The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism And Its Legacy

376 Pages·1998·8.19 MB·English

by  Sara Friedrichsmeyer

The Imperialist Imagination
Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany
Geoff Eley, Series Editor
A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880-1980: Seasonal Workers/Forced
Laborers/Guest Workers, Ulrich Herbert, translated by William Templer
Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bis­
marck, Geoff Eley
The Stigma of Names: Antisemitism in German Daily Life, 1812-1933, Dietz Bering
Forbidden Laughter: Popular Humor and the Limits of Repression in Nineteenth-
Century Prussia, Mary Lee Townsend
From Bundesrepublik to Deutschland: German Politics after Unification, Michael G.
Huelshoff, Andrei S. Markovits, and Simon Reich, editors
The People Speak! Anti-Semitism and Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Bavaria,
James F. Harris
The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia: Conservatives, Bureaucra­
cy, and the Social Question, 1815-70, Hermann Beck
Technological Democracy: Bureaucracy and Citizenry in the German Energy
Debate, Carol J. Hager
Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870-1930, Geoff Eley, editor
Paradoxes of Peace: German Peace Movements since 1945, Alice Holmes Cooper
Jews, Germans, Memory: Reconstruction of Jewish Life in Germany, Y. Michal
Bodemann, editor
Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity
in the Austrian Empire, 1848-1914, Pieter M. Judson
Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Public Sphere, 1923-1945,
Kate Lacey
How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming
Woman, Erica Carter
West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in Germany in the
Adenauer Era, Robert G. Moeller, editor
A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the Ger­
man Heimatschutz Movement, 1904-1918, William H. Rollins
A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies, Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, and
Jonathan Petropoulos, editors
Catholicism, Political Culture, and the Countryside: A Social History of the Nazi
Party in South Germany, Oded Heilbronner
Contested City: Municipal Politics and the Rise of Nazism in Altona, 1917-1937,
Anthony McElligott
The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy,
Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, editors
Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany 1820-1989,
Steve Hochstadt
Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German
and Austrian Imagination, Gerd GemUnden
Triumph of the Fatherland: German Unification and the Marginalization of Women,
Brigitte Young
The Imperialist Imagination
German Colonialism and Its Legacy
Edited by Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox,
and Susanne Zantop
Ann Arbor
The Universitt or Michigan Press
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 1998
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
© Printed on acid-free paper
2001 2000 1999 1998 4 3 2 1
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise,
without the written permission of the publisher.
A CIP catalog recordfor this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The imperialist imagination : German colonialism and its legacy /
edited by Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop.
p. cm. — (Social history, popular culture, and politics in
Germany)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-472-09682-6 (acid-free paper)
ISBN 0-472-06682-X (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. Arts, German. 2. Arts, Modern—20th century—Germany. 3.
Exoticism in art—Germany. 4. Imperialism in art. 3. Colonies in
art. 6. Germany—Colonies—Africa—History. 7.
Nationalism—Germany—History. I. Friedrichsmeyer, Sara. II.
Lennox, Sara. III. Zantop, Susanne, 1945- IV. Series.
NX550.A1 153 1999
325'.343—ddc21 98-25522
CIP
Contents
Introduction 1
Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop
Put 1. Colonial Discourse in the New Empire
Nietzsche’s Colonialist Imagination: Nueva Germania,
Good Europeanism, and Great Politics 33
Robert C. Holub
Orientalism, Imperialism, and Nationalism:
Karl May’s Orientzyklus 51
Nina Berman
Engendering German Nationalism: Gender and
Race in Frieda von Bülow’s Colonial Writings 69
Friederike Eigler
National Identity, Nomadism, and Narration in
Gustav Frenssen’s Peter Moor’s Journey to Southwest Africa 87
John K. Noyes
The Talk of Genocide, the Rhetoric of Miscegenation:
Notes on Debates in the German Reichstag Concerning
Southwest Africa, 1904-14 107
Helmut Walser Smith
On Colonial Spaces and Bodies: Hans Grimm’s
Geschichten aus Südwestafrika 125
Thomas Nolden
Part 2. Imperialism without Colonies
Formalism to Psychoanalysis: On the Politics of
Primitivism in Carl Einstein 141
Andreas Michel
VI The Imperialist Imagination
Mapping the Native Body: On Africa and the
Colonial Film in the Third Reich 163
Sabine Hake
Reading the Face of the Other: Arnold Zweig’s and
Hermann Struck’s Das ostfidische Antlitz 189
Leslie Morris
Blacks, Germans, and the Politics of
Imperial Imagination, 1920-60 205
Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse, and
Yara-Colette Lemke-Muniz de Faria
Part 3. Imperial Fantasies after 1945
Of Seeing and Otherness:
Leni Riefenstahl’s African Photographs 233
Lisa Gates
White Ladies and Dark Continents in
Ingeborg Bachmann’s Todesarten 247
Sara Lennox
Imagining Migrants’ Literature:
Intercultural Alterity in Jeannette Lander’s
Jahrhundert der Herren 265
Leslie A. Adelson
Christoph Hein’s Homs Ende:
Gypsy Essences and German Community 281
Sara Friedrichsmeyer
Ethnic Drag and National Identity:
Multicultural Crises, Crossings, and Interventions 295
Katrin Sieg
Epilogue: MLand of Truth—Enchanting Name!”
