Journal Articles
Journal of Global History
“A Benchmark for the Environment: Big Science and ‘Artificial’ Geophysics in the Global 1950s,” Journal of Global History 15, no. 1 (2020): 149-168.
Security concerns during the early Cold War prompted United States strategists to solicit worldwide assistance in studying Earth’s physical environment. Comprehensive geophysical knowledge required cooperation between researchers on every part of the planet, leading practitioners to tout transnational Earth science—despite direct military applications in an age of submarines and ballistic missiles—as a nonpolitical form of peaceful universalism. This article examines the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year as a powerful fulcrum in the transfer of ideas about Earth’s global environment from Western security establishments to conservationists worldwide. For eighteenth months, tens of thousands of researchers across every continent pooled resources for data collection to create a scientific benchmark for future comparisons. Illuminating Earth as dynamic and interconnected, participants robustly conceptualized humanity’s emergence as a geophysical force, capable of ‘artificially’ modifying the natural world. Studies of anthropogenic geophysics, including satellites, nuclear fallout, and climate change, conditioned the global rise of environmentalism.
Contemporary European History
“Europe’s Final Frontier: Astroculture and Planetary Power Since 1945,” Contemporary European History 32, no. 3 (2023): 475-488.
Understanding Europe’s final frontier requires attention to the frontiers that came before. Bringing the legacies of colonial violence into the history of space holds urgency in light of close linkages between spaceflight, militarism and global capitalism, as well as the ties between outer space and environmental thought. The continued wealth of Europe in this era of growing inequality and ecological crisis, moreover, should call attention to the ways European power has been sustained after empire. Space programs have played a substantial role in preserving Europe’s worldwide influence, rendering them among the many necessary areas to target within ongoing efforts to alleviate the intertwined problems of global inequality and climate crisis. This article explores these themes through a review of recent literature.
German Studies Review
“Terms of Racial Endearment: Nazi Categorization of Mennonites in Ideology and Practice, 1929-1945,” German Studies Review 44, no. 1 (2021): 27-46.
The Christian Mennonite denomination maintained a privileged position within National Socialist thought and policy through its conceptual and legal association with an evolving series of racial categories. Nearly all the world’s half-million Mennonites lived outside German borders between the World Wars. This allowed a small number of church leaders and sympathetic scholars to shape their image within Germany, especially as Hitler’s wartime expansionism brought a fourth of the denomination’s members under Nazi rule. Casting Mennonitism as part of one or more subgroups within a larger Germanic whole benefitted most adherents in regions administered by the Third Reich while simultaneously enabling their enrollment in propaganda and empire building.
Antisemitism Studies
“The Making of a Holocaust Denier: Ingrid Rimland, Mennonites, and Gender in White Supremacy, 1945-2000,” Antisemitism Studies 5, no. 2 (2021): 233-265.
The novelist Ingrid Rimland became a prominent Holocaust denier in North America during the 1990s. Before embracing neo-Nazism, Rimland won acclaim within the Mennonite church—the Christian denomination in which she was raised—for her writings about women’s hardships in the Soviet Union. Her debut novel, The Wanderers: The Saga of Three Women Who Survived (1977), reflected widespread efforts to position feminized Mennonite suffering as comparable to Jewish persecution under Nazism, coupled with silence about the role individual Mennonites played in the Holocaust. The church’s male-dominated elite offered Rimland limited structural support as a female writer, however, and she struggled to sustain her literary career while raising a son with disabilities. Patriarchal constraints alongside Mennonite leaders’ failure to address historic antisemitism helped allow her drift into white supremacy.
Monograph
Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). Paperback 2019.
“If you associate Mennonites not only with belief in adult baptism but also with pacifism, with refusing to take oaths, and with proper distance from politics, then this richly documented book shatters all of your illusions.”—Hartmut Lehmann, American Historical Review
*European Studies Book Award, Shortlisted 2018, Council for European Studies
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the global Mennonite church developed an uneasy relationship with Germany. Despite the religion’s origins in the Swiss and Dutch Reformation, as well as its longstanding pacifism, tens of thousands of members embraced militarist German nationalism. Chosen Nation is a sweeping history of this encounter and the debates it sparked among parliaments, dictatorships, and congregations across Eurasia and the Americas.
