Search

Otto Hahn, a lawyer and emigration promoter from the German state of Wurttemberg, was an integral part of the German debate about emigration, colonial empire and German identity. This paper suggests that any discussion of nineteenth-century European emigration must consider its location in the context of colonial expansion. Hahn was, in many ways, typical of the emigrationist colonialist. Yet, he had ideas which deviated from what has been recognized as emigrationist colonialism. His growing fascination with Canada sheds light on how this popular ideology could be altered. Any discussion of a transnationally conceived German identity in the late nineteenth century, then, must include intellectual and spiritual communities as sources of such an identity, and must locate them in the general context of the diffusion of modernity. The last part of Otto Hahn's story, finally, allows us to get a rare glimpse of an emigrationist colonialist turned actual emigrant, thereby permitting us to conceive of emigration as a way to contest and negotiate nationalism rather than an exit from the national community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]