Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany

Introduction: Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent

Introduction: Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent On March 14, 1896, the Social Democratic daily Vorwärts: Berliner Volksblatt printed an unsigned, front-page commentary on an important event that occurred in the Reichstag the preceding day. On March 13, the Social Democratic leader August Bebel vehemently denounced the colonial of‹cial Carl Peters for his alleged brutality against Africans in 1891 and 1892 while serving as an imperial commissioner in German East Africa. According to Bebel, Peters married an African girl in accordance with local tradition but executed her along with her lover, one of Peters’s male African servants, upon discovering her in‹delity. Vorwärts claimed that the revelations exposed on the ›oor of the Reichstag amounted to “a black day for German ‘colonial policy.’” The article compares Peters to Menelik II, the Ethiopian emperor whose forces had tortured to death hundreds of Italian soldiers and their askari1 troops following the recent battle at Adwa.2 In explaining Peters’s actions, Vorwärts stated that the two executed Africans were in fact substitutes for the real targets of his rage. “Germany has not succumbed to an African Menelik,” the newspaper proclaimed . Germany “has found its Menelik in a German—in a ‘truly Teutonic man,’ an enraged ‘Aryan,’ who wishes to destroy all Jews, but, for a lack of Jews over there in Africa, shoots Negroes dead like sparrows and hangs Negro girls for his own pleasure after they have satis‹ed his desires.” 1. From Arabic, meaning “soldier,” used to denote European-led African infantries in northern and eastern Africa. 2. On March 1, 1895, an Ethiopian force of 100,000 annihilated a much smaller Italian army of 20,000 (including askaris) at Adwa (Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 [New York: Avon Books, 1991], 471–82). Vorwärts characterized Peters as “the classic representative of German colonial policy.”3 The suggestion made by Vorwärts that Carl Peters substituted Africans for Jews as the targets of his murderous rage is both interesting and remarkable. Writing at a time when physical violence against Jews was rare within Germany and when the horrors of the Holocaust could not have been imagined, the article’s author anticipated Hannah Arendt’s idea of a link between radical antisemitism and the brutalities of the colonial project. In her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argued that the colonial experience in Africa during the age of high imperialism laid the ideological groundwork for the Holocaust by radicalizing European racism, imbuing it with genocidal possibilities, and propagating a racial consciousness throughout European society. Arendt claimed that colonialism also engendered the techniques of racial domination later used by the Nazis, saying that it was in Africa where Europeans learned “how peoples could be converted into races and how, simply by taking the initiative in this process, one might push one’s own people into the position of the master race.”4 Like Arendt, the Vorwärts article recognizes a dynamic 2 Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent 3. “Ein schwarzer Tag,” Vorwärts: Berliner Volksblatt, March 14, 1896. Carl Peters was one of the most active and important early members of imperial Germany’s colonial movement . He founded the Society for German Colonization in 1884, which organized treaty-signing expeditions to east Africa, laying the foundations of the future German colony. Peters led several expeditions himself, and he became a well-known and popular spokesman for the colonial cause. The government appointed him as one of three imperial commissioners of German East Africa in 1891, and it was while serving in this capacity on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro that the events discussed in the Reichstag in March 1896 are alleged to have taken place. Although Peters admitted to having had sexual relations with African women, he denied marrying the African girl or ordering the executions out of jealousy. An of‹cial investigation determined that Peters had lied about the incident to his superiors, and a disciplinary court charged him with ‹ling false reports. He was dismissed from his post following this conviction (Martin Reuss, “The Disgrace and Fall of Carl Peters: Morality, Politics, and Staatsr äson in the Time of Wilhelm II,” Central European History 14 [1981]: 110–41; Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riots: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 [Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1995], 184, 195; Juhani Koponen, Development for Exploitation: German Colonial Policies...