Kolonie and Heimat: Race, Gender, and Postcolonial Amnesia in Veit Harlan's Opfergang (1944)

After completion of her ground-breaking study Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany (1997), Susanne Zantop had begun to explore the legacy of colonial thinking in the shaping of German cultural identity, attributing its persistence in large measure to widespread ignorance of the colonialist past. In her bold exploration of Veit Harlan's deployment of gender relations at home as metaphors to mask colonial ambitions abroad in Opfergang (1944), Zantop demonstrates how this film reinvigorates the colonial fantasy in a way that also enables it to obliterate and forget the failures of Nazi Germany. The material in this essay was planned as a chapter in her book-in-progress, to be entitled "Postcolonial Amnesia." A shorter version was delivered at the German Studies Association annual conference in Houston, Texas, in October 2000. The version that appears here was prepared and lightly edited by her Dartmouth College colleagues Gerd Gemünden and Irene Kacandes after the author's death. (PH)