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German Colonialism in a Global Age
By Bradley Naranch, Geoff Eley Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7639-2
CHAPTER 1
Empire by Land or Sea?
Germany's Imperial Imaginary, 1840–1945
GEOFF ELEY
FROM IMPERIALISM TO EMPIRE
After something of a hiatus in the 1980s, interest in imperialism is booming. Yet the language has changed. We prefer the sanitized usage of "empire." "Imperialism" in the 1960s described the coercive domination and exploitative relations imposed by metropolitan countries on the more vulnerable parts of the world. Imperialist expansion was attributed to compulsions from inside the imperialist societies, whether economic, more specifically mercantile, more narrowly strategic, or more grandiosely geopolitical. Usually this was linked to arguments about dominant interests too, variously located among military and naval strategists as well as foreign policymakers, colonial administrators, and civil servants, entrepreneurial and business interests, freebooters and visionaries, or simply "the official mind." Yet these days "empire" often shrinks back to international politics more narrowly understood: foreign policymaking, national security concerns, geopolitical strategy, international monetary policy, trade agreements, international policing, and the deployment of military force. That earlier structural or systemic unity linking power abroad to pressures at home seems far less evident.
For popular involvement in imperialism, however, the contrast cuts the other way. Treatments of empire seem more capacious rather than less. Social historians' first impulse in the 1960s and 1970s was often to query the extent of working-class identification with colonies, locating imperialist enthusiasm mainly elsewhere, whether among the prosperous educated and propertied bourgeoisie or the self-employed and white-collar lower middle class. From anti-imperialist sentiments or sheer parochialism and indifference to the wider overseas worlds, historians argued, working people remained stubbornly uninvolved. On the evidence of elections and nationalist campaigning groups, workers proved much harder to win for patriotic causes. Yet now, the contrast could hardly be greater. In the wake of cultural history, scholarship shows the penetration of colonial ideas into all possible areas of popular culture and everyday life. Now we emphasize not the marginality or insignificance of empire for ordinary life but rather its pervasiveness and presence.
This dichotomy, between stressing the thinness of colonialism's impact inside the home society and seeing its depth, describes most national historiographies. But skepticism has been all the stronger in the German field, given the colonial empire's transitory duration. Because German colonialism lasted only from 1884 to 1919, the argument runs, it makes no sense for German historians to copy the British and French by taking the "imperial turn." By any criteria, German colonialism was a marginal phenomenon, at best a sideshow. For Jürgen Osterhammel, "the social histories above all of Great Britain, Portugal, and the Netherlands, and in some respects of Russia and France, have to remain incomplete or incomprehensible once divorced from their imperial-colonial context," whereas in Germany that is not the case. David Blackbourn agrees: "one could hardly argue that the German colonies possessed the same centrality for domestic political debate as the far larger empires of the British and French"—or for that matter the Belgians and Dutch. Under a "transnational" perspective, moreover, the colonies become recalibrated into just one instance of Germany's growing embeddedness in a larger set of global relations. By relativizing the colonies as such, the transnational perspective as often shrinks their significance as asserts it.
As our volume makes abundantly clear, though, knowledge about the colonies reached far down into German society in manifold ways. From propaganda of the Colonial Society and the Navy League, through the literary and visual landscapes of newspapers, magazines, pulp literature, postcards, schoolbooks, and all the new paraphernalia of advertising and mass marketing, to the public spectacles of museums, Völkerschauen, films, slide shows, exhibits, and congresses, the public sphere of the late Kaiserreich was saturated with the citations of colonialism overseas. Here the patriotic intensities unleashed in December 1906–January 1907 during the "Hottentot elections" afford a telling illustration. By the first day of polling (January 25, 1907), the Navy League central office, acting as a clearinghouse for the government's electioneering, had dispatched 21 million leaflets highlighting Germany's colonial interests. The most numerous included Arbeiter, Kolonien und Flotte (5 million copies), Für die Kämpfer in Sudwest Afrika (3.5 million), Die Wahrheit über unsere Kolonien (2.4 million), Deutsches Volk, wie sorgt der Reichstag (2.3 million), and Warum ist der Reichstag aufgelöst? (2 million). The use of Gustav Frenssen's 1906 popular novel, Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest—ein Feldzugsbericht, is especially well documented. Embraced immediately by radical nationalists, Frenssen's account of a young Schleswig-Holstein artisan's experience of the Herero war, which sold 180,000 copies by 1914, brought the violent romance of the colonial frontier vividly home. During the 1907 elections the Navy League purchased a thousand copies for distribution through its regional sections. Frenssen, a best-selling popular novelist from Schleswig-Holstein commonly associated with regionalist Heimatkunst but actually far more outward looking, epitomized the colonial world's new allure. Inspired by friendship with Friedrich Naumann, he constructed his fictions around the neo-Nietzschean idealism of his youthful protagonists as they passed from family and farm into the scenes of national grandiosity, which by the 1900s were patently placed on a global-cum-imperial scale.
