The CEHS Presidential Roundtable. Volksdeutsche Beyond German History: Re-Centering “German” Communities in Central Europe and the Americas

region shows their complicated relationship with each other and with their Romanian and Ukrainian neighbors, and also how German historiography to this day siloes these experiences into national history, "scientific" research, and popular culture.Mirna Zakić provides perspectives on how Volksdeutsche negotiated their Germanness with Serbs and others in the multiethnic Vojvodina in Serbia, and why much of this history was elided in postwar historiographies.The forum is moderated by Winson Chu, who served as CEHS president in 2024-25 and works on German and Polish history.With a critical examination of the concept of Volksdeutsche, the forum examines German minority communities on two levels: 1) how the historical actors could use Germanness as a resource or see it as a liability; and 2) how historians grapple with the pitfalls in understanding and narrating this history through the lens of "ethnic German."The participants also uncover issues related to national indifference, wartime collaboration, immigration, gender, and diasporas.The forum follows the challenges of writing transatlantic and transnational history, how increasingly authoritarian regimes can threaten this scholarship, and how foreign language learning can impact future research.The lively discussion that followed the roundtable had to be cut short, but many of the impulses and insights are reproduced in the conversation here.To get things started, tell us a little bit about your own research on Volksdeutsche and where you think trends are going. Doris BergenThe invitation to be part of this discussion was especially welcome for me, because I'm returning to a project I began in the 1980s (!), that I call "Defining Germanness during the Holocaust."Back when I was a graduate student researching the German Christian Movement, I discovered that those militantly pro-Nazi Protestants had an outpost in Romania.Researching its leading figure, Wilhelm Staedel, got me interested in the Volksdeutschen, specifically their connections to religion.In the 1990s, I jumped on new possibilities to visit archives and sites in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, and I used my findings to write a series of articles and book chapters.Later I was part of a related project on European Mennonites and the Holocaust, led by Mark Jantzen and John Thiesen (now a volume published by University of Toronto Press). 2 Now, as I try to chart my course through the mountains of material I've gathered, I have some observations to share.One point is just about the expansion of scholarship since the late 1980s.In fact, there was actually quite a bit written about the Volksdeutschen of eastern Europe even then, but with a few exceptions, it fell into two categories: a small but intense body of studies produced in what was then known as the East Bloc, depicting ethnic Germans as "fifth columnists" of Hitlerite fascism, and a much larger body of apologetic work produced in the West-in West Germany and also in German diaspora communities-that depicted, often in minute detail, the suffering of the German expellees.Now we have works that are nuanced and integrative, including publications by all of you, as well as Isabel Heinemann, Valdis Lumans, Gerhard Wolf, Eric Steinhart, Tara Zahra, Hugo Service, David Furber, Bradley Nichols, and others.I want to draw attention to a recent and especially significant contribution, and that's the two-volume work by Alexa Stiller, Völkische Politik: Praktiken der Exklusion und Inklusion in polnischen, französischen und slowenischen Annexionsgebieten 1939Annexionsgebieten -1945.3 .3 Stiller's work is both

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