German And United States Colonialism In A Connected World: Entangled Empires [1 ed.] 3030532054, 9783030532055, 9783030532062

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Praise For German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
1 Introduction: Relational Empires
American Danger
Relational Field
Part I Portabilities
2 Seapower and Frontier Settlement: Friedrich List’s American Vision for Germany
The Swabian Reformer and the American Exile
Liberal Imperialism, Colonialism, Navalism
A German Settlement Frontier in the Southeast
Conclusion
3 The Fantasy of Open Space on the Frontier: Max Sering from the Great Plains to Eastern Europe
Experiencing Frontiers
Homesteads for Germany: Inner Colonization, 1886 to 1914
The Creation of Open Frontier: Germany Conquers the East, 1914–1918
The Legacy of an Eastern Frontier: Sering in the Weimar Years, and the Nadir of Nazi Empire
Conclusion
4 The Role of US Railroads in the German Expansionist Mindset of Gerhard Rohlfs
Gerhard Rohlfs and German Africa-Explorers
The Greatest Manifestation of Industrialized Technology: The Railway in the US and Western Europe
Locomotive Narration in Africa Without a Railroad
A Railway to Central Africa: The US Railroads as the Key to German Self-Confidence
Conclusion
5 Between France, Germany, and the United States: Raymond Aron as a Critical Theorist of Colonialism and Empire
Biographical Notes on Aron
On Nazi Imperialism
On French Colonialism and Decolonization
On the United States as Rising and Declining Empire
Conclusion: Aron’s World of Empires
Part II Passages
6 “A Truly Exquisite Little Phrase:” Global Colonialist Visions vs. The “Drang nach Osten”
Eastern and Western Dreams, 1815 and 1871
European or Global Expansion, 1871–1914
From Colonization Schemes to Total Destruction: Eastern Expansionism Between 1914 and 1945
Conclusion
7 Ruling Classes and Serving Races: German Policies on Land, Labor, and Migration in Trans-Imperial Perspective
Labor Questions
Settling People, Creating Landowners
Unsettling People, Producing Workers
Controlling People, Directing Migration
Conclusion
8 How the Südwest Was Won: Transnational Currents of American Agriculture and Land Colonization in German Southwest Africa
German Imperialism and Africa
A “New Germany” in Africa
German Southwest Africa as a Western Frontier
Conclusion
9 Practicing Empire: Germany’s Colonial Visions in the Pacific Northwest
“Just Like Frisco’s”: Social Networking in Victoria & Vancouver
In Search of “Indianer:” Curating Authenticity on the Falke
The Right to Fish: Salmon Fishing and the Falke
Return to an “Urban” Setting: Sitka/Sheet’ká, an “American” Outpost
“Jumping-Ports to East Asia” and “Yankee Entrepreneurial Spirit”: Tourism and Extraction in Coastal Alaska
Conclusion
Part III Parallels
10 Similarity in Appearance—“Chinaman” in German and American Satire Magazines Around 1900
Celestial Ladies
Saving Our Boys
The Uncurable
Conclusion
11 “I Almost Pulled Her to My Heart, but…” Competing Masculinities in Karl May’s Wild West Fictions and Their Modern Theatrical Adaptations
Gender on the Page: May’s Literary Heroes
Gender on the Stage: Theatrical Adaptations of May’s Literary Heroes
Gender from Page to Stage
Conclusion
12 In Service of Empires: Apaches and Askaris as Colonial Soldiers
Colonial Enlistment: Masculinity, Voluntarism, and Preparation for Violence
A Sharp Military Instrument: Recruitment and the Labor of Soldiering
Inside Out, Outside In: Soldiers, Violence, and Belonging
Conclusion
13 Words and Wars of Conquest: The Rhetoric of Annihilation in the American West and the Nazi East
Language and Annihilation
Language and the Limits of Assimilation
Rhetoric, Punishment, and Atrocity in the US West
Rhetoric, Punishment, and Atrocity in the Nazi East
Comparing the Rhetoric and the Reality of Warfare the American West and the Nazi East
Part IV Afterwords
14 Empires of Comparison
15 Settler Colonialism and Financial Imperialism: The German and United States Empires in a Global Age
Index

Citation preview

German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World Entangled Empires Edited by Janne Lahti

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies

Series Editors Richard Drayton Department of History King’s College London London, UK Saul Dubow Magdalene College University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series is a wellestablished collection of over 100 volumes focussing on empires in world history and on the societies and cultures that emerged from, and challenged, colonial rule. The collection includes transnational, comparative and connective studies, as well as works addressing the ways in which particular regions or nations interact with global forces. In its formative years, the series focused on the British Empire and Commonwealth, but there is now no imperial system, period of human history or part of the world that lies outside of its compass. While we particularly welcome the first monographs of young researchers, we also seek major studies by more senior scholars, and welcome collections of essays with a strong thematic focus that help to set new research agendas. As well as history, the series includes work on politics, economics, culture, archaeology, literature, science, art, medicine, and war. Our aim is to collect the most exciting new scholarship on world history and to make this available to a broad scholarly readership in a timely manner.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/13937

Janne Lahti Editor

German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World Entangled Empires

Editor Janne Lahti Department of Philosophy, History and Art University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland

ISSN 2635-1633 ISSN 2635-1641 (electronic) Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies ISBN 978-3-030-53205-5 ISBN 978-3-030-53206-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Chapter 1 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Niday Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

As usual, academic gratitude has accumulated during the making of this book. The period spent as a visiting scholar at Free University Berlin’s Global History Program certainly proved extremely helpful in deepening my views on German colonialism and contemplating on the forms and range of historical connections between United States and German empires. Thanks for having me over and for the exchange of ideas, Sebastian Conrad. I also enjoyed the lattes/beers and the talks with Eriks Bredovskis, Nicola Camilleri, Minu Haschemi Yekani, Adam Hjorthen, Valeska Huber, Dörte Lerp, and Ben van Zee. The experience would not have been as stimulating without my Global Settler Colonialism class. Thanks to all the wonderful students for engaging my arguments and challenging me. The same goes to the equally wonderful students at the University of Helsinki, where I have taught several years on settler colonialism and German and US empires. For enabling this book to come to life in the first place, I wish to thank the Academy of Finland and the Finnish Cultural Foundation. Both institutions, together with the University of Helsinki, have kept my academic career afloat in recent years. Research fellowships at the Hunting Library, in San Marino, California, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, in Cody, Wyoming, have also been very helpful in nurturing my ideas on global empires. My magnificent author team deserves a massive thanks. At Palgrave, Molly Beck, Ashwini Elango, Maeve Sinnott, and Sam Stocker have proven most

v

vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

helpful, patient, and supportive. Finally, my warmest thanks go, as always, to my family, to my wife Sanna who has put up with me for two decades already, and our two soon-to-be-adults, Sofia and Juho.

Praise For German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World

“Janne Lahti brings together a fine ensemble of international scholars to look at one of the currently most rewarding fields in imperial history, the history of transimperial entanglements. The volume specifically engages with US-German imperial relations and throws new light on their great historical significance. Lahti’s skillful and gripping introduction immediately draws the reader into the subject matter. His real feat, however, lies in the composition of the contributions that covers broad historical ground and at the same time provides in-depth empirical analysis. A timely and stimulating book at the interface of imperial and global history.” —Roland Wenzlhuemer, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München “This outstanding collection of essays on the many entanglements of Germany and the United States in the age of empire showcases a highly dynamic research field of younger and established scholars that is breaking down the barriers and stale conventions that have long hindered a full understanding of global competitive colonialism. By also challenging the national exceptionalism that has long contained both American and German history, the essays are sure to spark lively debate that will lead to productive new avenues of research.” —Erik Grimmer-Solem, Wesleyan University

vii

viii

PRAISE FOR GERMAN AND UNITED STATES COLONIALISM IN A …

“Entangled Empires presents global and transnational scholarship at their finest. Full of original research, arresting insights, and powerful case studies, the essays collected here decentre US and German colonialism in compelling ways. In crisp and elegant prose the authors in this superb collection show as never before how the United States and German imperial formations were entangled by flows of knowledge, people, and strategies of colonial domination, and developed relationally with one another. This carefully curated volume showcases how the signature methods of transnational and global history—connected, comparative, and collaborative—offers vital new understandings on imperial formation and the imperial origins of contemporary globality.” —Stephen Tuffnell, St Peter’s College, University of Oxford “This important collection offers a wealth of thought-provoking essays that open up a long overdue discussion about the myriad ways that U.S. and German colonialism interacted with one another across the long nineteenth century. After reading German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, it will be impossible to think about U.S. or German history—or, indeed, global history—the same way ever again.” —Karl Jacoby, Columbia University “The compelling essays in this rich, wide-ranging volume vividly demonstrate the value of approaching histories of modern colonialism as globally entangled. Focusing on the ways Germans’ perceptions of U. S. empire— as inspiration and model, rival and threat—shaped their understandings of Germany as nation, empire and world power, the essays reveal myriad ways that German visions of settler-colonial rule, racialized power and colonial violence crossed national and imperial boundaries.” —Paul Kramer, Vanderbilt University

Contents

1

Introduction: Relational Empires Janne Lahti

Part I 2

3

4

5

1

Portabilities

Seapower and Frontier Settlement: Friedrich List’s American Vision for Germany Gregor Thum

17

The Fantasy of Open Space on the Frontier: Max Sering from the Great Plains to Eastern Europe Robert L. Nelson

41

The Role of US Railroads in the German Expansionist Mindset of Gerhard Rohlfs Tracey Reimann-Dawe

63

Between France, Germany, and the United States: Raymond Aron as a Critical Theorist of Colonialism and Empire George Steinmetz

83

ix

x

CONTENTS

Part II 6

7

8

9

“A Truly Exquisite Little Phrase:” Global Colonialist Visions vs. The “Drang nach Osten” Jens-Uwe Guettel Ruling Classes and Serving Races: German Policies on Land, Labor, and Migration in Trans-Imperial Perspective Dörte Lerp How the Südwest Was Won: Transnational Currents of American Agriculture and Land Colonization in German Southwest Africa Jeannette Eileen Jones Practicing Empire: Germany’s Colonial Visions in the Pacific Northwest Eriks Bredovskis

Part III 10

11

12

Passages

109

129

153

177

Parallels

Similarity in Appearance—“Chinaman” in German and American Satire Magazines Around 1900 Volker M. Langbehn “I Almost Pulled Her to My Heart, but…” Competing Masculinities in Karl May’s Wild West Fictions and Their Modern Theatrical Adaptations A. Dana Weber In Service of Empires: Apaches and Askaris as Colonial Soldiers Janne Lahti and Michelle R. Moyd

203

229

253

CONTENTS

13

Words and Wars of Conquest: The Rhetoric of Annihilation in the American West and the Nazi East Edward B. Westermann

Part IV

277

Afterwords

14

Empires of Comparison Andrew Zimmerman

15

Settler Colonialism and Financial Imperialism: The German and United States Empires in a Global Age Sebastian Conrad

Index

xi

301

307

315

Notes on Contributors

Eriks Bredovskis is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto and affiliate with the Collaborative Program at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. Funded by the Canada Graduate Scholarship from SSHRC, his dissertation examines German anxiety about US empire from 1878 to 1918, with a particular interest in Germans in the North Pacific Ocean. His most recent publication is titled “Sketching America: German Depictions of the United States and Woodrow Wilson” in the October 2019 issue of German Studies Review. Sebastian Conrad is Professor of Global History at the Free University of Berlin. He has a background in both modern Western European and Japanese history and is currently interested primarily in transnational and global history approaches and their contribution to an understanding of the interactions and entanglements of the past. His recent publications include German Colonialism: A Short History (Cambridge University Press, 2012), What is Global History? (Princeton University Press, 2016), and An Emerging Modern World, 1750–1870, eds. with Jürgen Osterhammel, (A History of the World, vol. 4; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018). Jens-Uwe Guettel is Associate Professor of German Studies and History at Penn State. His first book, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States, 1776–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), focuses on the domestic ramifications of colonial expansion for

xiii

xiv

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany and Nazi expansionism. His current book project, Radical Democracy in Germany, 1871–1918, takes a broad look at women, socialists, anarchists, and a host of other individuals and movements interested in radical change in Germany before 1918. Guettel’s articles have appeared, for instance, in the Journal of Modern History, Central European History, and Modern Intellectual History. Jeannette Eileen Jones is Associate Professor of History and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research expertise and interests include Gilded Age and Progressive Era history, transnational history, pre-Colonial Africa, history of science, digital history, Black European Studies, and the Black American West. She is the author of In Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884–1936 (The University of Georgia Press, 2010). She is currently working on her second monograph, America in Africa: U.S. Empire, Race, and the African Question, 1821–1919, which is under advanced contract with Yale University Press. Janne Lahti works as Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His research focuses on global and transnational histories of settler colonialism, borderlands, the American West, and German and Nordic colonialism. He has authored five books, including Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World in Film, with Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (Routledge, 2020), The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge, 2019), and Wars for Empire: Apaches, the United States, and the Southwest Borderlands (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017). His current book project is titled Global Settler Colonialism: American West and Imperial Germany in the World of Empires. Volker M. Langbehn is Professor in the German Program at San Francisco State University. His scholarly interests include German Literature from 1700–1820 and from 1890–present, theory of literature, cultural criticism, European and American Colonialism, Visual Studies, and Genocide Studies. His main publications include German Colonialism: Race, Holocaust, and Postwar Germany, with Mohammad Salama (Columbia University Press, 2011) and German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory (Routledge, 2010). Langbehn’s current project is titled

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xv

Precursors to Genocide: European and American Imperialism and Mass Culture from the late 19 th Century to 1933. Dörte Lerp works as postdoctoral researcher at the Free University of Berlin. Her research interests include German and European colonial history, postcolonial memorial culture as well as tourism and development history. Her first monograph, Imperiale Grenzräume. Bevölkerungspolitiken in Deutsch-Südwestafrika und den östlichen Provinzen Preußens 1884–1914 (Campus, 2016), examined colonial policies in German Southwest Africa and the eastern Prussian provinces. Her current project, funded by the German Research Council, investigates how tourism shaped European-African economic and socio-political relations. Her publications also include New Perspectives on the History of Gender and Empire. Comparative and Global Approaches, with Ulrike Lindner (Bloomsbury 2018). Michelle R. Moyd is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University—Bloomington. She is a historian of eastern Africa, with special interests in the region’s history of soldiering and warfare. She is also interested in bringing the experience of nineteenth-century African-American soldiers into a broader analysis of soldiers of empire. Her book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa, was published by the Ohio University Press in 2014. Robert L. Nelson is Head of the Department of History at the University of Windsor, Canada. His main areas of research include settler colonial studies, cultural military history, the law of warfare, and food history. His revised Cambridge dissertation appeared in 2011 as German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge University Press). Earlier he published the edited volume Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East: 1850 Through the Present (Palgrave, 2009). He is currently working on the biography of Max Sering. Tracey Reimann-Dawe is Assistant Professor in German at Durham University, UK. Her research interests focus on aspects of German history, literature, and culture from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, including colonialism, travel writing, nationalism, cultural memory, and protest movements. Her publications include “Time and the Other in Nineteenth-Century German Travel Writing,” Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies [Special section ‘Travel Writing and Knowledge Transfer], 2016 and “The British Other on African soil: the rise

xvi

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

of nationalism in colonial German travel writing on Africa”, Patterns of Prejudice [Special issue ’German Nationalist and Colonial Discourse’], 2011. George Steinmetz is the Charles Tilly Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan and has been a tenured professor at the University of Chicago and the New School in New York. His main areas are the sociology of empires and states, social theory, and the history and philosophy of the social sciences. His recent publications include “Soziologie und Kolonialismus: Die Beziehung zwischen Wissen und –Politik,” Mittelweg 36 (May 2020), “Scientific Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Social Research in the United States,” Critical Historical Studies (Fall 2018), and “Sociology and Colonialism in the British and French Empires, 1940–1960s,” Journal of Modern History 89.3 (2017). Gregor Thum is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Central European history with a particular interest in the German borderlands of east central Europe, the history of forced migration, and politics of the past. He is the author of Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions (Princeton University Press, 2011), editor of Traumland Osten: Deutsche Bilder vom östlichen Europa im 20. Jahrhundert (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006) and co-editor of Helpless Imperialists: Imperial Failure, Fear, and Radicalization (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013). A. Dana Weber is Associate Professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Her interdisciplinary research addresses diverse topics including performativity, performance and the uncanny, Karl May festivals, the films of Fritz Lang and Quentin Tarantino, film noir in East Germany, and the German Romantic novella. Dana is the author of Blood Brothers and Peace Pipes: Performing the Wild West in German Festivals (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), editor of the essay collection Performativity— Life, Stage Screen. Reflections on a Transdisciplinary Concept (LIT Verlag, 2018), and author of several articles. Edward B. Westermann is Professor of History at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. He has published extensively on the Holocaust and military history, including Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016)

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xvii

and Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East (University Pres of Kansas, 2005). His newest book, Drunk with Genocide? Drinking Rituals, Masculinity, and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany will be published by Cornell University Press in March 2021. Andrew Zimmerman is Professor of History at the George Washington University. They is the author of Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago University Press, 2001) and Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton University Press, 2010). They has also edited Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Civil War in the United States (International Publishers, 2016). Their current project is writing a transnational history of the American Civil War.

List of Figures

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

Fig. 9.1

Fig. 9.2

Fig. 9.3

Campbell’s Soil Culture Manual Cover (1905) (Courtesy of History Nebraska) Top Left: Oxcart on the Trek. Bottom Left: Rambouillet Sheep in Rehoboth. Top Right: Grazing Land of His Majesty’s the Emperor’s Farm. Bottom Right: Cattle Herd by the Open Water (Source Deutschland als Kolonialmacht: Dreißig Jahre deustche Kolonialgeschichte [1914]) Page from Paul Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer “Falke,” Auslandsreisen unter dem Kommando von Korvettenkapitän Paul Behncke (Fotoalben), Nordund Mittelamerika,” Bundesarchiv-Freiburg, BArch N 173/31, Bd. 31 Page from Paul Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer “Falke,” Auslandsreisen unter dem Kommando von Korvettenkapitän Paul Behncke (Fotoalben), Nordund Mittelamerika,” Bundesarchiv-Freiburg, BArch N 173/31, Bd. 31 Image from Paul Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer ‘Falke,’ Auslandsreisen unter dem Kommando von Korvettenkapitän Paul Behncke (Fotoalben), Nordund Mittelamerika,” Bundesarchiv-Freiburg, BArch N 173/31, Bd. 31

166

169

183

186

193

xix

xx

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 10.1

Fig. 10.2

Fig. 10.3 Fig. 10.4

Fig. 11.1

Fig. 11.2

Fig. 11.3

Celestial Ladies, from Harper’s Weekly, Vol. 2, no. 53 (January 2, 1858). Held by the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, held in the Lincoln Library, Allen County Public Library (Image courtesy of Internet Archive. https://www.archive.org/) Chinese Coolies, from Harper’s Weekly, Vol. 2, no. 53 (January 2, 1858). Held by the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, held in the Lincoln Library, Allen County Public Library (Image courtesy of Internet Archive. https://www.archive.org/) “What Shall We Do With Our Boys?,” Oakland Museum of California (https://www.archive.org/) “Im Hospital der Unheilbaren,” Heidelberg University Library (https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kla 1900/0324) From left to right: Nscho-tschi (Radost Bokel), Old Shatterhand (Jochen Bludau, ✝ 2019), Intschu-tschuna (Wolfgang Kirchhoff), and Winnetou (Jean-Marc Birkholz), in blood-brotherhood scene, Elspe 2012 (Photograph by A. Dana Weber) From left to right: Nscho-tschi (El’ Dura), Winnetou (Hans Otto), and Old Shatterhand (Ludwig Körner), Berlin 1929 (Image available in the public domain) Uschi Behm (right) and a friend as Old Shatterhand and Winnetou on the shooting location of Winnetou’s film adaptation in Croatia, 1982 (Used with permission)

209

210 212

219

234

241

247

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Relational Empires Janne Lahti

Summer 1893. Chicago. While the historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American history,” in the meeting of the American Historical Association, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show performed close by, packing audiences twice a day to an arena of eighteen thousand spectators. However, the main attraction in town was the World’s Columbian Exposition, a massive celebration of Columbus’ landing some 400 years earlier. The exposition covered around 600 acres, with nearly 200 new buildings, and drew millions of visitors. The exposition, Buffalo Bill’s show, and Turner’s paper were all big hits (in their respective ways), and they all symbolized and celebrated American exceptionalism. They inserted US history into a tight national framing. While the exposition lauded and featured examples of American technological progress, the dynamism of its civic society, and the prominence of its civilization, Turner’s famous “frontier thesis” offered an explanation of American identity and history as a westbound process where Anglo pioneers built civilization on free land. Buffalo Bill’s

J. Lahti (B) Department of Philosophy, History and Art, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_1

1

2

J. LAHTI

Wild West show also delivered validations of American national story through performances that centered reenactments of the frontier process, of the winning of the West. The exposition, Cody, and Turner idealized American development, and in doing so suggested an innate difference toward European empires and their colonial projects.1 Yet as Chicago celebrated America and its uniqueness, the world was never far from the scene. The exposition’s Midway Plaisance held several ethnographic shows of “primitive” cultures, disseminating stories of civilization and savagery from America and around the world, of the global regimes of difference and integration colonialism had created. Converging in Chicago were also men like Carl Peters, Carl Hagenbeck, and Max Sering. These men, in their own way, were dynamic advocates of German colonialism and globalization. And they all were infatuated by the example the US was setting as a rising empire. Drawing inspiration from the American westward expansion, the explorer Peters was a staunch campaigner for German colonial expansion outside Europe, while the agrarian economist Sering was a promoter for German settler colonialism in Eastern Europe. Being a highly successful entrepreneur, Hagenbeck imported exotic animals and colonized peoples—including members of Native American groups such as Lakotas—to Germany and placed them on display for the masses.2 Buffalo Bill too was more global then one could first think. He was a performer and storyteller of not only US but global colonialism. He toured Europe extensively, incorporated topics from other colonial empires to his show, and was a smash success, especially in Germany.3 Even Turner engaged with German colonialism. He was impressed by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who had toured the American West prior to coining the term lebensraum, living space. Turner quoted Ratzel at length and the two scholars engaged in correspondence over territorial expansion and integration, and spatial destinies of nations, recognizing parallels between US frontier expansion and German acquisition of African colonies in the 1880s.4 In all, Turner, Ratzel, Cody, Sering, Hagenbeck, and Peters suggest that Germany and the United States were relational empires; that they were entangled with each other and the world via an assemblage of multidirectional connections arising from diverse and intricate human actions, manifesting multiple voices, engaging numerous sites, and traversing great distances.5 Taking as its cue the suggestion made by historians Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton on the need to explore relationships and

