Egodocuments and History Series 11 - Negotiating Racial Po ...

Barbara Henkes

• 20 september 2020
• 9789004399662

Samenvatting:

In Negotiating Racial Politics in the Family, Henkes investigates how migrants negotiated their various responsibilities and loyalties towards family and nation, plus other major ethical obligations, when they became implicated in repressive political regimes such as National Socialism and Apartheid.



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.