3 - Emigrant Nation

Summary

As Imperial Germany came into being in 1871, it entered into the consciousness of people who already belonged to an emigrant nation.It contained people who lived far outside that nation-state’s borders, and it included many who considered themselves German plus other things. It was tied together by dynamic forms of communications: ever-more-efficient methods of correspondence, a growing German-language press, not to mention the pedagogical networks that thickened during the last decades of the nineteenth century and ever-more-powerful networks of trade, transport, and travel. The global consciousness that had grown over the previous century now included a consciousness of German communities around the globe and an ever-greater comfort with mobility. That not only extended older forms of labor mobility beyond Europe’s borders but also witnessed an increase in families extending their membership into an ever-greater variety of transcultural places. There were, in fact, millions of Germans living transnational lives in transcultural communities by the end of the century—some in Europe and some far from it.