The Popularity of Empire and the Workings of Race in Imperial Germany

Over the last two decades, scholars have underscored the importance of colonialism to the history of Germany, whether as a realm of fantasy, a field of conflict (and genocide), a font of national identity, or as an early moment of transnationality.¹ While this new research attests to the myriad ways colonialism was important in German history, a skeptic might still pose a new question: important to whom? “Germany” is far from monolithic; its national history is riven with intense divisions around region, social class, politics and ethnicity. Some of this new research has tended to gloss over these divisions, and thereby construct an overly homogenized Germany by conveying an overly homogenized colonial project.

John Short’s Magic Lantern Empire offers a sophisticated, subtle and multifaceted account of “popular” colonialism in Germany, and the importance of this “Volkskolonialismus” to the German public’s sense of their place in the world. Short’s cogent introduction sets the stage with the hullabaloo surrounding the declaration of Cameroon as a protectorate in 1885 that inaugurated Germany’s overseas empire. Of course, the usual experts on geography, anthropology and political economy weighed in to delineate the new “German” colony’s landscape, inhabitants, and economic worth. And the daily and illustrated press churned out breathless descriptions of the new colony. But popular attractions such as the Colonial Panorama offered actual glimpses into Cameroon—a romanticized peek into a world of tropical exoticism and heroic colonial warfare. The Cameroon story thus brought together an array of metropolitan elements: colonial ideology and bourgeois expertise, but also mass media representation, carnivalesque sensation and “idle popular curiosity” (16), which offered a truly popular understanding of colonialism. Colonialism in late nineteenth-century Germany, Short therefore argues, can be seen as “a shifting field refraction, mediation, and dissemination of both discursive and visual representations of the overseas empire, a complex field that traced the contours and convulsions of German society in the period of its most intensified industrialization” (2). If this description of shifting fields of refraction seems complex and multifaceted, so too is Short’s argument; indeed, the introduction is best read twice—revisited after the detail provided in the chapters has lent flesh to its sophisticated formulations. To simplify Short’s argument here (and do some damage to its subtlety): colonialism in Germany was, as the title hints, a magic lantern show—a series of different “slides” (discourses and visual representations), produced by different actors with different agendas for different audiences, but collectively arranged into a narrative that seemed coherent, and therefore smoothly elided its internal contradictions and yawning gaps in knowledge. Moreover, even ostensible opponents of colonialism, such as the Social Democratic Party, worked within this composite magic lantern narrative; they simply tried to invert the slides. To add a bit more complexity, Short also sees a simultaneous evolution in the structures behind these diverse discourses and visual representations; if I may push Short’s metaphor a bit further, the “tray” in which these magic lantern slides were organized was initially the (bounded) public sphere generated by bourgeois associations and institutions (like colonialist clubs and ethnography museums); but over three decades of colonialism, it was replaced by a vastly larger “tray”—namely, that provided by capitalism itself. As many of the colonial propagators (from Colonial Society activists to carnival popularizers) actually used “magic lantern” slides as a key part of their shows, Short’s metaphoric title seems particularly apt.

So what was the emergent, seemingly coherent narrative in this slideshow? It was a broad-ranging “colonialism” that incorporated a bourgeois valuation of the authority of expertise (political clubs, ethnography), but blended in a popular penchant for sensationalism (ethnographic shows, panoramas, dime novels), which together formed a modern, market-oriented...