eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
While conventional definitions locate colonial space overseas, Kristin Kopp argues that it was possible to understand both distant continents and adjacent Eastern Europe as parts of the same global periphery dependent upon Western European civilizing efforts. However, proximity to the source of aid translated to greater benefits for Eastern Europe than for more distant regions.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472028580 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 09/27/2012 |
| Series: | Social History, Popular Culture, And Politics In Germany |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 255 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Germany's Wild East
Constructing Poland as Colonial Space
By Kristin Kopp
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2012 Kristin KoppAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11844-1
CHAPTER 1
Constructing German Colonial Space in the East: Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben as Colonial Novel
Every nation has the Kipling that it deserves: the Germans had their Gustav Freytag.
Jean Améry
Deutschland, aber wo liegt es? Locating "Germany" after 1848
In the aftermath of the failed attempt to create a united German nation-state in the late 1840s, the question of Germany's location in the world loomed large. To a certain extent, this question was cartographic in nature: according to which criteria could the rightful borders of the nation be drawn? Contemporary maps of Europe didn't offer any concrete answers and vexed their readers instead with a motley collection of kingdoms, duchies, and principalities of various shapes, sizes, and degrees of territorial uniformity — a colorful patchwork perhaps, but not a reassuring image when viewed in its broader geopolitical frame: France, England, and Russia all appear as solid blocks of uniform color, as organized spaces of integrated political and economic power.
This cartographic disunity reflected a set of relational concerns: where did Germans stand with respect to the peoples of other European nations? What was the role and status of "Germany" in the global arena? This question was intimately connected to the ongoing process of European imperial expansion. In a world rapidly dividing into a dual system of imperial cores and colonial peripheries, the status of German-speaking lands was at best ambiguous. France and England appeared as solar centers surrounded by their colonial satellites, and they expressed imperial power in an ability to orchestrate global circulations of naval and trading fleets, colonial raw materials, and metropolitan processed goods. Was a non-united Germany destined to observe from the sidelines? Finally, in a world in which Europeans constructed their global superiority through narratives of colonial diffusion — of spreading cultural and technological innovations to the world's non-European periphery — did Germans also have stories to tell?
Gustav Freytag's enormously popular novel of 1855 provides its readers with a set of reassuring — and programmatic — answers to these questions of German identity. The novel tells the story of Anton Wohlfart, a young man who migrates to Breslau from the Polish border of Silesia to apprentice in T. O. Schröter's import-export firm for colonial wares. Anton works his way up the company ladder, learns the value of the bourgeois work ethic, and ultimately marries his employer's sister, thereby becoming a partner in the firm. Soll und Haben was a best seller for over a century and introduced generations of readers to a European colonial project in which Germany was a valuable participant. This colonial subjectivity depended in large part upon the simultaneous rendering of Poland as the space of German colonial endeavor. We therefore follow Anton Wohlfart as he temporarily takes leave from Schröter's firm to spend time in Poland as a self-proclaimed German colonist. In Poland, Anton discovers land that is largely barren and unstructured in its boundlessness, and a population that is largely childlike, uncivilized, and prone to violence. In what I argue to be the German colonial novel par excellence, Anton creates an island of German order and prosperity in this sea of chaos, and thereby expands the borders of German space.
Soll und Haben is conventionally read as a bildungsroman depicting the spiritual shaping of its hero and celebrating the German Bürgertum he represents. The novel shows this class embodying a set of values, among them the insistence upon stability, solidity, and security, that allows its members to consolidate their strength and resources and expand their sphere of power and control. In the course of his development, Anton comes to internalize these values; his ability to successfully transfer them into Polish space proves his value as a member of the German bourgeois collectivity and ultimately leads to his elevation to an esteemed position within it.
But if the text is viewed through a slightly different analytical optic, and the focus of attention shifted from the main protagonist's personal narrative onto the way space is both organized and constituted in the novel, it becomes apparent that Soll und Haben also tells the story of the Bildung of the German nation. Where it no longer seemed wise to entrust the unification of the diverse German polities to the political sphere, Soll und Haben offers an alternative: a German bourgeois socioeconomic order that would be unaffected by administrative borders, yet nonetheless act spatially, steadily growing to incorporate all German regions into its quasi-organic network. The result would be a geographically continuous, internally cohesive, and hierarchically organized spatial order that could form the integrative foundation for collective action and collective identity. And, as a model of quasi-organic spatial extension, the imagined bourgeois order would also provide the mechanism for German colonial expansion. Freytag's text positions the Bürgertum as both best equipped to unite Germany and best able to locate the nation on the world map as an integral member of the global colonial project.
