By Seth Quartey
Introduction and Purpose
This paper documents the representation
of Africa and the politics of German colonialism during this period. It
aims at introducing students of German colonialism in Africa to some of
the studies in this field. On the methodological side, I focus on the
salient racist and imperialist publications that the intellegentia
developed under the rubric, "Lebensraum". Rather than offering the
views about the ongoing debates in the field of German colonialism, this
exposition aims to present the reader to some instant references of
some of main studies and key players. It is evident that this
bibliography may arouse questions as to what may be included or not
included. For that matter, I have selected a wide range of literary
works, which outline how Germany pursued her colonial ambitions. The
bibliography will lead the reader to additional related works. I
include exposition of dissertations, some articles, and the “scientific”
and religious theories within the African context to justify
colonialism. The last parts examine colonial novels and discuss
post-colonial theories that criticize new approaches on documenting
Africa in the Western world. Since race and culture are the central
organizing themes, and very sensitive as such, extensive quotations of
some sources are included as well as a reformulation of some statements
that may shed a different light on their original intent.
The
date conventionally used for the climax of European colonization of
Africa is 1884 when, on the tables at the Congress of Berlin, imperial
Europe carved up the African continent in order to exploit raw material
and minerals to keep the industrial machines in Europe functioning.
Before then, pro-colonial forces had expressed their dissatisfaction
with the on-going economic stagnation and consequent class alienation in
many cities of Western Europe. These economic depressions plus
increasing social unrest augmented the cries for colonial acquisition.
Now as a major part of the political agenda, there was a
demand for opening up former and new territories for a rapidly
industrializing Germany. In dire need of appeasing these outcries in
his nation, Bismarck agreed to the Volks’ colonial ambitions. The main
supporters of imperial policies were banking institutions and industries
with agrarian and commercial interests . Thus, with mounting pressures
from the financial institutions, a political base was created to promote
colonial ideologies. This idea of Weltpolitik increased with the help
of middle class demagogic discourses and a series of nationalist
publications. In her bid for new Lebensraum, Germany annexed territories
in Africa -- Südwest-Afrika (Namibia), Togo, Cameroon and Tanzania, and
in the South Pacific regions -- New Guinea, Samoa, Nauru, The Caroline,
Marianne, the Marshall Islands and Kiao-Chow in China.
With
the slogan “only through colonies could Germany be made safe against
social revolution,” (Stoecker, 1986:22) Africa and other non-European
regions became the venue for popular research and literary themes. Led
by missionaries and “traders,” the Germans acquired overseas
territories, set up trade depots , and ruthlessly tried to eliminate
practices that, by their standards, were evil and dark in those
so-called less developed regions . Using the works of these
colonialists, German writers introduced their nationals to other
cultures through what are now commonly known as Trivialliteratur, and
Tätigkeitsberichte kolonialer Gesellschaften. Mostly, these publications
spread racist and revisionist ideologies. Apart from that, however,
these publications ignored any brutal German imperialist past and were a
pacifying mechanism to ameliorate internal social and political
differences.
After World War I, Germany was deprived of her
colonies in Africa and the South Pacific by the allies The Versailles
Treaty that held Germany solely responsible for the war inflamed
nationalist sentiments and turned into a popular target for colonial
agitators. Nationalist publications argued for the return of their
colonies and helped spread ideas of reestablishing new Kolonial
Ideologien and to thwart the Kolonialschuldlüge. Such publications
also helped prevent any redistribution of German colonies by the allies.
Wolfe W. Schmokel (1964) writes
"Under the energetic
leadership of the former colonial governors Theodor Seitz (1920-1930)
and Heinrich Schnee (1930-1936), the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft
(DKG), despite its relatively small membership, showed some lively
activity, especially in the field of colonial propaganda. Until 1928,
the monthly Mitteilungen der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft was its main
organ. In that year, it acquired the Deutsche Übersee, und
Kolonialzeitung. A subsidiary, the Frauenband der DKG [...] Deutsche
Jugend Deutsche Kolonien, designed to appeal to youth, carried
glamorized biographies of colonial heroes, photographs, accounts of life
in the colonies, colonial fictions, etc. It also helped to maintain
German schools in the former colonies and supported the Koloniale
Frauenschule in Rendsburg, which trained girls for life in overseas
areas (2-3)."
Once the nation had become committed to this
policy, a way had to be found that would lead to desirable outcomes. The
maxim was “Zivilisation und Christentum hinaus in die Welt zu tragen”
(Westphal, 1984; 15). Once the effects postulated by Zivilisation und
Christentum were embedded in public opinion, the means to objectify the
colonized or, as Fanon (1985) writes, the “Entfremdung des Schwarzen,”
from their culture was initiated.
Exposition of the Literature
The
first point of departure in laying out any expository bibliography on
German colonialism is to look at the definitions of “colonialism” and
“colonial literature”. Aimé Césaire, (1972) in Discourse on Colonialism,
defines colonialism:
“What, fundamentally, is colonialism? To
agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic
enterprise, nor a desire to push back for the greater glory of
God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law. To admit once for all,
without flinching at the consequence, that the decisive actors here are
the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner,
the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them,
the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a
certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons
to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic
economies...that the chief culprit in this domain is Christian pedantry,
which laid down the dishonest equation Christianity=civilization,
paganism=savagery, from which there could not but ensue abominable
colonialist and racist consequences whose victims were to be the
Indians, the yellow peoples and the Negroes” (9ff.)
Cesairé
defines both the exploitative (trade) and Christian aspects of
colonialism, as well as distinguishing the various approaches used in
justifying colonialism: biological and moral. Joachim Warmbold (1982)
defines colonial literature as:
Kolonial-literatur ist
Trivialliteratur. Die Autoren präsentieren ihren Lesern eine Welt, die
sich ausschließlich aus Klichees zusammensetzt. Vor einer stereotypen
afrikanischen Kulisse kämpfen stereotype nationale ‘Helden’ um die
Verwirklichung einer Pseudoidylle. Kolonial-literatur ist
‘Blut-und-Boden’ Literatur (27ff). Warmbold’s definition lays out
certain features of racism that articulate themselves in “nationale
Helden,” and of “death” to the object of evil, viz., the African.
