This Presidential Session of the Central European History Society looks at “German history” in a global context through a variety of new historiographical and historical insights into the problem of “Volksdeutsche,” or ethnic Germans living outside of Germany. A problematic concept known best for its association with Nazi Germany’s expansionism, the presenters ask instead what historians can gain from looking at Volksdeutsche beyond German and European contexts. The roundtable thus uses the concept of Volksdeutsche as a starting point to examine issues of national indifference, wartime collaboration, transatlantic and transnational history, immigration, and diasporas.

Overall, this roundtable examines the minority communities on two levels: 1) how the historical actors could use Germanness as a resource or see it as a liability; and 2) how historians grapple with the pitfalls in understanding and narrating this history through the lens of “ethnic German.” The roundtable will pay special attention to the political problems for historians undertaking such work in increasingly authoritarian regimes as well as the crisis of language today.

Doris Bergen’s work on Nazi policies in Poland and the USSR reveals how Nazi policies for Germanizing eastern Europe contrasted starkly with the reality on the ground and how these contradictions of “Germanness” led to ever more radical “solutions.” Benjamin Bryce’s research on German-descent communities in Ontario and Argentina looks at the limits of using the terminology of Volksdeutsch in non-European contexts, both by the German actors then and by historians now. Gaëlle Fisher’s investigation of Germans and Jews in the Bukovina region shows their complicated relationship with each other and with their Romanian and Ukrainian neighbors, and also how German historiography to this day siloes these experiences into national history, “scientific” research, and popular culture. Mirna Zakić provides perspectives on how Volksdeutsche negotiated their Germanness with Serbs in the multiethnic Vojvodina in Serbia, and why much of this history was elided in postwar historiographies.