Frenssen's novel conveyed the German colonies' long afterlife. Never out of print, the Third Reich produced numerous editions for schools and the army. During World War II it surpassed half a million copies; in 1952 it appeared once again. In contrast with the other old-imperial western European countries, (West) Germany faced none of the violence and divisiveness of decolonization, although the large-scale labor migrancy from the late 1950s had similar displacement effects. If British and French reactions to immigrants signaled a postcolonial return of the repressed, then so too did West German reactions to Gastarbeiter, especially once earlier German imperialisms are brought to mind—from Mitteleuropa, Berlin-Baghdad, and the Balkan entanglements of the Kaiserreich to the southeastern European and Mediterranean theaters of expansionism under the Nazis. Colonialism not only seared long-lasting legacies into the public cultures of Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal; it left their viral traces in German popular memory, too, flaring every so often into life.
In October 1966, at the height of the Fischer Controversy, West German television broadcast a polemical documentary by Ralph Giordano called Heia Safari, subtitled The Legend of the German Colonial Idyll in Africa. With an audience of some nine million, the reception confirmed German colonialism's ability to continue troubling the political unconscious of the nation. The right-wing press was outraged. Eugen Gerstenmeier and Franz Joseph Strauß telephoned Klaus von Bismarck, head of Westdeutsche Rundfunk (WDR), to demand that the documentary's second part be shelved and a more sympathetic film be produced instead. As a compromise the channel agreed to a studio discussion (aired in February 1967). While German society lacked the permanent reserves of love for the colonies present in Britain, France, and elsewhere, a constructed memory of colonial benevolence continued resurging on occasions like the one above, goading the defenders of Germany's civilizing mission into vociferous voice. In those ways "colonial fantasies" continued to echo.
So we have a paradox, setting long-standing tendencies to play down the importance of Germany's formal empire, whether in time or domestic penetration, against current insistence on its thoroughgoing pervasiveness, a claim the present volume attests. Hans-Ulrich Wehler offers a revealing example. In Wehler's mature works—whether his multivolume magnum opus, the Gesellschaftsgeschichte, or the collections of essays and reviews—colonialism plays virtually no part. This silence seems ironic because Wehler's 1969 classic, Bismarck und der Imperialismus, made a compelling case for taking colonies seriously. It also stood plainly alone. There were only Helmut Bley's and Karin Hausen's case studies; a smattering of works by Africanists; and monographs from the DDR. Works that did tackle German colonialism on a broader front were Klaus Bade's study of Friedrich Fabri and Hartmut Pogge's account of the Kolonialrat.
Yet once we begin broadening the contexts for colonialism by setting our sights beyond direct colonial rule toward German expansion into the wider extra-European world—as soon as we make the conceptual moves of Sebastian Conrad's Globalisation and Nation—then older literatures provide far more help. While not formally about colonialism, certain works become extremely suggestive once viewed in that light: Mack Walker's study of German emigration; William Hagen's Germans, Poles, and Jews; Kenneth Barkin's Controversy over German Industrialization; Alfred Vagt's older study of German-US relations in the context of Weltpolitik; Fritz Fischer's two great classics; Wolfgang Mommsen's Max Weber and German Politics. Each proves very illuminating once colonialism is approached in a more broadly contextualized set of ways.
