German Colonialism: Race, The Holocaust, and Postwar Germany ed. by Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (review)

This volume of thirteen carefully documented and well-argued chapters explores a sequence of relationships: between German colonialism and the Holocaust; between Germany's overseas expansionism, especially in South West Africa, and its later quest for Lebensraum in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland; between internal cultural constructions of German nationalism during the era of colonialism and external imperialist doctrines; and between early claims to German national and racial superiority and reclamations of the German past by today's German historiography. The skeletal structure holding the disparate issues together is the question of "continuity" between two extreme "book-ends" of modern German history: heuristic pathways can be imputed or disclaimed, documented or discredited, averred or disavowed to reveal or disprove how and to what extent German colonialist devastation of the Herero and the Nama in German South West Africa connect with Nazi genocidal horrors against the Jews.

The authors go beyond these questions to probe their own status as interpreters of history, exploring (among other questions) whether it is even possible for historians to establish a relationship between the violent excesses of one period and those of another. Chapters address the possibilities of memory itself with respect to historiography; the quest for analytical categories relative to historicity; and the place of narration of the past within contemporary social imaginaries. One thing they seek to comprehend implicitly is the influence of collective discourses on the narrativity of historical memory. They reflect on the methodological standards they themselves apply in the substantive arguments that bind their anthology together.

The editors declare, "we define history as a text that constitutes itself only in relation to other texts and historical contexts and thereby defines its unity as relative and variable" (p. 22). This methodological stance contributes to the volume's liveliness. Authors do disagree on German exceptionalism; the extent to which the Holocaust can be theorized in the contexts of European colonialist drives and fantasies and/or European ideologies of racialized imperialism; and the uniqueness of the Holocaust in the tragic scenario of European colonizing brutalities. But the feature that sets this volume apart is the ongoing questioning of these very matters.

The volume under review, then, presents us with a group of historians and literary scholars debating not only complex questions of history, but also their own capacity to ply their craft successfully. Readers will come to their own conclusions regarding the state of the art: the authors implicitly struggle against foundational authority in order to assert the fundamental importance of epistemological uncertainty in the language they use, the theories they apply, and the conclusions they derive.

The chapters are organized into five groups: colonial (dis)continuities; Lebensraum and genocide; the East, including Poland and the Ottoman Empire, in German historiographic ideology; missionary or "civilizing" impulses and economic causes in German revanchism; and postcolonial German policies. One strand running throughout is the processes and dynamics in German policy from colonialist to postcolonialist; the volume includes a number of comparative studies in colonialism and genocide. Together, the studies illuminate how German experiences with colonialism played out in nationalist formulations of racial ideology, and eventually in violent antisemitism up to and during the Holocaust.

Timothy Brennan demonstrates the racialism informing Nietzche's colonialist vision grounded in a "racialist fantasy of conquest" in ways that continue to "authorize the oddly Eurocentric anti-Eurocentrism that characterizes much of postcolonial studies" (p. 22). Birthe Kundrus stresses the prevailing influence of "prestige," that is, "a constant vacillation between self-affirmation and perceived threat by the foreign Other, the 'white woman' as a guarantor of culture, the sexualized metaphor of the conquest, the pronounced de facto caste system in the colonies, the cultures of difference in colonial policies" (p. 34) and the effects of prestige consciousness on German aspirations in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Shelley Baranowski examines the priority Hitler assigned to the acquisition...