CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2010
| Author | Lippek, Sarah Christine |
|---|---|
| Title | American Nazism: Whiteness and the German-American Bund |
| Summary | The German-American Bund of the 1930s represents the peak of the American Nazi movement. This paper investigates the organizational history and cultural position of this group, and sites its story within a broader narrative of whiteness and immigration in the United States. The German American Bund was neither ideologically marginal nor a serious threat to the social order. I contend that the GAB represented an highly visible version of endemic American white supremacism. Their insistence on their own whiteness and the unfitness of non-whites is an example of a deeply American phenomenon, that of a recently-integrated immigrant group aggressively patrolling the borders of a whiteness into which they themselves are only provisionally incorporated. I contend that reactions against the Bund were characterized by the language of pathology and difference, and that the American mainstream viewed the GAB as a specifically foreign, invasive, immigrant group, rather than as a product of the American context. Anti-Bund activity was fueled by ideas of the alien, the un-American immigrant, and the foreign invader as much as by any strongly anti-racialist ethical stance. |
| Supervisor | Hall, Karl and Siefert, Marsha |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2010/lippek_sarah-christine.pdf |
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