"Friedliche Imperialisten": deutsche Auslandsvereine und auswartige Kulturpolitik, 1906-1918 (review)

'Friedliche imperialisten,' Deutsche auslandsvereine und auswaertige kulturpolitik, 1906-1918. 2 vols. By Juergen Kloosterhuis. Frankfurt: Peter Lang Europaeischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1994.

Historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American history, as well as historians of ethnic cultures in geographic diasporas, need to pay serious attention to Juergen Kloosterhuis's two-volume book entitled German Ethnic Organizations Abroad and Foreign Cultural Policy 1906-1918. This published Ph.D. dissertation represents a major departure from mainstream scholarship as it asks a new and important question about German war guilt: What role did cultural politics play in German efforts to reach great power status between 1871 and 1920? The result is a nuanced, sophisticated micro study that examines how the ideas and practices of German cultural policy evolved in the context of Great Power competition.

Kloosterhuis pays particular attention to Kurt Rietzler, the close adviser of German chancellor Bethmann Hollweg. Rietzler argued in favor of a third, nonviolent path toward Great Power status for Germany: economic imperialism. This, according to Kloosterhuis, represents an overlooked alternative that needs to be wedged between the other two political options that are by now very familiar: the apocalyptic yearnings of class warfare by German communists and socialists, and the racial madness of German fascists. Rietzler insisted on the possibility of peaceful imperialism based on economic competition, a prescription from which several ingredients where finally taken after 1945.

Next follows a gem of a chapter. Whereas until 1914 German cultural policy had evolved into a professionalized "quiet tool" through ongoing interactions between German governments and ethnic German clubs abroad, this changed once World War I broke out. Kloosterhuis masterfully demonstrates how the maelstrom of war itself turned governmental cultural policy into a new, distinct process that militarized previous authentic expressions of diaspora culture into a propaganda tool that had to be dominated by the German state. This militarization of cultural policy, unlike the policy of economic imperialism, left no room for diaspora self-definition or self-expression. Because Germany had to win the war, cultural policy and ethnic groups abroad had to be reshaped aggressively to fit the self-destructive needs of war propaganda; the German loss of World War I changed the function of cultural policy once again. In the midst of the collapse of the monarchic political system, German diplomatic bureaucrats earmarked once again the "weapon of culture" as one of the few real remaining tools that Germany could deploy in the new international order created through the 1919 Peace Treaty of Versailles.

In the second volume Kloosterhuis provides an impressive, probably exhaustive catalog, that lists all ethnic clubs abroad in the geographical regions of Latin America, North America, Europe, Africa, Near East, and the Far East. Australia is not included. More important, this catalog lists the year and place of publications for each organization.

This impressive scholarly achievement is a thrilling invitation to move beyond the painful clichés of Polka and Gemuetlichkeit when it comes to the study of German ethnic communities abroad. Kloosterhuis creates an intellectual and bibliographical foundation on which we can stand and ask deeper questions. For example, his findings beg for a comparative study of other ethnicities abroad. How did the experiences, expressions, and practices of Japanese, Chinese, French, British, Italian, Spanish, U.S. and Syrian ethnic organizations in Latin America compare to those of Germans? Another future research topic would be a comparison between the cultural policy practices of the German monarchy, the Weimar Period, the Third Reich and Federal Republic of Germany (1949-89). There can be no better foundation to study the repeated instrumentalization and manipulation of European and Asian cultural diasporas for the purposes of Great Power politics in the twentieth century. Unfortunately the book has not yet been translated into English or Spanish.

Friedrich E. Schuler
Portland State University

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