Historiographies in Dialogue: Beyond the Categories of Germans and Brazilians

This essay underscores the many benefits that scholars can glean by bringing the histories and historiographies of Brazil and Germany into dialogue. It argues that such dialogues can help to decentre the nation state in our narratives of German history; they allow us to identify many parallels in Ge...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:German history 2015-09, Vol.33 (3), p.347-366
Main Author: Penny, H. Glenn
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Brazil
Federal Republic of Germany
Germany
Historiography
Intellectuals
Narratives
National Identity
Radicalism
State
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Summary:This essay underscores the many benefits that scholars can glean by bringing the histories and historiographies of Brazil and Germany into dialogue. It argues that such dialogues can help to decentre the nation state in our narratives of German history; they allow us to identify many parallels in German histories that took place in multiple places around the world; and they afford us a better understanding of the roles that many Germans' multiple subject positions and hybrid identities played in the histories of both Germany and Brazil. At the same time, such German histories, unbounded by the nation state, reveal the many local-to-local and transregional interconnections that persisted across the most radical political ruptures of the twentieth century, but which are often obscured by naturalized national narratives. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]
ISSN:0266-3554
1477-089X
DOI:10.1093/gerhis/ghv081