Soll und Haben presents the readers with three main social groups positioned in opposition to the German Bürgertum: German aristocrats, urban Jews, and ethnic Poles. To a certain extent, these groups are defined by their economic practices; the title Soll und Haben already refers to the novel's privileging of the economic order represented by the Bürgertum, and the novel contrasts their financial success with the inability of the other social groups to contribute positively to the collective "debit and credit." But while Soll und Haben can certainly be read as a tallying ledger, it also presents the reader with a narrative atlas — a collection of mental maps of an envisioned global order drafted through the codes of literary narrative. It is here that the novel's colonial import becomes most apparent.
Atlases often include maps of varied spatial frames within their covers; a road atlas may provide a continental overview of major transportation channels as well as street guides for individual cities. Similarly, Soll und Haben constructs several different mental maps of the world that range in scale from a world map of global economic circulation to the floor plan of a building. Through a series of analogic structures, the novel works to superimpose these maps of differing scale and focus upon one another, such that a view of any specific map also reveals the palimpsestic outlines of those lying beneath. This spatial layering is significant because the city of Breslau, the region of Central Europe, and the globe as a whole are all configured according to a shared model of modern center versus primitive periphery, and this structural congruence allows for statements made in one frame to analogously structure perceptions in the others. In Soll und Haben, the narrative moves easily between the various maps it constructs, silently weaving the global and the local together into an overarching narrative of world order. Be it a citywide, regional, or global frame, the German bourgeoisie is always positioned at the map's center and is shown to be best able to consolidate the order of this center such as to expand its boundaries into the space of the periphery.
In addition to its centrality, bourgeois space is depicted as integrative, easily able to interpolate ethnic Germans from other classes into its order, and possibly even able to assimilate ethnic others (i.e., Jews and Poles) into its collective. This interpolative function derives from the symbiotic relationship that the bourgeois class forms with its environment: bourgeois space is represented as space that has been infused with bourgeois values through the act of bourgeois labor. The construct is tautological because bourgeois labor is defined by the text as the infusion of (bourgeois) social values into space. The resulting buildings, fields, cities, and landscapes have been disciplined and structured to serve the needs of the Bürgertum, but these spaces have also gained the agency to shape and mold those who come to dwell in them according to bourgeois principles. In this cyclic, symbiotic relationship, space and its inhabitants are reciprocally formative: once space is conquered by the Bürgertum, the space conquers future inhabitants, and the bourgeois order steadily expands.
Through this spatial function, nonbourgeois Germans are readily integrated into the German bourgeois collectivity, but Jews and Poles are largely excluded from this process. Instead, they are pushed ever further into the peripheries of the growing German bourgeois space. On the text's mental maps, the models of center and periphery are structurally congruent: the Jews are positioned on the external margin of the German bourgeois city, and the Poles on the external frontier of the German nation. Jews and Poles inhabit the peripheries into which the bourgeois order expands, and in both cases, this process results in their physical displacement outward.
Although Soll und Haben has been deemed by many (including Theodor Fontane, who published an early, extensive review of Freytag's novel) to be highly anti-Semitic, Jews in the text actually share many of the German Bürgertum's core qualities, and they mirror their German business counterparts down to the fine detail: they also work very hard, hold business acumen in high esteem, and structure their lives according to modern socioeconomic considerations. Yet there is a decisive difference: where the German Bürger subordinates his desire for individual gain under his concern for the welfare of the collectivity, the Jewish businessman ignores the needs of his collective to prioritize individual gain. This singular inversion of priorities reflects itself in all aspects of the Jewish habitus: Jews too create a symbiotic relationship with the space they inhabit, but it lacks the strength and stability of a collective foundation and therefore ultimately collapses into ruin.
While the Jews present an alternative — albeit negative — model of civilization with an alternative constitution of social space, the Poles are positioned as an uncivilized, primitive population (indeed, as a Naturvolk) lacking the ability to constitute social space altogether. "Poland" thus exists as a chaotic, unstructured expanse positioned adjacently to "Germany" in the text. Although both of these terms are frequently referenced in Soll und Haben, neither "Germany" nor "Poland" existed as such at the time the novel was written or narratively set; Poland had been divvied up among Prussia, Russia, and Austria in the Polish Partitions of the late eighteenth century, and Germany had yet to emerge as a unified state. Yet, despite their absence from the cartographic map, "Germany" and "Poland" categorically organize the mental maps generated by the novel. "Germany" gains shape and cohesive inner homogeneity as a structured, civilized European space most readily in its opposition to the unstructured, uncivilized, and non-European "Poland."
