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When the Bavarian naturalist Moritz Wagner travelled in the kingdom of Georgia, in 1819, he encountered there thousands of Germans, some of them living in what he described as a “ganz deutscher Bauart”, a German-designed village. They or their parents hhd emigrated there after the Napoleonic Wars.
What Wagner found in the Caucusus could also be encountered elsewhere in Russia, as well as in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, “the triangular area between Cincinannti, St. Louis, and St. Paul”, and in places considerably closer to his native Bavaria. They were communities of people who were, as my guest Glenn Penny describes them, “German and something else.” Their stories are the heart of Penny’s new book, German History Unbound: From 1750 to the Present.
Glenn Penny is Professor of History and the Henry J. Bruman Endowed Chair in German History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent publications include In Humboldt’s Shadow: A Tragic History of German Ethnology. He is currently working on a book entitled Belonging in the Southern German Borderlands since 1800.
For Further Investigation
- One interesting moment in the conversation was when it turned to imagining German history without necessarily including the Third Reich. A couple of conversations from the podcast do indeed discuss German history without the telos of Adolf Hitler. They are Episode 119: The Curious Case of the Lion’s Blood, or, How Anna Zieglerin Came to Be Burned at the Stake and Episode 190: Porcelain
- We talked about Germans who emigrated to Russia; and some of that population who then left Russia for the Americas. Here’s the Germans from Russia Heritage Society, where you can learn more about these peripatetic people. They even have a list of German villages in the Caucasus.