1

INTRODUCTION: RELATIONAL EMPIRES

3

spaces not merely within but between empires,6 this anthology examines German and US colonialism through their previously underanalyzed shared and intersecting histories in a global setting of empires. It grapples with and elaborates on the range, forms, and intensity of connectedness between the two empires. Traditionally, Germany and the United States have been understood to represent an authoritarian vs. a liberal path into modernity, but such dichotomies are misplaced, as these essays here show. There are many more similarities than we think—and they are the result of multilayered entanglements made visible via circulations, transfers, and exchanges of ideas, peoples, and practices relating to conquest, settler expansion, power, race, and rule of difference. This book also sees that the Germany–US connections were not exceptional but emblematic of an interconnected, highly competitive, and increasingly integrated world of empires.7 It argues that this kind of approach, to rephrase historian Sebastian Conrad, allows us to investigate colonial globality via “a complex web of shared histories,” where historical processes are seen as relational. In this way, we cannot only avoid and go beyond the sharp division between “internal” and “external” so prevalent in national histories, but to situate what we discuss via an inherently relational and dynamic framework of structured transformations and multidirectional entanglements spanning and linking empires and the local and the global.8

American Danger In a recent essay historian Sven Beckert maps how the late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century European discussion of “American danger” explicated a rising imperial colossus that spearheaded new forms of spatial integration—connections between territory, state power, and capital through its continental expansion—forcing European powers to take notice. US empire grew into an essential question in European imaginary and discourse, as Beckert notes, and birthed real and imagined projects among European colonial powers addressing more effective territorial colonization of Africa, possibilities for European integration, and questions of violent territorial expansions within Europe. In short, Europeans began to measure themselves against the United States and to imagine a future world dominated by only a select few empires that were territorially expansive enough.9 It is from within this setting that the German–US entanglements drew their vitality. While Britain, France,

4

J. LAHTI

Japan, and even Italy mattered in German eyes, still the United States, like historian Erik Grimmer-Solem recently noted, “emerged as the most important reference point” for German imperial ambitions, Weltpolitik, and as “the greatest potential long-term threat to German globalization.”10 Thus, while the German imperialists admired and followed the United States for the scale and integrative efficiency of its colonial projects, they also feared and envied it for the very same reasons. Entanglements between Germany and the United States took on many forms, and drew from many root systems, penetrating the German society. The United States impacted minds and guided actions from the corridors of higher political power to the ranks and file of public and private organizations, and to the fictive realm of literature and mass entertainment. Paving the way for unearthing the repertoire of these German–US entanglements have been Andrew Zimmerman and Sven Beckert’s investigations on the agricultural regime of the southern United States influencing and guiding German colonial exploitation and control in Togo.11 In addition, as Jens-Uwe Guettel and Robert Nelson show in their respective studies, the US conquest of the West worked as an inspiration in German domestic debates relating to settler expansion and as a model for concrete colonial policies in the Prussian East and in Southwest Africa during the Kaiserreich.12 Later, the US West also stimulated many of the influential Nazis in their hunger for expansion and living space, Hitler included.13 Another type of nexus for German–US colonial connections can be detected in the naval race, with its close mutual surveillance and imitations in development.14 The most pertinently researched form of interlinkage, however, is the emigration of Germans to the United States, as thousands upon thousands made the move in the 1800s, related their experiences back home in millions of letters, and thus actively promoted interest in the US settler colonial expansion among German workers and middle classes.15 Another node of transimperial connections among the educated classes and the bourgeoisie were the universities and sciences as knowledge transfer and scholarly exchanges disseminated colonial knowledge and influenced policies. Grimmer-Solem has shown how connectedness of the academic world, “this ‘empire of learning’ became entangled with the task of learning about the world and devising an imperial strategy” in the Kaiserreich.16 Guettel, in turn, has stressed how the United States and its forms of empire and colonialism—territorial expansions

1

INTRODUCTION: RELATIONAL EMPIRES

5

and racialization—were especially attractive among, and deeply permeated the thinking of, liberal and progressive segments of German society, including academics but also entrepreneurs and merchants.17 The US empire reached all segments of the German society, however. Karl May’s adaptations of the American West held a prominent place in German popular imagination spanning class boundaries, as May’s books were read by millions of people. Millions also came to see the numerous “Wild West shows” touring Germany.18 Much of this book’s focus is on the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. It was in this integrated and competitive age where empires formed the principal political, social, and cultural motors for globalization. Furthermore, this period corresponds with the temporal and spatial fundamentals of the recent colonial turn in both US and German historiographies, respectively. Traditionally, the national-history paradigm has been excessively dominant, contributing, among other things, to strong traditions of exceptionalism and denial of empire in the United States. But in recent years, historians, in their approaches and analysis, have made the imperial visible in US history, reaching across national boundaries and into transimperial and global histories of US empire.19 Studies have de-exceptionalized the histories of the continental empire and the US imperial formations more broadly, exposing the transimperial connectedness of peoples, ideas, commodities, as well as colonial structures and processes.20 In Germany, the national-history paradigm has traditionally led to the marginalization of the colonial “phase” as short and insignificant. The “usual story” claims Germany as a “late” arrival to the world of colonial empires, and not a very successful one because the period of formal German colonial rule proved short-lived (starting in the mid-1880s and terminated by World War I). Recent studies on German colonialism have overturned much of this outdated thinking, reexamining, and reconceptualizing the history of the Kaiserreich, the Weimar Republic, as well as the Nazi regime as colonial history.21 This colonial turn looks all the more noteworthy since not long ago German colonial history scarcely existed as a field outside the toils of a select few practitioners.22 What histories centering the national-history paradigm frequently overlook is that the 1800s and early 1900s was an era of globalization. The trans-Atlantic migrations, the telegraph, and the railroads, for instance, integrated the world together in an unprecedented manner. As did empires fueling innovations and mobility and spreading across much of

6

J. LAHTI

the planet: scrambling for Africa, contesting for Asia, extending informal influence over Latin America, and competing whose explorers would reach the most remote polar areas, impenetrable deserts, and highest mountains first. It was also a time of settler colonialism: the United States taking over the trans-Mississippi West from Mexico, Britain, and numerous indigenous powers, “British Wests” expanding exponentially in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, hundreds of thousands of Europeans imposing a settler society in French Algeria, Russian settler projects remaking the Caucasus and the Siberia, Japanese settler colonialism penetrating Korea and Manchuria, and the Germans initiating settler projects in the German-Polish borderlands and in Southwest Africa.23 This all lead to complex, entangled, and uneven processes of contact and mutual exchange that operated on different scales from the local to the global and remade the metropole as well as the colonies. Relationships of power and hierarchies of differentiation were enforced, negotiated, and contested in everyday lives and in discourse, while intensifying, intertwined, and interdependent globe-spanning networks and rivalries recalibrated commerce, state power, and culture.24 The current drive in German colonial history has a strong transnational and global flavor, involving an ongoing effort to rebut nation-centered analysis in favor of treating imperial centers and colonies within a single analytical field and exploring relationships and spaces within and beyond the formal bounds of empires.25 While this has meant a fundamental reconceptualization of German colonial history, the German–US connections have remained relatively unexplored considering their extent, diversity, and depth. There exist several significant studies showing how intellectually stimulating it can be to explore the German and US entanglements26 and that the potential for future research remains considerable. This book further addresses this research gap these works have started to fill by emphasizing the scope and the repertoire, and the relationality and open-endedness of these entanglements.

Relational Field The purpose of this book is to bring attention to the German–US colonial entanglements as part of far-reaching, multidirectional, and multilayered networking and circulations between empires. These entanglements involved numerous actors, a broad repertoire of exchanges, and countless forms of influencing and borrowing. This book does not pretend to

1

INTRODUCTION: RELATIONAL EMPIRES

7

be exhaustive in its coverage or claim to provide comprehensive answers on the histories of German–US colonial connections. Rather it wants to canvas some of the potential avenues of research, arouse heightened attention to the German–US colonial connectedness, and create discussion on the meanings and connotations of these connections. It also wishes to offer analytic threads for further investigation. This book introduces a strand of global history often overlooked and stimulates dialectic and open-ended understandings and narratives of colonial entanglements. It hopes to ascertain that the spaces between empires still have much unexposed possibilities for scholars to uncover. This book is organized into three thematic groupings: portabilities, passages, and parallels. Each offers a specific way of approaching the German–US colonial entanglements. The first part advances analysis pertaining to transferability of ideas and policies through the actions and thinking of individuals. The second section navigates the techniques of circulations, borrowing, and networking in the realm of colonial policies and practices. The third segment looks at patterns and analogies of divergent yet interrelated colonial racialization and gendering. Obviously, the essays overlap in myriad ways, showing the layered and multidirectional qualities of these colonial intersections. Furthermore, while each chapter in the book is intended to function independently, they, of course, also relate to others bringing a chorus of voices to play. It is no homogenous cadre of voices contributing to a uniform narrative storyline, and it is not meant to be. But it is rather a structured, multivocal mix of voices in discussion with each other, against each other, and over each other, and in relation to the broader field of global history. The first essay to examine the portability of American colonial methods, practices, and ideas in the German colonial context is Gregor Thum’s “Seapower and Frontier Settlement: Friedrich List’s American Vision for Germany.” Thum argues that his US experience made the German economist List an intellectual forerunner for envisioning a German colonial empire in the mid-1800s. List not only pioneered visions of a united Central Europe under German leadership, but advocated for a German settlement frontier in Eastern Europe and took a great interest in advancing German maritime power for empire on the seas. In “The Fantasy of Open Space on the Frontier: Max Sering from the Great Plains to Eastern Europe,” Robert L. Nelson makes a case for agrarian economist Max Sering being of central importance in the intellectual and practical transfer of settler colonialism from the American West to the

8

J. LAHTI

German East. It was Sering’s personal travels on the Great Plains that made him a visionary for settler colonial expansion for Germany, advocacy that lasted for decades, spanning from the “inner colonial” program of settlement in the Prussian eastern provinces to the First World War and the Ober Ost. Tracey Reimann-Dawe’s essay “The Role of US Railroads in the German Expansionist Mindset of Gerhard Rohlfs” in turn builds a powerful treatise on the role of US railroads, as a vehicle for spatial takeover, fueling German colonial imagination. By centering the German Afrikareisender, explorer and traveler Gerhard Rohlfs, she claims the railroads enabled a self-perception for German colonialists that allowed for a mental identification with the United States and for distancing from the British and the French in the global colonial context. George Steinmetz in turn provides an example of a different type of colonial convergence. By looking at the interplay of German, French, and US empires and colonialism in the writings of the French philosopher and sociologist Raymond Aron, Steinmetz carves openings for grasping some conjunctional spaces and trajectories of portabilities between empires. He does this by following Aron’s intellectual journal, from, first, his preoccupation with Nazi Germany as imperialist form, then French overseas colonialism, and lastly with United States as global hegemon empire of the Cold War world. Starting part II, “A truly exquisite little phrase:” Global Colonialist Visions vs. the “Drang nach Osten,” by Jens-Uwe Guettel, scrutinizes German debates from the Kaiserreich to the Nazis on the direction German colonialism should take: turn global or turn eastward. He claims that the proponents in these debates frequently referenced the American westward expansion, as global and eastern expansion plans formed political and ideological, argumentative and practical opposites. Dörte Lerp also keeps an eye on the close relationship between nation building and imperial expansionism. Her article “Ruling Classes and Serving Races: German Policies on Land, Labor, and Migration in Trans-Imperial Perspective” tracks the centrality of agrarian and colonial labor within the German expansionist debates and their trans-imperial machinations and considerations. While looking to the United States for models these debates did not limit comparing Germany with just one specific empire but looked for broader inspirations from the world of empires. She notes how deeply racialized debates in the Prussian East and in German Southwest Africa encouraged white Germans, as “ruling classes,” to settle in

1

INTRODUCTION: RELATIONAL EMPIRES

9

both regions, while limiting the access of Africans and Poles, the “serving races.” Jeannette Eileen Jones continues with the theme of agrarian colonization in “How the Südwest Was Won: Transnational Currents of American Agriculture and Land Colonization in German Southwest Africa.” She examines how the Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee (Colonial Economic Committee) and the Reichskolonialamt sought information on agricultural practices—irrigation and dry farming—in the American West for the effective transformation of arid lands into white settlements in German Southwest Africa. Seeking to make the Southwest into a booming settler colony the Germans collected information from the United States about the so-called Campbell system in irrigation on the Great Plains and on the irrigation practices of Yakima Valley, Washington. In “Practicing Empire: Germany’s Colonial Visions in the Pacific Northwest,” Eriks Bredovskis writes about traveling Germans in the Pacific Northwest of North America. He uses the tour of the German cruiser the Falke from Oregon to Alaska and back in 1905 as a case to study on how Germans in non-German spaces were active participants in the building of settler societies, disseminating notions of middle-class colonial belonging, and the development of Germany’s colonial imaginary landscape. Furthermore, he also encourages us to think about the constant production of a variety of documents by colonial agents and how intersecting these different source types provides an understanding of ordinary Germans’ fascination with North America during the Kaiserreich. Opening the third section, and the comparative case studies, is Volker M. Langbehn, who, in “Similarity in Appearance – ‘Chinaman’ in German and American Satire Magazines Around 1900,” compares the visual depiction of Chinese in Germany and the United States. He shows how ordinary people became exposed to similar colonial tropes of racialization in their everyday readings of newspaper cartoons on both sides of the Atlantic, while also connecting satirical images, as a node in the transimperial network of transmitters of categories, to developments in modern sciences, especially eugenics. Armed with a premise that the German author Karl May’s “Wild West” writings were much more fluid in gender terms than the heteronormative masculine triumphs they are usually perceived as, is A. Dana Weber’s essay “‘I almost pulled her to my heart, but…’ Competing Masculinities in Karl May’s Wild West Fictions and their Modern Theatrical Adaptation.” She traces the gendering of

10

J. LAHTI

the American West over time in German popular imagination through analysis of the contested masculinities in May’s texts and in their current reincarnations in German Karl May festivals. Next Janne Lahti and Michelle R. Moyd’s piece “In Service of Empires: Apaches and Askaris as Colonial Soldiers” showcases how German and US colonial conquests involved interrelated, complex, and nuanced histories of violence. Focusing on the Apaches in the Southwest United States and askaris in German East Africa, the authors stress the tensioned relationships of power, where imperial pressures and colonial complicity coexisted with colonized empowerment through assertions of masculinity and households. Keeping with the theme of colonial violence, Edward M. Westermann unravels parallels and synchronicities between military rhetoric of annihilation in nineteenth-century US–Indigenous wars in the West and in the Nazi East. His “Words and Wars of Conquest: The Rhetoric of Annihilation in the American West and the Nazi East” shows how the discourse that drove the westward march of the American empire and the displacement of Native Americans provides intriguing parallels with the use of language during the Nazi conquest of the East and the conduct of a racial war of extermination against the region’s Slavic and Jewish populations. As it scrutinizes the techniques of US and German colonialism, this book represents diversities in entanglements and multiplicities in approaching them. In the process it not only pays attention to the networks and webs of circulations in German–US connections, but situates them against a larger global canvas of empires that brought the United States to Germany and Germany to the United States, and both to the world. In all, this anthology represents a contribution to the recent scholarly attempt to turn attention to the global dimensions of German and US histories and thus it attests to the ongoing scholarly effort to look beyond the borders of the nation state and individual empires. Through this pursuit it deliberates on the nature, scope, and directionality of German and US colonial entanglements, on their shared colonial epistemologies and relational trajectories as rising world powers. Surely, this line of investigation has much more to offer, and the deliberations on the related German and US empires are just getting started.

1

INTRODUCTION: RELATIONAL EMPIRES

11

Notes 1. Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Frontier in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (1920; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1996), 1–38. 2. On Peters, see Arne Perras, Carl Peters and German Imperialism, 1856– 1918 (New York: Clarendon Press, 2004), and Guettel and Jones in this volume; on Sering, Nelson, Guettel, and Lerp in this volume; and on Hagenbeck, Hilke Thode-Aroa, Für fünfzig Pfennig un die Welt: Die Hagenbeckschen Völkerschauen (Frankfurt: Campus, 1989); Eric Ames, Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009). 3. Julia Stetler,Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Germany: A Transnational History (PhD dissertation, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2012); Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Knopf, 2005); Robert W. Rydell, and Rob Kroes. Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 4. Jens-Uwe Guettel, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 100–102. On Ratzel’s views of America, see Friedrich Ratzel, Die Vereinigten Staaten von Nord-Amerika (München: R. Oldenburg, 1893). 5. On connections as plural, diverse, and intricate in global history, see Roland Wenzlhuemer, Doing Global History (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), esp. 5–12, 19–22. 6. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, “Empires and the Reach of the Global,” in Emily S. Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 430. 7. On the world of empires, see Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 8. Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5–6; Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 9. Sven Beckert, “American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950,” American Historical Review 122.4 (October 2017), esp. 1139–1143, 1146. 10. Erik Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

12

J. LAHTI

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

Press, 2019), 22. On Germans emulating Italian colonialism, see Patrick Bernhard, “Hitler’s Africa in the East: Italian Colonialism as a Model for German Planning in Eastern Europe,” Journal of Contemporary History 51.1 (2016), 61–90. See also Patrick Bernhard, “Colonial Crossovers: Nazi Germany and Its Entanglements with Other Empires,” Journal of Global History 12.2 (2017), 206–227. On German-British colonial connections, see Ulrike Lindner, Koloniale Begegnungen: Deutschland und Großbritannien als Imperialmächte in Afrika 1880–1914 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2011). Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Sven Beckert, “From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton,” Journal of American History 92.2 (2005), 498–526. Guettel, German Expansionism; Robert L. Nelson, “From Manitoba to the Memel: Max Sering, Inner Colonization and the German East,” Social History 35 (November 2010), 439–457. Edward B. Westermann, Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016); Carroll P. Kakel III, The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective (New York: Palgrave, 2011); James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). Dirk Bönker, Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States Before World War I (Cornell University Press, 2012). On German emigration, see Stefan Manz, Constructing a German Diaspora: The “Greater German Empire,” 1871–1914 (New York: Routledge, 2014); Dirk Hoerder and Jörg Nagel, eds., People in Transit: German Migrations in Comparative Perspective, 1820–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire, 7. Guettel, German Expansionism, 4. H. Glenn Penny, Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians Since 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop, eds., Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). See also Kristin Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). For the past two decades the volume of scholarship that examines various periods and strands of US history as empire, and connects it to the world has magnified. For overviews of available scholarship, see Kristin

1

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

INTRODUCTION: RELATIONAL EMPIRES

13

L. Hoganson and Jay Sexton, “Introduction,” in Hoganson and Sexton, eds., Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 1–22; Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116.5 (December 2011), 1348–1391. See, for example, Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); A.G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States (New York: Vintage, 2019); Janne Lahti, The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2019); David Wrobel, Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013); Hoganson and Sexton, Crossing Empires. For an overview of German colonial history and historiography, see Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See also Jürgen Zimmerer, et all, Kein Platz an der Sonne: Erinnerungsorte der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte (Frankfurt: Campus, 2013). See, foremost, Helmut Bley, Southwest Africa Under German Rule (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971); Horst Drechsler, “Let us Die Fighting”: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama Against German Imperialism (1884–1915) (London: Zeb Books, 1980); Woodruff D. Smith, The German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). Settler colonialism refers to a form of colonialism that, as argued by its key theorist, the anthropologist Patrick Wolfe, is preoccupied with replacement and access to territory, the land itself. It includes conquest, long-range migration, permanent settlement (or at least intent of such), elimination and substitution of Natives, and the reproduction of one’s own society on what used to be other people’s lands. See Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8.4 (December 2006), 387–409. See also James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave, 2010); Janne Lahti, “What Is Settler Colonialism and What It Has to Do with the American West?,” Journal of the West 56.4 (Fall 2017), 8–12. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Empires and the Reach of the Global, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012); Rosenberg, A World Connecting; Osterhammel, Transformation of the World; Heather Streets-Salter, and Trevor R. Getz.

14

J. LAHTI

Empires and Colonies in the Modern World: A Global Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 25. The volume of this new scholarship is too broad to do justice here. Some key works with a global emphasis include, Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley, eds., German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang, eds., German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014); Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama, eds., German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Dörte Lerp, Imperiale Grenzräume. Bevölkerungspolitiken in Deutsch-Südwestafrika und den östlichen Provinzen Preußens 1884–1914 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2016); Benjamin Madley, “Patterns of Frontier Genocide, 1803–1910: The Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia,” Journal of Genocide Research 6.2 (June 2004), 167–192. 26. For example, Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire; Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa; Guettel, German Expansionism; Penny, Kindred by Choice.

