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"A polycentric German history that pointedly decenters the nation-state. It includes communities of Germans far beyond its borders, and it emphasizes that for generations many who considered themselves to be German also felt themselves to be other things. Taking up a decidedly counter-hegemonic position, Glenn calls for a greater integration of mobilities, migration flows, and pluralities of belonging into our narratives of Germans' histories. He also argues for greater attention to the transcultural spaces many Germans helped to fashion and the various networks that tied them together."--

Introduction kihawahine : the future in the past -- Hawaiian feathered cloaks and Mayan sculptures : collecting origins -- The Haida crest pole and the Nootka eagle mask : hypercollecting -- Benin bronzes : colonial questions -- Guatemalan textiles : persisting global networks -- The Yup'ik flying-swan mask : the past in the future -- Epilogue : harnessing Humboldt.

Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Modernist Visions and Municipal Displays; 2. The International Market in Material Culture; 3. The Cultures of Collection and the Politics of Science; 4. The Audience as Author; 5. Museum Chaos; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index

AbstractFrom the late nineteenth century through the interwar period, the production and consumption of German things played critical roles in delineating and connecting a wide variety of German places in Latin America. Such places became ubiquitous in Chile and Argentina. They flourished because there was ample room in the German imagination for the multiplicity of German places and the cultural hybridity that accompanied them to extend beyond Imperial Germany's national boundaries and colonial possessions. They also flourished because host societies found virtue in having those German places in their states. This essay uses German schools in Argentina and Chile as a window into the emergence of such German places and the soft power that accompanied them. Scholars often overlook that power when they focus on colonial questions or formal and informal imperialism in Latin America. More than any other institution, German schools became sites where the production and consumption of German things were concentrated and multilayered, and where the consistencies and great varieties of Germanness that arrived and evolved in Latin America gained their clearest articulation. Because those schools were both centers of communities and nodes in a global pedagogical network that thrived during the interwar period, they provide us with great insight into a nexus of motivations that created German places in Latin America. Life around these schools also underscores the importance of studying immigrants and their things together.

Germans have long been part of the multi-ethnic and multicultural histories that shaped the territory between the Oder and the Urals. The presence of Germans, however, was seldom the same as 'a German presence' nor has it always been clear who the 'Germans' might be, or might have been. During the medieval period, for example, as Roger Bartlett and Karen Schönwälder reminded us more than a decade ago, a German in eastern Europe 'might be one who came from a core German territory, spoke a Germanic language, or to whom German law applied; but none of these criteria was necessarily decisive or historically unambiguous'. That equivocality proved tenacious, and consequently the clichéd polarity of Teuton and Slav has frequently obscured the 'fluidity of identity and multiplicity of interaction' that remain 'crucial' to understanding the history of this region, where 'impulses of culture, religion, political and economic interest, whether uniting or dividing, have often cut across linguistic or ethnic differences'.

German interactions with Latin America have a long history. Indeed, early modern historians have demonstrated that people from German-speaking central Europe took part in all aspects of the European conquest of Central and South America. They have shown that these people were critical to mining operations and publishing in sixteenth-century Mexico; they have found them among Portuguese and Spanish sailors and soldiers almost everywhere; and they have located them playing important roles in a wide range of professions from Mexico to the south of Chile.

Acuriousphotograph appeared in 1976 in the East-German newspaperJunge Welt(Fig. 1). Two well-known members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), Dennis Banks and Vernon Bellecourt, were shown together with an elderly German woman, Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, at her home in East Berlin. This photo, like so many of the photos of Indians in unexpected places, always seems to amuse people, leading them to ask with a snigger why the Indians were there. The Indians' presence in such places, however, is seldom a laughing matter, and in this case, scholars of the post-war era might find the answer to the simple question of the Indians' presence somewhat disconcerting.