Where these older works offer little help is with the less direct, less perceptible, and more diffuse consequences of colonialism inside German society at home—all those questions now gathered under the sign of the "cultural turn." Here the decisive departure was certainly the volume edited by Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop called The Imperialist Imagination. If that volume came almost entirely from literary studies, moreover, the intervening historical work has now transformed that disciplinary picture, opening German historians in the process to the pertinence of race, gender, and sexuality. In consequence, the salient questions, methodologies, archive types, and grounds of inquiry have come to look profoundly different from those inspiring Bley and Hausen forty years before. The complicated passages between "the social" and "the cultural" experienced by historians during that time are nowhere clearer than in the history of colonialism. As we hope to show, it is exactly the bringing of the cultural and the political together that makes possible the most challenging recent work on the history of German empire making before 1918.
FROM "SOCIAL IMPERIALISM" TO WHAT?
There seems far less interest than during the 1970s in drawing connections from the domestic environment of politics to foreign policy. From the perspective of the "primacy of domestic politics" (Primat der Innenpolitik), the new histories seem decoupled from an interest in the societal grounding of German foreign expansionism as more traditionally understood. In the wake of the Fischer Controversy, the continuity thesis originally took its cachet primarily from foreign policy and the similarities linking the war aims of 1914–1918 with the later imperialism of the Nazis. At the outset the continuity argument involved Germany's "grab for world power," after all. In those discussions of the 1960s and 1970s, it was the compulsion toward empire that in the first instance defined the postulated continuity.
Conceptually speaking, the sharpest contrast between then and now concerns the idea of "social imperialism," which in the 1970s had been pivotal for new approaches to the Kaiserreich. In Wehler's formulation, this denoted a "defensive ideology" against the "disruptive effects of industrialization on the social and economic structure of Germany," one that enabled "the diversion outwards of internal tensions and forces of change in order to preserve the social and political status quo." A more recent iteration puts it thus: "It was only beneath this perspective that Wilhelmine Weltpolitik revealed its real meaning, its deeper driving force." By 1914 it was a permanently embedded pattern of politics: "Only this technique of rule seemed to make it possible to continue blocking the reformist modernization of the social and political constitution in the necessary degree." Beginning with Bismarck and continuing from the later 1890s with growing recklessness and escalating results, a fateful pattern was projected into the future: "If there is a continuity in German imperialism," Wehler argued, then it consists in "the primacy of social imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler."
Much of the historiographical excitement then surrounding the Kaiserreich came from an insistence that the imperialist drives of the two world wars possessed direct and compelling equivalence. That is, those successive waves of foreign expansionism needed to be understood in relation to the persistence of a domestic political power structure, a definite constellation of dominant class interests and their associated antidemocratic politics. For the Nazi period the analogue to this "Fischerite" approach to the July Crisis was Tim Mason's interpretation of the outbreak of World War II, a more pointed version of the widely shared view that the essential principle of the Third Reich's social system was the drive for war.
Neither of these viewpoints—centrality of "social imperialism" for historiography of the Kaiserreich and Mason's thesis about Nazi expansionism—has kept much influence. Yet there are other ways of continuing to connect imperialist expansion to life inside Germany itself: the "racial state" clearly links the drive for foreign expansion to the logics of domestic policymaking, while cultural histories of the salience of the colonial relationship for the life of the German metropole could hardly enjoy greater influence. What has been lost is the strong conceptual unity that Wehler's generation constructed, linking the drive for empire, government strategies of rule, dominant class interests, and the structural persistence of authoritarianism. Current work on colonialism is concerned less with the persistence of authoritarian forms of rule than with the broader impact of German interactions with a non-European set of worlds. Rather than show interest mainly in origins (in colonial policy as an expression of conflicts and pressures coming from inside German society), recent work focuses on consequences and the impact of the colonial encounter. One obvious priority, therefore, would be to find ways of reestablishing concrete linkages from "colonialism" into the mainstream of German politics and policymaking in the early twentieth century.
We get furthest in tackling that question by thinking inside a far more capacious concept of colonialism. Formal colonial rule might be deemed just one instance in a wider repertoire of Germany's expansionist relations with an exploitable world. "German expansionism" might then encompass everything from colonial policy as such to all the other ways in which German interests began seeking global penetration: the arms race and the big Navy; export drives and trading policy; the competitiveness of the German economy in world markets; questions of migration and maintenance of ties with Germans overseas; the "civilizational" impetus behind German culture; German diplomacy and the wider realm of Weltpolitik; and finally the July Crisis and Germany's aims in World War I.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from German Colonialism in a Global Age by Bradley Naranch, Geoff Eley. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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