German Colonialism: Race, The Holocaust, and Postwar Germany

✍ Scribed by Volker Langbehn; Mohammad Salama

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 363
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

More than half a century before the mass executions of the Holocaust, Germany devastated the peoples of southwestern Africa. While colonialism might seem marginal to German history, controversial new scholarship compares the acts of this period with Nazi practices on the Eastern and Western fronts.

Examples of the most important research conducted on the "continuity thesis" over the past five years, the chapters in this anthology debate the connections between German colonialist activities and the behavior of Germany during World War II. Some argue that the country's domination of southwestern Africa gave rise to perceptions of racial difference and superiority at home, contributing to a nascent nationalism that blossomed into National Socialism and the Holocaust. Others remain skeptical, and both sides are well-represented. Contributors merge Germany's colonial past with debates over the country's identity and history and compare its colonial crimes with other European ventures. Issues discussed range from the denial or marginalization of German genocide to the place of colonialism and the Holocaust within Germany and Israel's postwar relations. Authors also compare the legacy of genocide in both Europe and Africa.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reconfiguring German Colonialism -Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama
PART I. Colonial (Dis)Continuities: Framing the Issue
1. Borrowed Light: Nietzsche and the Colonies -Timothy Brennan
2. German Colonialism Some Reflections on Reassessments, Specificties, and Constellations -Birthe Kundrus
PART II. Lebensraum and Genocide
3. Against “Human Diversity as Such”: Lebensraum and Genocide in the Third Reich -Shelley Baranowski
4. Hannah Arendt, Imperialisms, and the Holocaust -A. Dirk Moses
5. Caesura, Continuity, and Myth: The Stakes of Tethering the Holocaust to German Colonial Theory -Kitty Millet
PART III: Looking East: Poland, the Ottoman Empire, and Politicized Jihadism
6. Germany’s Adventures in the Orient: A History of Ambivalent Semicolonial Entanglements -Malte Fuhrmann
7. Arguing the Case for a Colonial Poland -Kristin Kopp
8. Colonialism, and No End: The Other Continuity Theses -Russell A. Berman
PART IV. Of Missionaries, Economics, andIntranational Self-Perception
9. The Purpose of German Colonialism,or the Long Shadow of Bismarck’s Colonial Policy -Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann
10. Christian Missionary Societies in the German Colonies, 1884/85–1914/15 -Ulrich van der Heyden
11. German Colonialism and the British Neighbor in Africa Before 1914: Self-Definitions, Lines of Demarcation, and Cooperation -Ulrike Lindner
PART V. Postcolonial German Politics
12. “Kalashnikovs, Not Coca-Cola, Bring Self-Determination to Angola”: The Two Germanys, Lusophone Africa, and the Rhetoric of Colonial Difference -Luís Madureira
13. Germany, Palestine, Israel, and the (Post)Colonial Imagination -Martin Braach-Maksvytis
Contributors
Index