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In Imagining a Greater Germany, Erin R. Hochman offers a fresh approach to the questions of state- and nation-building in interwar Central Europe. Ever since Hitler annexed his native Austria to Germany in 1938, the term "Anschluss" has been linked to Nazi expansionism. The legacy of Nazism has cast a long shadow not only over the idea of the union of German-speaking lands but also over German nationalism in general. Due to the horrors unleashed by the Third Reich, German nationalism has seemed virulently exclusionary, and Anschluss inherently antidemocratic.However, as Hochman makes clear, nationalism and the desire to redraw Germany's boundaries were not solely the prerogatives of the political right. Focusing on the supporters of the embattled Weimar and First Austrian Republics, she argues that support for an Anschluss and belief in the großdeutsch idea (the historical notion that Germany should include Austria) were central to republicans’ persistent attempts to legitimize democracy. With appeals to a großdeutsch tradition, republicans fiercely contested their opponents’ claims that democracy and Germany, socialism and nationalism, Jew and German, were mutually exclusive categories. They aimed at nothing less than creating their own form of nationalism, one that stood in direct opposition to the destructive visions of the political right. By challenging the oft-cited distinction between "good" civic and "bad" ethnic nationalisms and drawing attention to the energetic efforts of republicans to create a cross-border partnership to defend democracy, Hochman emphasizes that the triumph of Nazi ideas about nationalism and politics was far from inevitable.
Erin R. Hochman is Assistant Professor of History at Southern Methodist University.
"With this masterful analysis of the German Question through anthems, holidays, and political parties, Erin R. Hochman reclaims transborder nationalism from the far right and elegantly reassesses liberal democracy's vitality in interwar Austria and Germany."
Ian Reifowitz, SUNY Empire State College, author of Imagining an Austrian Nation: Joseph Samuel Bloch and the Search for a Multiethnic Austrian Identity, 1846–1919:
"Erin R. Hochman's work on interwar republican nationalism fits nicely into a broader trend that questions the notion that German politics was dominated by nationalists and that their triumph was somehow inevitable."
David S. Luft, Oregon State University, author of Eros and Inwardness in Vienna:
"Erin R. Hochman has written a thoughtful and sure-handed account of republican nationalism in Germany and Austria during the interwar years. Americans and West Europeans often do not have a clear understanding of the relationship between Germany and Austria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially the role of German nationalism in its republican form. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this story is the left-wing, großdeutsch nationalism that was part of interwar politics in both Germany and Austria."
Peter Thaler, University of Southern Denmark, author of The Ambivalence of Identity: The Austrian Experience of Nation-Building in a Modern Society:
"Imagining a Greater Germany is an important contribution to the history of interwar Austria and Germany. Its challenge to existing historiography is well-argued and its consistently transnational focus exemplary."
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