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

PART I

Portabilities

CHAPTER 2

Seapower and Frontier Settlement: Friedrich List’s American Vision for Germany Gregor Thum

At a turning point of WWII in the summer of 1943, when the Wehrmacht lost the initiative to the Red Army in the east and was on the retreat in Sicily, where US and British troops had landed and now pushed toward the Italian mainland, the movie Der unendliche Weg (The Endless Road) landed in German cinemas. It prepared the German audience for an alliance shift that an increasingly desperate Nazi leadership hoped for during the final years of the war. The film recalled the adventures of the once-famous nineteenth-century German political economist, entrepreneur, and railroad pioneer Friedrich List (1789–1846), who spent his formative years in Pennsylvania and contributed to the economic development of the United States by building one of the first longdistance railroad connections in the country.1 List was a well-chosen figure to highlight the density of German American entanglements. He was both a German and American political economist, a US diplomat and a German public intellectual. As

G. Thum (B) Department of History, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_2

17

18

G. THUM

short as the time he spent in the United States had been, the five years between 1825 and 1830 shaped List in a profound way. He arrived in the United States with some political experience, basic economic ideas, and a fascination for the railroad. He returned to Europe as an experienced journalist and railroad pioneer with a comprehensive program of national economic development in mind. Once he put his ideas into writing, most importantly as the author of The National System of Political Economy (1841),2 he was one of the best-known political economists of his time.3 List’s vision cannot be detached from his American experience. It was a reflection on what he saw, read, and experienced in the United States. As a political economist, List lacked Karl Marx’s erudition and complexity. But unlike Marx, he did not need to revise his predictions again and again to not be proven wrong by the actual developments.4 List had an infallible sense for global economic and political trends. He foresaw that the nation state would be the building bloc of the future global order. He understood the relevance of space and territory and of navigable rivers and maritime ports in defining a nation’s ability to attain and maintain economic independence. He realized early on that the railroad would revolutionize spatial relations and forge nations. He also predicted that the United States would displace Britain as the world’s leading naval and commercial power—“perhaps in the time of our grandchildren.”5 Upon his return to Europe in the early 1830s, List was convinced that Germany had the most potential of all nations to emulate the rise of the United States—a bold prediction in light of Germany’s political fragmentation, modest level of development, and lack of any serious maritime tradition. Yet List began to advocate for an active German policy of nation and empire building, making him one of the earliest and most influential German imperialists of the first half of the nineteenth century. He did not use the terms “Großraum” (large space) and “Mitteleuropa” (Central Europe) that would eventually gain so much currency in German geopolitical thinking. But he introduced and popularized the very ideas that underlay these concepts. He became a pioneer of geopolitical thought long before the term “geopolitics” was even coined.6 This chapter discusses List’s imperial vision for Germany against the backdrop of his American experience. I argue that this experience made List a trailblazer for a Central Europe united under German leadership and early advocate for a German settlement frontier in the east. But List was also an Atlanticist. In fact, he took a much greater interest in the idea

2

SEAPOWER AND FRONTIER SETTLEMENT …

19

of German maritime power and German colonial and commercial penetration of the Americas than in the possibility of an eastward expansion in Europe.

The Swabian Reformer and the American Exile Friedrich List was born into the family of a well-to-do tanner in the town of Reutlingen in southwest Germany in the early days of August 1789, only weeks after the Storming of the Bastille in Paris. He was born into a world of accelerated social, economic, and political change that would fascinate him throughout his life. List embarked on the career of a civil servant, starting out as a clerk in the state administration of Württemberg. He quickly made a name for himself as an efficient and publicly active civil servant, who in 1816 even founded his own journal, the Württembergisches Archiv, to promote constitutional and administrative reforms. In 1818, the reform-minded King Wilhelm I of Württemberg appointed List, who had never obtained a university degree, professor at the University of Tübingen. But List was too restless a spirit to thrive in such a setting and content himself with training civil servants. Only a year after his appointment List asked to be relieved from his academic duties to serve as secretary of the German Commercial and Industrial Union (Allgemeiner Deutscher Handels- und Gewerbeverein), a club of merchants and manufacturers he helped to establish in 1819. The Union lobbied for the removal of tariffs within the German Confederation and the eventual creation of a German customs union. The revolutionary potential of this organization was not lost to the defenders of the old order. They began to observe List’s activities with increasing suspicion. In 1820, after he had been elected into Württemberg’s Chamber of Deputies, List fell out of favor with his king. For his involvement with the “Reutlingen Petition,” a handbill that exposed inefficiency and corruption in the state administration, List was put on trial for “libel and defamation of honor of the government.” In 1822 he was sentenced to ten months in prison, with the understanding that this would ban him from ever holding public office again.7 For two years List avoided imprisonment by living in exile in France, Switzerland, and England. He returned to Württemberg in 1824, hoping that his king would now be willing to pardon him. But he was arrested and thrown into the fortress of Hohenasperg. Only after he had served

20

G. THUM

half of his sentence, the government offered his release under the condition that he and his family of four would emigrate to the United States and never return. The Lists boarded a ship to New York in the spring of 1825. Their arrival in America started on a high note. Marie-Joseph Motier, known as General Lafayette, the celebrated hero of the American War of Independence, was at that time on his second grand tour through the United States. Lafayette, who knew List from his exile in France, invited the Swabian revolutionary to join his entourage as his personal guest. List happily accepted the invitation and was thus introduced to the political and intellectual elite of the United States during a three-month trip along the eastern seaboard.8 The excellent connections List established upon his arrival did not spare him a miserable first winter, when he and his family tried to run a farmstead near Harrisburg without any agricultural experience. It was thus with great relief that List in the spring of 1826 accepted the position of editor-in-chief of the Readinger Adler, one of the country’s oldest and most widely read German-language weeklies. The Lists abandoned their farm and relocated to the small town of Reading between Harrisburg and Philadelphia, where they could enjoy life in modest comfort.9 In hindsight, List considered the editorship a critical learning opportunity for a butting political economist. He had to write most of the weekly’s articles himself and thus explored a wide range of topics related to social, political, and economic development of the United States: The best book one can read in this new country about political economy is life. One can observe how wilderness is transformed into prosperous and powerful states. Only here I realized that national economies develop in stages. A process that took centuries in Europe is taking place under our watch - namely the transition from wilderness to animal husbandry, from there to agriculture, and from there to manufacture and trade.10

While in Reading, List established contacts with the influential Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Manufactures and the Mechanic Arts. The members of this society were eager to enlist the German professor in the ongoing American debate between the advocates of protective tariffs, who were mostly based in the country’s industrial north, and the free traders from the cotton-producing south. List had been a critic of free trade since his days as secretary of the German Commercial and Industrial Union. But thanks to his involvement with

2

SEAPOWER AND FRONTIER SETTLEMENT …

21

the Pennsylvania Society he learned of the work of American political economists, among them Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures (1791), Daniel Raymond’s Elements of Political Economy (1823), and pamphlets Matthew Carey had been writing for the Pennsylvania Society. List contributed to this school of thought his own Outlines of American Economy, a sharp critique of free trade under the conditions of British global dominance, published in 1827 with the support of the Pennsylvania Society.11 List hoped that Outlines would pave the way for a professorship at one of the American colleges. Yet life took him into a different direction. When he witnessed the “coal rush” around Pottsville north of Reading, where a large anthracite field had been found, he began to conduct his own geological investigations. Following the coal bed to the east, he discovered even richer anthracite deposits in the vicinity of Tamaqua. To get the coal from there to the industrial metropolis of Philadelphia, List came up with the plan to build a railroad that would transport the coal the twenty miles from Tamaqua to Port Clinton, where it could be loaded on ships and sent down the Schuylkill River to Philadelphia. He teamed up with Isaac Hiester, a friend from Reading and nephew of Pennsylvania’s governor. They secured a loan, purchased 27,000 acres of land for mining and timber production, and in 1829 founded the Little Schuylkill Navigation Railroad and Coal Company. In 1831, the company opened one of the earliest long-distance railroad connections in the United States.12 Before the business could produce major profits, List had begun to sell his assets and prepare for a return to Germany. “Whatever I encounter here,” he wrote from Pennsylvania to the Bavarian railroad pioneer Joseph von Baader in the spring of 1827, “I explore with Germany in mind.”13 Ironically, it was his involvement in the US presidential campaign of 1828 that cleared the path for a return to Europe. As editor of the Readinger Adler, he managed to swing the vote of the German community so effectively in favor of Andrew Jackson that the later President Jackson felt to owe him.14 Upon List’s request, Jackson appointed him US consul in Hamburg in the fall of 1830, only weeks after List had acquired US citizenship. The position did not come with a salary. But it provided the diplomatic immunity List needed to enter German territory without fear of being arrested again.15 In 1832, the Lists left the United States for good and settled in Leipzig. List served as US consul until 1837 while holding his family above water mostly from the proceedings of his remaining American

22

G. THUM

assets. His hope to find a government position commensurate with his political and economic experiences never materialized, though. While he had influential friends and admirers, among them the Bavarian King Ludwig I, he also faced powerful enemies. His most formidable opponent was Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich, the strongman of Europe until 1848. He pulled the strings to ensure that List, whom he in 1834 described as “one of the most active, cunning, and influential among the German revolutionaries,” would not obtain a position of political power within the German Confederation.16 If List remained largely confined to his intellectual work, his political influence was nonetheless significant. Among others, he was the inspirator of, and contributor to, the Rotteck-Welckersches Staatslexikon, a highly respected political encyclopedia and mouthpiece of German liberalism. As one of the leading railroad specialists in Europe, he advised various governments and developed proposals for a German railroad network that came remarkably close to what was eventually built. Between 1843 and 1846, he also edited, and largely wrote, the Zollvereinsblatt, a weekly List used to advocate for greater economic integration within the German Confederation.17 But he found his greatest recognition as the author of The National System of Political Economy, published in a first and only volume in 1841, and translated in many languages ever since. The National System offered a thematically wide-ranging historical reflection on the geographic and political conditions under which nations may develop into economically independent industrial powers. It made strong arguments for interventionist politics for the sake of economic and territorial development, described the steps German governments in particular would need to take to unleash Germany’s economic and geopolitical potential, and argued for an eventual “free union” of Europe’s continental powers. Many factors shaped List’s thinking, but The National System was primarily the sum of his American experience.

Liberal Imperialism, Colonialism, Navalism During his lecture at the Philadelphia Manufacturers’ Dinner in November 1827, in the presence of the President John Quincy Adams, List presented the United States as empire of the future: For the first time, a great empire was founded on industry, on equal rights, and on the moral force of the citizens - where the governments

2

SEAPOWER AND FRONTIER SETTLEMENT …

23

are mere committees of the people, and conquests are made for no other purpose than a participation in freedom, civilization and happiness with the conquered.18

As his later work shows, it was this model of empire—the combination of a liberal political order, a thriving industry, and an expansionist foreign policy—List envisioned for Germany. In the words of historian Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, List was “one of most influential early advocates of an imperialist foreign policy as a central tenet of liberal politics.”19 Since he had only his words to promote an active imperial policy, he represented the “imperialism of intellectuals” so characteristic for the early German imperialist movement.20 Typical for German liberal imperialists was also the fact that List saw in the United States Germany’s most important model.21 List considered it the right and duty of any advanced nation with a population and territory large enough to pursue an independent imperial policy to partake in the spread of civilization across the globe via conquest and colonization. He encouraged these nations to strengthen and modernize their “productive forces” at home, from administration over education and research, infrastructure, and industry, to their military forces, especially their navies, so they can someday follow the British example and partake in the “profitable business of cultivating waste territories and civilizing barbarous nations.”22 It is the combination of economic interest, national prestige, and the moral impetus of a civilizing mission that shaped List’s thinking about empire. We do not find in List’s writings the racist assumptions and statements that became dominant in European and North American colonial discourse in the second half of the nineteenth century. He stood for a version of colonialist thought more typical for the first decades of this century, according to which humans constituted a single race, divided only by different stages of development. “Barbarism” signified in List’s writings a stage of economic development rather than a quality essential to a given people. He thus also used “barbarism” to describe the state of Germany’s development at the beginning of the eighteenth century.23 At the same time, List was convinced that climate had an inescapable effect on human societies. He divided the globe into a “temperate zone” in the north, where industrialization would find the best conditions, and a “torrid zone” in the south, where the climate would not allow for

24

G. THUM

more than a predominantly agricultural economy. While all human societies would be able to attain a degree of prosperity and civilization, those inhabiting the torrid zone would be unlikely to reach the same level of development, wealth, and imperial power attainable to the nations in the temperate zone. Global trade meant for List the exchange of industrial goods produced in the north against the raw materials and agricultural products of the south. He did not suggest that this exchange always needed to be colonial in character, and he did not exclude the possibility that nations in the torrid zone could obtain at least a degree of independence. At the same time, he believed that the greater wealth the manufacturing nations can acquire would also provide them with the means to project their power outward. They are thus prone to increase their control of the lands in the torrid zone by building colonies or creating economic dependencies. Also, colonies in the torrid zone are unlikely to follow the example of Britain’s North American possessions and gain independence. The asymmetry in economic wealth between north and south was just too pronounced.24 “There is no greater interest for the advanced nations of Europe and North America,” List wrote in 1837, “than the civilization and colonization of the lands of South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia.”25 In National System he called colonies “the greatest expression of manufacturing strength.” Having colonies would not only stimulate a nation’s domestic and foreign trade. It would also provide “a beneficial outlet” for the “surplus strength of the mother nation in terms of population, capital, and entrepreneurial spirit.” Those who “enrich themselves in the colonies” would often return to the motherland and reinvest or spend their accumulated wealth there.26 Little what List said here departed from the mainstream of the current European colonialist discourse. But it is another case in point for the importance of German imperial and colonial aspirations during the Vormärz period, decades before Germany was in a position to pursue its own imperial policy. List was as much an advocate for German colonial engagement and robust maritime presence as he was a promoter of (temporary) protective tariffs, railroads, and the integration of Central Europe under German leadership. Only in combination do these political objectives reflect his comprehensive program of national unification and empire-building. List stood for a German national movement that was from its very inception imperial and global in its orientation.27

2

SEAPOWER AND FRONTIER SETTLEMENT …

25

List was one of the first to consider the lack of a German maritime tradition a serious deficiency. “The sea,” he wrote in 1843, “is the high road of the globe (…), the parade ground of nations. (…) The sea is the rich communal land where all economic nations fatten their flocks. He who has no part in the sea is excluded from the good things and honors of the world - he is our dear Lord’s stepchild.”28 This sea was for List primarily the Atlantic, as it connected the industrially advanced nations in Europe and North America with each other and the wider world. List was convinced that the leading nations of the future would be Atlantic powers. He therefore considered a strong foothold at the Atlantic coasts a precondition for prosperity and economic independence. Even in the case of the United States, which had a hinterland of continental proportions, List believed that the industrial cities and large ports along the Atlantic seaboard would remain the economic, political, and cultural heart of the nation. It was the combination of a long Atlantic coast and a hinterland with inexhaustible potential for demographic growth and industrial development that put the United States in a position to challenge Britain’s global supremacy.29 This said, List did not believe that a strong maritime tradition alone would suffice. A nation also needed a large, well rounded, and populated territory, including natural resources and control over the mouths of a nation’s main navigable rivers, to sustain naval power and economic independence in the long run. Nations that did not meet these criteria either had to find ways to expand their territories via heritage, purchase, or conquest, or they were left with no choice other than leaning on larger nations or outright merging with them. The latter was the fate List foresaw for Denmark and the Netherlands. As impressive as their maritime and colonial traditions and capabilities were, both lacked the territory, population, and economic resources to sustain their independence. List thus considered their admission into the German Confederation, “and consequently into the German nationality,” to which he thought they anyway belong “as respects their descent and whole character,” the only reasonable option.30 Apart from Britain, the only nation that in List’s view enjoyed an independent position in the world, List saw France on track of gaining such independence soon. The United States would follow suit. For others, List attested potential but also significant challenges. Germany would have to overcome its fragmentation and lack of access to the Atlantic. Spain and Portugal would need to find ways to invest their colonial wealth in the

26

G. THUM

development of the metropole. And Russia would have to continue on the path of Peter the Great and modernize the country’s backward political institutions before it could make use of its economic and strategic potential.31 List did not subscribe to any form of geographic determinism.32 The whole point of the National System was to show that it was always the combination of privileged geographic conditions and wise political actions that brought independent nations into being. Conversely, wrong political decisions may squander a nation’s wealth or leave its potential unexploited. As far as Germany was concerned, List was convinced that the size of the combined territories and populations of the German Confederation could sustain a global power. Also, the quality of its public institutions, accomplishments in science, culture, and education, the industriousness of its people, and the advanced level of agriculture provided the German Confederation with all that was needed to build a competitive manufacturing base. On the other hand, centuries of misguided German politics had resulted in political fragmentation and bitter territorial losses. Instead of seizing the opportunity of the sixteenth century to create “the greatest military and naval power which had ever existed” by uniting “under one flag all the shipping from Dunkirk as far to Riga,” Germany lost the Netherlands and thus its maritime and colonial potential.33 If List was an enthusiastic supporter of the German Customs Union established under Prussian leadership in 1834, he called this Union incomplete “so long as it does not extend over the whole coast, from the mouth of the Rhine to the frontier of Poland, including Holland and Denmark.”34 The advocacy of Holland’s and Denmark’s integration into the German Customs Union was one of List’s obsessions. He questioned Germany’s ability to compete on a global scale if it could not draw on Dutch and Danish maritime capabilities, and if it would not control the mouth of the River Rhine with its large Atlantic ports. At the same time, he believed it to be also in the Danish and Dutch interest to throw in their lot with the larger Germany. “On the side of England, Holland is a satellite for the English fleet - unite it with Germany, she is the leader of the German naval power.”35 With his call for acquiring a German fleet List echoed and popularized what German imperial advocates had been uttering since the early days of the nineteenth century. He also shared their general fascination with the Americas and the hope that the Germans too would establish a colonial presence there. In fact, when List published The National

2

SEAPOWER AND FRONTIER SETTLEMENT …

27

System, confidential negotiations were under way that resulted in the Mexican government offering to sell the province Alta California to Prussia, an enormous territory that covered all of present-day California, Utah, Nevada as well as parts of Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. The episode is largely overlooked in the historiography, although it makes for a fascinating case of counterfactual history. It would have been the game-changing deal of the century. List was not informed, let alone involved. But it is safe to assume that his advocacy for German colonies in the Americas served as an inspiration.36 It was in 1837 that the Mexican government of President Anastasio Bustamante confidentially approached the Prussian representative in the country, Friedrich von Gerolt, to enquire if Berlin would not be interested in supporting the creation of German settlement colonies to the north of the Rio Grande. Bustamante’s government feared that Mexico’s sparsely populated northern provinces might otherwise face the fate of Texas and declare their independence after an infiltration of US settlers. Bustamante hoped to counteract further US encroachments on Mexican territory by opening the country to German immigrants, who he imagined could establish largely autonomous military settlement colonies. The Prussian government responded negatively when von Gerolt passed on this information and instructed him not to pursue the offer any further. Yet other Prussian diplomats got involved and began to conduct their own investigations. Capitalizing on Mexico’s increasingly desperate political, financial, and demographic situation, the Prussian diplomats convinced the Mexican government in 1842 to offer Alta California to Prussia for sale. In 1844, Christian Charles Josias von Bunsen, the Prussian envoy to London and apparently the driving force of the deal, could even report that the British government would enthusiastically support such a transfer. After all, the creation of a large German colony in North America promised to significantly weaken the US position on the continent and reduce the pressure on Britain’s remaining colonial holdings there.37 If nothing came out of all these efforts, it was for the unwillingness of the Prussian government to seriously explore this opportunity, citing the lack of a fleet and the assumption that Prussia would never experience mass emigration. US Senator William Hogan, who was involved in the backdoor conversations with the Prussian diplomats, commented with sarcasm: “I see plainly (he said) that the project is too vast and startling

28

G. THUM

for many of your politicians, who measure territory by acres, the population by decades and future progress by the past.”38 In 1848, the Mexican government lost California to the United States, just in time for the Gold Rush to break loose and draw hundreds of thousands of settlers to the West Coast, among them many Germans. A similar fate awaited the German Texas project. In 1842, a group of mostly southern German nobles founded the so-called “Texas Society,” MainzerAdelsverein, in support of a systematic German settlement in the then independent Republic of Texas. The Society raised significant funds to buy land and managed to send a first group of several thousand settlers across the ocean. In combination with the California project, a German settlement focus in Texas would have created a contiguous German territory from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific. But the project failed due to the lack of German government support, poor organization and the outbreak of the Mexican–American War in 1846. The foundation of the two German cities, Neu Braunfels and Friedrichsburg, was among the only few tangible results.39

A German Settlement Frontier in the Southeast As much as List cherished the time he spent in America, he did not deem the mass emigration of Germans to the United States a positive development from a German national standpoint. He had seen with his own eyes how quickly immigrants in the United States assimilated into the Anglophone society to take full advantage of the social and economic opportunities that came with such a move. He therefore called it an illusion to assume that lasting German communities would emerge in the United States and create significant demand for German imports.40 This said, a German emigration to the less developed countries of Central and South America as well as Texas would be more advantageous, provided the emigration “were well led and undertaken on a large scale.”41 List assumed that German colonists were less inclined to assimilate in this environment but instead would create stable German-speaking communities that would help foster close trade relations between Latin America and Germany.42 But List also understood that the establishment of such a German presence in Latin America would require maritime capabilities that the German states did not have yet. He therefore floated the idea that

2

SEAPOWER AND FRONTIER SETTLEMENT …

29

for the time being “European Turkey and the Lower Danube territories,” i.e., southeastern Europe, could be a viable alternative for German colonists. “A man dwelling by the Upper Danube could transport himself to Moldavia and Wallachia, to Servia, or also to the south-western shores of the Black Sea, for one fifth part of the expenditure of money and time which are requisite for this emigration to the shores of Lake Erie.” List was convinced that German settlers in southeastern Europe would not be lost to Germany. They would establish lasting German colonies in proximity to the motherland and stimulate the economic development of the region. But List also understood that German governments would have to increase their diplomatic presence in southeastern Europe and use their influence to push for an improvement of the region’s living conditions. Otherwise German migrants could not be convinced to move there.43 List elaborated on this idea in a longer essay on land reform and emigration he published in 1842.44 The piece shows even more to what degree List’s Danubian dreams were inspired by the American frontier. List wondered aloud about the rationale by which colonists from southern Germany almost exclusively headed for North America. This choice of destination “is just as unnatural as if the inhabitant of the Delaware, Susquehanna or Hudson shores, once he ran out of arable land, would emigrate to Australia or New Zealand instead of migrating to the shores of the Mississippi or Missouri or Lake Michigan.” List went on to claim that the shores of the Danube from Pressburg (Bratislava) all the way down to the Black Sea would offer an abundance of unused, fertile land, which would be no more difficult to reach than the lands along the Mississippi and the Missouri for the North American from New York or Pennsylvania (…) What a tremendous stream of power is flowing from southeastern Germany to the ocean! Channeled down the Danube, what effect could it have?45

List saw an analogy between American westward and German eastward expansion precisely because Germany too did not yet have the means to grow like England by establishing overseas colonies. But we can grow like North America, and this very soon and quickly, without the sea and fleets and colonies: We have a hinterland (blackwoods [sic]) no less than the Americans – the countries along the lower Danube

