Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (review)

In this generously illustrated book, David Ciarlo offers a meticulous and compelling analysis of the colonial dimensions of commercial visual culture in Wilhelmine Germany. He focuses, in particular, on the emergence and consolidation of particular stock images and the effects these images had on popular understandings of race. Ciarlo offers a convincing case that these images operated neither as faithful reflections of actual colonial experiences nor as instructive ethnographic guides to non-European peoples. Instead, he shows that advertisers increasingly came to create a simulacrum of race and empire, a form of “commodity racism” (255) that referred to their own evolving traditions of representation, and that served and reflected not the political and economic priorities of the empire, but rather the commercial imperatives of the new consumer society. Even though political and military incidents such as the Boxer Rebellion, the Herero War, and the Morocco Crisis led to a number of topical advertisements and collectibles, the interior logic of commercial imagery and the development of commercial imperatives only tangentially reflected the finer-grained history of German colonial development and politics. Quite rightly, Ciarlo shows that advertisers were never simply subordinate to the advocates of empire or the imperial state, even if they freely responded to the public’s immense interest in things that were at least superficially “colonial.”

The developments in visual culture that the monograph traces certainly deserve the attention bestowed upon them. From the “commodity fetishes” of the exhibition halls at trade fairs, through the irreverent carnivalesque of the ethnographic show, which quickly left behind all pretensions to educational value, to the placards and newspaper advertisements that marshaled racial stereotypes to sell soap, tobacco, and cocoa, Ciarlo illustrates how images that, at first glance, appeared to be telling representations of Germany’s colonial world often had their origins in the racialized advertising of the United States or Britain. Given, too, that most Germans had never experienced the colonies first hand, Germany’s popular racial vernacular cannot be seen, Ciarlo argues, as having been drawn exclusively from the effects of German imperialism, but was, in large part, an amalgam of standardized commercial images that dominated the popular imagination.

In fact, he argues, the transnational and commercial nature of advertising, so often reliant on lithographic plates borrowed from abroad, or on images consciously modeled on successful overseas counterparts, meant that the racial language of German commercial images often reflected the North American “minstrel” tradition and British imperial models, as well as Germany’s own imperial engagement. Other more banal forces, such as copyright or trademark limitations, were also at work. Alternatively, stylistic questions were foregrounded: toothpaste advertisements of the period, Ciarlo tells us, often made use of racial caricatures not only because of the attention-grabbing juxtaposition of a modern cosmetic product’s being used by an African, but also because black skin and white teeth offered better contrast—a whiter white—in monochromatic advertising (230). Yet, Ciarlo does not overplay this separateness between the commercial and the colonial, recognizing that this racialized visual language only made sense to Germans because they shared a historically acquired understanding of the cultural connotations of “African” and “European,” “blackness” and “whiteness.” Advertising could freely subvert or reinforce the social meaning of these terms, but only because it could rely on the concepts’ more general stability.

Possibly owing to the painstaking description and analysis of an enormous body of visual material, the reader must at times work hard to garner the many worthwhile insights offered by the book’s exhaustive exegesis. In fact, its conclusions might well be extrapolated upon in valuable ways not countenanced by the author. Ciarlo’s work tests and contributes in important ways to discussions generated by a number of other, more theoretically oriented approaches to colonialism and mass culture. Admittedly, it is sometimes necessary to listen attentively to the subtext for this to become clear. While Ciarlo’s debt to Walter Benjamin...