Germany's Colonial Pasts

Foreword

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 [First Page] [-9], (1) Lines: 0 to 18 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-9], (1) Foreword In my series Texts and Contexts I have published a number of distinguished books over the past decade, their subjects ranging from European and Jewish culturetohumanpsychology.NeverhaveIfeltcompelledtowriteaforewordto one of these books, as I believe that they should stand on their merits without any attempt on my part to argue for them. Many of these books have entered into the marketplace of ideas in the most extraordinary manner. They have increased my own reputation much more than I could have puffed theirs. Writing this foreword is very different. It is an act of homage to a colleague whose work I admired from the beginning of her academic career and whose murder (together with that of her husband Half) shocked the nation. Susanne Zantop was a rare scholar. She was imbued with an enthusiasm for Spanish American as well as German culture because of her lived experiences in both. Early in her career she invited me to speak at a small Heine conference in Hanover, where I had a chance to talk at great length about our mutual love of Mexico, Mexican culture, and Spanish literature. My engagement with her was heightened when she published her major scholarly study Colonial Fantasies, in which she took on many of my own early views on German attitudes toward Africa and the Africans in a critical way. Good scholarship surveys the terrain of existing scholarship, building on it, rebutting it. Her scholarship certainly did this in such a way as to further the creation of a field – that of German colonial studies. Over the past decade, as a result of the current interest in postcolonial studies , much of the work that I did in the 1960s and ’70s in response to the civil rights movement as well as my own study of stereotypes have undergone radical reassessment. What was earlier a taboo subject within German Studies, undertaken only at its very fringes, became a bridge between German Studies and the rest of European Studies. There was a search for the meaning of the German colonial experience, for the implications of that moment when the first German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck – against his own sense of what the new Germany should be – decided that engaging in the “scramble for Africa” (to use the contemporary phrase) was a necessary element in the ix Foreword 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 [Last Page] [-10], (2) Lines: 18 to ——— 52.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-10], (2) future of the German Reich. The short period of three decades saw the creation of a German colonial experience unlike that of the Dutch and the Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth or even the French and the British in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The German experience had a duration similar to the Belgian one that fulfilled the promise Léopold II made to his foreign minister (engraved on a piece of the Parthenon that Léopold gave him when he appointed him) that “I shall give Belgium its colony.” So, too, in Africa, the South Pacific, and China, Germany created a colonial world that mirrored its status as a new nation. Germany and Belgium – nations created in the nineteenth century – built very different colonies but ones that mirrored their need to shape a new national identity as much as it reflected the economic imperatives of colonialism. Both Zantop’s project and the project of this volume are to trace a particular version of the German Sonderweg: the uniqueness of German colonial practice and imagery. As much as this discussion has been abandoned within German social and cultural history over the past decade, it is vital in understanding the idea and image as well as the practice of the colonial experience in Germany. Eachofthecolonialexperiencesisclearlyunique;thecultureofFranceisnot that of the United Kingdom (which is in an odd way not England), and neither is close in any way to the cultures of Spain, Portugal, and Holland. While there are striking similarities between...