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The Creation of a Seminar for Oriental Languages in Berlin The ‹nal years of Büttner’s career were intimately tied to the Seminar for Oriental Languages. The seminar opened its doors in 1887, only three years after Germany became a formal colonial power. It was an academic department at Berlin’s Friedrich-Wilhelms University and the ‹rst institution in Germany to offer regular instruction in African languages and cultures. Berlin thus became Germany’s ‹rst center for African studies, and the seminar ’s establishment signaled an important shift in the primary location of “colonial” knowledge production from the missionary ‹eld of the African periphery to the metropolitan core. Within several years, the seminar had become a key player in the development of information on the colonies. It allowed future German colonists to examine Africans and other non-Europeans away from their “natural” habitats and in the comfort of a sanitized , safe, and orderly classroom.55 The creation of the seminar and the slow institutionalization of African studies in Germany also heralded a shift away from the earlier, international roots of the discipline embodied in the Protestant Mission. In its early stages, the seminar was essentially a branch of the Foreign Of‹ce, and most of its students were Germans preparing for colonial careers. Accordingly , the seminar emphasized those African languages spoken in the German colonies or languages that could prove economically bene‹cial to German traders. Missionaries had transcribed languages from across the continent, often in English-run territories; from the 1880s, they were encouraged to concentrate on the major German “colonial” languages. This is unsurprising, considering that the seminar was government-funded and had connections with nationalist pressure organizations such as the Colonial Society. The Colonial Society formed in 1887, the same year as the seminar, and was an amalgum of two preexisting organizations: the Colonial Association and the Society for German Colonization, the latter of which Peters had established in 1884.56 Early on, Peters expressed a lively interest in the seminar’s curriculum. He believed that Berlin needed to offer courses in Bantu languages and wrote a memo arguing as much to Bismarck in March 1887. Peters explained that as the German population in the colonies would soon be expanding, there would be an increased need for Bantu language knowledge that the seminar should be ready to ‹ll. He speculated further that German business ventures in Africa would soon ›ourish, and the businessmen conducting them would require a rudimentary knowledge of Bantu languages as well.57 60 Africa in Translation Peters’s con‹dence that legions of German immigrants would soon ›ood the African colonies was misplaced, as was his faith that German businesses would reap unimaginable riches from expeditions in Africa; the colonies never drew many settlers, and pro‹ts from Germany’s overseas empire were marginal at best.58 Inspired by Germany’s putative colonial successes of the 1880s, and excited by the potential of its new possessions, however, colonial fantasies thrived as never before in this era of increasing national agitation and reformulation of the German political, social, and economic landscape. Germany had industrialized later than its main foes, England and France. Once the process of industrialization had started, though, Germany quickly began to challenge and then outstrip its neighbors in terms of production. As Germany’s industrial might grew, so did its imperial ambitions. Competition among Europe’s great powers had a global reach, and each tried to amass as large an empire as possible. Germany had a particular interest in displacing England as the world’s preeminent maritime power, and it strove to create a navy that could best the British, creating pomp and pageantry to sell the ›eet to the German people, as Jan Rüger has shown.59 This sort of international rivalry was hardly inconsequential for a school like the seminar, since most of its students attended in order to pursue careers that would advance German concerns abroad, whether in military, political, or economic venues.60 The seminar also had its own nationalist mythology. According to legend , the original inspiration for the seminar came from a speci‹c incident involving China, one that conveniently involved the colonially apathetic Bismarck. Eduard Sachau, the seminar’s director from its founding through 1918, related that Bismarck believed more young Germans needed to be trained in non-Western languages after having dif‹culties locating a German who could interpret Chinese for him.61 Other evidence suggests that it may not have been...

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