Continuity and Change in Germany from the Wilhelmine Empire to National Socialism

In histories of the Third Reich, race is a ubiquitous topic, but German society produced a much more complex variety of racial representations over the first part of the twentieth century. This volume explores the hateful depictions of the Nazi era alongside Wilhelmine images of indigenous peoples, revealing race as on object of fascination for Germans across several eras.

Race in 20th-century German history is an inescapable topic, one that has been defined overwhelmingly by the narratives of degeneracy that prefigured the Nuremberg Laws and death camps of the Third Reich. As the contributions to this innovative volume show, however, German society produced a much more complex variety of racial representations over the first part of the century. Here, historians explore the hateful depictions of the Nazi period alongside idealized images of African, Pacific and Australian indigenous peoples, demonstrating both the remarkable fixity race had as an object of fascination for German society as well as the conceptual plasticity it exhibited through several historical eras.