The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Wurttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918, and: Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870 (review)

The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918. By ALON CONFINO. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997 . Pp. xiii + 280 . $59 .95 (cloth); $19 .95 (paper).

Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870. By SUSANNE ZANTOP. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997 . Pp. ix + 292 . $54 .95 (cloth); $18 .95 (paper).

For decades historians of Germany have been debating the idea of whether or not Germans in their nation-building process throughout the nineteenth century embarked on a different or separate path (Sonderweg) towards modernity. Hindsight guides most of these considerations as the horrors of Nazism provided good reason to investigate the less than liberal elements enshrined in the German political tradition. While such debates ensure an interest in German pasts throughout the world's history departments, they also served to insulate investigations of German history from larger, more global themes. As far as world history is concerned the historical investigations of the German global legacy were on their own Sonderweg, namely that of excluding the German case examples from larger global investigations. The development of new research interest in both German and world histories, however, is reversing this trend as two recent publications reflect. The late Susanne Zantop's Colonial Fantasies and Alon Confino's The Nation as Metaphor render important contributions to the world historical themes of "history," memory, and imagination. Both works investigate how such themes are played out in the emergence of the German national and supranational consciousness. Their investigations reveal how Germany's own troubling modernities have important implications for the study of world history.

Zantop's study tackles German colonialism. Unlike the tremendous global impact of British and French colonialism, German overseas expansion was a rather limited endeavor. Not only did Germany acquire her colonies late, but she soon lost them as a consequence of the Great War. As a result German colonialism has been largely neglected by colonial and postcolonial studies. Zantop, however, argues against this limited view since it ignores what she calls "colonial fantasies": "stories of sexual conquest and surrender, love and blissful domestic relations between colonizers and colonized, set in colonial territory, stories that made the strange familiar . . ." (p. 2 ). Such stories, Zantop reminds us, prevailed in German literature prior to unification in 1871 , hence greatly enhancing Germany's colonial legacy. Zantop, a professor of German Literature at Dartmouth College until her tragic death in 2001 , did considerable amount of research on German writings connected to South America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her work is fueled by an impressive bibliography of no less than 950 German texts. While no part of South America was technically ever under German control, its turbulent colonial history provided an important test case for German writers. After exculpating their own countrymen from initial involvement in the colonization of the Americas, several authors then explored the obvious pitfalls of other colonizing powers (in particular those of Spain). Through close analysis of the situation at hand they arrive at the perfect colonizer: the German male who would surely avoid the mistakes of his predecessors.

Although Zantop is clearly inspired by Edward Said's lead in postcolonial studies, she seeks to expand his work in one important aspect. Said and others following his example have neglected the German colonial imagination, assuming that the absence of colonies made the Germans less susceptible to the colonial gaze than other European powers. For Zantop, however, it is precisely this absence of colonies which makes the German case "special." Because German commentators were able to sit on the sidelines and observe the unfolding colonial events, they were free to critique other colonial powers. Their "imagined" colonialism in Zantop's...