2 - Cultural Nation

Summary

Millions of Germans helped to transform much of North America during the 19th century, and smaller numbers did similar things across Latin America, in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, Eastern Europe and especially Imperial Russia.As they did that, they also built and moved across networks of communication, trade, and transportation that expanded over generations. The nodal points in these extra-European networks wereoften transcultural places filled with varieties of Germans who were frequently being or becoming German plus other things.At the same time, across polycentric German-speaking Europe there were many centers, places of belonging, that often tied together people across vast regions.Many of these centers had a global reach; even when they remained modest in size and can be difficult to find on political maps, they frequently held great significance for people’s mental maps.Often discounted today, it was the notion of a German cultural community, or Kulturgemeinshaft, which recognized commonalities across the many differences that tied these disparate people and their orientations together and provided many with considerable cultural capital as they went abroad.