Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture and Globalization in the Age of Empire by Jeremy Best (review)

In the past twenty-five years, historians of Germany's short-lived colonial empire have delved into the impact of colonialism on ideas of race and nation in imperial Germany. Jeremy Best's Heavenly Fatherland is a lively and illuminating contribution to this literature. While joining recent works by Sara Pugach and Albert Wu that have examined the history of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German mission movement, Best's is the first study to situate missionaries within imperial Germany's colonial culture. In doing so, Best challenges interpretations that reduce missionaries to lackeys of state and commercial interests or forbearers of conquest and genocide. Instead, he argues, Protestant missionaries adopted a different ideology and practice of colonialism from their secular counterparts. Inspired by the "Great Commission," an interpretation of Scripture that called on Christians to spread the Gospel to all corners of the earth, missionaries adopted a universalist vision that emphasized the conversion of souls rather than the exploitation of people and territory. Although they identified strongly as Germans, missionaries believed that each Volk served as a unique conduit for God's message, and they rejected ideologies of racial hierarchy.

Best supports this thesis with a rich archive of missionary texts, including theological treatises, sermons, speeches, periodicals, and correspondence. The book's six chapters balance a reconstruction of the worldview of mission movement leaders, including theologians such as Gustav Warneck and Karl Axenfeld, with an analysis of missionary activities in German East Africa. Especially important to Best's argument are chapters that detail the conflicts between Protestant mission societies and the German colonial state over issues of education and labor. Whereas the colonial government sought to impose German as the language of instruction in mission schools, missionary leaders insisted on instruction in local languages, eventually compromising on Swahili, in order to create an indigenous Volkskirche. Protestant missionaries also opposed the use of plantation labor and the reduction of education to vocational training, which, they claimed, violated the Christian message and disrupted evangelization. Through these examples, Best shows how missionaries rejected the German state's most rapacious colonial policies. At the same time, Protestant missionaries did not entirely abandon German nationalism. In territorial disputes with their Catholic counterparts, as Best illustrates in a chapter on the Benediktinerstreit between the Berlin Mission Society and Catholic Benedictines, Protestant missionaries unabashedly mobilized the anticlerical rhetoric of the Kulturkampf.

Best's most provocative claim involves the impact of the Protestant mission movement inside imperial Germany. Through a network of local Hilfsvereine, he argues, mission societies mediated ordinary Germans' experiences of globalization. The programming of mission societies reached "hundreds of thousands, and likely millions, of Germans" (153) and "promoted an inclusive understanding of the wider Christian world" (20). While there is limited evidence for how ordinary Germans received missionaries' ideas, Best draws creatively on reports and correspondence of the Berlin Mission Society to paint a detailed portrait of local engagement across Brandenburg, Pomerania, and Silesia. The Berlin Mission Society sponsored frequent mission festivals that incorporated worship, study, performance, and magic lantern shows, demonstrating "the profound dynamism of German religious life" (153). Best also shows how Protestant women and girls were active participants in the Hilfsvereine, adding a gendered lens absent elsewhere in the book.

Still, Best's analysis of missionary ideology is multifaceted and he recognizes that missionary internationalism remained a Eurocentric project. Missionaries "presumed to know what Africans needed" and "transformed indigenous cultures while insisting on their own moral superiority" (218). Germany's Protestant missionaries may have rejected biological conceptions of race, but they "did view Africans as culturally inferior when compared to European Protestant culture at its best" (17). At times, this argument could be pushed further, to address the intersections of Christian and secular conceptions of race as well as the blurry distinction between biological and cultural racism. Karl Axenfeld's use of Buschneger to describe non-Swahili speakers in...