Co-published with the Waterloo Centre for German Studies For centuries, large numbers of German-speaking people have emigrated from settlements in Europe to other countries and continents. In German Diasporic Experiences: Identity, Migration, and Loss, more than forty international contributors describe and discuss aspects of the history, language, and culture of these migrant groups, individuals, and their descendants. Part I focuses on identity, with essays exploring the connections among language, politics, and the construction of histories—national, familial, and personal—in German-speaking diasporic communities around the world. Part II deals with migration, examining such issues as German migrants in postwar Britain, German refugees and forced migration, and the immigrant as a fictional character, among others. Part III examines the idea of loss in diasporic experience with essays on nationalization, language change or loss, and the reshaping of cultural identity. Essays are revised versions of papers presented at an international conference held at the University of Waterloo in August 2006, organized by the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, and reflect the multidisciplinarity and the global perspective of this field of study.

Documents of Protest and Compassion offers the first extensive critical assessment of Bauer's considerable poetic oeuvre. In this long-overdue supplement to recent anthologies of Bauer's poetry and essays on his life and work, Angelika Arend draws on Bauer's diaries and letters to reveal the profoundly humane intentions that guided his choice of themes and structures. She shows that social protest and brotherly compassion, shared responsibility and critical self-reflection are Bauer's main thematic fare, which he presented in simple, yet carefully crafted, poetic structures, and explains how these ideas and forms developed or remained constant in light of historical, cultural, social, and personal developments. Documents of Protest and Compassion is important for those interested in Bauer's work, German poetry, German-Canadian literature, and the immigrant writing experience.

During the 1930s, Germany's industrialization, rearmament and economic plans taxed the existing manpower, forcing the country to explore new ways of acquiring Aryan-German labor. Eventually, the Third Reich implemented a return migration program which used various recruitment strategies to entice Germans from Canada and the United States to migrate home. It initially used the Atlantic Ocean to transport German-speakers, but after the outbreak of World War II, German civilians were brought from the Americas to East Asia and then to Germany via the Trans-Siberian Railway through the Soviet Union. Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 ended this overland route, but some Germans were moved on Nazi ships from East Asia to the Third Reich until the end of 1942. This book investigates why Germans who had already established themselves in overseas countries chose to migrate back to an oppressive and authoritarian country. It sheds light on some aspects of the Third Reich's administration, goals and achievements associated with return migration while also telling the individual stories of returnees.

A journal of history, literature, biography and genealogy.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of Canadian authors were revealed to have faked the identities that made them famous. What is extraordinary about these writers is that they actually "became," in everyday life, characters they had themselves invented. Many of their works were simultaneously fictional and autobiographical, reflecting the duality of their identities. In Literary Impostors, Rosmarin Heidenreich tells the intriguing stories, both the "true" and the fabricated versions, of six Canadian authors who obliterated their pasts and re-invented themselves: Grey Owl was in fact an Englishman named Archie Belaney; Will James, the cowboy writer from the American West, was the Quebec-born francophone Ernest Dufault; the prairie novelist Frederick Philip Grove turned out to be the German writer and translator Felix Paul Greve. Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, Onoto Watanna, and Sui Sin Far were the chosen identities of three mixed-race writers whose given names were, respectively, Sylvester Long, Winnifred Eaton, and Edith Eaton. Heidenreich argues that their imposture, in some cases not discovered until long after their deaths, was not fraudulent in the usual sense: these writers forged new identities to become who they felt they really were. In an age of proliferating cyber-identities and controversial claims to ancestry, Literary Impostors raises timely questions involving race, migrancy, and gender to illustrate the porousness of the line that is often drawn between an author's biography and the fiction he or she produces.

Translators mediate between cultures; they negotiate the transfer of meaning from one word and world to another. Writers who migrate, uprooting themselves from one world and settling in another, also mediate between cultures and are mediated by them. This collection of essays explores the contact zones produced by the migrations of two German-born cultural figures: New York Dada poet and artist Else Plötz (1874–1927), better known as Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven or simply "the Baroness"; and writer and translator Felix Paul Greve (1879–1948), aka the Canadian author Frederick Philip Grove. Both figures negotiated languages beyond their mother tongue (German); both moved between geographic and cultural worlds; both produced cultural works in their adopted countries (the United States and Canada); and both "translated" themselves into new contexts. The Politics of Cultural Mediation features contributions by Richard Cavell, Jutta Ernst, Irene Gammel, Paul Hjartarson, Klaus Martens and Paul Morris and includes Morris’s translation of Greve’s "Randarabesken Zu Oscar Wilde."