The Persistence of Race: Continuity and Change in Germany from the Wilhelmine Empire to National Socialism

Race in 20th-century German history is an inescapable topic, one that has been defined overwhelmingly by the narratives of degeneracy that prefigured the Nuremberg Laws and death camps of the Third Reich. As the contributions to this innovative volume show, however, German society produced a much more complex variety of racial representations over the first part of the century. Here, historians explore the hateful depictions of the Nazi period alongside idealized images of African, Pacific and Australian indigenous peoples, demonstrating both the remarkable fixity race had as an object of fascination for German society as well as the conceptual plasticity it exhibited through several historical eras.

Oliver Haag teaches at the University of Barcelona and is Visiting Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary’s College, Chennai. He is the co-editor of Ngapartji Ngapartji: Reciprocal Engagement (Australian National University Press) and has authored a special issue of National Identities (Routledge). His scholarship has appeared in Continuum, Aboriginal History, Journal of New Zealand Studies, and Neohelicon, among others.