Many interwar connections among German communities, as well as many that were much older, persisted into the postwar era as well.These continued to influence and inform people’s actions and fates. If Europe saw the greatest forced migration in human history, Germans’ migrations were not limited to Europe and many postwar migrations followed older patterns.Moreover, while a great many German communities were shattered by the war and the subsequent population transfers, in many cases older relationships were rehabilitated and older networks and connections persisted.Moreover, many people’s postwar actions mirrored prewar patterns.There was, for example, even more mobility, even more mixing in the postwar German nation-states, and a great many immigrants and refugees arriving in these states were German plus other things. Postwar and post-unification German history, like the periods before it, are aggregate histories made by Germans whose multiple subject positions have been defined outside as much as inside of the German nation-state.

World War I dramatically transformed Germans’ subject position regardless of whether or not they participated in the war or supported Imperial Germany. In addition to exposing Imperial Germany’s dependence on commodities from abroad for its industry and its residents’ well-being, it witnessed a kind of economic warfare that was just as unprecedented as the military conflict that took place in Europe.Around the globe, the Allied powers targetedGermans—citizens of Imperial German as well as ethnic Germans who were not that.That led to internments and confiscations; but the Allies applied pressure outside their territories as well. Latin America, in particular, became a site of extreme pressure as first the British and then the United States used the war to increase their economic and political power in the region at the expense of the German networks that had long competed against them.Facing a shared set of challenges actually served to bind many of these disparate German communities in the Americas together even as they radically reduced the size of many German communities in other European states and the colonial territories.