German Women for Empire, 1894-1945 (review)

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall permitted greater access to the archives formerly housed in Potsdam (now relocated in Berlin-Lichterfelde), there has been a burgeoning interest and production in scholarship on Germany’s colonial empire, an arena of German history previously either neglected or given scant attention. What these newer works increasingly prove is that Germany’s colonial past was indeed significant and that it provides useful insights into the larger scope of Germany history. Nowhere is this more evident than in Lora Wildenthal’s German Women for Empire. Prior to the publication of this book, most of the newer literature on this subject has dealt primarily with the “images” and “fantasies” surrounding German colonialism and empire and has been written almost exclusively by those in literary studies. ¹ Thus, the authors tend not to look at the actual experiences of Germany’s colonial enterprise. Wildenthal’s corrects this oversight.

In her monograph, Wildenthal offers a comprehensive examination of the confluence of German colonial activity and feminism across three regimes (namely Wilhelmine Germany, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich). Like a few writers before her, such as Woodruff Smith ², she attempts to bridge the gap between colonial rhetoric and activism in the metropole and actual happenings in the colonies. However, like some of her predecessors who also write more directly on German colonial propaganda and activities, she only provides occasional forays into actual occurences in the colonies in order to explain events in Germany and hence focuses primarily on the metropole. Nevertheless, what makes her study unique is its use of more recently available documents; her utilization of the contributions from literary studies on German colonialism; and her focus on an often neglected, though important and increasingly examined component of German society, namely women.

As Wildenthal skillfully illustrates, women’s role in this very public and highly charged enterprise was at first limited and only gradually expanded over the decades. Initially, it was assumed that there was no place for women in the colonial endeavor because it was seen as essentially men’s work. Nonetheless, women did find a way to contribute early to the empire as “the organizers and staff of medical nursing in the colonies (p. 3).” However, this proved to be insufficient for women’s ambition (primarily those belonging to the upper middle class and aristocracy). Women aspired to participate more actively and directly in German colonialism, though their ambitions collided with men’s vision of colonialism. But, as the situation in the colonies changed due to conflicting views about the rise in miscegenation and the growing numbers of offspring from such liaisons, a new opportunity arose for women. Though men initiated the call for more white women in the colony to combat this perceived threat to German colonialism and nationalism, a new cadre of colonialist quickly co-opted the so-called “Women’s Question” as a means to enhance not only their role in the colonies, but also in German colonialism as a whole. Consequently, as enforcers of racial distinctions, women were able to claim a role beyond the private sphere by politicizing domesticity. In other words, in the colonial situation, female domesticity assumed a nationalist cloak and thus became a vehicle for women to go beyond the role assigned to them by bourgeois society.

In the decades following Germany’s loss of colonies at the end of World War I, new challenges and opportunities arose for colonialist women. Because of the changed atmosphere in Weimar Germany, women became some of the most vocal opponents to the enforced de-colonization, but they still relied on the same pre-war rhetoric. In the post-war environment, “the conflation of ‘household’ [i.e., domesticity] and ‘economy’ [i.e., the importance of empire] connected German women’s new political role, which required them to be aware of economic issues, with traditional gender roles (p.177).” Meanwhile, after 1933, “Nazism gave a prominent ideological place, though not much real...