New Books In German Studies

A recent book review I read began with the line “borderlands are back.” It’s certainly true that more and more historians have used borderland regions as the stage for some excellent work on the construction of national identities (or indifference to them) in recent years. J. Laurence Hare, Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, makes a novel and highly compelling contribution to that literature with Excavating Nations: Archaeology, Museums, and the German-Danish Borderlands (University of Toronto Press, 2015). As the title suggests, the book looks at the role of antiquities and archaeology in the creation of Danish and German national identities from the early nationalist period through the twentieth century. The region between Denmark and Germany is perhaps not the place many Americans think of when they think of Scandinavia (home of wind-swept islands and fjords) or Germany (with its forests and Alpine vistas). Yet the German-Danish borderland has a very distinctive