German Colonialism in a Global Age ed. by Bradley Naranch, Geoff Eley (review)

This set of sixteen chapters covers a wide range of topics relating to German colonialism from approximately 1884 through 1945. Two major themes emerge from, even if they are not systematically pursued by, the various authors—first and most prominently, the links between occupation of overseas territories and other forms of German “colonialism” and, second, the resonances of territorial colonialism within domestic German political, economic, and cultural life.

Steinmetz (in a work not related to his contribution to this volume) uses the German case to make a widely cited distinction between overseas “exotic” colonies and the expansion of state boundaries within Europe.¹ However Eley in the opening chapter, offers “a far more capacious concept of colonialism” (24), including such issues as Weltpolitik (general international power assertion), emigration, and German control over East and East Central Europe. In this spirit, the book contains only five chapters about African and Asian German colonies and two about overseas ventures (naval battle fleets and Germans living in Iran) that have no connection to territorial control by Germany.

The real engagement with the role of overseas colonies in larger issues of German expansion comes in two chapters that focus on Slavic peoples and their territories under German rule. The first, by Sebastian Conrad, addresses Polish populations within the Wilhelmian Reich. These people, as Conrad points out, were not to be confused with “colonial subjects”; they were fellow Europeans with established national aspirations of their own and/or (in the case of residents as opposed to migrants) claims to full German citizenship. They even shared an antagonism, the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf, deeply rooted in European history and (as Conrad fails to note) directed as much at ethnically German “Papists’ as Poles. Conrad’s discussion of racist anxieties about Poles, “germanizing” education policies, and projects (never close to realization) of replacing Slavic migrant workers with African or Chinese labor do not make a convincing case for treating Germany’s erstwhile eastern provinces as “colonies.” Birthe Kundrus pursues the notorious “continuity” question by asking, “How Imperial [that is, how inspired by, or analogous to, overseas colonialism] was the Third Reich?” Although Eley insists on the connection (39), Kundrus tends to deny it. Hitler, she points out, despised Wilhelmian colonialism, and Nazi policies toward newly conquered Slavic peoples were too violent to allow any possibility for an enduring multicultural empire in this region.

The chapters about how colonialism shaped Wilhelmian German society at home—a major issue in postcolonial studies as well as in Eley’s contribution—focus upon overseas territorial rule, with an almost universally skeptical slant. In the most insightful of them, David Ciarlo shows how, in the advertising of various consumer commodities, “colonial fantasies” (not always tied to actual colonies) represented “less the politicization of commerce than the commercialization of politics.” Jeff Bowersox indicates that the inclusion of tropical studies in the German school curriculum was more the result of an autonomous pedagogical movement to reform geographical learning than a program of promoting colonialism. Moreover, colonialism did not map easily onto German antisemitism (Christian Davis) or the core, Europe-centered conceptions of proto-Nazi Pan-Germanism (Dennis Sweeny). John Phillip Short argues that even after the partial defeat of the Social Democratic Party in the 1907 Hottentot election, the German working class did not follow its “revisionist” leadership in supporting colonialism.

This review’s focus on what appear to be the central issues of Naranch and Eley’s volume does not do justice to the richness of the individual chapters. Even if they do not ultimately make a convincing case for an expanded presence of colonialism in Germany’s Aussen- or Innnenpolitik, the authors of this remarkable collection provide valuable accounts of such issues as Germany’s role in colonial medical projects (Deborah Neill), the ambiguous coastal “semicolony” of Kiaochow in China (Klaus Mühlmann), and pre–World War I German and American naval strategy (Dirk Böhner).