My new project, tentatively titled Anticolonialism as Nationalism: Colonial History in Tanzania and the Two Germanies, 1953-1989, steps beyond recent debate about African objects in European museums to a larger conversation about managing the history and memory of European colonialism in Africa. I demonstrate that this historical memory has had important consequences in Europe as well as Africa. The project is an analysis the contested history of the 1884-1918 German colonization of mainland Tanzania as the intersection of two of the most important elements in postwar state building: national identity formation and Cold war international politics. My examination of this transnational historical process furthers recent research on the Global Cold War, which has moved the focus beyond the superpower contest. Historians have devoted increasing attention to Cold War politics in Africa and other nations in what was then known as the Third World. This scholarship has highlighted the importance of less prominent actors in shaping global history, but it has focused on the actions of the superpowers, combat, or contestation over models for modernization. I instead attend to the role of Cold War politics in shaping the attempts of new nations to build political legitimacy. It also brings an international dimension to the study of the role of history in national-identity formation in all three countries. I thereby demonstrate how national-identity formation in Europe and Africa were intertwined in a shared project of managing the past and negotiating its role in the present.