30

G. THUM

and the Black Sea - all of Turkey - the whole southeast beyond Hungary is our hinterland.46

List imagined the creation of “a powerful Germanic-Magyar eastern empire” that would gradually absorb the territories of the declining Ottoman Empire. Hungary would become Germany’s “key to Turkey, the entire Levant, the Orient, and at the same time a bulwark against northern [British] domination.”47 List introduced here the idea of a Central European empire united under German leadership that would resurface again and again in German imperial thought. We encounter it in the so-called “empire of seventy million” advanced during the debates of the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848/1849,48 in Joseph Partsch’s influential book Central Europe, which he wrote at Hartford Mackinder’s suggestion for the series The Regions of the World,49 or in Friedrich Naumann’s WWI bestseller Mitteleuropa.50 List stands at the beginning of German Großraumdenken, a belief in large geographic entities as the precondition for economic independence. These ideas would eventually also inform the Nazi empire, albeit in combination with a racist and exterminatory program that had little in common with earlier visions. When List developed his Danubian ideas, it did not occur to him that the mass immigration of German speakers to southeastern Europe and the expansion of German influence might cause hostile reactions among the region’s indigenous populations that would have felt a need to defend their own cultures against such an encroachment from the north. It is ironic that List of all people failed to take such sentiments into account. He was the political economist who declared “the civilization of the human race only conceivable and possible by means of civilization and development of the individual nations,” based on a cultural concept of nation defined by language, literature, traditions, and history.51 To explain this contradiction it is important to note that when List referred to nations as the building blocs of human society he thought of the well-established, larger nations of his time, of the English, French, Dutch, Germans, Poles, or Magyars. Like many of his contemporaries, he did not see Croats, Serbs, Romanians, or Bulgarians on that level and could probably not imagine that they would ever be in a position to seek national independence. It is worth to recall in this context the notion of the “non-historic peoples” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels advanced in response to the revolutions of 1848. They too were not willing to grant

2

SEAPOWER AND FRONTIER SETTLEMENT …

31

the smaller nationalities of southeastern Europe a future independent of the larger, more developed, “historic” nations.52 List was hardly less ignorant about southeastern Europe and the national aspirations there than Marx and Engels. Except for a short trip to Budapest in 1844, where he was celebrated as the author of The National System, he never made it further east than Saxony. The eastern provinces of Austria and Prussia never seemed to be of any interest to him, and we do not find many people among his long list of correspondents who could have filled in the blanks in his regional knowledge.53 Yet it was precisely this lack of knowledge about the eastern half of central Europe that allowed for List’s grand imperial designs—a nexus that would become a characteristic feature of many German imperial projects in the area. Apart from this lack of regional expertise, I would argue that List’s American experience had a significant impact on the way he thought about the Danube region. In fact, List’s constant references to the American frontier when he wrote about southeastern Europe suggest that he believed in an analogous situation, namely the expansion of European civilization into sparsely inhabited and largely undeveloped frontier zones. In the United States, List had witnessed how easily European immigrant communities assimilated into Anglophone culture if that culture offered opportunities for social advancement and prosperity. He took it for granted that German, or German-Magyar, culture would play a similar role in southeastern Europe. He apparently did not consider the difference it made whether people were exposed to a foreign language and culture because of their own emigration or because of the arrival of foreign settlers. To fully understand List’s vision, it is important to emphasize that he subsribed to an ethnically open, voluntarist concept of German nationhood typical for most mid-nineteenth-century German liberals.54 List believed that everybody could become a German simply by embracing German language and culture. The idea of national or racial purity was alien to him. In fact, he was vocal in rejecting such notions by repeatedly referring to the critical import of know-how and capital by immigrant populations. He pointed to the Flemish weavers, Italian bankers, Venetian and Hanseatic merchants, and Jewish refugees from the Iberian Peninsula and their positive impact on Britain’s economic development.55 He also recalled the fact that Germany owed the early phase of its industrialization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the Huguenots, Protestant refugees from France, who introduced modern manufacturing

32

G. THUM

techniques.56 Conversely, he counted the expulsion of Jews and Moors among the reasons for Spain’s economic decline.57 List’s open concept of nationhood was more than just a reflection of the mixing of people he had witnessed in the United States, though. He also took a stance against the racism that informed slavery and segregation in America. “It is undeniable that the mixing of two quite different races results, almost without exception, in a powerful and fine future progeny; and this observation,” he wrote in 1841, “extends to the mixing of the white race with the black in the third and the fourth generation.”58

Conclusion List did not live long enough to see the 1848 Revolutions and the election of the first German National Assembly in Frankfurt. He took his life in a moment of desperation on November 30, 1846. Deeply disappointed over his lack of success in securing a government position, concerned over dwindling financial resources, and haunted by his deteriorating health, List shot himself in the Austrian-Bavarian border town Kufstein when passing through on a trip to South Tyrol. His tragic death, widely reported in the German and international press, came as a shock to many. Only a few months earlier, the same von Bunsen who had pulled the strings of the Prussian California project, urged his king to find an appropriate position for List in Berlin. Bunsen suggested a position as general inspector of railroads and factories in the German Customs Union, or putting List in charge of a program to bring German colonists to Prussia’s predominantly Polish provinces. Friedrich Wilhelm IV agreed to have List come to Berlin and start a conversation. However, the move List had hoped for his entire life came too late.59 Had List been still alive in 1848, it is quite possible that he would have been elected into the Frankfurt Parliament. But even without his physical presence there, he was present through his ideas. The many parliamentarians who advocated a united Germany with global imperial aspirations said little that could not be found in List’s texts. They echoed List’s advocacy for a German Navy and for German colonies, and they shared List’s concern regarding the mass emigration of Germans to the United States. In their search for a more advantageous destination for Germany’s superfluous population, they picked up List’s proposal to send German colonists to the lower Danube region and prepare the ground for Germany’s imperial expansion to the southeast. With words that could

2

SEAPOWER AND FRONTIER SETTLEMENT …

33

have been List’s, Heinrich von Gagern, leading German liberal and president of the National Assembly, called on the Germans “to live up to our destiny toward the Orient, to include those peoples of the Danube Basins who have neither the calling for nor the claim to independence like satellites in our planetary system.”60 It is important to emphasize, though, that the colonization of the Danube region occupied a less prominent place in List’s geopolitical reflections than the historiography sometimes suggests. List merely touched on the idea in his National System.61 Also in the often-cited essay on land reform and emigration, List’s reflections regarding a German settlement in southeastern Europe do not occupy more than a section in a long text.62 List did think more about Germany’s possible expansion toward the Orient during the last couple of years of his life, though. It was no longer a German–Hungarian empire that captured his imagination but a British-German alliance. List had come to believe that the growing imperial rivalry with Russia, France, and the United States would sooner or later force the British Empire to seek a secure land bridge to its Indian possessions by gaining control of the Ottoman territories. Germany, List was convinced, would be Britain’s only viable partner in such an undertaking, which would mean that Germany could count on its full share in a future division of the Ottoman Empire.63 List was carried away by ever grander imperial projects at the end of his life. In style and tone, it was a noticeable departure from the much more realistic geopolitical reflections laid out in The National System. There he had declared the German colonization of the lower Danube region a mere possibility, dependent on whether or not the political and economic conditions in that region could be sufficiently improved to attract German migrants. In his later texts he spoke exclusively about the advantages of a German colonization of southeastern Europe without considering any longer that migration patterns depend on individual choice and cannot easily be controlled by governments. Yet it was this grand but naive frontier idea that List passed on to later generations of German settlement activists. They too paid little attention to the fact that the dramatically falling costs and the growing safety of the Atlantic passage brought the German eastward migration to an end in the 1830s and 1840s. North America had simply become too attractive a destination for Central European migrants to consider moving east or southeast. Nonetheless, German governments supported by settlement activists of various kinds launched several attempts between the 1880s

34

G. THUM

and the 1940s to reverse the migration trends of the time and push for a German eastward colonization. All these projects ran into the same problem: settlers could not be found in sufficient numbers. This was the case with the German colonization of Prussia’s eastern provinces pursued by the Prussian government between 1886 and 1914. Despite enormous investments in the infrastructure of the eastern provinces to increase their attractiveness, German migrants were hesitant to move east. The same lack of German settlers haunted Hitler’s lebensraum program during WWII. The only German settlers that could be recruited in the “Heim-ins-Reich” campaign to populate the annexed Polish territories were German speakers from further east, from the Baltics, Volhynia, or Bukovina. Their resettlement confirmed the east-west migration trend that the lebensraum program was supposed to reverse. It is telling that the List movie arrived in the German cinemas precisely at the moment when the lebensraum project had failed, when Heinrich Himmler instructed his SS to suspend all settlement activities and when Joseph Goebbels began to sell Germany’s military campaign in the east as an attempt to save Europe from Bolshevism. The movie made no references to Friedrich List as advocate of a German settlement frontier in the east. Instead, List was presented as railroad pioneer and German Atlanticist in friendly interaction with the American people. In this sense, the movie proved unwittingly prophetic. Germany’s military defeat in 1945 and the policy of Germany’s “de-imperialization” pursued by the Allies after the war opened an entirely new chapter in the country’s history. West Germany, separated from the East Elbian territories and cut off from eastern Europe, was transformed into the Atlantic nation List had imagined, albeit in a radically different geopolitical context. The creation of a Western camp under US leadership during the Cold War provided German industry and trade with unimpeded access to the Atlantic. This included access to the Dutch ports at the mouth of the Rhine River, again in a way List did not foresee. In 1957, West Germany and the Netherlands belonged to the signatories of the Treaty of Rome, the decisive step toward the gradual creation of a common European market. While Germany and the Netherlands remained separate nations, European integration brought the Rhenish industry and the Dutch ports, and later also the Danish merchant marine, into the close economic connection List had considered critical for unleashing the

2

SEAPOWER AND FRONTIER SETTLEMENT …

35

economic potential of all three nations. In other words, there was more List in these postwar political arrangements than we are aware of. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the editor Janne Lahti and Jan Musekamp for their comments on this chapter.

Notes 1. Jerzy Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films, translated from the Polish by Lilli Kaufmann, 5 vols. (1973–1991. Reprint. Berlin: Henschel 1992), vol. 4, 222. 2. Friedrich List, Das nationale System der politischen Ökonomie. Vol. 1: Der internationale Handel, die Handelspolitik und der deutsche Zollverein (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J.G. Cotta, 1841). For an English translation: Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy, trans. Sampson S. Lloyd (1885. Reprint. Fairfield, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley), 1991. See also the reprint used for the purpose of this text whenever the English translation seemed not exact enough: Friedrich List, Das nationale System der Politischen Ökonomie: Neudruck nach der Ausgabe letzter Hand, eingeleitet von Professor Dr: Heinrich Waentig, 4th ed. (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1922). 3. On List’s life and work, see W.O. Henderson, Friedrich List. Economist and Visionary, 1789–1846 (London: Frank Cass, 1983); Eugen Wendler, Friedrich List (1789–1846): A Visionary Economist with Social Responsibility (Heidelberg: Springer, 2015). Wendler, a List afficionado, provides a wealth of detailed information but does not always give credit to the published work he builds on. See also the collected works with a wealth of biographical information: Friedrich List, Schriften, Reden, Briefe, edited on behalf of the Friedrich-List-Gesellschaft by Erwin von Beckenrath, et al., 10 (in 12) vols. (Berlin: Hobbing, 1927–1935). On List’s time in the United States, see William Notz, “Friedrich List in Amerika,” ibid., vol. 2, 3–61. For a historical contextualization of List’s economic ideas, see Keith Tribe, Strategies of Economic Order. German Economic Discourse, 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 32–65. 4. See the insightful comparative study Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 5. List, National System, 94. 6. Still the most comprehensive and insightful study on the history of the Mitteleuropa ideas: Henry C. Meyer, Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action 1815–1945 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955). For the international context, see Sönke Neitzel, Weltmacht oder Untergang: Die Weltreichslehre im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (Paderborn: Schöningh,

36

G. THUM

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

2000). See also Juan Fernando Palacio, “Was Geopolitics Born 60 Years Before Mahan and Mackinder? The Forgotten Contribution of Friedrich List,” L’Espace Politique 21 (2013). Wendler, List, 39–46. For the trip with Lafayette, see Notz, “List in Amerika,” 4–5; Eugen Wendler, Friedrich List’s Exile in the United States: New Findings (Cham: Springer, 2016), 20–23. Notz, “List in Amerika,” 6–10. Ibid., 13. Friedrich List, Outlines of American Political Economy in a Series of Letters Addressed by Frederick List … to Charles J. Ingersoll (Philadelphia: Samuel Parker, 1827). For List’s engagement with the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Manufactures and the Mechanic Arts see Notz, List in Amerika, 20–31; on the influence of Hamilton, Carey and Raymond on List’s economic theories, see ibid., 52–57; Tribe, Strategies, 44–58. For the French context of List’s ideas, see David Todd, Free Trade and Its Enemies in France, 1814–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), especially 123–154. Henderson, List, 124–127; Notz, “List in Amerika,” 36–40. Letter to Ritter von Baader, 27 April 1827, in List, Schriften, vol. 3/2, 534. Notz, “List in Amerika,” 14–19. The US Senate refused to confirm the appointment, though. In 1832, List was appointed US Consul in Baden, and US Consul in Saxony in 1834. Notz, “List in Amerika,” 42–45. Metternich’s letter to the Austrian representative in Berlin, von Kast, 10 November 1834, List, Schriften, vol. 9, 73. The editors of List’s collected works posthumously composed a booklike text under the title “Die politisch-ökonomische Nationaleinheit der Deutschen,” based on the articles List wrote for the Zollvereinsblatt: List, Schriften, vol. 7. Friedrich List, Speech at the Philadelphia Manufacturers’ Dinner, 3 November 1827, in List, Schriften, vol. 2, 157–172; 159. Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884 (New York: Berghahn), 58. See also Hans Fenske, “Imperialistische Tendenzen in Deutschland vor 1866: Auswanderung, überseeische Bestrebungen, Weltmachtträume,” Historisches Jahrbuch 97/98 (1978), 336–383. Hans Fenske, “Ungeduldige Zuschauer: Die Deutschen und die europäische Expansion 1815–1880,” in Wolfgang Reinhard, ed., Imperialistische Kontinuität und nationale Ungeduld im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1991), 87–123; 98.

2

SEAPOWER AND FRONTIER SETTLEMENT …

37

21. Jens-Uwe Guettel, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States, 1776–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 22. List, National System, 270. 23. Ibid., 81. 24. Ibid., 270; see also chapters 21–22. For the discussion of the role of climate and colonialism in List’s economic thinking, see Mauro Boianovsky, “Friedrich List and the Economic Fate of Tropical Countries,” History of Political Economy 45 (2013), 647–691. 25. Friedrich List, “Le Système Naturel d’Économic Politique” (1837), quoted in Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany, 57. 26. List, Nationale System, 372–373; see also a less literal translation in List, National System, 269. 27. This is also the point Fitzpatrick makes by calling Weltpolitik and Lebensraum two sides of the same coin of German imperialism. I would argue, though, that the term Lebensraum is too closely associated with Nazi Germany’s genocidal policies in eastern Europe to be used in a more general sense: Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany, 11. 28. Friedrich List, “Die deutsche Flagge” (1843), in List, Schriften, vol. 7, 57. 29. List, National System, 102–103. 30. Ibid., 175–177; for the quote, ibid., 177. For the right of conquest, see also ibid., 410–411. 31. See the chapters on individual nations, List, National System, 3––106. 32. Szporluk, Communism, 123–124. 33. List, National System, 31. See also Szpoluk, Communism, 121. 34. List, National System, 171.On the surprisingly understudied subject of the German Customs Union, see W.O. Henderson, The Zollverein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975 [1939]). See also Emmanuel N. Roussakis, Friedrich List, the Zollverein, and the Uniting of Europe (Bruges: College of Europe, 1968); Hans-Werner Hahn, ed., Der deutsche Zollverein. Ökonomie und Nation im 19. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau, 2012). 35. List, National System, 387. 36. I could identify two older articles that provide detailed information, largely based on documents of Preussisches Geheimes Staatsarchiv in Berlin: Georg Smolka, “Auswanderung und Kolonisationsprojekte im Vormärz: Kalifornienplan und Texasverein,” in Franz Mayer, ed., Staat und Gesellschaft. Festgabe für Günther Küchenhoff (Göttingen: Otto Schwarz, 1967), 229–246; John A. Hawgood. “A Projected Prussian Colonization of Upper California,” Southern California Quarterly 48.4 (1966), 353–368. See also Fenske, “Imperialistische Tendenzen,” 370–371. 37. Smolka, “Auswanderung,” 235–236.

38

G. THUM

38. Hawgood, “Projected Prussian Colonization,” 362. See also Smolka, “Auswanderung,” 240. 39. Smolka, “Auswanderung,” 240–246. Fenske, “Imperialistische Tendenzen,” 371. The official name of the Texas Society was “Verein deutscher Edelleute und Fürsten zum Schutze deutscher Einwanderer in Texas.”. 40. List, National System, 430–432. 41. Ibid., 430. 42. Ibid., 432–433. 43. Ibid., 433. Regarding List’s advocacy for a German southeastward expansion, see Klaus Thörner, “Der ganze Südosten ist unser Hinterland”: Deutsche Südosteuropapläne von 1840 bis 1945 (Freiburg: ca ira, 2008), 19–34. 44. Friedrich List, “ Die Ackerverfassung, die Zwergwirtschaft und die Auswanderung (1842),” in List, Schriften, vol. 5, 418–547; especially 499–522. 45. List, “Ackerverfassung,” 499. 46. Ibid., 502. 47. Ibid. 48. Günter Wollstein, Das “Grossdeutschland” der Paulskirche: Nationale Ziele in der bürgerlichen Revolution von 1848/1849 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977), 269. 49. Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, trans. Clementina Black (London: Henry Frowde, 1905). 50. Friedrich Naumann, Mitteleuropa (Berlin: Reimer, 1915). 51. List, National System, 169. 52. For the pioneering work on this topic, see Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the ‘Non-Historic’ Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848, trans. John-Paul Himka (Glasgow: Critique Books, 1986). See also Szporluk, Communism, 169–192. 53. For the trip to Budapest, see Henderson, List, 108–109. For List’s correspondents, see List, Schriften, vol. 8. 54. Brian E. Vick. Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and the National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 55. List, National System, 56–57. 56. Ibid., 83. 57. Ibid., 58. 58. Ibid., 220. 59. For details regarding List’s death, see Wendler, List, 253–258; see also List, Schriften, vol. 8, 835–854. For von Bunsen’s letter to Friedrich Wilhelm IV, List, Schriften, vol. 7, 521–523; see also the deliberations within the Prussian government about a possible appointment for List, ibid., 633–635.

2

SEAPOWER AND FRONTIER SETTLEMENT …

39

60. Gregor Thum, “Megalomania and Angst. The Nineteenth-Century Mythicization of Germany’s Eastern Borderlands,” in Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 42–60; 47. See also Thöner, Der ganze Südosten, 48–67; Wollstein, Großdeutschland. 61. List, National System, 433–434. 62. List, “Ackerverfassung,” 499–520. 63. Friedrich List, “On the Advantages and Conditions of an Intimate Alliance between Great Britain and Germany” (1846), in List, Schriften, vol. 9, 140–159; Henderson, List, 117–123.

CHAPTER 3

The Fantasy of Open Space on the Frontier: Max Sering from the Great Plains to Eastern Europe Robert L. Nelson

Why was the German Agrarian Economist, Max Sering, so excited to see the abandoned farms of war-torn Latvia in September of 1915? What did this settlement specialist, one who had toiled for decades to eke out room for German farmers in the eastern Prussian provinces, experience in the flat fields of what had once been the land of the Teutonic Knights? The revelation that so thrilled Sering had been central to the settler colonizer’s gaze for centuries. It was the recognition that the land one had conquered was, in actual fact, “empty.” Once, long before, as a young man, Sering had encountered a frontier as an open space of possibility, a land he understood as being largely free of pesky humans getting in the way of gigantic state plans. In 1883, Sering had stood on the Great Plains of North America and witnessed what a nation state, a settler empire, with seemingly limitless space could

R. L. Nelson (B) University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_3

41

42

R. L. NELSON

undertake. Such a state had an ever-present safety valve for the citizens in its overfull, urban centers, a hinterland that it could divide into plots and provide to its people. For decades after his return to Germany Sering had had to “custom fit” the Homesteading model of North America into the much more densely populated “East” of the German Empire, a crowded arena filled with Germans and Poles, where seemingly every square inch was fought over, a struggle contemporary commentators quite literally called the “battle for the land” (Bodenkampf). One could not simply hand out 160-acre plots to German pioneers in an area that was so thickly populated with Polish “natives.” Especially given that these “natives” were Prussian citizens with legal rights, who had further orchestrated a powerful and effective counter-colonial project, stymieing Sering and his German settler colleagues at every turn. But suddenly, at the end of the Great Advance of 1915, in the wake of a retreating Russian Army that had absconded with every military-aged male they could find, and with those men’s families following eastward, Sering encountered a Latvia with less than half of its original population. He found agricultural land without people and he realized this was a realm outside of German laws, where whatever locals were left were not German citizens. These were subjects who could do little to stand in his, and Germany’s, way. He found open space on the frontier. He saw America. Immediately upon his return to Germany Sering wrote and submitted a report in which he claimed “[t]he average population density is, at twenty-five people per square kilometer, and outside the cities nineteen people per square kilometer, the same as western America.”1 In a major speech a few weeks later, at “The Conference for the Preservation and Strengthening of German National Power (Volkskraft),” he lamented that “previously empty continents [were] now covered with settlements and gigantic empires,” and that until now Germany had not had the luxury of simply sending its excess population out onto an empty frontier. But now everything had suddenly changed: “Without any overconfidence we can speak today of victory. The land that we alone in the East have conquered encompasses an area three-fifths the size of the German Empire.”2 By mid-November, in a speech in Rostock, Sering made clear the degree to which his jerry-rigged system of settling over the last thirty years, so-called “inner colonization,” could be largely abandoned on the new frontier in the East: “Simply put, we must rely more on the American model for Courland (Latvia) than our own native experience.”3 In the mind of

3

THE FANTASY OF OPEN SPACE ON THE FRONTIER …

43

the chief settler colonial planner for the German Empire, the conditions found on the American frontier had now appeared in the German East. Every time historians point to Hitler’s claim that the Volga would be Germany’s “Mississippi,” the reader is left wondering to what degree such comparisons were empty metaphors, or real links, truly comparative situations. What did Frederick the Great “mean” when he stated, “The Polish provinces may be compared to no state in Europe, they may only be likened to Canada.”4 In fact, some of the new villages in Frederick’s newly acquired Polish lands had names like Florida, Neu-Boston, and Quebec.5 However, often those doing the imagining, such as Hitler or Frederick, never set foot in North America. Their grandiose visions of the East did not encompass any concrete example of the American frontier, they were instead pulled from legends, myths, stories or, at best, their reading of travelers’ accounts and explanations. But is there in fact a figure of central importance in Germany’s settler colonial history of Eastern Europe who actually visited and studied the American western frontier? And if so, can we confidently assert that an intellectual (and practical) transfer of settler colonialism traveled from the American West to the German East? It is my contention that we do in fact have such a character in Max Sering. Germany’s preeminent expert on agricultural settlement, the country’s eminence grise behind the “inner colonial” program of settlement in the Prussian eastern provinces from 1886 to 1914, the very man sent to conquered Eastern Europe during the First World War to draw up plans for the settlement of millions of Germans on the newly won (and “empty”) frontier, had indeed experienced a life-changing transformation while studying American and Canadian settler colonization “on the ground” over a six-month period in 1883. This event, the concrete lessons of which he would carry throughout his life, were directly transferred from the American West to the German East over a decades-long process.

