This book is situated at the cutting edge of the political-ethical dimension of history writing. Henkes investigates various responsibilities and loyalties towards family and nation, as well as other major ethical obligations towards society and humanity when historical subjects have to deal with a repressive political regime. In the first section we follow pre-war German immigrants in the Netherlands and their German affiliation during the era of National Socialism. The second section explores the positions of Dutch emigrants who settled after the Second World War in Apartheid South Africa. The narratives of these transnational agents and their relatives provide a lens through which changing constructions of national identities, and the acceptance or rejection of a nationalist policy on racial grounds, can be observed in everyday practice.

In his groundbreaking Imagined Communities, first published in 1983, Benedict Anderson argued that members of a community experience a "deep, horizontal camaraderie." Despite being strangers, members feel connected in a web of imagined experiences. Yet while Anderson's insights have been hugely influential, they remain abstract: it is difficult to imagine imagined communities. How do they evolve and how is membership constructed cognitively, socially and culturally? How do individuals and communities contribute to group formation through the act of imagining? And what is the glue that holds communities together? Imagining Communities examines actual processes of experiencing the imagined community, exploring its emotive force in a number of case studies. Communal bonding is analysed, offering concrete insights on where and by whom the nation (or social group) is imagined and the role of individuals therein. Offering eleven empirical case studies, ranging from the premodern to the modern age, this volume looks at and beyond the nation and includes regional as well as transnational communities as well.