Day had not yet spread its wings. The smell of antiseptic and anticipation lingered in the halls of the hospital in the little village outside Berlin in a war-torn Germany. Suddenly, a baby's first outcry shattered the calmness of the early hour. In a room, Greta, a blonde, beautiful woman, listened to the crying baby; and when the nurse wanted to give her the baby to hold, she turned away. 'No, no, I am tired. I don't want it.' Elke Hawthorne shares the fascinating tale of her life, from her humble birth devoid of a loving parent's anticipation, to her fear and confusion at being asked to spy on the U.S. by the East German police. Born in East Germany at the end of WWII, she escaped the conditions of socialist Germany by crossing the borders of the newly built Berlin Wall even under gunfire. She lived as a dancer, married a U.S. soldier, moved to Texas, survived in the path of a tornado, and was even asked to spy for her native country. Although she is forced by nature and necessity to trust those around her, she is betrayed over and over again. Yet through it all, she finds a way to forgive and forget, always moving onward to help those around her.

With the end of the First World War, Germany became a "post-colonial" power. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 transformed Germany's overseas colonies in Africa and the Pacific into League of Nations Mandates, administered by other powers. Yet a number of Germans rejected this "post-colonial" status, arguing instead that Germany was simply an interrupted colonial power and would soon reclaim these territories. With the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, irredentism seemed once again on the agenda, and these colonialist advocates actively and loudly promoted their colonial cause in the Third Reich. Examining the domestic activities of these colonialist lobbying organizations, Empire in the Heimat demonstrates the continued place of overseas colonialism in shaping German national identity after the end of formal empire. In the Third Reich, the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft and the Reichskolonialbund framed Germans as having a particular aptitude for colonialism and the overseas territories as a German Heimat. As such, they sought to give overseas colonialism renewed meaning for both the present and the future of Nazi Germany. They brought this message to the German public through countless publications, exhibitions, rallies, lectures, photographs, and posters. Their public activities were met with a mix of occasional support, ambivalence, or even outright opposition from some Nazi officials, who privileged the Nazi regime's European territorial goals over colonialists' overseas goals. Colonialists' ability to navigate this obstruction and intervention reveals both the limitations and the spaces available in the public sphere under Nazism for such "special interest" discourses.