Experiencing Frontiers The agrarian romanticism that so imbued frontier settlement obsessives like Max Sering, appears to have taken hold in him already as a child. Born in the small Saxon village of Barby an der Elbe, the young Sering saw an idyllic medieval version of peasant life being destroyed by modernity, as a steady stream of farmer youth left the countryside for work in the nearby metropolis of Magdeburg. Attending school in that city, he saw the

44

R. L. NELSON

nightmare of stinking, overcrowded tenement buildings into which those farmers had moved. In 1872, Sering’s father, a music teacher, received an appointment at the Reichsuniversität in Strasbourg, in what had become a newly conquered “frontier” of the German Empire, Alsace-Lorraine. Indeed, in colonial fashion, this territory did not attain provincial status, and was instead directly overseen from Berlin, as a Reichsland. For the most part, incoming Germans openly began a “civilizing mission” to bring out the “Germanness” of the Alsatian natives, a people who had undergone decades of French assimilationist policies. Thus, by the time he matriculated at the Reichsuniversität in 1877, to study with such famous professors as Gustav Schmoller and Friedrich Knapp, Sering was already built to understand the life of farmers, as well as respect the challenges of life on the frontier.6 America, the land where farming and frontier life could be found in abundance, was a place of increasing interest to Germany. As other chapters in this volume make abundantly clear, Germans throughout the nineteenth century were infatuated with the US, as a land of opportunity and as an example of liberal democracy. By the early 1880s, it was also becoming an example of a meteoric rise in global power. The US was producing so much grain, so cheaply, that Germany’s agrarian elite, the landed aristocracy of the eastern provinces, the Junker, were under increasing economic pressure. At the same time, the medieval hangover of a land ownership structure that created a huge underclass of landless laborers was now seeing those farmhands leaving the East in droves. They were traveling west, but while many stopped for the industrial jobs in cities like Magdeburg, many more continued oversees, to America, where they could quickly become owners of 160 acres of land on the western frontier. Such a loss of population anywhere in Germany was a cause for concern, but there was a special situation on the eastern frontier as fully ten percent of Prussia was Polish, and in the provinces of West Prussia and Posen, many areas had a Polish majority. The higher Polish birthrate only increased the fear that these provinces were being “polonized.” Under these circumstances, the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture contacted Gustav Schmoller, asking that a six-month investigation of the North American agricultural economy be undertaken, and did he have anyone to recommend? As it happened, in 1881, Schmoller’s star student, Max Sering, had completed his PhD and was now in need of a new topic for his Habilitation, the postdoctoral project required in Germany in order to receive a tenured chair. Under the guidance of Erwin Nasse

3

THE FANTASY OF OPEN SPACE ON THE FRONTIER …

45

at the University of Bonn, Sering took a deep dive into the literature on agriculture and settlement in North America during the winter of 1882– 1883, submitted his report, and in February traveled to Bremen where he boarded the Werra, and embarked for North America. He thus began a journey that would set his life’s trajectory, and profoundly influence Germany’s settler colonial evolution. Upon his arrival in New York, Sering had little chance to take in the bustling polyglot metropolis before immediately departing for Washington D.C., where he consulted with several officials from the Department of Agriculture on the nuts and bolts of settlement.7 Sering completed his East Coast briefings in the academic environs of New Haven, where he stayed at the home of Henry Walcott Farnam. Having also studied with Sering’s supervisor Schmoller, Farnam welcomed the young Sering, and importantly introduced him to his father, a central figure in both canal and railroad construction, the kind of transportation networks Sering would later describe as key to any frontier settlement project. Farnam wrote Schmoller that although they had had a nice time, the eager twenty-six-year-old Sering had spent far too much time writing in his journal.8 Upon bidding adieu, Sering boarded a train and began his explorations, heading west toward the Great Plains. In a mere thirteen days, Sering traveled from the East to the West Coast, via Chicago, Omaha, Pike’s Peak and Salt Lake City, before setting up his base in San Francisco. He thus passed “through” the frontier after a fashion. Although the famous Battle of the Little Bighorn had occurred a mere seven years earlier, Sering saw in the Great Plains a huge open space being turned into farms and ranches for incoming settlers, in a relatively orderly, government-regulated fashion. His first extended stay, however, was in the already hundred-year-old settlement of San Francisco. Over sixteen days in early April, Sering made several trips throughout the area, often seeking out Germans who had settled nearby. After scouting out Sacramento, San Jose and Monterey, Sering conferred with the German-American Professor of Agricultural Chemistry at Berkeley, Eugene Hilgard. Now armed with extensive soil knowledge, Sering inspected the rich Sacramento Valley, visited a farm in Red Bluff, and was amazed at the sheer size of the largest vineyard in the world, Great Vina Ranch, through which he strolled with its owner, former Governor Leland Stanford. Sering visited with the German-American “Father of Merced,” Henry Huffmann, and learned of the importance of wheat hauling and storing in the continental railway

46

R. L. NELSON

system. Finishing up in the Santa Clara Valley, Sering was struck by the enormous, yet still uncharted potential of this region, what would become America’s bread basket. The efficacy of industrial irrigation was as of yet still unproven, but in any case, for Sering, such a system did not jive with his romantic ideal of the independent yeoman farmer on the frontier. He packed up and boarded a ship for a two-day journey along the coast, then up the Columbia, disembarking at the small but bustling city of Portland on 20 April. Although again not “wild” in terms of lawlessness, the Pacific Northwest was definitely one of the final frontiers of settlement in North America. Once again seeking out the company of German-Americans, Sering set off from Portland for a six-day journey with the Speyer-born railroad baron Henry Villard. Villard had attempted to found a colony of Germans in Kansas in 1856. He was now, in April 1883, the President of the Northern Pacific Railway and attempting to complete the line from Portland to Montana by September.9 They traveled for two days along the Columbia River, overlooking a view Sering would later say was one of the most beautiful in all of North America, before detraining and taking coaches through Umatilla to Blue Mountain. The first stage of this journey was an experience that Sering would never forget, as they passed though the Indian Reservation of the Umatilla people. After having been forcibly settled on this plot of land in 1855, as late as 1879 the Umatilla had fought white settlers over access to food resources.10 The pitiable conditions Sering saw in 1883 led him to acknowledge that here was a settler colonial plan structured around the confinement, starving out and erasure of Indigenous peoples. Weeks later, in Manitoba, Sering saw something closer to assimilation, when he visited a Métis farming colony wherein these people of mixed Indigenous and European heritage had been taught European methods of farming.11 This contrasting approach to dealing with “natives,” assimilation or removal, was central to the question of what to do with non-German peoples in the German East. Sering would always encourage the assimilation of Slavic peoples, not their removal. Sering made his first excursion into Canada at this point, spending a week traveling up to Victoria and back. About the entire region, Sering later wrote, “A few words are more than enough to describe the cultural possibilities of this region.”12 For a man who came to idealize the flat, open agricultural settlement possibilities of the Great Plains and Prairies, the rugged coastline, jagged peaks and narrow (but fertile) river valleys of

3

THE FANTASY OF OPEN SPACE ON THE FRONTIER …

47

Cascadia were not the mark of a major settler empire. Sering was nevertheless in awe of the ninety-meter tall hemlocks he saw in the White River Valley south of Seattle. He left Portland on 22 May, and headed East through Walla Walla on his way to Bismarck in the Dakota Territory, where he arrived on 6 June. Here in the vast, forest-less prairies, with endless fields of wheat, Sering found the platonic settler farmer ideal. Settlers had been given free land, and unlike the landless, class-based system of the German East, here, Sering argued, they felt deeply connected to the land they owned, and were therefore hardworking, and were producing huge amounts of grain. This form of settlement, providing land to one’s own citizens within the borders of one’s own nation, as opposed to overseas colonial settlement, is something that Sering would call “inner colonization,” and a version of this is exactly what he would promote as a salve to Germany’s depopulation in the East. But on the Great Plains Sering also identified problems with such a system, issues that he would wrestle with to the end of his days. Perhaps the single biggest predicament was that of speculation. Upon his arrival in the pleasingly named Bismarck, Sering spoke to a railway employee who had flipped his free homestead, now within the city limits, for a price of $75,000. Sering would later hear that within a year of his visit, the entire real estate bubble of Bismarck had popped. Throughout his journey he learned of planned cities that were never built, and of the re-routing of railroads, all because of the boom and bust of speculation. At the heart of the problem was the question of entailment: were Germany to give land to German settlers in the East, could the government legally prevent them from flipping the land? Such a restriction would look an awful lot like the feudalism that so many of the settlers on the Great Plains were running away from. And was it not the actual freedom from such medieval shackles that provided the very spirit of the wildly successful North American settler West? Sering was never able to fully solve this problem. The other reality with which Sering had to come to terms with was that of “bonanza farms,” gigantic undertakings of sometimes 75,000 acres, operations that had swallowed up smaller nearby farms, and now employed farmhands in what was much more akin to wage employment than some Jeffersonian ideal of yeomen farming. In the coming decades Sering was all for the breakup of huge Junker estates in Eastern Germany, to be parceled out to small, independent farmers. Thus, what he saw happening

48

R. L. NELSON

on the idyllic western plain, the capitalist “freedom” to buy up and create huge farms, a kind of “serfdom-lite,” surely irked him. A month long side trip to the Prairies of Canada provided a fascinating parallel for Sering to compare and contrast the two frontiers. The relatively harsher climate to the north had resulted in a slower, and therefore less chaotic, less lawless, initial settlement. Unlike in the US, the Mounties for the most part kept ahead of the settlers, establishing “peace, order and good government.” For Sering there was the added element of border settling, so important in East Central Europe, with the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and its concomitant population settling along its length, keeping relatively close to the forty-ninth parallel and thereby preventing a northern encroachment of American settlers. Added to this was a seemingly even “emptier” frontier, the true tabula rasa onto which the settler could carve his quadrants. Nevertheless, Canada had a similar problem of speculation, with the CPR sometimes taking irrational paths to avoid purchasing property that had skyrocketed in price. Sering also had to confront the issue of “rational” agricultural choice (which would have been a belt of good soil running through the middle of Saskatchewan and Alberta), versus the “nationalist” choice of running the CPR through the arid scrub and grasslands that hugged the American border. Later on, settlers in the German East would spend enormous energy trying to reclaim moors for farming, and attempting to make such swampland appealing to incoming settlers, all in the name of strengthening the German nation against the Polish threat. On the way back to the US, south of Winnipeg, Sering visited a Mennonite community and was very pleased to find that, despite more than a century as a diaspora surrounded by non-Germans, first in Russia and now in Canada, these people still maintained their Germanic language and identity. But what Sering then encountered had him worried about the ability to maintain German nationalism in settler colonialism on nonGerman lands, for the children of the German-Americans he met in Belleville, Iowa, spoke English in the streets, and a certain Mr. Frentz in Monmouth, Illinois, no longer understood German. The maintenance of German “islands of speech” in a sea of Slavic otherness would always be a paramount concern in the German East. The sheer rapidity of settler colonial advancement left Sering in awe, as he realized the 800 km through which he traveled from Omaha to Chicago had been completely settled within one and a half generations. Indeed, the reckless speed of settling “too much” emptiness was on

3

THE FANTASY OF OPEN SPACE ON THE FRONTIER …

49

display when Sering visited the German-American Charles Rümelin at his farm near Dent, Ohio, in early September. Rümelin had lived here for fifty years and witnessed the frontier come and go. The first wave of settlers had arrived, deforested the region, then sold their land and moved on to the new frontier, leaving in their wake a landscape of empty farms overrun with weeds. Two weeks later Sering was aboard the Elbe on his way home, already converting what he had learned on the American western frontier into useful knowledge for an agricultural settler colonialism that, he hoped, would solve the problems of the new German Empire.

Homesteads for Germany: Inner Colonization, 1886 to 1914 Shortly after his return, at his new base in Bonn, Sering gave his Habilitationsrede, a speech on his research that completed his formal requirements to attain a permanent teaching position. This talk was expanded and published in 1884 in his doctoral supervisor’s own journal, known colloquially as Schmollers Jahrbuch, and was simply entitled, “The Agrarian Politics of the United States of America.” This article laid out the Leitidee of Sering’s entire career, the kernel of which could be found in the opening sentence, “The economic history of the North American republic is that of a colonizing Volk.”13 This fact, and its link to the vaulting of the US into the league of Great Powers, is exactly what Sering would spend his entire career importing into Germany, the role of being a “colonizing Volk” in the East. But the painful contrast at the heart of the comparison of the two frontiers was the fantasy and yearning for open space: while America conquered “a not yet existing society, in an immense, hardly settled space,” Germany was forced to deal with “old lands” where every innovation was frustrated by a palimpsest of traditions and peoples.14 Sering directly compared the high modern grid of 160-acre rectangles, with all their orderly beauty, to the ancient, unmappable property lines of the German East, and the resultant interminable squabbling. Despite the fantasy, however, Sering was often a realist, pointing out that the American grid made no allowances for hills, streams, and wasteland, and a mere look at how roads could only follow property lines unveiled the sometimes absurd nature of much of the system. Sering then, for the first time, threw down the gauntlet in what would be a lifelong fight. In describing antebellum America, he praised the small, independent landowning yeomen farmers of the North, claiming that

50

R. L. NELSON

this model had triumphed against the slaveholding South and was now conquering the western frontier. He then condemned the South, with its huge estates and landless labor. This was a useful, and thinly veiled, heuristic to attack the conditions in eastern Germany, where the landed elite, the Junker, owned vast estates, employed landless labor, or worse, seasonal Polish migrants, and directly worked against the kind of yeomen agricultural structure that would be required to recreate the American West in the German East. Sering would return to this comparison over and over again throughout his life, and was, unsurprisingly, seen as a mortal enemy by the Junker. In his discussion of the 1862 American Homestead Act, Sering honed in on what he had already encountered on the frontier as its Achilles’ heel: speculation. Although the Act stated that the land was to be given for free if the homesteader stayed for a minimum of five years, improving the land, Sering noted that one could purchase the property, after a mere six months, for a “minimum price,” and flip it. Although Sering here made the lofty claim that Germans had a deeper connection to the soil and would not treat it like a commodity, he knew there was an insolvable puzzle at the center of any homesteading scheme. Sering ended this article by stating that the German people were wandering again “after more than a thousand year rest,” and they were unfortunately migrating over the ocean due to the enticing prospects of an organization of agricultural land that would provide them with their own farm. It was a top-down government system that had created the situation on the western frontier, Sering pointed out, leaving the reader to fill in the blank as to what Germany should now do.15 While Sering settled down in Bonn and spent the next four years turning his travel notes into a major book, Chancellor Bismarck’s regime undertook to turn the Prussian Polish lands into a settlement frontier. Their first move, in fact, aped the treatment of many Indigenous people on the American frontier: removal. In March of 1885, 32,000 Russian and Austrian Poles (a third of whom were Jewish), were expelled from Prussian Poland. But unlike the American frontier, where virtually all native peoples could be denied legal rights and expelled from the coveted territory, millions of native Poles were citizens of Prussia and therefore could not be removed.16 A different scheme would be necessary to reverse the “polonization” of the German East. Alongside Sering’s article on the need for a governmentally organized program of land parcellation and settlement, akin to the bureauctratic scheme he had observed in

3

THE FANTASY OF OPEN SPACE ON THE FRONTIER …

51

North America, there was a growing clamoring among Schmoller and his fellow professors in the Society for Social Policy (Verein für Sozialpolitik) for a system to provide land for German farmers threatening to leave the country. In December 1885, Bismarck’s advisor, Christoph von Tiedemann, was asked to formulate a permanent fix for the crisis in the East, and he provided the Chancellor with a memorandum in January 1886 that would be enormously influential for German settler colonialism.17 Using the memorandum as a framework, Bismarck championed and eventually successfully inaugurated the Prussian Settlement Commission which set up and ran the Program of Inner Colonization, a scheme whereby one hundred million marks were placed in a fund in order to buy up bankrupt Polish estates and provide them to (ideally incoming) German farmers, in an attempt to increase both the German population and German landholdings in the two, most threatened, Prussian provinces of West Prussia and Posen. Over the next twenty-eight years, the Program struggled, both in its attempts to wrestle land from Polish hands, and to entice Germans to “go east,” instead of “west.” After the initial few years of outbidding Poles and actually increasing German land holdings, the Polish community set up their own “land banks” to help keep Polish farms afloat, or at the very least, retain them in Polish hands. At the same time, there was little incentive for German settlers to enter into the crowded field of groups fighting over every yard of arable soil. In other words, missing from the German attempt to create a settler colonial frontier was the one thing that was so enticing about the American example: open space. By 1914, the 22,000 German families brought in to the threatened provinces via the Program of Inner Colonization, had failed to reverse the demographic trend.18 Over the course of these three decades, Max Sering became the godfather of “inner colonization,” publishing key works and becoming the public intellectual face of settler colonialism within the German borders. Four years after his return from North America, he published his monumental study, The Agricultural Competition of North America in the Present and Future. Agriculture, Colonization, and Transportation in the United States and in British North America. To emphasize his belief that the free provision of land was the key to settler success, Sering pointed out that although in the American East overpopulation was a “push” factor for emigration to the frontier, that was decidedly not the case in the German East. Directly contradicting a colonial rhetoric being spouted in Germany that argued that an overpopulated Germany needed

52

R. L. NELSON

a release valve via overseas colonies, Sering stated that a huge proportion of Germany’s emigrants came from the thinly populated eastern provinces. The only “push” from that area, as was recounted to him by many German-Americans on the Great Plains, was the intolerable situation of greedy Junker owning all the land. Sering argued that although crucial differences between the settlement zones (namely the presence or lack of both open land and ancient traditions) meant that Germany could not simply import the American settler colonial model. Ultimately however a government-controlled system of provision of land to independent farmers would have to be practiced in Germany if it was to stay competitive on the world stage. For now, unfortunately, Sering admitted that there continued to be “viel Raum,” much space, on the American frontier.19 In 1893, Sering published another book that firmly placed his stamp on the field, The Inner Colonization of Eastern Germany. Right at the outset Sering made clear who he considered as the obstacle to inner colonization. It was not the native Pole, but the landowning aristocracy, the Junker. It was not just that, unlike America, Germany lacked open space. There was indeed a lot of empty space, but it was found on the huge estates of the Junker, each of which tended to be farmed by incoming, seasonal Polish workers. Such a system kept empty land empty. Despite the Junker being portrayed as the backbone to preserving Conservative power in Germany, both Sering, and his younger colleague Max Weber, saw these men as profoundly un-nationalistic, for instead of thickly peopling the eastern frontier by parceling out their estates to German yeomen farmers, they were instead driving landless Germans overseas to Nebraska while simultaneously polonizing the East with their cheap imported labor. In other words, Sering wanted to create the open space of the American frontier by divvying up the lands of the aristocracy, a position he never let go of and which made him permanently persona non grata with the Junker. Fascinatingly, Sering felt the need to respond to what was clearly the belief by some that eastern settlement would be too difficult and too “multicultural,” with Rheinlanders living next to Swabians, and tillers of Badenese soil having to get used to the dirt of Posen. Sering admitted that there would be some growing pains, but it would be nothing like the polyglot world of the American West, with vastly different temperatures, agricultural situations, and mutually unintelligible ethnicities. That Germans should choose the German frontier over the American was,

3

THE FANTASY OF OPEN SPACE ON THE FRONTIER …

53

according to Sering, “undoubtedly correct.”20 As such arguments indicated, getting settlers to go east in the first place was always a struggle, and for this reason, the German frontier never had the serious problem in speculation, and property flipping, that Sering feared. Nevertheless, preventing speculation via some form of entailing the farmers to the land continued to be a fraught question at the heart of “inner colonization” debates. Famously, the western frontier did indeed “close,” and Sering was in fact back in America in 1893, visiting the very World’s Fair in Chicago where Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier to be now closed. On this, the second of his three journeys to America, Sering noted the increased usage of mechanization on large American farms which allowed, he claimed, one farmer to do the work of two. Were German farmers to adopt such technology they would better be able to compete with nations “of a lower cultural level than us, who threaten to pull our standard of living down to theirs, and it is these very people who command weapons that would render impossible any honourable fight. Above all I [Sering] speak of Russia and Argentina.”21 By the turn of the century Sering had become a nationally recognized figure, strongly associated with a conservative agrarian romantic tradition, for after all, he saw Germany’s future strength in a program that siphoned workers away from cities and onto the land. Yet, because of his profoundly anti-Junker position, grounded in a deeply romantic and nationalistic approach to the German East, he was never easy to pinpoint politically. Also difficult to gauge was his relationship to the growing colonial lobby in Germany. Although interested in both the Great Power status of possessing overseas colonies, as well as the needed raw materials these could supply, Sering always argued that a large overseas population of German settlers living in strange tropical environments was not the kind of settlement that would ultimately strengthen the German Empire.22 It was instead a settler colonialism much closer to home, on the eastern frontier, that would achieve his imperial ambitions. But as already mentioned, the Program of Inner Colonization was frustrated at every turn, and as Sering well knew, he would never find his American frontier in a land full of “natives” with the rights of citizenship, and a landed elite that seemed wholly uninterested in settling pioneers on their own barley fields. Something had to change for Sering’s dreams to come true.