These
definitions draw our attention to the centerpiece of this project, that
is, how can contemporary interest in rediscovering German literature on
Africa be explained? The rationale leads many to the assertion that
atrocities on foreigners in Germany are better understood when Germany’s
historic and cultural relationships to non-German states are revisited.
Another rationale is that Germany is not presently racially
homogeneous, but rather has other ethnic groups that include over
400,000 individuals of African descent. The last rationale is that
Africa was part of the corpus of German literary works in the Middle
Ages, and played a significant role in education, literature and
religion.
Numerous dissertations also focus on colonial
representations and the politics of German colonialism in Africa. One of
the latest is Lisa Marie Gates’ (1996) Images of Africa in Late
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century German Literature and Culture. Gates
analyses the Völkerschau and carnival exhibitions of Africans in Hamburg
that were popular at the turn of the century. She examines varieties of
ethnographic publications and writings that documented this spectacle.
She also discusses the development of the colonial adventure novel into
the Nazi period. In a broader context, she lays out the ethnographic
photography of Leni Riefenstahl whose pictures of the Nuba people
capture the complex relations between Germany and Africa. The African is
reduced to a “noble savage”, an immature creature or a thing with
over-dimensional sexual anatomy. She writes that such biological
incorrectness by anthropologists who claim that African cultures are
primitive is the cause for such racial ridicule.
In another
dissertation, Tales of the “Land of Stories”: Settlers and
Anti-modernity in German Colonial Discourses on German South West
Africa, 1884-1914 (Namibia), Udo Rainer Krautwurst (1997) discusses
anthropologists’ fixation with an ‘ethnographic present’ which situates
the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in past and present colonial contexts. As
such, he argues further, that anthropology’s uncritical acceptance of
epistemological positing of history helps create an homogenous colonizer
and an invisible colonized.
Daniel J. Walter (1996), in
Creating Germans Abroad: The Policies of Culture in Southwest Africa,
1894-1939, discusses the policies pursued by the German cultural elite
at the beginning of the century to establish and preserve specific
versions of Germanness in Southwest Africa. The work stresses the
methods used by the Germans to acquire land and institutionalize racial
and national exclusion of the African. It also documents the political
agitation against the “savagery” of the African in both Southwest Africa
and Germany to enforce settlements.
Lora Joyce Wildenthal’s
(1994) Colonizers and Citizens: Bourgeois Women and the Woman Question
in German Colonial Movement: 1886-1914 examines the situation of German
women who immigrated to German colonies at the turn of the century. She
generally distinguishes personal commitment from the official imperial
idea of white cultural superiority that legitimized their public role.
Whereas some women contributed to the subjugation of the African, some
were confronted with the “Koloniale Frauenfrage.” In order to achieve a
new society, any interaction between the white woman and the African had
to be controlled. For that reason, a Koloniale Mischehedebatte
developed which later led to the ban on mixed marriages. Wildenthal
concludes that the main aim of the white man had been to acquire women,
raw materials and land, and that he abused the indigenous men to satisfy
his warlike nature.
Apart from lectures and dissertations,
various literary journals also thematize Africa in German literature.
Susanne Zantop (1997), in Colonial Legends, Postcolonial Legacies, links
colonialism to the outbreak of violence on foreigners in Germany. She
argues that denials by German citizens that “we are not racists” had its
source in Germany’s “colonial legend” (191), which associates itself
with “victimhood” (198). She argues that this repressive mentality goes
even deeper, since the Holocaust now overshadows any previous relations
with colonialism. This position, she infers, has to do with the German
government’s position on colonialism. She writes: “As late as 1965 ...
whoever mentioned parallels between the genocide of the Herero and that
of Jews and Poles abroad was confronted with the censors of the Foreign
Office.” (199) She concludes that Germany’s motive of repressing
colonialism indicates the need to show the “Holocaust as unique ...
rather than a past historical continuum that included the racial
theories preceding colonialism and the race policies of colonial times.”
(200)
Ingeborg Solbrig’s (1990) American Slavery in the
Eighteenth Century German Literature: The Case of Herder’s
“Neger-Idyllen, is concerned with the impact of German university
training on the intellectual development of W.E.B. Dubois and Alain
LeRoy Lock, two African-American scholars. Dubois and LeRoy Lock studied
in Berlin in the 1890s and 1910s, respectively. Solbrig builds her
argument to neutralize myths and popular institutionalized
misconceptions of biological or organic deformities about Africans.
All
negative representations of the Africans are bound up with ideas about
biological evolution or how they have socially and economically
developed within their cultures. At this stage, I will look at how some
seminal anthropological, geographical, religious theories depict Africa.
As already seen, classical colonialism is a distinct geographical and
territorial exploitation of the resources of others, and organized
around race relationships. The following review shows how racial
stereotypes were developed to legitimize colonial politics. Walter
Markov (1964) writes:
Die Kolonialpropaganda, von Bismarck
erlaubt und gefördert, kam rasch auf Hochtouren; zahlreiche
Kolonialprojekte wurden in den siebziger Jahren entworfen. Mehrere
Verfasser bemühten sich, die Notwendigkeit der kolonialen Eroberung
theoretisch zu begründen (14).
