Germans Abroad Respatializing Historical Narrative by H. Glenn Penny and Stefan Rinke Abstract: The introductory essay engages with recent work on the myriad groups of German speakers that flourished outside the borders of the German nation-state between the 1880s and the 1930s. Since the end of the Second World War, scholars have treated the notion of the Auslandsdeutsche (German expatriates) with considerable ideological suspicion. This essay, however, argues that a German history that moves beyond those prejudices and integrates these communities of German-speakers into a more inclusive historiography offers us the chance to create a dialog between German national history and the histories of the nations and regions in which German cultures took hold and, to use the language of the times, where German colonies were founded. The integration of these German spaces and their diverse communities into our historical narratives offers us the chance to fashion a more inclusive notion of German history, one that effectively decenters the role of the German nation-state by recog- nizing the inherently polycentric character of German nationhood during this period. Historians need not fear thinking about Germans abroad as an integral part of German history. As David Blackbourn makes clear in his contribution to this special issue, people and communities that could be (and often were) categorized as Auslandsdeutsche played important roles in German history, indeed in world history, long before the nineteenth century. Moreover, as the other essays in this issue demonstrate, the importance of those communities continued through the heyday of nation making and well into the twentieth century. That history, however, has been fraught. If, from the sixteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century, the accepted idea of the German nation was, in essence, a cultural conglomerate of different kinds of Germanophones living in a wide variety of different political states, the notion that those communities could and should be interconnected became increas- ingly politicized after unification and particularly during the age of Weltpolitik. 1 It also became the basis for the worst kinds of imperialist 1 For an excellent discussion of this politicization and the discursive shift from Auswanderer to Auslandsdeutsche in Germanophone political discourse, see Bradley Naranch, Inventing the Auslandsdeutsche. Emigration, Colonial Fantasy, and German National Identity, 1848 – 71, in: Eric Ames et al. (eds.), Germany’s Colonial Pasts, Lincoln 2005, pp. 21 – 40. The classic overview of German migration is: Klaus J. Bade (ed.), Deutsche im Ausland –Fremde in Deutschland. Migration in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Munich 1992. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 41. 2015, S. 173 – 196  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Gçttingen 2015 ISSN (Printausgabe): 0340-613X, ISSN (online): 2196-9000