54

R. L. NELSON

The Creation of Open Frontier: Germany Conquers the East, 1914–1918 Sering spent much of the first year of the Great War obsessed with the British naval blockade of Germany. Not only had Germany been cut off from its colonies, but also global trade. How would Germany feed itself, and prosecute a world war, under such circumstances? For the time being the Program of Inner Colonization in West Prussia and Posen was not at the forefront of his mind. Still, although the Russian invasion of East Prussia had been repelled, Germany’s eastern border remained unclear. Already at the end of 1914, and into the new year, many settlement experts were scheming to take advantage of wartime conditions. Their plans for the East focused on the creation of “open space,” the missing component in the Junker-controlled, Polish-infested Prussian provinces. Prompted by Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, several of these experts submitted reports for a plan to create such space, the socalled “border strip.”23 A corridor of land just east of Prussia would be annexed, an “Indian Removal” of Poles living there would take place, an ethnic cleansing, and the entire region would be given over to incoming German farmers. What is crucial to understand is that this was not a radical new way of thinking about settler colonialism in the German East, but instead involved the very men who had been leaders in the frustrating experience of “inner colonization” in Germany for the last three decades. These were thinkers who had been stymied by a lack of space, and who now saw that war might solve this intractable problem. Within a few months, the war would give them all the land they could ever desire. From late Spring to September 1915, the Great Advance of the German Army created a front line just west of Riga and running south through Belarus. Germany had quite suddenly inherited a “Wild East,” already emptied out by the conflict. As the military machine settled down for the winter, none other than Max Sering arrived in its wake to fulfill his settler colonial fantasy. Sering traveled through vanquished Poland on the way to Lithuania and Courland. The latter, a region of Latvia, loomed large in the nationalist imagination as it had been settled by Germanic Teutonic Knights in the 1200s, whose descendants were still there as Baltic German barons. Standing on an abandoned farm in the flat agricultural land just south of Mitau (Jelgava) it would have been very easy to “see” Iowa or Manitoba. Not only was the land now relatively “empty” (having been

3

THE FANTASY OF OPEN SPACE ON THE FRONTIER …

55

depopulated by the retreating Russians), the local native Latvians were not Prussian citizens, and were therefore legally much more akin to Native Americans under American hegemony. In 1916, in the journal Panther, Sering published his plans for the settling of up to two million Germans on this empty land.24 He consulted with General Ludendorff on how this could be administered in what was in effect a military colony, the so-called Ober Ost, encompassing Lithuania, Latvia, and a large section of Belarus.25 When it came to the Belarusian steppe, Sering’s vision of the frontier, and who owned what land, had taken on truly grand dimensions. Hitherto, the relatively moderate Sering had shied away from the ethnic cleansing element of the “border strip” idea, but was nevertheless keen to have that area de-polonized. He alighted on a certain solution: provide the newly founded (and German-controlled) Kingdom of Poland its own settler colonial frontier, Belarus, and Poles from the (full) west would be enticed to the (empty) east and settle there of their own accord. Concerning those who already lived in the east, Sering claimed that White Russians (Belarusians) merely passed over the land, but did not really use it, and thus had no real claim to own it.26 This was pure Jeffersonian language of the kind used to justify taking land from Native Americans on the American frontier.27 Of course, after the Treaty of Brest Litovsk in March 1918, Germans had a colonial empire of a size beyond their wildest imagination. Sering was guest lecturing to German officers in Kiev in September of that year, just as the very first German settlers were arriving in Latvia. And as the Western Front was collapsing. For a brief moment, Germany was at the apex of its settler colonial power, it had fulfilled its fantasy of “open space.” Millions of German soldiers, and thinkers like Max Sering, experienced this elation. Within weeks it would all be taken away. But what had been achieved would not be forgotten.

The Legacy of an Eastern Frontier: Sering in the Weimar Years, and the Nadir of Nazi Empire In a shocking twist in the history of German settler colonialism, one that would be repeated post-1945, the very planners of “distant” colonization were suddenly forced to focus on the resettlement of Germans inside a now smaller Germany following the Treaty of Versailles. Already before the Armistice, Sering had been asked to begin planning a renewed “inner colonization,” one that would provide farmland to the soon-to-be

56

R. L. NELSON

veterans who had sacrificed so much. In the chaos that followed defeat, Sering quickly wrote up the new Reich Settlement Law, which came into effect already in January 1919. In it, the power and control over land and people that had so enthused Sering and other planners during the war was apparent and there was no patience for dealing with obstinate Junker. The Law decreed that the government could expropriate a third of Junker holdings, to create the open territory required for settlement. The frontier, which had jumped from Posen to Riga, was now, in the wake of Versailles and the creation of Poland, much closer to Berlin. Despite the Junker’s ability to thwart this expropriation throughout the 1920s, Sering continued to plot his fantasy of an open frontier, now inside the Weimar Republic. In an article in 1930, he contrasted the now thickly populated western frontier of Poland, to the relatively “empty” Prussian East. He stated that the Polish “desire for Lebensraum” was strong, and that if the Germans did not fill up their thinly populated East, the Poles would.28 Nevertheless, there was no state money to purchase property during the lean years of Weimar and the Junker continued in their recalcitrant ways. This situation made it easy for Hitler to attack inner colonization, in Mein Kampf , arguing that a limited amount of soil can only feed so many people, and that it is in fact the vast amount of land for settlement that makes America so powerful. Therefore, he argued, Germany needed to have a “colonial policy” that acquired more land in Europe, not overseas.29 Although he served on the Western Front, Hitler was a part of the Army that had defeated Russia and created a vast colonial empire in the East, and already in 1918, he would have met many men who had experienced, first hand, that great German victory. As Sering’s international reputation continued to grow in the 1920s, he spent much of his time combatting the “evils” of the Diktat of Versailles. And in this he made plain that despite the war, he was still fond of America, and he very much pinned his hopes on that country to free up the global economy (for German trade) and to pressure the UK and France to weaken the reparations’ stranglehold on Germany.30 In 1930, Sering made his third and final journey to the US, giving a talk at the International Conference of Agrarian Economists, at Cornell. There he told his audience that his journeys through America some forty-seven and thirty-seven years earlier were some of his “most cherished memories.”31 From Ithaca he traveled as far as Fargo, visiting some of the farms he had seen decades ago. As he had predicted, none of the German-Americans he met still spoke German. The frontier was long closed, but, in line

3

THE FANTASY OF OPEN SPACE ON THE FRONTIER …

57

with his critique of the Junker in the East, he noted that the huge farms of Kansas resulted in a thinly populated landscape, something his own country could not afford to have for national defense purposes in the “threatened East.”32 With the Nazi seizure of power, a more extreme, biological form of settler colonialism led to the sidelining of Max Sering. The problem was the question of race, and assimilation versus removal. One could say that despite his love of the American frontier, Sering’s understanding of how to create “open space” was not “American enough” for the Nazis. In both his approach to the Poles of eastern Germany, pre-1914, as well as what he wrote about remaining Latvian farmers in 1916, Sering believed that “erasure” would take place through assimilation, a cultural rather than literal genocide. Surrounding Poles and Latvians with German farmers, German agricultural technique, and German Kultur, would ultimately “germanize” these people. Of course, he was overjoyed by the convenience that the Russians had physically erased, or removed, a significant number of Latvians already when he arrived in 1915, but he never wanted to be seen as the one recommending such horrific, violent means as a part of his understanding of settler colonialism. Nazi racial settlement experts, lead by Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture SSObergrüppenführer Walther Darré, believed assimilation to be impossible, and physical removal of non-Germans to be the only answer for settlement. After Darré published his plan for a German agricultural scheme in which the racial purity of the farmers was at the heart of how land would be inherited and distributed, Sering publicly criticized such an “unscientific” approach, and was then quickly removed from positions of influence.33 During his last years, Sering continued to rail against the Nazis, as is richly detailed in the diary of the American Ambassador William Dodd. Sering’s many American colleagues had told the history professor to seek out Sering once he was settled in the Third Reich, and on more than one occasion Dodd describes Sering speaking out against the regime at public gatherings.34 Nevertheless, by the late 1930s, Sering’s frontier gaze was once again active, this time in his publications declaring that Southeastern Europe, along the Danube, would be an excellent candidate for economic union with Germany, what with its rich raw materials and, once again, low population density.35 Sering died in November 1939 just after the Nazi conquest of Poland. The lands that Sering had spent decades helping germanize, which had

58

R. L. NELSON

then been lost to the new Poland post-Versailles, were now reincorporated into the German Reich and renamed the Warthegau. This time, however, settlement experts did not want to deal with native Poles, and in December of 1939, a program of removal was begun. Poles from the Warthegau were to be ethnically cleansed, forcibly transferred to the Generalgouvernement, the huge dumping ground carved out of central and southern Poland. They were to be given enough of an education to work for their occupiers, but ultimately, like the Native Americans Sering had seen on the Umatilla Reservation, Poles were supposed to become a “vanishing race.” Some 400,000 Poles were deported by the summer of 1940, as many as were sent westwards to work deeper inside Germany as forced labor. But after that the program petered out. There were too many Poles, and in fact, many of them simply walked back to the Warthegau after deportation.36 Instead, the Nazis would turn their attention to a more solvable problem, the Jews they had confined to ghettos throughout Polish territory.

Conclusion When Max Sering stood on the western frontier in 1883, he imagined a settler colonialism for Germany, one in which an “empty space” was an elusive, yet key ingredient. Although he shied away from any violent solution, he spent more than fifty years creating a settler colonial frontier in Germany’s East, a frontier which, like the American West, he believed could make Germany a truly great land empire. Although he never advocated for violence in order to see his plans through, he welcomed its results. Through the combination of his inspirations and goals, the methods he used, alongside the logistical roadblocks he overcame, Sering unquestionably helped create the conditions, and normalized a settler colonial mindset, that paved the way for a Nazi settler colonialism of removal and genocide, and the creation of open space on the frontier. The story of settler colonial frontiers in East Central Europe ended with two ironic twists. First was the fate of the Warthegau. After decades of German inner colonization, it was the Poles who would successfully complete the removal of other people (the Germans) and then complete an ethnically “pure” settlement. In the wake of the Second World War, reborn Poland was shifted west, as the Russians annexed the eastern third of the post-Versailles Poland, while much of Germany’s West Prussia, Posen, and Silesia became western Poland. Virtually all Germans in this

3

THE FANTASY OF OPEN SPACE ON THE FRONTIER …

59

space were forcibly removed, and the Polish refugees from the East then arrived and settled in the “open space.” Finally, although their teacher was now dead, the generation of “inner colonization” settlement experts that Sering had trained were kept very busy in post-war West Germany, performing a grand act of settler colonialism, in what was the final German “frontier.” Throughout the late 1940s, some ten to twelve million ethnic Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe, the vast majority of whom ended up in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), a bombed out, starving, occupied country. Once the postwar emergency had ended, and rebuilding was underway in the 1950s, the very settlement experts who had looked east, now focussed on the heartland. A massive program to settle the refugees on farm plots in the FRG was undertaken, an endeavor of astounding scale, as a quarter of the entire FRG population in 1960 were expellees.37 Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, Germany’s “Great Plains” were filled to capacity and the last refugee camp in the FRG was closed in 1970. The journal of the settlement experts, Innere Kolonisation, in a 1976 editorial, wondered what their mission would be, now that the refugees had been settled.38 The periodical briefly transformed into an environmentalist publication, before finally shutting down in 1981. Some ninety years after the US frontier was declared closed, so too German “frontier” settlement came to an end.

Notes 1. Max Sering, “Bericht ueber die eroberten Gebiete des Nordostens und ueber die deutsch-russischen Beziehungen,” 1. HA 90, number 2697, Geheimes Staatsarchiv preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. 2. N.a, “Ländliches Siedelungswesen,” Deutsche Kurier, n. 8, 8.1.16. 3. Max Sering’s speech is found in the minutes recorded in Vereinigung für exakte Wirtschaftsforschung. Studienkommission für Erhaltung des Bauernstandes, für Kleinsiedlung und Landarbeit. Vierte Sitzung am 15./16. November 1915. III. Rücksiedlung von Auslandsdeutschen und Sammlung deutsch-russischer Kolonisten in Kurland. V. Ausschaltung der Bodenspekulation im neuen Ostland (Rostock: Carl Boldt’sche Hofbuchdruckerei, 1915), 207. 4. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 273.

60

R. L. NELSON

5. Marion W. Gray, “Frederick the Great’s Internal Colonization Projects: Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Society,” paper presented at the German Studies Association, San Diego, 2007. 6. For good overviews of life in this “colony,” see Dan P. Silverman, Reluctant Union: Alsace-Lorraine and Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974), and John E. Craig, Scholarship and Nation Building: The Universities of Strasbourg and Alsatian Society, 1870–1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 7. The entire journey described in this section is detailed in Max Sering, Die landwirthschaftliche Konkurrenz Nordamerikas in Gegenwart und Zukunft. Landwirthschaft, Kolonisation und Verkehrswesen in den Vereinigten Staaten und in Britisch-Nordamerika (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1887). 8. Erik Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 45, fn 62. I thank Erik Grimmer-Solem for this reference. 9. It is interesting to note, as evidence for Sering of the boom and bust nature of both rail building and land speculation, that the Northern Pacific went bankrupt soon after its completion, and Villard was back in Germany by 1884. 10. Carl Waldman, Encyclopedia of American Tribes, rev. ed. (New York: Checkmark Books, 1999), 255–256. 11. For an extensive discussion of this and Sering’s other experiences in Canada, see Robert L. Nelson, “A German on the Prairies: Max Sering and Settler Colonialism in Canada,” Settler Colonial Studies 5 (2019), 1–19. 12. Sering, Die landwirthschaftliche Konkurrenz, 300. 13. Max Sering, “Die Landpolitik der Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika,” Schmollers Jahrbuch 8 (1884), 439. 14. Sering, “Landpolitik,” 440. 15. Sering, “Landpolitik,” 483–495. 16. Matthew Fitzpatrick, Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), Chapter 4. 17. Christoph von Tiedemann, “Denkschrift betreffend einige Maßregeln zur Germanisirung der Provinz Posen,” No. 66, N2308, Bundesarchiv, Berlin (Lichterfeld). 18. Scott M. Eddie, Landownership in Eastern Germany Before the Great War: A Quantitative Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 19. Sering, Die landwirthschaftliche Konkurrenz, 62. 20. Max Sering, Die innere Kolonisation im östlichen Deutschland (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1893), 230–242.

3

THE FANTASY OF OPEN SPACE ON THE FRONTIER …

61

21. Max Sering, “Das Sinken der Getreidepreise und die Konkurrenz des Auslandes,” in Vier Vorlesungen von Prof. Dr. M. Sering (Berlin: Telge, 1894), 23. 22. See for instance his speech “Die Politik der Grundbesitzverteilung in den grossen Reichen,” in Verhandlungen des Königlichen Landes-ÖkonomieKollegiums (Berlin: Parey, 1912), 357–389. 23. This episode is most famously analyzed in Imanuel Geiss, Der polnische Grenzstreifen, 1914–1918. Ein Beitrag zur Deutschen Kriegszielpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Lübeck: Matthiesen, 1960). 24. Max Sering, “Ansiedlungsverhältnisse und Siedlungsmöglichkeiten in den besetzten Gebieten des Ostens,” Der Panther: Deutsche Monatschrift für Politik und Volkstum 4.10 (1916), 1265–1276. 25. This region is carefully detailed in the seminal work of Vejas Liulevicius, see his, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 26. Max Sering, “Die Zukunft Polens,” in N/1210/121, number 21, Bundesarchiv, Koblenz. 27. Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 28. Max Sering, “Die Notwendigkeit intensiver Siedlungsarbeit im Osten und die Mittel zu ihrer Durchführung,” Archiv für innere Kolonisation 22 (1930), 148–156. 29. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 133–138. 30. One of his works appeared in English: Max Sering, Germany Under the Dawes Plan: Origin, Legal Foundations, and Economic Effects of the Reparation Payments, trans. S. Milton Hart (London: P.S. King, 1929). 31. Max Sering, “Causes of the International Depression of Agriculture,” in Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Agricultural Economists, Held at Cornell University, Ithaca NY, 18–29 August 1930 (Menasha, WI: The Collegiate Press, 1930), 21. 32. Max Sering, “Die internationale Agrarkrise,” in Verhandlungen des Vereins für Sozialpolitik in Königsberg 1930. Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik 182 (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1931), 105. 33. Irene Stoehr, “Von Max Sering zu Konrad Meyer — ein “machtergreifender” Generationswechsel in der Agrar- und Siedlungswissenschaft,” in Suzanne Heim, ed., Autarkie und Ostexpansion. Pflanzenzucht und Agrarforschung im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), 57–90. 34. William E. Dodd Jr., and Martha Dodd, eds., Ambassador Dodd’s Diary, 1933–1938 (New York: Victor Gollancz, 1941), 298–300, 384–385, 395. 35. Max Sering and Constantin von Dietze, eds., Agrarverfassung der deutschen Auslandssiedlungen in Osteuropa (Berlin, Franz Vahlen, 1939).

62

R. L. NELSON

36. Phillip T. Rutherford, Prelude to the Final Solution: The Nazi Program for Deporting Ethnic Poles, 1939–1941 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), and Alexander B. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005). 37. Liulevicius, Myth of the East, 221. 38. “Fünf Minuten vor Zwölf,” Innere Kolonisation—Land und Gemeinde 25 (1976), 173.

CHAPTER 4

The Role of US Railroads in the German Expansionist Mindset of Gerhard Rohlfs Tracey Reimann-Dawe

As we cannot count on air transportation in the near future, the only thing left is the railway. In this regard, the United States has demonstrated and proven what railways can do for the development of a country. In this huge republic [the US], railways are not merely built as they are in the ‘Old World’ – namely to link pre-existing towns and cities. In this huge republic railways are built to open-up large rural areas, to exploit areas that have been too far away from trade routes, to make use of rich arable land, mountains pregnant with minerals and forests with valuable types of wood. Such methods should guide us in our construction of a railway to Central-Africa.1

German explorer and colonial advocate Gerhard Rohlfs wrote this statement in the opening sections of his 1877 article “Eine Eisenbahn nach Central-Afrika.” His article sets out detailed plans to construct a railway from Tripoli to Lake Chad and so consolidate European economic and

T. Reimann-Dawe (B) School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_4

63

64

T. REIMANN-DAWE

political influence in Africa. A prolific, and in his own lifetime, internationally famous explorer, Rohlfs had traveled on foot and by camel along the proposed rail route a decade earlier. This two-year expedition from 1865–1867 earned him widespread acclaim as the first European to cross Africa from Tripoli through the Sahara to Lake Chad, the Niger, and finally to the Gulf of Guinea. Yet it was not until Rohlfs undertook a lecture tour in the US in 1875, traveling across the country by rail, that he gained the final impetus for his visions of a similar railway across the Sahara. Up until this point, the militarily aggressive, but globally marginalized Germany had not entered the drive for colonial African territories. However, Rohlfs’s African railway—supposedly a joint European project—carves out a leading role for the newly unified Germany. In order to justify this project and the desired global power shift toward Germany, Rohlfs must convince his readership that Germany is up to the task. The emphasis on “Old” and “New Worlds” in the above statement is particularly telling here. While Rohlfs asserts that bringing the believed “cultural superiority” of the “Old World” of Europe to Africa through transport and trade links can civilize “barbaric tribes,”2 he also portrays Germany as somehow different from the “Old World” of Europe. After all, it is in comparison to European powers—the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese—that Germany plays a marginal political role on the world stage. As this essay will show, it was the US example—particularly with regard to the railways—that was quintessential to portraying an understanding of what it meant to be German and what it meant to further the German colonial project in the world. As we shall see, the US railroads played a key role in the German imagination, providing inspiration and a model for Rohlfs, who used the US to champion the German cause in expansion and empire-building.

