We seek proposals for chapters for an edited volume tentatively titled “Race and Racism in Divided Germany,” which will bring together new scholarship on the history of racialization and racism in both East and West Germany during the Cold War and since unification. We are particularly interested in work about the period between the 1970s and the 1990s. The collection editors argue that East and West Germany each developed distinct attitudes towards racialization, and that these attitudes shaped unification and the period since 1989. Overall, the book aims to understand how “race after Hitler” developed into “race after the Cold War”.

The edited volume will show how the field of German history has developed since the publication of After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (2009), one of the first books to assert the importance of race in postwar German history and to interrogate how West German forms of racism both persisted and diverged from racism during the Third Reich.

We have had strong interest from academic publishers and intend to submit a proposal with abstracts in September 2022. Pending acceptance of the proposal, we would anticipate scholars submitting their first drafts of chapters (8,000–10,000 words) in April 2023. We will then have a series of Zoom meetings to workshop these drafts with all the contributors, with the goal of submitting the full manuscript to a publisher in Fall 2023.

We are broadly open to submissions that engage with histories including but not limited to:

- Black Germans and Afro-Germans
- Roma and Sinti
- Jewish Germans
- Asian-German studies
- Post-Soviet migration
- Muslim migration
- Queerness and race
- (Dis)ability and race
- Environment and race
- Postcolonial memory/amnesia

We are particularly interested in contributions showcasing the work of early-career and contingent scholars. Interested scholars should send a 500 word abstract of their intended contribution and copy of their current CV to Michelle Kahn (mkahn@richmond.edu) and Lauren Stokes (lauren.stokes@northwestern.edu) by June 15, 2022. We will reply to all submissions by July 15.