Two influential German
theoreticians helped in propagating the notion of racial inequality and
Lebensraum. Rudolf Virchow, an anthropologist, and Friedrich Ratzel, a
geographer, posited physiological (racial types) and geographical
substrates as reasons for expansionist ambitions.Rudolf Virchow
established his racist anthropological theories during Völkerschau of
non-Europeans in the early part of this century in Hamburg, Germany. He
constructed his theory by using biological determinants like sizes of
the heads, noses, movements, comprehensibility of European cultural
norms and sexuality. His findings fossilized the African as genetically
inferior. He made the following observation:
Die hier
Vorgestellten haben, obgleich körperlich im Ganzen gut veranlagt, doch
noch die Charactere des Wilden in unverkennbarer Weise an sich, wie sich
besonders durch die mangelhafte Entwicklung [sic] der Unterarme und der
Waden, die schmalen mageren Hände und Füsse kenntlich macht. Die
Extremitätenmuskulatur nimmt bei regelmässiger Arbeit unter geordneten
Verhältnissen schon in der ersten Generation einen völligeren, oft sogar
herkulischen Charakter an. (15).
Virchow observed that the
African “Nasenindex” ... ohne Anstand annehmen dürfen, dass der
gemittelte, osteologische Index der Nase ausgemacht platyrrhin ist”
(19). In normal language, “platyrrhin” refers to a monkey-type.
Furthermore, he stressed their “kriegerischen Erziehung und ihrer
offenbaren Lust am Kriege” but somehow, due to contact with European
civilization, they had attained a certain “Anstrich von Civilisation”
that went beyond their normal intellectual development (20). The African
body and character were equated with those of animals with biological
irregularities, which rendered them objects to be exterminated.
Therefore, the science of anthropology established a series of reasons
to pursue settlement and permit the intruder to destroy without seeing
the “other” as human.
Friedrich Ratzel (1897) embraced the
concept of Lebensraum. The notion of Lebensraum became synonymous with
colonial expansionism that aimed “für die politischen Bedeutung des
Raums.” He argued that geographical expansionism is a natural phenomenon
and a fight ums Dasein and Kampf um den Raum. Ratzel’s argument was a
version of the biological explanation of superior behavior in which
intelligence and survival instincts are construed as genetic
characteristics of the European, which in turn predispose him to pursue a
Weltpolitik. He stressed further: [I]n Europa wird künftig am größten
sein, wer am größten in Außeneuropa ist (355). Clearly, therefore,
Ratzel designated European aggression as a means for Raumbewältigung on
the defining terms of race.
The validity of such perceptions
depends on how colonial writers put it into practice. Gerhard Rohlfs
(1882), in his Welche Länder können Deutsche noch erwerben? demanded
Germany’s sovereignty over the Moroccan people. He made much of the
fact that Morocco remained politically and socially a backward country
and its aspiration for self-determination was not to be considered
seriously. He regretted that the German government had little intention
of annexing Morocco. He wrote:
Der Erwerb Marokkos ist in der Tat
wert, im Auge behalten zu werden. Wenn es sich hierum handelt, kann dies
natürlich nur durch den Staat geschehen, wie ja überhaupt alle
nordafrikanischen Länder nur mit Gewalt kolonisiert, kultiviert und
zivilisiert werden können...Man braucht sich deswegen auch keine
Gewissenbisse zu machen (356). He argued that the Moroccans had no
political power and that unless Germans, the superior race, intervene on
behalf of “civilization”, things would turn out for the worst.
Among
the more controversial authors was Adolph von Conring. In his Marokko -
das Land und die Leute (1880), the views he expresses were just as
negative as those of his predecessors were. When one compares these
polemics, one finds hardly any contradictions to those stated in
Virchow’s scientific findings. Conring writes:
Die heutigen
Bewohner Marokkos werden niemals lernen eines der fruchtbarsten Länder
der Welt gesund and nützlich zu machen...(314). Da finden wir vor den
Toren Europas...ein großes gesegnetes Land, welches nur darauf wartet,
durch eine arbeitsame Bevölkerung ausgebeutet zu werden und reichen Lohn
zu gewähren ... In irgendeiner Weise eine Intervention Europas
unbedingt über kurz oder lange erfolgen, und es ist daher Zeit, sich mit
diesen Gedanken vertraut zu machen (317).
These
pseudo-scientists exhibit more than a simple narrative for societal
consumption. In all cases, they vacillate between narcissistic
intellectual and moral judgments about the colonized to express their
“well-minded” intention on German imperialism . Friedrich Fabri (1824
–1891), an inspector of the Rheinische Mission for twenty-five years,
argued in like manner. In Does Germany need Colonies? (1879), he laid
down a polemic about the role and need for colonies in recognition of
Germans’ emigration. Fabri saw Germany as "the bearer of a culture
mission" and if “the new Germany wants to protects its […] position of
power, it must heed its Kultur - mission" through colonial conquest. In
sounding the call for colonization, he would simultaneously involve the
new territories in trade, and make those colonized a contingency for
Christianization. At a time when Germans were living in colonies under
foreign jurisdiction, Fabri gave ample arguments to sustain
nationalistic feelings in German emigrants to remain German citizens. He
urged the Bismarck government to take control of foreign territories
where Germans lived. In his view, this would ease the burden of an
overcrowded and industrialized Germany, which wanted to avoid domestic
resistance from its own misfits. Baete (1968) rightfully adds, “Fabri
was thinking of colonies […] as a remedy for the problem of
over-population” (389), national pride and the tranquility which Germans
“foresaw as results of European control" (392) Like many of his
contemporaries, Fabri was under the spell of cultural differences and
evolution. In the end, it becomes clear that he was inspired by an
eagerness to bring the rothen Rasse under the control of the "white man"
in order to impound on them a "higher sense of morality" and work
ethics. Likewise, Gustav Warneck proposed proselytizing, according to
the Pietistic tradition. Known as the "father of missiology," he turned
missiology into an accepted academic discipline at the University of
Halle in the late 1890s. In "Modern Missions and Culture" (1883),
Warneck suggested that missionaries must develop an inward “compassion
with the multitude,” which had not been responsive to the resources
nature had offered them. It was the task of the missionary to bring
these unorganized entities into the Volkskirche. Like Schleiermacher
and Fabri, he adopted an ethnographic approach that touched more on
entities governing the European identity. Warneck then detailed
apocalyptic scenarios of the colonized world, which could only be saved
through Volkschristianisierung. Important in this view is the physical
presence of missionaries on these uncharted landscapes to open them up
both as a textual space to possess and analyze, and as a Christian space
to reaffirm Christian ideology.
