Germans Abroad? Danube Swabians and the Plurality of Diasporic Possibilities

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This article engages with the history of the so-called Danube Swabians from the eighteenth century up to the present as a history of multiple diasporic possibilities. Showing how the Danube Swabian case complicates fixed understandings of homeland and host-state, the article also makes the case that the history of Germans abroad—especially of Germans in the Southeast of Europe—should be released from the tight analytical straitjacket of the German nation-state and/or of the host-states in the Southeast of Europe. A closer look at the migration processes underlying and informing Danube Swabian identifications reveals that the homeland has only at times been imagined as the German nation-state and that several other regional entities and nation-states have been considered potential homelands and points of reference. Moreover, the ‘return’ to the Federal Republic of Germany did not unmake the diaspora. Hence, this article invites a reassessment of the frames of reference typically used for engaging with Germans abroad in the past and in the present. It indicates that diasporic analyses should think of key characteristics of the diasporic condition, such as orientation to the homeland and representations of dispersion, as elastic and in flux.