Creating Germans Abroad is clearly inspired by the work of Benedict Anderson (1983) and written in the spirit of the work of Ann Stoler (1995; 2002). In this work, Walther suggests the idealization of the possibility of a German homeland outside of the European territory in colonial Southwest Africa. The emphasis on agriculture, climate, and landscape countered the increasing push towards industrialization in the Fatherland. Here, there was not just a nostalgic longing for an imagined German past that is pastoral as opposed to industrial (a longing used and manipulated by Nazi ideologues), but an actual place where the idealized Heimat (homeland) could be realized in practice. The problem, however, became the presence of so many non-Germans, in this case not only “Black” Africans, but also “White” Afrikaners. In this sense, an appropriate title for the book might also be “Creating Germany Abroad.”

Throughout the work, Walther uses archival evidence to establish the ways in which Germany and Germans were produced in colonial Southwest Africa, from German Colonial Rule through Namibian independence in 1990. From land appropriation, to mass murder of “Black” Africans, to the building and centralized administration of German-language schools; from the early importation of “respectable” German women, to an emphasis on the right kind of German settler, Walther traces the ways in which not “Whiteness,” but German-ness became central to the creation of Southwest Germans in their transition towards becoming German Southwesterners. Insights such as German Southwestern support for Namibian independence reveal the intensity of feeling for ideologies of nation over race. However, as Walther's account suggests, one should not lose sight of the relationship between events in Southwest Africa and those in Europe, such as the end of World War I, when Germany officially lost control of its colonies, and the beginnings of World War II, when the possibilities of dual citizenship for Germans in Southwest Africa were officially banned, and the ruling South Africans began to see the Nazi party as a threat to “White” solidarity and local governance.

In this account, it becomes clear that both the classroom and the pulpit were critical sites of German citizenship production—here, citizenship should be understood in the broadest sense, as colonial administrators were interested not only in formal activities such as voting rights and land appropriation, but also in class and respectability, marriage, sex, and reproduction. Of course, these connections are not new, but the reader finds insight into the specificity of the administrative imagination and its adaptation by Southwestern Germans.

While this work is not overtly theoretical, Walther's methodology and chapter organization are clearly inspired by recent theoretical interventions and feminist critiques (see for example Foucault 1978; Mosse 1985). In general, however, one wishes for a greater emphasis on daily life connected to the official accounts of colonial administrators, political parties, and social organizations (which often had direct links to concomitant organizations in Germany).

Finally, “Black” African natives in this work remain symbolic ‘others’ as opposed to active agents. Given this reality, it becomes clear that more methodological innovation is needed to get at the particularities of “Black” African colonial experiences, but this, unfortunately, is not the direction in which Walther's work is headed. He instead emphasizes his growing interest in comparative accounts with other settler colonies in East Africa, Samoa, and South America.