After looking at “scientific”
and religious justifications for colonialism, let us see how science was
incorporated in colonial publications and the Völkerschauen. The
literature offered in this section is mostly in the African context. A
minor part focuses on German colonies in the South Pacific, since they
were less significant concerning my aim.
In his novel, "Peter
Moor Fahrt nach Südwest" (1906), Gustav Frenssens gives an account of
German heroism during the Herero uprising in Southwest-Africa . Peter
Moor, the protagonist, joins the German marines because he wants to
expand his Lebensraum. His opposites are the “Schwarzen feige," who had
killed German farmers “samt Frauen und Kindern” in Southwest-Africa. In
this parody of metonymic identification, Frenssen reduces the African to
a savage who must be destroyed. “Wir müssen hin...um an einem wilden
Heidenvolk vergossenes deutsches Blut zu rächen” (6). Frenssen
objectifies further Africans by giving them animal characteristics.
Moor’s encounter with Africans eating on a ship is described as follows:
Sie...saßen und in gurgelnden Tönen miteinander schwatzen und
wie sie um die großen Eßtöpfe hockten, mit den Fingern eine Unmenge Reis
zum Munde führten, und mit ihren großen knarrenden Tiergebissen Beine,
Gekröse und Eingeweide ungereinigt fraßen; es schien ihnen gar nicht
drauf anzukommen etwas Schmackhaftes zu essen, sondern nur, ihren Bauch
zu füllen. (30)
Frenssen embraces the traditional beliefs about
Africans as savage and uncivilized. At the height of the narratives is
the notion of Lebensraum, which sets the stage to claim territories as
Moor and his men arrived in Southwest:
Wir sahen keinen Strauch,
nicht einmal einen Grashalm, und keine Tier. Nur wir Menschen rollten
auf unsern knarrenden Wägelein..” (37f.)
Hans Grimm’s novel,
Volk ohne Raum (1932), contributed extensively to the racial policies
of imperial Germany. Under four subtitles, Grimm narrates the colonial
fate of the socialist German settler, Cornelius Freibott, who left an
overpopulated Germany for the "open space" in Africa. In Heimat und
Enge, Grimm writes about overpopulation and poverty due to the
fast-paced industrialization. Fremder Raum und Irregang covers
Freibott’s work and participation in the Boer War and his later
imprisonment by the British. Deutscher Raum narrates Freibott’s
temporary good life in Southwest-Africa. Das Volk ohne Raum tells of
Germany’s total loss of all acquired territories due to her defeat in
World WarI. In this section, Freibott returns to Germany only to come
back to Southwest-Africa to find his farm occupied by the British. He is
imprisoned for killing a Khoisan, the so-called “Bushman”. Later, he
escapes and goes to Germany, where he propagates racial and colonial
doctrines. Freibott denounced socialism and he is tragically killed for
betraying the socialist doctrine. Volk ohne Raum shows a Kampf um den
Raum occupied by “primitive” Africans who had no rights. It was
influential in keeping Germany’s interest in the colonies alive. It
claims that Germany’s internal insecurity is due to her limited
Lebensraum, and the remedy is territorial expansion beyond her borders.
Grimm’s
Die Kämpfe der deutschen Truppen in Südwestafrika (1907) focuses on
German troops’ overtly racist perceptions about the Africans. The
African is a Räuber, Viehdiebe and sonstige Gesindel so far as they
offer any resistance. It terms anti-colonists who criticize such
enslavement and extinction of Africans as Dünkels who show a Hasses auf
die deutschen Wohltäter and are representative of the negroiden race.
Friedrich
von Dincklage-Campe (1908), in Deutscher Reiter in Südwest.
Selbsterlebnisse aus den Kämpfen in Deutsch- Südwest-Afrika narrates
personal experiences of the German Schutztruppen in Deutsch-Süd-West
during the Herero's resistance. However, personal experiences in this
work are meant to show how the African is brutalized. The titles of
these reports are illustrative. “Eine wildeJagd”, “Schießt mir die Kerls
herunter”, “Uns gehört der Platz”, “Auf der Spur des Mörders,” “Das
Maschinengewehr kam zur Rechten Zeit”, or “Das war kein Zuckerlecken”. [
Due to their strong resistance, the African had to be abgeschossen,
ausgesäubert, zersprengt, to enable the Germans the Aufbau der deutschen
Herrschaft On the basis of the prospects of colonization, as seen in
this summary, writers manage to spread a mixture of the racial and Blut
und Boden ideologies for the German government to seriously entertain
colonial ambitions.
The Biases in their narratives against the
local inhabitants and the exultation of the German colonialists was
counteracted in a well-written work by Heinrich Loth’s Die Chistliche
Mission in Südwestafrika (1963). Loth addresses this “false
consciousness” and the fundamentalist behavior of German missionaries.
He brings to his study an understanding of German missionary history and
the development of white nationalism in South Africa. He examines
conflicts between missionaries and Africans as the missionaries emerged
as supporters of a racist white military policy in South Africa. He
writes that the first missionaries of the Rheinischen
Missionsgesellschaft came to Southwest Africa at a time when Herero
territory, under the reign of Jonker Afrikaaner, was in the stage of
feudal state formation. With the introduction of “Christianity” as an
indirekte Bekehrungsmittel, the Rhein Mission was able to exercise a
strong influence on the local population. The missionaries acquired a
trade monopoly for their Waffenhandel, making them a centre of local
power willing to use force. Locals could be taxed at will and coerced to
produce raw materials needed for export, all under eine illusionare
Form eines Kirchenstaates. Loth is especially critical of the political
sociology of racial relations and the destruction of existing African
social structures under the pressures from German religious sects.