Gerhard Rohlfs and German Africa-Explorers Rohlfs’s expedition from Tripoli to the coast of Guinea from 1865–1867 that served as the basis for his rail project, was his first major scientific expedition. It was swiftly followed by further expeditions from Tripoli to Alexandria in 1868–1869, through the Libyan desert from 1873–1874, to the oasis Kufra from 1878–1879 and an expedition to Abyssinia in 1880. Rohlfs’s prolific efforts were indicative of a wider phenomenon in the history of German exploration that saw numerous German scientific

4

THE ROLE OF US RAILROADS IN THE GERMAN EXPANSIONIST …

65

expeditions to Africa between the years 1849 and 1914. This intensive period of African exploration had been initiated by German geographer Heinrich Barth, who in 1849 accompanied the British to North and Central Africa under the leadership of missionary James Richardson. Upon Richardson’s sudden death, Barth’s role changed from observer to expedition leader. After successfully fulfilling the expedition mandate—a trade agreement with Sheikh Omar, Sultan of Bornu, Barth led the party southwards to fulfill his dream of reaching the Niger. His achievements were groundbreaking in two senses; firstly proving the capabilities of German explorers as leaders of expeditions rather than passive observers; secondly providing the impetus that initiated numerous German-led and German-funded expeditions. Known as Afrikareisende, or AfricaExplorers, the scientific explorers who led these expeditions were famed for the wealth of detailed first-hand meteorological, botanic, and ethnographic information that underpinned their cartographic achievements. Afrikareisende were at the frontline of the flow of information from African territories to the Prussian and later German government, as well as to the geographical societies that funded the expeditions. Although not explicitly marketed as colonizing expeditions, the information collected by explorers like Barth and Rohlfs did aid later colonial projects in Africa. In Germany, explorers were taken as authorities on all things African and acted as advisors to the government. When Germany joined the Scramble for Africa, explorers were allocated political roles based on their knowledge of the continent. Rohlfs, for example, was named as consul to Zanzibar in 1885 when the island became of strategic interest to Germany.3 Rohlfs’s article “Eine Eisenbahn nach Central-Afrika” is based on the geographic, ethnographic, and cartographic information collated during his 1865–1867 expedition to map a route from the North African coast to the Gulf of Guinea. Although this and Rohlfs’s later expeditions sit firmly within Afrikareisende exploratory traditions, Rohlfs’s pathway to scientific exploration was somewhat out of the ordinary. In contrast to his predecessor and founding Afrikareisender Barth, Rohlfs undertook this expedition as a relatively uneducated young man. His record as an adventurer had gained him considerable admiration from the general public, yet Rohlfs was desperate to undertake a scientific expedition that would elevate him to the respected status of Afrikareisender established by Barth. Rohlfs’s connections to August Petermann, editor of the geographical journal Mitteilungen aus Justus Perthes’ geographischer

66

T. REIMANN-DAWE

Anstalt, were enough to grant him leadership of the expedition.4 Petermann provided financial aid in return for the first written accounts of the expedition, but the Prussian government, recognizing the potential advantage of being the first to discover cross-continental trade routes over land, acted as the main sponsor. Rohlfs achieved his ambition, as the successful expedition and its publication in narrative form gained him the recognition he desired as a scientific explorer. Rohlfs’s experiences were published in a multivolume account entitled Quer durch Afrika. Reise vom Mittelmeer bis zum Tschad-see und zum Golf von Guinea.5 This book series was the main method of disseminating information assembled during the expedition and appeared in print before Rohlfs published his plans for an African railway. Yet, the expedition account and plan for the railway are not just interlinked by shared factual information, but also through the transfer of cultural and ideological discourses. It is clear that Rohlfs carried an a priori image of German scientific and cultural superiority to Africa. His expedition narrative contains numerous references which encourage the imposition of German culture—in the form of territorial acquisitions—on African soil. Rohlfs’s expedition narrative and ensuing article sit within the context of the wider Afrikareisende works. Each explorer typically compiled a written account of his travels that served a combination of interests—on the one hand these works are factual reports disseminating geographic and ethnographic information to a German audience.6 On the other hand the works draw on elements of the adventure novel to entertain a non-specialist audience. Furthermore, each explorer reevaluated his predecessor’s works by referencing, correcting and reinterpreting the information gathered so far to create a characteristic macrotext that spans a period of internal political turbulence. Although the explorers were wellknown in their time and compiled an extensive corpus of works, they have received comparatively little attention in scholarly literature. Yet this period of African exploration and its recreation in narrative form took place against the backdrop of German unification in 1871, Germany’s emergence as a colonial power after 1884 and on the brink of the World War in 1913. The works therefore provide insight into German self-understanding during this period of extensive political turmoil.7 A crucial feature of this self-understanding can be seen through German-African encounters, but also through interactions with other nations both in Africa and in relation to German African exploration. In a

4

THE ROLE OF US RAILROADS IN THE GERMAN EXPANSIONIST …

67

letter to his editor about his experiences on the 1849 British-led expedition, founding Afrikareisender Barth stated that the “poor Germans” had been treated neither as members of the expedition, nor as “gentlemen,” but rather as “servants.”8 Barth’s letter reveals a discourse that is present throughout Afrikareisende works. In spite of divergences in political opinion among the German Africa explorers, in particular with regard to territorial acquisitions, their works propagate a common key theme. From the first work to the last, the explorers spin a common narrative that Germans could do things better than their European counterparts—be it from navigation to modes of travel to cartography.9 For those explorers like Gerhard Rohlfs who advocated colonial expansion, this was particularly frustrating. It was clear to these explorers that the political framework was missing with which to convert Germans’ believed superior knowledge-accumulation and exploratory ability into colonial territories—and therefore increased political influence on the European and world stage. An essential symbol of this belief in superiority and to the progress of the German colonizing ambition was the idea of constructing a railway through Africa. It was not only the practicality of the railway that was at the forefront of the German imagination, but also and if not more so, the ideological symbolism of this mode of transport. As we shall see, the railway represented values that German explorers and their readership felt akin to; an innate sense of Germanness even during the time when a unified nation-state was lacking. As the opening quote of this essay indicates, the significance of the railway to the consolidation of the US territories was also firmly embedded in German consciousness. The works of Gerhard Rohlfs exemplify the significance of the railway to the German imagination and also the intertwining of German and American colonial pathways. As we shall see, Rohlfs asserts in his expedition narrative that German explorers already possess the knowledge and skill to travel through Africa with the ease and precision of the railway. They thus offer something new to the European colonizing project. Yet Germans must also look beyond European borders to their US counterparts to measure their chances of success.

68

T. REIMANN-DAWE

The Greatest Manifestation of Industrialized Technology: The Railway in the US and Western Europe Rohlfs undertook his first scientific expedition at a time when rail travel was “opening-up” the US and also changing the face of Germany. The first railroad in Germany was opened between Nuremberg and Fürth in 1840, followed in close succession by lines between Munich and Augsburg and between Magdeburg and Dresden via Leipzig and Halle in Saxony. By 1912 over 60,000 Kilometers of track had been built. In 1870 the railways transported 5.3 billion ton/kilometer of goods. By 1913 the figure had risen to 67.7 billion ton/kilometer. The comparable figure of rail passengers increased almost tenfold between 1871 and 1913.10 In the US, the railroad had become one of the most significant features of the Civil War and epitomized the new face of modern warfare. When fighting broke out in 1861 the country had a rail network totaling more than 30,000 miles. Of this, 21,300 miles was concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest while the Confederacy enjoyed only 9022 miles. Railroads provided fresh supplies of arms, men, equipment, horses, and medical supplies directly to where armies were camped, meaning that it was no longer necessary to wage battles close to populated areas to make use of resources.11 Railroads were also targeted as tactical objectives. The North was quick to realize the potential of the rail network, with President Abraham Lincoln signing the Pacific Railway Act into law in 1862. The Transcontinental railroad project was launched within a year and completed on May 10, 1869 when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines met at Promontory Summit, Utah.12 But it was not just the physical nature of the railway that was so transformative during this period. The introduction and expansion of the railway revolutionized the mentalities of the people and became synonymous with modernity as a symbol of humankind’s control over its environment. Historian and scholar of cultural studies Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes the consequences of rail travel as “the annihilation of time and space.”13 The mechanization of transport altered the perception of duration while traveling, by separating the traveler from the terrain covered. Gradual changes in landscape, which differentiated stages of the journey, disappeared, as did the traditional, physical experience of travel. All notions of effort through self-movement were also removed. Whereas preindustrial modes of transport were subjected to exhaustion by

4

THE ROLE OF US RAILROADS IN THE GERMAN EXPANSIONIST …

69

the forces of nature, the railway subjected nature to mechanization. The shape of the landscape was altered to provide linear and level tracks and so ensure the quickest route between two points. Travel became characterized by origin and destination and so eliminated the places in between, while abstract coordinates rather than real landscape determined geography. Schivelbusch describes the dialectical process which ensued as space was seemingly enlarged by enabling greater distances to be covered, yet simultaneously reduced by shortening the time taken to travel across it.14 The wider-reaching effects on the socio-cultural perception of time initiated by modern technology were extensive. The initial experience of disorientation resulting from the altered mode of perception gave way to the acceptance of regular, mechanical movement as the new norm.15 Germany’s political development from a loose confederation of states to a unified nation-state took place at the same time that this technology was revolutionizing Western Europe and the US. Germany could therefore link its pathway to the phenomenon of modernization. Mechanization, demanding frictionless interaction of its individual parts, required the same of its controlling structure. The expansion of the railway led to the introduction of standardized time. Railway companies were the first to instate standard time to improve their inefficient timetabling resulting from localized time zones.16 As railways extended over national boundaries, the process had to be repeated on a larger scale. The introduction of standard time at the end of the nineteenth century regulated time zones to enable more efficient movement and communication over longer distances. The International Meridian Conference took place in Washington on October 22, 1884, with representatives from twentyfive countries. Delegates established Greenwich as the zero meridian, determined the exact length of the day, divided the earth into twentyfour time zones, each one hour apart, and fixed a precise beginning of the universal day.17 As a tool of industrialization, the railway with its linearity, dynamism, reliance on speed, and adherence to standardized, measurable time symbolizes the introduction of new, industrialized values. The pace of life accelerated as the size of measurable units of time decreased and the importance attached to each one increased.18 No longer an abstract entity, time became a valuable, measurable commodity that could be gained, lost, or wasted.19 Carrying pocket watches and a proliferation of clocks in public places throughout Europe and the US symbolized the understanding of the regularity and measurability of time as a symbol of

70

T. REIMANN-DAWE

modernity.20 These are the values that Western Europe shared with the US and which guided Rohlfs through his African expedition. They are also the values against which Rohlfs judged African cultures. He laments dealing with North African Tuareg tribal leaders as they have “no concept of the value of time” and as such waste this resource that is so valuable to Rohlfs and key to German self-understanding.21 The railway and a sense of keeping track of time went hand in hand. Rohlfs could not wait to construct a railway through the otherness of the North African desert. And his main source of knowledge with which to prove the validity of this project was the US railroad.

Locomotive Narration in Africa Without a Railroad As Rohlfs was well aware, the political and economic means to construct a large infrastructure project on African soil were beyond the reach of the German nations while he was undertaking his expedition in 1865. The discourse of superior German exploratory skill that runs throughout the works of German Africa-explorers is often coupled with a sense that many German explorers felt “left behind” by their powerful western European neighbors who had long-since entered the race for colonial territories and imperial power. Afrikareisende labeled the British, for example, as all-powerful22 and willing to aggressively defend their national interests at the expense of others.23 German authors understood British colonial expansion as the result of a strong national character, fueled by nationalist sentiment.24 In Germany, however, nationalist sentiment could only be mobilized through the promise of colonial domains. A prestigious project such as the railway through Central Africa would certainly be a step towards international recognition and acceptance that would mobilize national self-confidence in Germany. This call for national selfconfidence and its link to the railway build on a discourse that began with in Rohlfs’s earlier expedition narrative. Although Rohlfs did not propose his plans for an African railway until he had experienced the US railroad first hand, the idea of a railway was already embedded in the narrative techniques he used to recreate his own movement through African space. As mentioned earlier, the expedition narratives draw on elements of the adventure novel to attract a non-specialist audience. This entails the use of certain narrative techniques to emphasize, indeed dramatize, the

4

THE ROLE OF US RAILROADS IN THE GERMAN EXPANSIONIST …

71

presentation of events. One of these narrative techniques is the narrative situation, or the voice which mediates the action. In the case of the expedition narrative, this role is fulfilled by a “quasi-autobiographical” narrator who is presented to the reader as an experiencing “I”.25 The physical existence of this narrator is an integral part of his identity. The figures of narrator and main protagonist are therefore at one level one and the same, so unlike other types of narrative situation, this means that there is no confusion between the identity of the narrator and the author. We can therefore assume that the opinions expressed by the experiencing narrator-figure are those of the explorer. A further criterion defining the “quasi-autobiographical” narrator is the relationship between the “experiencing” and “narrating” self.26 The “experiencing self” typically becomes increasingly dominant during moments of heightened tension. This increases the immediacy of experience as the “narrating self”—which structures and controls events—diminishes. The relationship between the “experiencing” and the “narrating self” is particularly interesting as it enables Rohlfs to convey a sense of control over his unpredictable encounters. The “narrating self” dominates Rohlfs’s portrayal of events and so, enhances his desired self-image as a dynamic, rational, scientifically minded, pristine example of German culture. These strategies are demonstrated in the following excerpt, which is taken from the latter half of Rohlfs’s journey. He is traveling on horseback with his guide Mohammed Gatroni and a small part of his entourage, heading southwards on an excursion from his temporary base in Kukawa in the Nigerian province of Bornu, to the town of Uandala, which lies south of Lake Chad: “At 6 o’clock we passed the village Kornáua, at 7 o’clock the fields of Komalúa, ½ an hour later Rilkáku.”27 Rohlfs employs the narrative situation to suggest that he can conquer alien African terrain as quickly as possible and thus demonstrate his mastery of otherness. The success of one German explorer is of course a step towards national prestige and national self-confidence. Here, Rohlfs portrays movement through foreign space as an almost mechanized consumption of terrain and so reduces it—like a train—to an empty homogeneity. As mentioned above, travel by rail became characterized by arrival and destination—eliminating the experiences in between. The depersonalized, factual nature of Rohlfs’s account similarly removes all sense of subjective experience. Rohlfs’s narrative style suggests that his passage through Africa is unhindered. So in order to convey a sense of superiority—not only over African territory, but also over fellow European

72

T. REIMANN-DAWE

explorers—Rohlfs’s narration of his passage through Africa mirrors the style of the railway. As the political infrastructure with which to construct an actual railway is absent, Rohlfs opts for suggestive narrative techniques as the next best option. As Rohlfs later confirms in his article, “Eine Eisenbahn nach CentralAfrika,” he was aware of the success with which the railroad had “openedup” the huge North American landmasses to European influence. He was also aware that his readership shared this knowledge. German interest in the US was expounded by a huge wave of immigration to the US in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This led to the “expansion of the German Kulturkreis (an uneven linguistic-cultural area) across the Atlantic” and to an increased flow of information between both nations.28 A key feature in this flow of information were regular reports on developments in the US railroads that appeared in national newspapers in Germany, and were thus well-known to the wider population.29 The US railroads also featured prominently in the most widely read fictional adventure novels of the time—the works by Karl May.30 As we have seen, at the time of Rohlfs’s expedition, developments in industry and technology, epitomized by the railway, had not just transformed the US, but also the landscape and mentality of many European nations. Rohlfs was well aware of the extensive changes in mobility of materials, goods, people, and services that had been necessitated by the introduction of the railway in the US and of course in Germany. The reference to his own movement through Africa mirroring the transit of a railway intentionally reflects connotations with this mode of transport that readers at the time would share with Rohlfs.

A Railway to Central Africa: The US Railroads as the Key to German Self-Confidence Rohlfs’s ideological imposition of the railway onto African soil through locomotive-like narration gets further expanded in his later article “Eine Eisenbahn nach Central-Afrika.” This time connotations are supported by a more realistic chance of success in actually building a railroad in Africa as Germany had unified as a nation-state. For explorers such as Rohlfs, unification meant that Germany would finally enjoy more political sway. Furthermore, Rohlfs could now draw on first-hand experience of both African and American terrain to support his geographic observations

4

THE ROLE OF US RAILROADS IN THE GERMAN EXPANSIONIST …

73

and comparisons. After all, it was the insistence on personal observation and verification that gave the cartographic achievements of German Afrikareisende their authority and credibility. In Rohlfs’s article, the introduction of the US example is thus key to giving credibility to the move from the railway as an ideological connotation to a real project. As the quote below demonstrates, this credibility is not only rooted in similarities between the US and African terrain. The ideology that successfully “opened-up” huge expanses of the US to the processes of modernization is also transposed onto Africa; On the long stretch from Chicago to San Francisco there were areas just as bare of human inhabitants as the Sahara; from St Louis to the Rocky Mountains there was not a single settlement, yet still they laid tracks from Denver to the Rockies, covering a desolate stretch equating to over 150 German miles. But the American knew what awaited him and his principle was always that railways do not […] link cities and towns, but also enable large areas to become productive. This founding principle proved true. Of course we have to be certain that the areas being opened-up by the railway are abundant. The American did not built the railroad for the sake of a prairie or savannah, but he knew that what counted was to bring areas blessed with rich agriculture closer to established trading-centers and to reap their produce.31

Rohlfs clearly sees the railway as the civilizing tool and answer to the question of European control over African territories. As this quote suggests, transportation and mobility of people from one place to another was not the prime motivation of US railroads, but coexisted with the need to make resources available to larger markets. Rohlfs refers to similar processes of “opening-up” Africa throughout his article, yet we get the sense that Rohlfs means open-up the continent to European business, with a very one-way focus. There is no indication that the profits from Rohlfs’s suggested transport route would benefit those indigenous peoples already living in the areas. In fact, enabling “large areas to become productive” inevitably entailed increased marginalization of indigenous populations. In all, the US railroad had a devastating effect on Native American tribes, particularly for tribes of the Great Plains. The railroad caused an existential threat as it altered the landscape, cutting through traditional hunting grounds and reducing the population of wild game.32 The extension of the railroad in the US meant increased settlement and thus cultural conflict as settlers claimed rights to land that had never

74

T. REIMANN-DAWE

been previously owned.33 Rohlfs’s imperial gaze suggests a similar understanding of African space as empty, waiting to be subjected to European modernization. Similarly, Rohlfs’s plan for a railway through Central Africa would not just appropriate terrain, but also African history and culture. It would follow—“cut through”—the routes traveled for centuries by Bedouin caravans.34 The ingrained, cyclical, nomadic movement along these caravan routes is a physical embodiment of Bedouin cultural history. Constant travel on these routes reiterates and strengthens the presence of this oral history. Rohlfs however suggests incorporating these routes into a network of Western modernization, guided by a focus on linear, measurable routes. Not only would technology take hold of this terrain, but also eradicate the prioritization of oral culture and tradition that Rohlfs sees as the antithesis of his German mindset. The natural mapping that existed for centuries would be erased by the penetrating force of western technology. Rohlfs’s planned railway, as had been the case for Union forces during the US Civil War, would also function to transport soldiers in the first instance, rather than civilian passengers. Rohlfs knew that the military advantage of the railway also made it a target for sabotage. This had been the case during the US Civil War, as troops from both sides attempted to destroy enemy supply chains.35 More relevant to Rohlfs’s project would be preventing potential attacks from the “suspicious” and “hostile”36 indigenous population, such as had occurred in Julesburg Colorado in 1865 when angered Cheyennes and their allies raided during the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad.37 As a preemptive measure, soldiers would occupy purpose-built forts along Rohlfs’s planned railway to secure the safe passage of goods. Here the US railroads serve as a useful tool with which Rohlfs can make his sinister suggestion of European military presence in Africa appear a logistical necessity. Rohlfs not only links the “civilizing” element of the US railroads to his plan but also makes further comparisons regarding structural similarities. It is not only the length of railroads through the US that Rohlfs links to his African project, but also the similarity in terrain; of vast open spaces. The “Old World” of Europe and its engineering feats of railway construction cannot be compared to those faced and overcome by the US railroads. Instead, Rohlfs wants to situate Germany within the “New World” of US success, so he needs to build a discourse of German superiority through his references to the US railroads. He thrives on the

4

THE ROLE OF US RAILROADS IN THE GERMAN EXPANSIONIST …

75

comparisons he can draw, suggesting that the European rail projects, once seen as the envy of the world, have been overtaken. He claims that lessons learned in the US will enable a railway to cut through African terrain with ease: Even the sand dunes do not present a serious threat, still less the sanddrifts. If it is possible to construct so-called snow-sheds along a stretch equal to 40 English Miles—so approximately 8 German miles or 60 kilometers, to hold back the snow, then it will also be possible to design a kind of sand-shed in the Sahara. True, there are also areas where there is no accumulation of sand, so tracks being covered with sand from the Samum winds should be prevented in the same way as the usual snowdrifts—by using a contraption attached to the front of the engine like the kind you see on all trains in the US.38

By linking American and African terrain so directly in this excerpt, Rohlfs defamiliarizes the otherness of Africa. Let us remember here Rohlfs’s own depiction of his movement through African terrain with similar clinical precision and elimination of all sense of otherness. Here, Rohlfs links African and American terrain implicitly, yet is also careful to distance himself from similar claims made by the Frenchman CharlesEdmond Duponchel. As Rohlfs states, the idea to construct a railroad from Algeria through Timbuktu to Senegambia had already been proposed by the French military officer and architect Duponchel. The Frenchman also employs the example of the US railroad as a key demonstration of the potential for a similar project in Africa. However, Rohlfs makes clear that the French proposal is deficient for two main reasons. Firstly, the main advocate of the proposal had never crossed the terrain himself. Rohlfs emphasizes that Duponchel’s knowledge is therefore far too “cartographic,” thus making “everything incorrect” about the proposal, as “nine-tenths of the Sahara” remained unexplored by Europeans.39 Consequently Rohlfs is quick to dismiss Duponchel’s claim that the Sahara poses less difficulties than the terrain in the US. The stretch between Albany and Cheyenne had been seen as the paradigm for the French project from Algeria. But according to Rohlfs, the US-stretch only posed territorial difficulties in the form of river crossings. Furthermore, as Rohlfs points out, the distance between these two points in the US was far shorter than the proposed Algerian-Senegambian route. Rohlfs

76

T. REIMANN-DAWE

discredits the ongoing discussion in France as “pointless,” especially as it includes several “even more suspicious” voices than that of Duponchel.40 So Rohlfs’s claim of the usefulness of the US railroads to his proposed African counterpart necessitates a difficult balance. Rohlfs must assert similarity between the US and a potential African railway, as the connotations of the success of the US project are so widespread. However, Rohlfs must also prevent other European nations from claiming this link for themselves. France must be clearly associated with the “Old World”— “old” seen here as making unfounded claims that are not based on scientific knowledge and first-hand experience. By discrediting the arguments put forward by the French, Rohlfs suggests that France and its colonial power are being overtaken by those with superior access to knowledge—meaning the Germans “on the ground.” Here we see a reassertion of the discourse that was initiated by Afrikareisende expedition narratives, namely that Germans have the superior exploratory and scientific ability, yet lack the national confidence and infrastructure to translate this knowledge into concrete projects. If the current balance of power in Western Europe is linked to the old guard, Rohlfs must link Germany and its way of thinking to the “New World”—the US. Rohlfs is also highly critical of the other main European colonial power—the British. Again his plans for an African railway draw upon and develop a discourse that began in earlier Afrikareisende works and became increasingly explosive as the Scramble for Africa heightened. The British bear the brunt of German bitterness regarding the lack of international standing for both German scientists and indeed the country itself. Yet there is also an underlying admiration for the British national egotism that is viewed by the Germans as the key to British colonial expansion.41 In his article, Rohlfs is keen to note that the British did not make use of condensing technology to distill drinking water on the “Abyssinian expedition,”42 a punitive expedition that involved marching a sizeable military force hundreds of miles across both desert and mountainous terrain. At the order of the King of Prussia, Rohlfs accompanied this 1868 British operation, led by Robert Napier.43 It was viewed as a military success at the time, yet Rohlfs’s reference to a lack of technological awareness locates the British firmly within the “Old World.” Rohlfs also refers to underhanded British tactics to undermine potential French extensions of power in Northern Africa. While claiming to be supporters of a joint Franco-British sulfur-mining company in Cyrenaica, the British government, Rohlfs reports, had simultaneously convinced the

4

THE ROLE OF US RAILROADS IN THE GERMAN EXPANSIONIST …

77

Turkish regime that the French intended to annex the area and should be forbidden from operating there.44 So Rohlfs discredits his European rivals on the grounds of unethical behavior and inferior knowledge, and thus draws upon and extends the discourse introduced by German explorers of Africa. Yet Rohlfs wants to awaken nationalist sentiment and selfconfidence, to finally put an end to the narrative of German political impotence. And to do this he feels he needs to firmly locate Germany in the same tradition as the US, not the French or the British. Rohlfs’s final suggestion is to model not just the construction of the engines, sand-sheds, and tracks on the US transnational railroad, but also to employ the same preparatory methods. Rohlfs thus firmly links the success story of German exploration in Africa to the fact-finding surveying expeditions that preceded the success story of the Central Pacific Railroad company.45 Rohlfs clearly demonstrated that his knowledge of terrain is superior to that of his French and British counterparts. Although these European rivals should be involved in the rail project due to their political importance as colonial powers, there is no question that a fact-finding mission along the route of the Central-African railway will be led by Germans. Yet in spite of his efforts, Rohlfs’s plans for a Central-African railway did not come to fruition. The ideological imposition of the German mindset onto Africa did however fuel nationalist sentiment, as German territorial acquisitions soon followed in 1884. The prestige of the railway nevertheless remained at the forefront of colonial politics. Yet rather than a joint European project, the acquisition of German East Africa in 1891 in fact thwarted British plans to construct a North–South rail link from Cairo to Cape Town. This inevitably increased tensions between European nations as they vied for African territories.