Offering a multifaceted perspective on nationalism’s emergence in Europe and around the world, Benjamin Goossen demonstrates how Mennonites’ nationalization reflected and reshaped their faith convictions. While some church leaders modified German identity along Mennonite lines, others appropriated nationalism wholesale, advocating a specifically Mennonite version of nationhood. Examining sources from Poland to Paraguay, Goossen shows how patriotic loyalties rose and fell with religious affiliation. Individuals might claim to be German at one moment but Mennonite the next. Some external parties encouraged separatism, as when the Weimar Republic helped establish an autonomous “Mennonite State” in Latin America. Still others treated Mennonites as quintessentially German; under Hitler’s Third Reich, entire colonies benefited from racial warfare and genocide in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Whether choosing Germany as a national homeland or identifying as a chosen people, called and elected by God, Mennonites committed to collective action in ways that were intricate, fluid, and always surprising.
The first book to place Christianity and diaspora at the heart of nationality studies, Chosen Nation illuminates the rising religious nationalism of our own age.
Praise for Chosen Nation
Endorsements:
“In this age of globally resurgent nationalism, Goossen delivers a timely reminder of the malleability and ever-shifting nature of such ideological collectives. His brilliant analysis takes us through two hundred years of Mennonite history and to a vast array of places—from Kazakhstan to Paraguay, from Germany to Canada—to show how religious and national identities emerge, intersect, and shift, often with lightning speed. This book is an important contribution to the thriving field of global history and to the politics of our times.”—Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History
“Chosen Nation is a remarkable exploration of the entangled histories of nationalism, race, and religion since the nineteenth century. Goossen tells the story of how Mennonites came to think of themselves as a German diasporic community in concert with the construction of the German nation. Based on stunning archival research, this is a beautifully written book.”—Tara Zahra, author of The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World
“This is a fascinating, deeply researched account of a transnational religious group’s encounter with modern German nationalism and its ongoing reinvention as an ethnicity, nation, race, and confession. Presenting a new unflinching scholarly voice from within the Mennonite community, Chosen Nation explains and reflects on the origins and consequences of the disastrous mid-twentieth-century Mennonite attraction to German nationalism, acceptance of Nazi racial ideology, and, in some cases, participation in genocide.”—Terry Martin, Harvard University
“Chosen Nation is a tour de force. In crystalline prose, Goossen argues that Mennonite and German identities were never stable, but created over time and deployed in specific historical circumstances, with the Mennonite articles of faith in tension with yet often supporting the modern nation-state–even during the Nazi period. This is an eye-opening guide to the vexed history of German Mennonites in the modern era.”—Helmut Walser Smith, Vanderbilt University
“This fine book sheds light on the integration of the Mennonites into German society as part of the construction of German nationalism in the twentieth century. Goossen’s use of government archival sources for Mennonite activity during World War II is groundbreaking and his assessment of Mennonite proximity to and involvement in the Holocaust is a significant achievement.”—Mark Jantzen, Bethel College
“What is so impressive about Chosen Nation is how it demonstrates that the history of a small, very unusual, and rather marginal religious group, the Mennonites, illuminates crucial themes in the development of Germany, Europe, and the modern world.”—Jonathan Sperber, author of Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life
“Developing a historical narrative of German Mennonites that runs through the age of high nationalism and into the present, Chosen Nation shows how some Mennonites found ways of accommodating the antagonistic positions of religious allegiance and loyalty to country. This is an important book.”—H. Glenn Penny, University of Iowa
Reviews:
“Goossen has produced a model of archival-based global history, frequently invoked but rarely carried out with such aplomb.”—Eric Kurlander, Journal of Modern History
“A notable, original contribution to the history of religion in modern Germany, Chosen Nation also succeeds brilliantly as an extended reflection on the very nature of personal identity in the context of complex cultural, social and political environments. On both accounts it merits a wide readership.”—Anthony J. Steinhoff, Journal of Ecclesiastical History