Boahen (1985) had similar views when he wrote “[...] the partition of
Africa was due, in no small measure, to a ‘broader missionary’ and
humanitarian impulse, which aimed at the regeneration of African
peoples. It has been asserted, moreover, that it was the missionaries
who prepared the ground for the imposition of colonialism.”
Regarding
direct involvement of colonial writers in overseas possessions, it is
obvious that their enthusiasm would generate critiques. In Geschichte
der Deutschen Kolonien, Wilfred Westphal offers an insight into
Germany’s claim of what she termed as herrenlose territories of the
South Pacific regions. This work is a collection of letters between the
government of imperial Germany, governors of her protectorates and
German “traders." In most cases, similarities abound here as to how the
African colonizers presented imageries of the Pacific peoples.
Die
Eingeboren sind eine freie Rasse Menschen, doch da die Natur ihnen
alles reichlich liefert, was sie zum Leben bedürfen, so sind sie
obgleich lebhaften Naturells, dennoch ungemein faul and träge, was
arbeiten und das Sammeln von Produkten anbetrifft, und sie betrachten
sich als weit über den Weißen stehend...Es existiert kein eigentlicher
Beherrscher dieser Inseln...Die Folge hier von ist ein beständiger
kleiner Krieg zwischen den Eingeboren, welcher...störend auf das
Geschäft wirkt. (94)
Apart from their laziness and immaturity,
their physical features were documented as having irregularities “von
kleiner Gestalt... die Nase, stark gebogen...”(95). Westphal also
relates events preceding Germany’s intrusion into Kiao-Chow, China, with
references to a 1900 speech made by Kaiser Wilhelm II in Bremerhaven
before sending German troops to China. The speech interweaves
traditional beliefs about the desolate Chinese paganism, German
orderliness, and military power.
...[I]hr könnt daraus ersehen,
wohin eine Kultur kommt, die nicht auf dem Christentum aufgebaut
ist...[j]ene heidnische Kultur... bewähren sollt ihr, einmal Eure alte
deutsche Tüchtigkeit...[I]hr sollt auch rächen, so wird er erschlagen,
Pardon wird nicht gegeben; Gefangene nicht gemacht (199).
Andreas
Eckert’s (1994) Verdammt seien die Deutschen reveals the conflict that
led to the execution of the Cameroonian King, Rudolf Manga Bell by the
Germans in 1914. King Bell had complained about the inhumane treatment
of his people. The work is primarily a justification of colonialism by a
redefinition of the Rassenhygiene of the Africans. The hatred of
Africans is reinforced by Regierungsärzte Kuhn and Noetel by
stereotyping both character and hygiene with expressions like
“ekeleregenden Gestank” of their food, “lautes Reden” and uncivilized
manners. The article describes how the Germans attempted to keep the
Africans who they called “Afterkultur” segregated from the white race.
It also documents how the press in Germany viewed this issue. The
Hamburger Nachrichten wrote about the “Negrophillie in Reichstag," and
the Berliner Neuesten Nachrichten asked, “[E]s fragt sich überhaupt, ob
die Neger ein Recht wie die deutschen Staatsbürger besitzen.”(Die Zeit,
20)
Hilde Thode-Arora (1989) discusses the visual representation
of Africans as an industry based on horror of the Africans and their
presumed sexual promiscuity in the “superior” European world. The work
focuses on how the Africans were caged or mishandled. An example here is
a spectator's observation during a winter exhibition in the Hamburg
zoo:
Wie wir erfahren, waren sie fasziniert von den Schnee am
Freitag, und vielleicht hat sie die Verunderung sie für einige Minuten
warm gehalten...Stellen sie sich, wahrend des Thermometer an dem
Gefrierpunkt in einer Grashütte schlafend vor, mit keinem wirksamen
Kälteschutz als ein Hemd (99)
Convinced by scientific theories
that Africans have organic deformities, hence, are sub-human, proponents
of the “zoo” were not concerned about their health. What caught the
attention of the visitors was the body of the eroticized African woman
and man, standing half-naked, performing and gesticulating in what
became a sex exhibition that allowed the European imagination to dwell
on what was forbidden. The novelty was the tendency of the viewer to
seek vicarious sexual sensation. The biological foundation of deformity
as ascribed to the African body was used for sexual stimulation. Given
this understanding, one may identify also a situation that does not
contradict the “scientific” claims of hyperactive sexuality. These
displays, therefore, Hilde Thode-Arora concludes, put both parties in a
complex situation. Whereas the shows meant to display an African
detached from sensitivity, common sense and intellectual attributes, the
European viewers got a vicarious psycho-sexual feedback and the
viewer’s personality and sensation was defined in terms of his
interaction with the “primitives."
In postcolonial analyses,
increasing nostalgia for the “primitive” features of the colonized has
moved the interpretive framework from addressing colonialism and its
political-cultural aftermath to an approach that fits into present
European cultural ideology. Postcolonial theoreticians who look at
Africa or former colonies contemporary relations to the core
particularly emphasize this concern. Frantz Fanon (1985), Edward Said
(1979, and Aimé Cesairé (1972) have been exceptions in this case.
Frantz
Fanon undermines the argument that post-colonial analyses when
theorized by western academia have more weight. In his Schwarze Haut,
weiße Masken (1985), he focuses on the growing power of the post
colonialist ideology in contemporary acculturation as the fundamental
psychological construct that disorients the colonized “self." Taking
language as basis, he argues that, language has larger implications on
the consciousness of the colonized:
Sprechen heißt imstande
sein, sich einer bestimmten Syntax zu bedienen, über die Morphologie
dieser oder jener Sprache zu verfügen, vor allem aber, eine Kultur auf
sich zu nemen, die Last einer Zivilisation zu tragen (14).
Fanon’s
analysis of racial and social structures refers to the basic elements
that define the situation of the African in simple terms. Under such
circumstances, the African is separated psychologically from his
physical form and alienated.
