Weimar Colonialism: Discourses and Legacies of Post-Imperialism in Germany after 1918 ed. by Florian Krobb and Elaine Martin (review)

With the end of the First World War and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany ceased to be a colonial power. The loss of colonies in Africa, the South Pacific, and China, the redrawing of European boundaries, and the occupation of German territory by other Western powers did not, however, mean that Germans stopped fantasizing about past and future colonial glory. The myriad colonial fantasies produced by German politicians, authors, cultural organizations, and the popular press after the official loss of colonies in 1918 are the subject of Florian Krobb and Elaine Martin’s multidisciplinary edited volume. As the editors rightly claim in their clear and comprehensive introduction, colonial fantasies predating the German empire have received extensive scholarly attention (e.g., in monographs by Russell Berman and Suzanne Zantop), while the dreams of empire that remained in the minds of Germans after the First World War have been given short shrift. Weimar Colonialism therefore fills an important gap in the scholarship on German “coloniality,” the enduring presence of colonial discourses in the absence of actual colonies.

As the authors of the volume’s eleven essays collectively show, the lack of real colonies allowed Germans to reimagine the recent past, to lament their present condition, and to look ahead to other areas of potential conquest. Decrying the injustice of Versailles, Weimar-era politicians, the leaders of colonial organizations, and imaginative authors took rhetorical revenge against the Western colonial powers that took over German territories by portraying French and British colonizers as weak and incompetent and German colonizers as superior. Ignoring the historical evidence of violent, paternalistic colonial practices, post-colonial Germans boasted of their “benevolent colonial methods” and “model rule” (15) that earned them the right to possess colonies. Colonial figures like General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck embodied the myth of the benevolent leader who inspired the respect and loyalty of the indigenous people, and, as Jason Verber shows in his cogent essay, heroic tales of Lettow-Vorbeck’s command of loyal Askaris (indigenous troops) in a successful East Africa campaign against British and Belgian forces lived on into the Weimar era and even into the first decades following the Second World War. Claims of loyal colonials, exaggerated or even falsified as they were, did not mean that German colonizers promoted close relations between white Europeans and black Africans. Indeed, a key element of German “model rule” was the ability to draw clear racial boundaries between colonizers and the colonized, something that French and British colonial powers allegedly failed to do. Fears of miscegenation that had already existed in the colonial discourse of Wilhelmine Germany were severely exacerbated in the Weimar era by the occupation of the Rhineland by French colonial troops (26). By sending black African troops into European territory, German critics argued, the French had brought “the spectre of reverse colonialism” to Europe (75), reversing racial power structures in order to shame and weaken the German nation. Elaine Martin’s contribution to the volume demonstrates how Germans used overtly racist caricatures and novels to feminize the German metropole, depicting it as a woman ravaged by bestial black troops (the so-called Black Shame). In such tales of racial and sexual panic, the fledgling Weimar democracy was portrayed as sullied from the start. Conservative critics of the new republic decried the metropole as unsuitable and advocated for the conquest of uncharted territory or “Lebensraum” for the propagation of a healthy German populace. The concept of “Lebensraum” was later used by the National Socialists to justify the renewed expansion of German territory.

The Weimar colonial imagination, the editors and authors of this volume contend, was not only to be found in conservative political agendas or racially oppressive narratives that anticipated the extreme racism and expansionism of the so-called Third Reich. Rather, there was “saturation of...