Kant’s Journey at Home 321
Willi Goetschel
Bibliography 337
List of Contributors 359
Index 363
Introduction
Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop
German cultural studies comes belatedly to the investigation of colonial­
ism and postcoloniality. Only in the mid-1980s did significant numbers of
German Studies scholars begin to explore the texts and experiences of
minorities in contemporary Germany, and few analyses of German colo­
nial and postcolonial discourse appeared in either the Federal Republic or
the United States before the early 1990s (Bitterli; Bader and Riesz; Horn).
But since the beginning of this decade, U.S. scholars, often influenced by
the sophisticated investigations of colonial and postcolonial topics within
Anglo-American cultural studies, have played a vanguard role in opening
up this new area for scholarly investigation within German Studies. Their
pathbreaking work has been presented in papers at the conferences of the
Modem Language Association, the American Historical Association, and
the German Studies Association, as well as in books like Arlene Teraoka’s
East, West, and Others: The Third World in Postwar German Literature
(1996), Nina Berman’s Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne: Zum
Bild des Orients in der deutschen Kultur um 1900 (1997) and Susanne Zan-
top’s Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Ger-
many, 1770-1870 (1997). That three German journals—KultuRRevolution,
Neue Rundschau, and Das Argument—have recently devoted special issues
to colonial and postcolonial topics suggests that these have also captured
the interest of a wider circle of scholars and intellectuals within Germany
itself. The present collection of essays grows out of such discussions both
here and in Germany. It comprises, we believe, one of the first interdisci­
plinary collections in English or German to focus entirely on German
colonialism and its aftermath, and brings to German Studies a range of
scholarly investigations that model how postcolonial theory and analysis
might be applied in a German context.
Although colonial and postcolonial studies have been the focus of
2 The Imperialist Imagination
special issues of prestigious scholarly journals like Critical Inquiry, Social
Text, Diacritics, Ariel, Yale French Studies, PMLA, and Signs, the
definitions of these terms are by no means uncontested even within Anglo-
American cultural studies. Most commentators, however, date the emer­
gence of the approach from the appearance of Edward Said’s Orientalism
(1978); as Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, editors of Colonial Dis­
course and Post-Colonial Theory, have observed, with this book Said “sin­
gle-handedly inaugurates a new area of academic inquiry” (S). Informed
by an eclectic appropriation of Gramsci and Foucault, Said’s interroga­
tion of how the West has produced knowledge and other forms of repre­
sentation about the Middle East, that is, the “Orient,” has deeply
influenced the subsequent development of the field. Although the expan­
sion of postcolonial studies has been accompanied by a not unsurprising
blurring of the term “postcolonial,” most scholars would agree with the
definitions of postcolonial literature and theory offered by Bill Ashcroft,
Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, editors of The Post-Colonial Reader:
“Post-colonial literatures are a result of [the] interaction between imperial
culture and the complex of indigenous cultural practices . . . Once
colonised peoples had cause to reflect on and express the tension which
ensued from this problematic and contested, but eventually vibrant and
powerful mixture of imperial language and local experience, post-colonial
’theory’ came into being” (1). Their formulations emphasize the breadth of
the field: “[P]ost-colonial theory involves discussion about experience of
various kinds: migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation,
difference, race, gender, place, and responses to the influential master dis­
courses of imperial Europe such as history, philosophy and linguistics, and
the fundamental experiences of speaking and writing by which all these
come into being. None of these is ’essentially’ post-colonial, but together
they form the complex fabric of the field” (2).