Given this alienation of the self,
in The Wretched of the Earth (1968), Fanon proposed a solution on how to
free oneself from this psychological oppression. He argued that the
contemporary man, even in postcolonial situations, is dominated by the
institution that “advises him by means of rifle butt and napalm not to
budge” (38) and “disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality”
(41). His freedom can be achieved justifiably only “by absolute
violence” (37) or rejection of metropolitan intellectual notions of
colonialism. Moving into this grand narrative of “decolonialization”
(36) of colonial theories, Fanon demonstrates the reductive and
distortive methods of many postcolonial theories.
In Orientalism
(1979), Edward Said suggests that the new post-colonial writers are
responding to theoretical arguments and political developments in
academia. In trying to offer a picture of interconnectedness in the
narratives and to mobilize popular support, the postcolonial writer, in
Said’s view, tries to find a new road freed from the centralizing
practices which, however, still undermine the “freed” colonized imagery
by placing it in a relation which seemingly is democratic. Said writes:
...[T]he
kind of language, though, and vision that I have been calling
Orientalism which is the habit for dealing with questions, objects,
qualities and regions deemed Oriental, will designate, name, point to,
fix, what he is talking or thinking about with a word or phrase, which
then is considered either to have acquired, or more simply to be,
reality... (58-59).
What lies within this assertion is that
postcolonial theory is fraught with ideological motivations whereby a
particular mixture of post-structuralists and anti-colonial politics are
molded together in a way that paradoxically results in strengthening
the core or colonizer.
Osundare Niyi’s, How Post-Colonial is
African Literature? (1994) argues that the revisiting of colonial
Africa in contemporary works binds the new science/genre “post
colonialism” to the former imperial center since it postulates that the
“rereading and rewriting of the European historical and fictional
records are a vital and inescapable task at the heart of the
post-colonial enterprise.” (196)
Rosemarie K. Lester (1982)
Trivialneger: Das Bild des Schwarzen in westdeutschen Illustrietenroman
stresses the nostalgia in post colonialism by tracing the development of
the African images in German novels from 1951-1977. Her study has the
merit of opening the hidden wishes of German national identity
“Exotischer ist erotischer”(2) and what she termed as being practiced
due to ideological aims:
[D]ie Negereinheit[en] werden im Roman
gegen die in der Nachkriegszeit vielen Deutschen besonders verhaßten
polnisch-jüdischen DP’s eingesetzt; damit wird in der Tat eine
diskriminierte Minderheit gegen eine andere ausgespielt.” (85)
She
said a terminology such as “Neger” is used intentionally by Germanists
like Uta Sadji who argues that she got the word “‘Neger’ durch die
Dichter der négritude, insbesondere Aimé Césaire und Léopold Sédar
Senghor;” hence, these people legitimise her usage (9). What are most
evident of nostalgia are the occasional qualifications and asides to
some past era that has escaped, and no matter how the present has
advanced their yearning for a return to the past remains in the ego.
What Lester provides is a cross-identity perspective with eloquent data
that speaks of the polarities of Germans and Africans. The extent to
which both groups are polarized is summarized in her argument:
In
Wirklichkeit aber bedeutet für diese Gruppen die Gleichberechtigung der
Schwarzen eine bedrohliche Konkurrenz auf dem Arbeitsmarkt und, aus
soziopsychologischer Sicht, den Verlust der vielleicht einzigen sozial
tieferstehenden Schicht, deren Existenz ihr kollektives Selbsbewußtsein
heben könnte.” (15)
Clearly this postcolonial theory follows the
pattern that seems to be common to many new fields of study which
attract writers who cannot be content with former school of thoughts and
imageries that help them identify and know themselves. Hence, they
reframe images that, inter alia, stabilize core interests, whilst being
of the core and protective of one’s own ideology. This statement makes
it obvious that post-colonial literature can be paradoxical because it
reflects and reacts against colonial literature, knowing that the past
is anathema but also worth conserving.
German Colonial Discourse
As
stated above earlier, scholars have recently questioned the fixation on
socio-political, economic and materialist motives of colonialism by
stretching its interpretive models to include socio-cultural aspects of
colonialism. We noted that Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism
(1993), argued that literary works played decisive roles in mediating
and defining differences in cultures. For Said, the colonial discourse
of the West was largely devoted to constructing a literary tradition,
subsequently perceived as canonical, which drew on parallel images that
mattered to the Western imagination that obliterated the existence of
non-Europeans. Three scholarly works within the field of German studies,
which have systematically treated German colonialism within this
literary framework, are Susan Zantop’s Colonial Fantasies (1997), Sara
Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox and Susanne Zantop’s The Imperialist
Imagination (1998), and Russell Berman’s Enlightenment or Empire (1998).
These studies discussed several dimensions of German colonialism to
show that the German colonial framework was different from other
empires, ultimately playing an important role in positing the notion of
German colonialism in terms of imaginary representations of colonial
identity and apologia for colonial rule in Africa.
Colonialism and Fantasies
In Colonial Fantasies (1997), Susanne Zantop discusses how pre-colonial
German narratives contributed to Germany’s “latent colonialism,” (2)
and shaped Germans’ fantasies of “otherness” and identity despite their
lack of colonies (30). The lack led to chronic fantasizing, imagining,
and paranoia about the “other” which the “armchair travelers” (36)
turned into “real” experiences and knowledge about other cultures and
the “self.” She defines this form of German colonialism as colonial
fantasies. The narratives, according to Zantop, are cast “as children’s
books or entertainment for adults, as narratives, poetry, or drama.
They were inserted into anthropological, philosophical and political
treatises... or as illustrative anecdotes” (2). This literature, Zantop
continues, came to ignore the difficult circumstances in the colonies
for a history of fantasies by which to shape German identity and
“other.” Within this context, German colonialism proper, was replaced by
“colonial fantasies” to develop “an imaginary national self freed from
history and conventions – a self that proved to the world what ‘he’
could do” (Zantop, 7). The consequence of “fantasies” about foreign
landscapes is serious because it evokes a predominantly male desire for
the “sexualization of conquest.” When the German reader enters the
fantasy world, he enters to exploit that space effectively in order to
construct imaginative narratives of identity as a distinct entity.
