internal and published documentation of several German-language schools in Buenos Aires, and publications of the Argentine National Council of Education at the Biblioteca Nacional de Maestros.