German Studies Review

Over the course of the nineteenth century, political grievances, religious and social repression, and the search for opportunities motivated millions of Germans to depart from Europe and fashion new lives around the globe. Some demographically minded Germans insisted that emigration siphoned away Germany’s military and economic strength. The sapping effects of emigration joined with a declining birth rate around the turn of the twentieth century—reversing the trend many Germans considered a crucial element in the nation’s recent ascendance to the world stage. France’s own relative decline appeared to prove the point. They further argued that rapid urbanization and the modern cityscape promoted the moral and physical decline of millions of Germans, and the working class represented a decidedly unstable social group. And in the East, the proportion of Jews, Poles, and Russians relative to the German population allegedly kept growing. They were convinced the increase in non-Germans and the simultaneous degeneration of Germans imperiled the nation.

Anna Danilina tracks the men (and some women) who were plagued by these fears but also maintained an emphatic optimism that Germany could halt the decline, even reverse it. Race, in the decades surrounding the fin-de-siècle, had not yet become a concept firmly fixated on immutable biology. Just as races could degenerate, they also held the potential to regenerate. Historians have often attended to the eugenic discourses focused on the unchangeable nature of races predicated on underlying biology—and how these discourses manifested in the Nazi racial state. In contrast, Danilina’s protagonists held a more flexible definition of race deeply imbricated with individual behavior and morality, labor relationships and economic organization, and emotions and repetition of physical actions. Race had plasticity.

The first half of the book details inner colonization efforts devoted to developing [End Page 343] relationships between space and race to simultaneously Germanize the land and Germans. Settlement planners, by and large, private parties unaffiliated with the Imperial or Weimar government’s formal biopolitical plans, conceived of the settlement community “as an economic institution that educated people to morality through work and German culture, while at the same time racially categorizing the settlers and workers and tying national Germanness to this” (79). Men like Adolf Damaschke, the founder of the Association of German Land Reformers and the chairman of the Obstbaukolonie Eden, rejected the capitalist commodification of the land even as he denounced internationalist Marxism (84). Colonies such as Eden, he argued, forged a third path that promoted a specifically German way of life for individuals conducive to the population’s overall racial health. Germanizing the land was a pedagogical experiential activity. It developed in settlers a proper sense of German labor and morality and rescued settlers who hailed from the lower class from racial degeneration. Race, Danilina reminds us, was intimately tied to class.

The second half of the book moves away from the co-constitutive racialization of space and population within Germany and toward the internalization of race in individuals’ bodies and feelings. Proponents of inner colonization believed the “physicality and materiality of race were . . . malleable, they could be culturally produced. It was not racial specifics that were considered set and unchangeable, but the boundaries of plasticity” (246). The biology of race, so the thinking went, predisposed individuals to certain characteristics, but participation in a wide spectrum of activities and ethics cast race as much more malleable. Religion, nutrition, the mental development of self-control, labor, and runic gymnastics, all shaped an individual’s race. Other races had their own limits—lower limits—of racial plasticity.

The author makes a timely methodological intervention by bringing both phenomenological philosophy and critical race theory into conversation with the historiography of modern Germany. This shifts the analysis away from discursive constructions of race and toward an attentive consideration of the relationships developed between historical subjects and race. Danilina questions “how racist feelings and racialized practices operate in the formation of the racial body. How is race produced through specific emotional and physical practices in feeling and acting? And what role do racist feelings and practices as relations to others play in the constitution of the racialized subject?” (226). If the construction of the self is a modern project, so too is the racialized self. Discourse alone did not create “the German.” Germans actively worked on themselves to create their own racial and national identities, to construct the non-German identities of others, and to fortify their own positions of whiteness and Germanness.

But the number of Germans living in the settlement communities and those participating in gymnastics and runic lifestyle communities gives pause to drawing broader conclusions about the prevalence of belief in racial plasticity. Friedrich Bernhard [End Page 344] Marby’s League of Germany’s Runic Researchers claimed a likely-exaggerated membership of 2000 (348). Theodor Fritsch’s Siedlungsgenossenschaft Heimland ebbed and flowed between 55 and 115 members (146). Women were underrep-resented in the undertakings that the book details, and this critically undermined the protagonists’ goals to demographically reinvigorate Germany. Inner colonialists certainly constructed a particular discourse concerning the malleability of race, but how broadly did these conceptions of becoming or being German or white extend beyond the small communities examined? Nevertheless, the work’s methodological contribution opens the field for further studies that interrogate the concept of race as historically contingent and not just discursive constructions, but also a set of material and emotional relationships with practiced and internalized phenomenological orientations.