Postcolonial scholars draw on a range of theoretical models, includ­
ing various new versions of Marxism; Foucault, Derrida, and other post-
structuralists; Fanon and other critics of imperialism; Freud, Lacan, and
other cultural critics influenced by psychoanalysis; feminists; race theo­
rists; new historicists, cultural materialists, and experimental ethnogra­
phers; and radical geographers. To be sure, some of the most distin­
guished practitioners of these approaches now question the utility of so
diffuse a term as “postcolonial.” Ella Showat and Robert Stam argue, for
instance, that, when it is applied to a wide range of spatially and tempo­
rally distinct phenomena—white settler colonies like Canada and Aus­
tralia, “third world” countries that gained independence after World War
II, the “third world” diasporic presence within “first world” metropo­
lises—“the all-inclusive formulation homogenizes very different national
Introduction 3
and racial formations, obscures power relations between colonizer and
colonized, and collapses diverse chronologies by designating formerly
colonized countries which achieved independence at very different his*
torical points or even the entire period of world history since European
colonization began” (37-39). Similarly, Anne McClintock protests that,
though the emergence of postcolonial subjects speaking in their own
voice drew the preeminence of the West into question, the use of the
term “postcolonial” threatens to reestablish that hierarchy: MIf post*
colonial theory has sought to challenge the grand march of Western his-
toricism and its entourage of binaries (self-other, metropolis-colony,
center-periphery, etc.), the term postcolonialism nonetheless reorients
the globe once more around a single, binary opposition: colonial-post-
colonial” (10-11). Yet even scholars who acknowledge the legitimacy of
such critiques also concede that the new method has evolved by neces­
sity to address a definitively new set of global and local relations. They
also acknowledge that the postcolonial condition, itself a hybridized,
syncretic product of local and global processes, elicits and necessitates
quite heterogeneous responses. What may, however, unite postcolonial
scholars and writers is their effort to draw into question the binary cate­
gories in which the West has described itself and its others.
This brief sketch of some of the components of postcolonial studies
begins to explain why the approach has been so slow to gain a foothold in
Germany. Most obviously, Germany’s short period as a colonial power,
from 1884 to 1919, has seemed to make the entire question of colonialism
far less relevant to Germany than it was for countries that enjoyed cen­
turies of imperial prestige and then endured protracted and costly strug­
gles over decolonization. To be sure, the German experience was less his­
torically significant than those of the generally acknowledged imperial
powers, but although its overseas empire was not as impressive geograph­
ically or as profitable economically as that of other colonial powers, the
German colonial empire did have historic importance, not alone for Ger­
many but for the colonies as well. Nevertheless, even historians in Ger­
many have traditionally accorded little attention to Germany’s colonial
past; similarly, when scholars today turn to the subject of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century imperialism, they most often focus on Great Britain
and France, ignoring the expansionist German and Austro-Hungarian
empires. It is not surprising, then, that postcolonial theories and analyses
have in general been developed with little substantial reference to the Ger­
man colonial experience (cf. Said, Culture xxii-xxiii).
A further reason for contemporary Germany’s seeming lack of inter­
est in postcolonial studies underscores other differences between Germany
and its imperial neighbors. If “postcolonial literature” means writing by
4 The Imperialist Imagination
formerly colonized people in the language of their colonizers, there are
apparently no postcolonial texts in German—partly as a consequence of
German language policy in the colonies, which in some instances may
have favored keeping the number of literate “natives” small. Even if
postcolonial writing also refers to texts by white settlers, the German*
speaking whites who still remained in the formerly German colonies
when they gained their freedom after World War II also appear not to
have written texts of belles lettres. Nor has there been until very recently
a diasporic presence of formerly colonized peoples in Germany to
remind Germans of the past violence that Europeans had inflicted on
non-European peoples, what Homi Bhabha has called “colonials, post­
colonials, migrants, minorities—wandering peoples who will not be con­
tained within the Heim of the national culture and its unisonant dis­
courses but are themselves the marks of a shifting boundary that
alienated the frontiers of the modem nation” (Nation and Narration IS).
Moreover, while many minority intellectuals in other Western European
countries and the United States have been educated and now teach at
elite Western universities, giving them privileged access to metropolitan
discourses, there is no equivalent of these nomadic stars in Germany.
Minorities in Germany, the “guestworkers,” for example, have instead
been concentrated at the bottom of the German economy, while Ger­
many’s citizenship laws, conferring automatic citizenship only on those
of German “blood,” have made it impossible for Germany’s immigrant
population to amass the political power that could force German politi­
cians to attend to their interests and needs.
The German focus on the Holocaust as the central and unavoidable
fact of German history may also have occluded Germans’ view of Euro­
pean colonialism and their own complicity as Europeans in it. To be sure,
various traditions of German thought insist on connections between colo­
nialism and National Socialism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah
Arendt explored how imperialism’s political self-legitimation laid the
groundwork for fascism (and Stalinism), and the German student move­
ment underlined connections between neoimperialism and fascism (the
chant “USA-SA-SS” was a favorite at anti-Vietnam demonstrations). In
addition, many historical studies have also pointed out continuities
between German colonial and Nazi policies and practices. Nevertheless,
the postulate of the singularity of the Holocaust has been fundamental to
postwar West German politics. The Federal Republic’s unqualified
embrace of Western values after the “aberration” of National Socialism
was therefore taken as proof that Germany had earned the right to rejoin
the family of nations. As Jürgen Habermas put it, “The unreserved open­
ing of the Federal Republic to the political culture of the West is the great