With
these categories as background, Zantop looks at the debates on the
national character in Germany in which Herder, Kant and many others took
part. The debates altered German consciousness on identity, masculinity
and sexuality and produced a “constant tension with nightmares in which
a savage, devouring ‘phallic’ femininity, in the form of impenetrable
jungles... threatens to annihilate the innocent European colonist” (45).
In a sense, the impact of the debate confused meanings of other
cultures because the corruption of German identity was so deep-seated
that nothing but acculturation of the other provided it with a sense of
the self. As part of the literary fantasy, to make fundamental
distinctions is to acculturate and assimilate the other and displace him
into the superior culture. Zantop illuminates a similar integrating
scene between a white male hero and his “savage” and how it illustrates
politicized narratives of marginality. “The German Crusoe, a true
self-made man, learns to achieve control over his mind [...] body [...]
relying on his physical strength and ingenuity alone [...]” whereas
Freitag is the “creature” or the “savage” (107). Thus, Robinson and
Friday end up in Hamburg, and Columbus distinguishes himself as the
fantasized god-like figure of the “newborn States and its children,”
(197). Here, through fantasies, the reader sees his culture as the
connector, comforting himself with a control of mind, which
differentiates the role of the “races” as imagination. In this manner,
Zantop shows that travel narratives, apart from disseminating colonial
cultures and images in Germany, also helped shape German national
identity.
The trope of colonial fantasies provided a useful
framework for the ideological transformation of German thought, which in
turn helped formed German cultural and national identity. This is the
thesis of The Imperialist Imagination (1998) , an anthology of German
colonial and postcolonial literature written by Sara Friedrichsmeyer,
Sara Lennox and Susanne Zantop. The authors aim at filling “a gap in
German cultural studies by promoting information about the German
colonial experience and the ways in which German colonial fantasies
affected the notion of Germanness and of German cultural and national
identity” (6). They offer a complete contrast to the previous work by
investigating the “continuities” and “pastness” of German empire,
nationhood and power of the German society beyond the broadly accepted
assertion of colonial experience. The continuities, they argue, were
concepts German writers used to construct the philosophical foundations
of German identity and colonist mind-set “before the desired object, the
colonies, came within German’s reach” (19). This mind-set, they argue,
prevents any historical scholarship from a postcolonial perspective from
taking place in Germany (8). In such an illusionary world, colonial
fantasies become a “kind of projection surface that allowed for the
insertion of different, even conflicting desires and interests” to
create sexualized images of strong states using their surplus energy to
“generate daughter colonies that would remain part of the family” (24),
while at the same time undertaking their civilizing mission. For
Germans, the increasingly ambivalent relationship between fantasy and
reality came to represent what German readers knew of themselves, and
defined their relationship with nationhood.
In opposition to the
theory of fantasizing stands a study on trans-acculturation by Russell
Berman (1998). In Enlightenment or Empire, Berman examines European
encounters based on the lives in colonies to which he adapts modes of
language and culture for the purpose of change. Berman’s study is
significant in many respects. It proposes the concept “of space, not
race” and reflects on the theorization of post-colonialism within German
studies (3). For Berman, the “space and the encounter with foreign
cultures and society certainly has the potential to elicit qualitatively
new experiences [...]”(5) and physically liberates them for
modernization. Within Berman’s text, colonialism was part of a
constructive paradigm that led to hybridization and trans-acculturation
in terms of global relationships to unite Europe and the postcolonial
and colonial world. Berman, therefore, has to recast the definition of
colonialism. Thus, he interprets it as a “location where, through
perpetual acts of cross-cultural contact, transgressive changes occur
precisely despite the efforts of colonial regimes to separate and
control” (5), and not a location of a Fanonian world where
war-unto-death between different races and competing cultures exists.
His narrow concept valorizes Homi Bhabha’s notion of cultural
development and language as the underlying structures of representation
and relations. Although Berman provides many clues behind his reasoning,
his reference to Cook’s Pacific journey brings some expansion on this
theory. He argues that the encounter was an intersection between
enlightenment and colonialism, a site of hybridization of subjectivity
where shifts in boundaries and the cartography of blank spaces took
place; and, in essence, race has no objective place in colonialism.
Berman concludes that colonialism was “not necessarily always
confrontational” (66). He explains, “if Europe too is remapped by the
process of imperialism, and if this remapping includes decentering -
between West and East, centre and periphery - then anti-colonial
accounts of a centred and monolithic Europe threatening the rest of the
world are solely inadequate” (67). What speaks against Berman is his
complication of the historical facts about the contacts between Africa,
Asia, and the Americas. His view of acculturation is in part a
reflection of post-modernist arguments based on common religious
interpretations of the colonial environment. For Berman, colonialism is
the promotion of the European aesthetic, culture and politics to improve
the condition of non-European regions. At issue, as Foucault (1980)
says, is the dissent of postmodernists who ignore the facts for “the
sake of endless commentaries.”
It is unlikely that power and
racism did not exist in the field of colonial discourse (West, 1982).
West summarizes Foucault’s specification of the concept of “discursive
field” and applies it to racism, while suggesting how it could be
incorporated into a Marxist historiography. His argument streamlines
racism’s applicability to the specific confines of colonialism, which
“consists of a totality of ordered relations in terms of violence and
repression, orderable and describable types,” and hence, is a
significant feature of colonialism. To an extent, Zantop et al. perceive
an evolving definition of colonialism that looks more into the
psychological condition of the writers and readers. However, under such
circumstances, they disallow what could prove useful in arriving at a
German colonial experience base on participation in the material world.