“[C]ertain to provoke conversations among the scholars of Mennonitism, and of religions and nationalisms. One can only hope that those involved in the ongoing political debates about the values and challenges of collectivism for democratic life read this book as well.”—Slavica Jakelić, Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire
“Goossen’s book is an impressively researched and engaging study. . . . It skilfully combines transnational, social and cultural approaches to produce a work which unites the revival of historiographical interest in the place of religion in the modern world with the analytical possibilities opened up by global history.”—Thomas Brodie, English Historical Review
“Where the mastery of this study lies. . . is in Goossen’s detailed retelling of how a community—or at least one part of it—once identified by its pacifism became the poster child for Nazi racial ideology, a development that was not without the active participation of German Mennonites themselves in both the creation of this vision and the crimes it elicited.”—Rebecca Bennette, German History
“Importantly, and in light of the global resurgence of far‐right and nationalist groups today. . . . Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era deftly unpacks the complex intersections between religion and nation but recognises the fluidity of identity.”—Katherine Williams, Nations and Nationalism
“Logically constructed, lucidly written, and well argued, Chosen Nation makes a solid case that. . . . [a]s Germany’s Mennonites traveled the twisted road from social outsiders during the Kaiserreich to racial darlings during the Third Reich, they poured their sense of collectivism from old religious wineskins into new vials of Aryan blood.”—John Eicher, Church History
“[C]arrying the narrative forward in a manner that is rich in detail but simultaneously a compelling story. . . . Chosen Nation is a wonderful resource in the study of how a religious community can struggle to maintain its principles in the face of political and other social pressures.”—George Adams, Nova Religio
“This compelling, detailed, and vivid story of Mennonites’ nationalization both is of interest to Mennonite scholars and makes a significant contribution to the discourse on religious communities and their quest to maintain faith principles in times of political pressures and national orientation.” —Berit Jany, Yearbook of German-American Studies
“A breakthrough book that addresses a vital topic of interest in great detail. . . . It has the potential to rekindle old conversations about the crises and fatigues of identity in religious communities, given that history is a major source of insight and direction for those communities, and for this reason—in addition to its historical research—it is an impressive and illuminating work.”—Maxwell Kennel, Reading Religion
“Goossen ruptures the familiar historical narrative of Mennonite martyrdom and victimhood, and challenges Mennonites to examine their pasts anew. . . . Goossen’s erudite analysis of Mennonites’ complicity in Hitler’s racism and genocide will, I hope, set new directions in research.”—Martina Cucchiara, Conrad Grebel Review
“Rejecting traditional definitions of religion and nationality, Goossen depicts Mennonites as a socially constructed and historically situated collectivity. . . . The result is a thought-provoking examination of Mennonite identity centred on Mennonites’ fluid relationship with Germany from the time of nineteenth-century nationalism and political unification to the present.”—Kyle Jantzen, Contemporary Church History Quarterly
“Goossen is an engaging guide through difficult material. His voice joins the calls by other historians. . . to talk about racism in their churches in open and honest ways. One hopes that churches can continue the same difficult scholarship and reflection.”—Troy Osborne, Mennonite World Review
“Central to Goossen’s thesis is the inherent instability, or, more positively, pliability of identity and how identity gets shaped by the sociopolitical forces of a given time and place. . . . Inasmuch as Mennonites have offered a glass of water in Christ’s name, Mennonites have also played a part in the worst of human judgments. The integrity of a future Mennonite witness may depend on the church’s ability to account for both.”—David Driedger, Anabaptist Witness
“Goossen’s strong narrative produces an engaging read. He asks relevant and sophisticated questions that challenge depictions of Mennonite global connections as having been forged under benign circumstances. . . . this book is a significant scholarly contribution that will inspire debates for many years to come.”—Aileen Friesen, Mennonite Life