Negotiating Racial Politics in the Family

Transnational Histories Touched by National Socialism and Apartheid
Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-90-04-39966-2
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 11, 274 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 548 g

Reihe: Egodocuments and History Series

This book is situated at the cutting edge of the political-ethical dimension of history writing. Henkes investigates various responsibilities and loyalties towards family and nation, as well as other major ethical obligations towards society and humanity when historical subjects have to deal with a repressive political regime. In the first section we follow pre-war German immigrants in the Netherlands and their German affiliation during the era of National Socialism. The second section explores the positions of Dutch emigrants who settled after the Second World War in Apartheid South Africa. The narratives of these transnational agents and their relatives provide a lens through which changing constructions of national identities, and the acceptance or rejection of a nationalist policy on racial grounds, can be observed in everyday practice.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Henkes, Barbara

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Politische Ethnologie, Recht, Organisation, Identität
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Minderheiten, Interkulturelle & Multikulturelle Fragen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

• Family and nation as imagined communities

• Race and narratives of Whiteness

• A first acquaintance

• Shifts in time and tongue



Section 1: National Socialism across the German-Dutch border

1. ‘Will my own brother have to fight against us now?’

Safe and risky stories in a German-Dutch family

• Political controversies

• A German-Dutch royal family

• Family and nation under pressure

• Gnadengesuch (Request for exemption)

• Race as the elephant in the room



2. ‘If war comes, I will be tossed to and fro’

Literature as a home for an immigrant from Germany

• Longing for the ‘good’ Germany

• Into the blue

• A Heimat in Holland?

• ‘You are no longer German’

• A sprinkling of sand in the gears

• Guild and shame



3. ‘Even after the war we will stand alone '

Letters as drops in an antisemitic Ocean

• Marriage certificate

• Stateless

• 'A man I had to protect'

• Growing isolation

• Terrified

• Together and yet alone

• ‘One cannot say: it belongs to the past’



Section 2: Apartheid across the Dutch-South African border

4. ‘Can we build a future on this?'

An epistolary love affair between the stamverwante Netherlands and South Africa

• The Second World War in Breukelen and Bloemfontein

• Foreign and yet so familiar

• A shared European origin

• Emigration fever

• On the way to the Promised Land

• The Dutch Reformed Dopper church in South Africa

• ‘A life full of grace’



5. ‘They are so different from us’

Messages from a White women’s world

• Whitening at sea

• A new world in Black and White

• Boers, Brits and Outlanders

• Among the Dutch in Pretoria

• Blank baasskap (White rule)

• A servant hutch in the garden

• Stay or return?

• A White civilisation narrative



6. ‘I never set out to wage war against my family.’

Cinematic explorations of Whiteness

• Family as a gateway to a ‘strange’ world

• The ‘Other’ in the household

• Apartheid at work

• Contact zones

• A tense family reunion

• You must have been – or gone away from – there

• The presence of the past



Epilogue

• Migration and national identifications

• Implicated in racial exclusion

• Touching tales



Acknowledgement

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Barbara Henkes, Ph.D. (1995), University of Amsterdam (Nl.) is senior lecturer Contemporary History at the University of Groningen. She has published monographs, edited volumes and articles (also in the South African Historical Journal) on forms of inclusion and exclusion in the 20th century, including Images of the Nation. Different meanings of Dutchness; Heimat in Holland. Duitse dienstmeisjes, 1920-1950 and Uit liefde voor het volk. Volkskundigen op zoek naar de Nederlandse identiteit, 1918-1948.