Though it must be stated that Zantop et al. acknowledge that there were
many German settlements in South America in the nineteenth century,
endorsing such emigration precluded any idea of a nation state. Berman,
on the other hand, rejects the notions of race and exploitation, thus
ignoring the fact that production of “space” is itself an ordering
process and hence, a forceful civilizing process. Detailed and
descriptive in their general theories of colonialism, some historians,
quite earlier have noted that the understanding of “colonial”
experiences lies beyond the pleasures of fantasies because one of the
colonial objective was to utilize the colonized body for economic gains
(Memmi 1957; Nkrumah 1963; Fanon 1968; Cesaire 1972; Rodney 1972).
Since it publication, Lora Wildenthal’s German Women for Empire
1884- 1945 (2001) has incited some attention. Drawing on some fictions
by Frieda von Bülow, mission society records, periodicals and memoirs
mostly by women of the Frauenbund der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft,
Wildenthal attempted to expose the various motives that led to the
increase of German women in the colonies, and the construction of empire
and Germaness in German colonies. Her goal was to provide the reader
with a vision of the white woman’s attitude and fear about the African
woman, and thereby expand on an issue, which do not find elaborated
attention in the field of German Studies – German women and colonialism.
She observes that the conventional investigation of German colonialism
plays upon suggestions that Germany’s participation was “too late and
too brief” (8) or is overshadowed by the strange fixation on the
relation between German colonialism and holocaust, and subsequently
ignoring other plausible factors that triggered typological variations
of colonialism. That made less visible, in this particular case, the
significance of German women or gender for the colonial process.
Wildenthal develops this idea by relating to the Marxist idea “that a
society’s level of advancement can be measured by the condition of its
women” (1). To Wildenthal, this extended to the hierarchy of cultural
comparison in which women became part of the civilizing mission.
Wildenthal wants to answer the question why many German women, enthused
by nationalistic venture and concerned about race, and specifically
about race in the colonies, changed German colonialism from an
exclusively male domain to include women. Wildenthal points out that
German women colonialists were not only concerned about making a
statement against race mixing between German men and a supposedly
degenerated sexuality of women of the Pacific and Africa, but also
“sought to be both symbols and agents of their society’s
advancement,”(1) of “ “Germany’s national prestige,” (2-3), and “women’s
freedom” (54). The black woman majority and white male minority in the
colonial space, as she states, were an envious and irritating issue for
white women in many nations in Europe. Stimulated by the “new
imperialism” of the nineteenth century, many Europeans, men as well as
women, indulged in universalizing “European-ness” or more specifically
“reconstructing German colonial communities” (7) as a space where women
could exercise authority. In order words, race was not exclusive of
colonialist women. Rather, “colonialist women evoked race as a national
collectivity prior to any voluntary one in order to avoid exclusion
from full participation […] (10). Wildenthal identifies other areas
which motivated German women for empire, such as economics or profit
making, cultural and political power. By sexualizing the white woman,
the black woman becomes desexualized and with that, a solution for
Rassenreinheit was found (79). She concludes that “colonial racism, in
all its intensions, manifestations and effects, was a project
implemented by German women and German men in interaction with each
other” for fear of a growing mixed-race population (202). For
Wildenthal, nothing is more coherent than race as a trope of colonial
power, a national spirit that elevates women on a symbolic level and
gives them distinctive roles. The main political picture, therefore, was
an apparent “focus on feminine essence” (175), race and “radical
nationalist vision” (56-7) in the colonial space.
With the
visibility of German women in the colonial space, there is a
“democratic” enfranchisement of space in terms of gender. By
participating in the appropriation of these extra-societal spaces, women
helped to transplant their national domestic spaces into the colonies
and to build-imagined identities of uncontaminated European bodies in
contrast to the sexual relationships with colonized” which destabilize
German authority. Wildenthal’s thesis has set the categories under which
we can organize gendered spaces. As she states, “ the unmooring of
German identity from German institutions also affected colonialists
women’s conceptualization of race” (177) and right wing activities
(176). What does seem clear is that, of these colonial sexual politics,
the patriarchal mechanism from which the female colonialist seek her
narrative, is also what calls attention to her role and status in the
colonial environment. Martha Mamozai (1989) has approached German women
in colonies from a similar if not powerful perspective to narrate
accounts of the hierarchical ordering of race und gender in colonial
politics. If Wildenthal’s study is favorably credited here, it is
because she offers exciting interpretations of the political, emotional
and gender issues in the context of violence against the local
inhabitants, assimilation and the preservation of racial purity in the
colonial environment as events unfold.
By drawing attention to
ideas of race, inequality, and assimilation of the other, she offers us
an insight into the cultural transformation-taking place in the face of
increasingly European domination. More importantly, that the histories
produced by those who possessed power in society, contributed
significantly in establishing and explaining the positions whence the
colonialist pursued his agenda.
Wildenthal’s work should suit
academics interested in revisiting Germany’s colonial past, which is
gradually becoming an anathema, especially due to the gradual rise of
academic conservatism in the field of German Studies. In particular,
Wildenthal’s study can shape in large part the way one looks into and
understand the motives of German women and colonialism. There is one
point that makes Wildenthal’s study in a limited sense, inadequate. Like
many other scholars of German and history, she also ignored that
particular important region of West Africa, especially, the territory
formally known as the Gold Coast, where in the nineteenth century many
German missionaries were sent for a “civilizing” mission. This
geographical field needs investigation due to the archival materials
available on these German missionaries and their practices.
The
African world presented in this project was the other space or
Lebensraum open for Germany’s penetration. Though the materials
presented here are solely a revisitation of history, yet in delineating
the subject matter, they open up various interdisciplinary perspectives
that help in understanding German national identity (Zantop, 189).
Indeed, by grounding the politics of racism and imperialism in the
context of power, one cannot ignore the fact that these factors,
historically and now, continue to determine or differentiate the African
from the European.
Notebook of alternative conceptions of the encroaching Neo-colonialism.