The text visits areas located in all three of the Polish Partitions but refers to each — even Polish Prussia — as "Poland" without any further distinction. This strategy seems to reunite "Poland" in the text's topographical imaginary, but it does so without any cartographic specificity: "Poland" hovers over the map, somewhere to the east of "Germany." Yet its function as Other serves to conceptually unite Germany as well. The civilizational inequality between "Germany" and "Poland" is so great that these two spaces seem to be separated by an oceanic divide — and this divide becomes the conceptual eastern border of "Germany." The text is able to use the terms "Silesia," "Germany," and "German space" interchangeably because "Poland" gives the notion of "Germany" shape and internal coherence. As I develop my argument, I will refrain from placing these two place markers in quotation marks, but it should be understood that "Germany" and "Poland" both refer to the diagrammatic (i.e., noncartographic, and instead relationally positioned) spaces evoked in the text's imaginary topography.
In addition to locating Germany, Poland also provides the German bourgeoisie with a spatial periphery into which they can demonstrate an expansionist identity. In two major episodes constituting two-fifths of the book's overall length, the Bürgertum is shown to successfully engage in two different modes of territorial expansion into Polish space. The first of these episodes is staged on the conventional world map of global economic flow: raw materials produced in the colonial periphery are imported for consumption in the European center, and the fruits of European production are shipped out for sale in the colonies. Poland is interpolated into this network through its production of raw materials that are imported into Europe and through its dependence upon the processed goods it receives in return. In the first Polish episode, the circulation of global economic flows is threatened with stoppage due to rebellion in Poland, where local insurgents have violently attacked one of Schröter's trade convoys, captured his goods, and prevented their movement back into German space. As I will detail below, Schröter and Anton travel into Polish space, rescue the convoys, and establish bases for ensuring future security and profitability. Their brave acts help to establish a mercantile order that provides a basis of stability in a landscape mired by political and social unrest; they thereby expand the boundary of European colonial trade further into the global periphery and secure Polish goods for the world market.
If this first episode positioned Germany at the center of a global system of colonial trade, the second turns to the question of settlement colonization and again features the German bourgeoisie as agents of territorial expansion. The scene is set on a map of the peripheral frontier; Poland is cast as a primitive and unordered space into which Anton arrives as a "colonist" bringing civilization and order. Occasionally, the term colonist appears as a synonym for settler (Ansiedler) in the text, but more frequently and conspicuously, German "colonists" in Poland are referred to as conquerors (Eroberer) who wrest control over foreign terrain by investing their physical labor in cultivating the land, and who protect their holdings against the native population through the use of armed force.
The novel presents this relationship between German and Pole in terms adhering to a colonialist model of diffusionism: the text emphasizes that the Poles are unable to develop or achieve civilizational progress on their own, and it narrates a long history of German improvements introduced into Polish space, all undertaken by businessmen or their occupational forerunners: medieval traders and merchants. The text claims German responsibility for technological innovations in agricultural and architectural practice, systems for organizing primitive space into politically and economically viable units, etc. This relationship of diffusion positions Germans as members of the civilized European center, as participants in the process of spreading European civilization into the global periphery.
Reading Soll und Haben as an envisioned atlas allows us to see that, whether the map is of the city, the nation, or the continent, the diagrammatical structure remains the same: the German Bürgertum consolidates its hold on the center, expands into the periphery, and incorporates the space it encounters into its spatial order.
Locating Germany in a Global Topographic Imaginary
In the wake of the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies, a number of scholars have returned to Gustav Freytag's novel to interrogate its complex spatial constructions. The marked difference between depictions of German and Polish space has featured prominently in these studies. In her insightful investigation of Freytag's imagination of the Polish East, Izabela Surynt analyzes the textual practices through which Polish space is rendered "distant" and "unheimlich" in Soll und Haben. She identifies a "topos of uniformity and endlessness (borderlessness)" in depictions of eastern landscapes that provide German agents with the opportunity to exercise and prove their ability to discipline space. By placing "boundary stones, border posts, bridges, and fences," Germans take that which cannot be organized by the eye (das Unüberschaubare) and impose structure and control upon it: "The inscription of the landscape with visible signs is a process of spatial appropriation enacted in the ascription of meaning; at the same time, these markings also establish structures of dominance in that they bring new objects into the space, name and nationalize them, and thereby create a new map of the developed space." It is a cyclical process of mapping one's own creation that naturalizes territorial claims.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Germany's Wild East by Kristin Kopp. Copyright © 2012 Kristin Kopp. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.