Conclusion The influence of the US railroad served a dual purpose for Rohlfs. On the one hand Rohlfs drew geographic, climatic, and political comparisons to the US in order to give credibility to the physical affirmation of a railroad in Africa. On the other hand, the project was designed to present concrete similarities between Germany and the US and so instigate the self-confidence that many Germans felt their nation was lacking in international policies. The US after all played a huge role in the German

78

T. REIMANN-DAWE

imagination, and the link between the late development and consolidation of both countries appealed to the German consciousness. At a time when inter-European rivalries were being played-out on African soil, the US was a focus of admiration, and the “civilizing” aspect of the railroad was a success story that German colonial advocates were keen to replicate. As Rohlfs makes clear, Germany must be seen as both different and superior to its European rivals. The US represents a useful yardstick against which Germany can compare itself as part of a new political order. Yet, as Rohlfs’s article makes clear, as Germany was becoming increasingly willing to defend its national interests, the US was also one of the few western countries that Germany did not view as a rival to its expansionist mandate.

Notes 1. Gerhard Rohlfs, “Eine Eisenbahn nach Central-Afrika,” in August Petermann, ed., Mittheilungen aus Justhus Perthes’ geographischer Anstalt über wichtige neue Erforschungen auf dem Gesamtgebiete der Geographie von A.Petermann. Vol. 23 (Gotha: Perthes, 1877), 45–53, 46. Translations are the author’s own, unless stated otherwise. 2. Ibid., 46. 3. Afrikareisender Gustav Nachtigal traveled through the Sahara and Sudan from 1869–1875, publishing his findings in Sahara und Sudan: Ergebnisse sechsjähriger Reisen in Afrika, 3 vols (Berlin: Verlagsgesellschaft M.B.H, 1879–1889). In 1884 he became special commissioner for West Africa and was integral to the acquisition of Togoland and Cameroon. 4. After two years in the Austrian army, Rohlfs studied medicine—three semesters at three different universities. He abandoned his studies to rejoin the army, yet deserted in 1856 to join the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. After leaving the Foreign Legion, Rohlfs remained in Morocco and became head physician to the Sultan. While traveling through Morocco, Rohlfs was attacked and left for dead—yet miraculously survived to tell the tale. For further biographical details on Rohlfs, see Günter Bolte, Gerhard Rohlfs: Anmerkungen zu einem bewegten Leben (Bremen: Falkenberg, 2019). 5. Gerhard Rohlfs, Quer durch Afrika. Reise vom Mittelmeer bis zum Tschadsee und zum Golf von Guinea, 2 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1875). 6. Several of these works were also published in English, including Barth’s cornerstone work that appeared simultaneously in English and German. Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa: Being a Journal of an Expedition Undertaken Under the Auspices of H.B.M.’s Government, in the Years 1849–1855 (London: Longman,

4

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

THE ROLE OF US RAILROADS IN THE GERMAN EXPANSIONIST …

79

Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts), 5 vols. Volume 1 (1857), Volume 2 (1857), Volume 3 (1857), Volume 4 (1858), Volume 5 (1858). Other Afrikareisende narratives include for example the works of botanist Georg Schweinfurth, Im Herzen Afrika, 2 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1874). Schweinfurth traveled from Khartoum to Equatorial Africa between 1868 and 1871. Zoologist and military officer Franz Stuhlmann’s work Mit Emin Pascha ins Herz von Afrika: Ein Reisebericht mit Beiträgen von Emin Pascha (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1894) represents the combination of politics and science behind German-African exploration in the colonial period. Heinrich Barth in August Petermann, ed., Mittheilungen aus Justhus Perthes’ geographischer Anstalt über wichtige neue Erforschungen auf dem Gesamtgebiete der Geographie von A.Petermann, Vol. 6 (Gotha: Perthes,1860), 408. Afrikareisender Leo Frobenius traveled through Nigeria and Sudan from 1910–1912, at the height of Anglo-German rivalry. Subjected to political game-playing, Frobenius finds his passage continually hindered by the authorities in British-Nigeria. Nevertheless, he locates artefacts at the site of a former temple near Ibadan. The British had visited the site before him, but in their haste and impatience, “overlooked” the relevant items. Frobenius’s “German thoroughness” was the key to successful knowledgeacquisition. Leo Frobenius, Und Afrika sprach. Bericht über den Verlauf der dritten Reiseperiode der Deutschen innerafrikanischen Forschungsexpedition in den Jahren 1910–1912, 3 vols (Berlin: Vita, 1912–1913), I, 85. Volker R. Berghahn, Imperial Germany 1871–1914: Economy, Society, Culture and Politics (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 20–21. William G. Thomas, The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 105–129. John P. Hankey, “The Railroad War: How the Iron Road Changed the American Civil War,” Trains, March 2011. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 1986), 10. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 35. Pre-industrial modes of transport became synonymous with chaos due to their unreliability and irregularity. The popular edition of Heinrich Barth’s narrative emphasises the preindustrial nature of African travel “Im Sattel” (in the saddle) and consequently reinforces stereotypical images of Africa as stagnating in a prior historical era. Heinrich Barth, Im Sattel durch Nord- und Zentral-Afrika 1849–1855, ed. and rev. by Heinrich Schiffers (Stuttgart: Thienemann, 2000).

80

T. REIMANN-DAWE

16. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 43. 17. A copy of the resolutions and the conference notes can be found at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. 18. Helga Novotny, Eigenzeit, Entstehung und Strukturierung eines Zeitgefühls (Frankfurt Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 18. 19. Modernization also had a profound effect on language, with the introduction of such phrases as “time’s-up” and “time-wasting” to US-English and attempts to standardize language in Germany that were supported by railway companies. Matthew Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany 1871–1918 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 89. 20. Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 51–52. 21. Rohlfs, Quer durch Afrika, I, 97. 22. Friedrich Fabri, Bedarf Deutschland der Colonien? (Gotha: Perthes, 1879), 6. 23. Carl Peters, “Deutsche Kolonialpolitik,” Die Gegenwart, I (March 1884), 335. 24. Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten: Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel Seiner Kolonien (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 6. 25. Franz K. Stanzel, Theorie des Erzählens (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 24. 26. Ibid., 31. 27. Rohlfs, Quer durch Afrika, II, 17. 28. H. Glenn Penny, Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians Since 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 26. 29. The Königlich Privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung, for example, reported important German and global news items—translated into German—to an educated German readership. It includes an item from the Philadelphia Times that reports on the ceremonial laying of the final piece of track that would link the sections of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad. Königlich Privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung, May 11, 1869, 9. 30. The US railroads play a role in many of May’s works, including earlier stories such as “Old Firehand,” which appeared in the weekly periodical Deutsches Familienblatt in 1875 and attracted a readership of all ages, as well as May’s later trilogy of full-length novels, Winnetou (1893). 31. Rohlfs, “Eine Eisenbahn nach Central-Afrika,” 48. 32. The US railroads, for example, contributed to the destruction of the bison. See Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 33. Workers on the US railroad, including Germans, were remunerated with land ownership. See Fisher et al., Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. https://dp.la/exhibitions/transcontinental-railroad/ human-impact/native-americans.

4

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

THE ROLE OF US RAILROADS IN THE GERMAN EXPANSIONIST …

81

Rohlfs, “Eine Eisenbahn nach Central-Afrika,” 48. See Thomas, The Iron Way. Rohlfs, “Eine Eisenbahn nach Central-Afrika,” 45. On January 7, 1865, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux raiders attacked the would-be railroad town of Julesburg, Colorado, in retaliation for the Sand Creek massacre, destroying essential telegraph wire in Platte Valley. On Sand Creek, see Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). Rohlfs, “Eine Eisenbahn nach Central-Afrika,” 48. Rohlfs, “Eine Eisenbahn nach Central-Afrika,” 47. Ibid.‚ 47. Numerous Afrikareisende refer to British self-confidence with both admiration and disdain. Franz Stuhlmann, for example, describes Henry Morton Stanley’s “inconsiderate egotism” yet great contribution to colonial “civilizing processes.” Franz Stuhlmann, Mit Emin Pascha ins Herz von Afrika, 3 and 27. Rohlfs refers to large magnifying lenses that use natural heat from the sun to condense water. “Eine Eisenbahn nach Central-Afrika,” 47. Rohlfs compiled a written account of his experiences in the work Im Auftrage Sr. Majestät des Königs von Preussen mit dem Englischen Expeditionscorps in Abessinien (Bremen: J. Küthmann, 1869). The expedition was widely advertised as humanitarian, yet Rohlfs recognized it first and foremost as a military operation. See also Bolte, Gerhard Rohlfs: Anmerkungen zu einem bewegten Leben, 69. Rohlfs, “Eine Eisenbahn nach Central-Afrika,” 50. For example, Theodore Judah’s 1860–1861 fact-finding survey to find a route through the Sierra Nevada for the Pacific railroad. It was Judah’s first-hand experience of the Donner Pass that provided the necessary information to enable construction of the railroad through this difficult terrain. See J. David Rogers and Charles R. Spinks, “Theodore Judah and the Blazing of the First Transcontinental Railroad over the Sierra Nevada,” Golden Spike 150th Anniversary History Symposium, Sacramento, CA, May 5–6, 2019. https://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/ame rican&military_history/THEODORE%20JUDAH%20AND%20THE% 20BLAZING%20OF%20THE%20FIRST%20TRANSCONTINENTAL% 20RAILROAd-Sierra%20Nevada-Rogers.pdf, 15.

CHAPTER 5

Between France, Germany, and the United States: Raymond Aron as a Critical Theorist of Colonialism and Empire George Steinmetz

Raymond Aron (1905–1983) has been the subject of numerous studies, yet he has rarely been discussed as a theorist of empires, imperialisms, and colonies, with the exception of his writing on the Algerian War.1 He is interesting in the present context for two specific reasons, in addition to being an original theorist and historian of empires. First, his analytical and historical writing dealt with Nazi and US imperialism, in addition to French colonialism. Second, his theoretical and epistemological orientation was formulated during a stay in Germany before 1933 and consolidated in his book on Weimar sociology and his doctoral theses on German philosophy of history.2 Aron represented one of the few bridges between the neo-historicist epistemology of Weimar sociology and postwar European discussions, given the scattering of refugee German sociologists in the wilderness of positivistic American social science, and

G. Steinmetz (B) Department of Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_5

83

84

G. STEINMETZ

their failure to reconstitute themselves within the postwar West German sociological discipline.3 The relative neglect of Aron’s theoretical and empirical work on empire is the result of several factors. First, Aron is relatively invisible within sociology today in the United States and Europe. The faded memory of Aron in the United States is due to the fact that his work is historical and geopolitical, whereas US sociology is mired in parochialism and homelandism.4 Aron explicitly rejects epistemic positivism; US sociology is dominated by that position, or at least by a positivist unconscious.5 In Germany, Aron has mainly been discussed as a theorist of totalitarianism, despite the fact that totalitarianism was not really Aron’s central category for analyzing Nazi Germany between the late 1930s and the 1950s; totalitarianism became more central for Aron subsequently as his politics shifted to the right. Aron’s relative invisibility within French sociology is again due to his historicism and internationalism. Among the Bourdieusians, who are more historical and less centered on the French hexagon than most other French sociologists, Aron was avoided for different reasons having to do with his break with Pierre Bourdieu in 1968 and his sharp rightward turn during the last 15 years of his life.6 The neglect of Aron’s writing on imperialism may also derive from a belief that anti-imperialism is the property of the political left. Like many French intellectuals who came of age in the 1920s and ’30s, Aron rejected the conventional left vs. right definitions of prewar Third Republic politics, and declared himself to be “neither of the right nor of the left” in 1933.7 Of course, Aron became fiercely opposed to the USSR, wrote later for Le Figaro, the leading French conservative daily, and was a founding member of the CIA-financed Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). None of this stopped Aron from advancing positions on a number of questions that were typically associated with the left, including colonialism.8 Aron was part of the interwar “non-conformist” generation of French students at the École normale supérieure who engaged intensively with German philosophy and culture.9 In Cologne and Berlin between 1930 and 1933, he immersed himself in the work of Max and Alfred Weber, Georg Simmel, Karl Mannheim, Wilhelm Dilthey, and the South-West German neo-Kantians. Aron’s La Sociologie allemande contemporaine (1935) was the first introduction in French to Max Weber and Weimar sociology. In his 1938 doctoral theses Aron welcomed the “decline of scientism” heralded by German trends in the human sciences and rejected

5

BETWEEN FRANCE, GERMANY, AND THE UNITED STATES …

85

positivist definitions of social causality, associated in France with Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim, which were patterned on the natural sciences.10 He defended the broadly neo-historicist approach associated with Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber.11 “True history,” Aron argued, “retains simultaneously the two terms, regularities and accidents, and looks not for a synthesis of them, but for their interweaving…”12 Historical events, he argued, should be shown to result from a conjunction of historical contingencies and decisionistic choices, together with historical series that might remain autonomous from one another or converge.13 Aron remained committed to this broadly Weberian version of historical sociology throughout his life. His interpretations of such diverse phenomena as Nazism, French colonialism, American hegemony, international relations, and societal development were undergirded by a rejection of social scientific positivism, that is, the assumption that the social sciences should seek general, universal, and simple laws. We can discern three main parts of Aron’s thinking about empires and colonialism. During the first period, starting in 1936, Aron wrote about Nazi Germany as an imperialist regime. In the second period, Aron analyzed overseas colonialism. This theme appeared first in 1945, intensified starting in 1952 with the Vietnam crisis, and culminated in 1957–1958 with Aron’s interventions around the Algerian war. Aron’s third imperial focus is the reconfigured international system resulting from World War II, characterized by the decline of French (and other European) powers and the European states system and the emergence of two great powers, the US and the USSR, dominating world politics. Although Aron understood the Soviet Union as the greatest threat and the United States as the essential ally of France and Europe, he dedicated most of his attention to understanding American foreign policy. The culmination of this interest is Aron’s 1973 book on American imperialism. In it, Aron ties together the United States, France, and Germany under the heading of empire and colonialism.

Biographical Notes on Aron Aron was a rising star in French sociology, teaching at the University of Toulouse, when Nazi Germany invaded France. After serving in the French Army, Aron, who was Jewish, went to England and joined the Gaullists. He was offered a position as deputy editor of a new review, La France Libre, initially associated with De Gaulle. Aron wrote for La

86

G. STEINMETZ

France Libre from 1940 through 1945, when he returned to France with his wife and daughter.14 In 1945, Aron turned down the offer of a sociology chair at Bordeaux and he did not press for the restitution of his prewar job at Toulouse. He initially continued to work as a journalist. He wrote for La France Libre until 1945.15 Between 1944 and 1947 Aron wrote for the Resistance journal Combat, which was edited at the time by Albert Camus and whose other contributors included Georges Bataille, André Malraux, and JeanPaul Sartre.16 Between 1947 and 1977, Aron wrote for the conservative daily Le Figaro.17 After 1955, Aron reentered academia and began to play a central role in solidifying sociology’s status within the French university system. He created the first dedicated university degree in sociology, and the first French sociological research center oriented toward European rather than American-style sociology, the Centre de sociologie européenne, in 1958. Together with British sociologist Tom Bottomore and German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, Aron created an international and multilingual sociology journal, Archives européennes de sociologie (European Journal of Sociology), in 1958.18 In 1955, Aron was elected to a sociology chair at the Sorbonne, from which he resigned at the end of 1967. In 1960 he became professor (directeur d’études ) at the Sixth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, which had rapidly become the center of advanced training in the social sciences in France.19 In 1969 Aron received the highest honor in French academia, becoming a professor of sociology at the Collège de France.

On Nazi Imperialism Aron’s experiences during and immediately after World War Two led to a decisive shift in his interests. As he wrote in his Memoirs, “the epistemological questions that had excited me before 1939 barely interested me in 1945.”20 Philosopher Allan Bloom wrote about Aron that Hitler remained “the obsessive puzzle of his life.”21 Aron’s experiences in Germany before 1933 and London during the war redirected his attention to international politics, including the forms of politics he described as “imperialist.” Aron’s writing on Nazism was part of an intellectual conjuncture in which Nazism was discussed as a new form of imperialism, as in works such as Franz Neumann’s Behemoth and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.22 Aron’s first effort along these lines was a 1936 article

5

BETWEEN FRANCE, GERMANY, AND THE UNITED STATES …

87

on Nazism as an “anti-proletarian revolution.” Aron began by reminding readers that “Hitlerism has always been anti-Semitic” and that Germany was pressing toward war, since the “advantages” Germany wanted were “not accessible peacefully.”23 Three years later, in an article analyzing Elie Halévy’s The Era of Tyrannies (1939), Aron explicitly discussed the idea of Nazi imperialism. At this point Aron had already distanced himself from Marxism (though not from Marx) through a systematic reading of economics, and he began by responding to Halévy’s framing of fascism as a form of tyranny linked to imperialist war. This argument was directed against the popular “Leninist” theory of imperialism as a function of “aging capitalism” seeking to “enlarge its market.” For Aron and Halévy, tyrannical fascism resulted from “strictly political”24 determinants, especially geopolitical ones: countries like Germany and Italy that did not extend over an entire continent tilted naturally toward imperialism.25 Aron argued the “new imperialisms” grant “clear primacy to exterior policy”—i.e., to war. The totalitarian state “has violently suppressed internal social conflicts and tends to project the country’s dynamism into exterior adventures.”26 Germany’s imperialist ambitions, Aron suggested, were “global,” i.e., oriented toward world domination.27 As we will see, Aron deepened his critique of the “Leninist” theory in a number of subsequent publications.28 Aron brought several different theoretical resources to bear on this problem. First, he analyzed Nazism as a modern form of Machiavellianism. Aron argued that violent elites had revolutionized politics and taken control of states in the modern era. With their “pessimistic view of human nature” and their “exaltation of human will and action,” modern tyrants were driven toward war.29 One specific technique recommended to Machiavelli’s Prince and deployed by Hitler was the “extermination of the conquered peoples”—specifically the destruction of the elites in subjected nations. Aron pointed to “concentration camps” as an expression of the Nazi form of authority based on barbaric violence.30 Aron deepened his analysis of Nazi imperialism in 1942 and 1943. A 1942 essay on the “threat of the Caesars” began with a typology of three types of “grand conquests.” In the first, a higher civilization subdues less developed cultures by virtue of its military and technological superiority. Aron’s example was the nineteenth-century European colonization of Africa. In the second, opposite form of conquest, a militarily superior but otherwise less developed “barbarian” culture overcomes a higher civilization. In the third form, a great power conquers rival states of

88

G. STEINMETZ

equal power. The classical case was the Roman “unification of the ancient world.” Aron’s example was Nazi Germany.31 Nazi imperialism was characterized by the emergence of a core contradiction that was indicative of a general “fragility” of all conquest empires.32 In the early phase there was a dynamic in which each new conquest reinforced the next. This momentum was a function partly of enthusiasm and partly of the addition of new combatants, manpower, and supplies from the vanquished countries.33 The modern form of imperial warfare was “hyperbolic” and “technological,” characterized by pure, violent action and “a return to barbarism,” and was led by a violent warrior elite.34 This frenzied warfare was not the result of capitalism or even a coherent ideology, but of “myth,” the “demon of adventurism,” and the “madness of seeking greatness.”35 The weakness of the Nazis’ dynamic imperialism stemmed from the reduction of the vanquished to slavery. Nazi ideology defined the German conqueror a priori as a master race. In comparison with classical notions of universal empire, Hitler’s empire was unlikely to succeed in “attracting people it reduced to status of slaves or at least to a secondary status.”36 The result was “an intolerable sense of complete subjection.”37 By contrast, “in the Roman empire, in the empire of Napoléon, every person retained the hope of becoming the equal of a Roman citizen, a French citizen.”38 Aron also argued—less convincingly, in my view—that the “genuine imperial tradition in Russia as in Great Britain involves bringing together many different peoples, each one according to its original essence, without the pretention of assimilating or unifying them.”39 Aron did not yet recognize that the contradiction he was describing was also inscribed into the constitution of European overseas colonies as the “rule of difference,” and was not unique to modern “continental” imperialisms. The Algerian War changed his understanding of modern colonialism in this regard. Alongside this general model, Aron recognized that Nazi imperialism was a hybrid political formation. Different approaches were used in different parts of the empire, using “expertly plotted gradations of subjection” with differing degrees of “autonomy and “methods of rule,” ranging from direct administration in the occupied countries to the putative independence of the Italian and Hungarian governments.40 Defeated France was the most complex case, as it was separated into five parts—the annexed, forbidden, occupied, and unoccupied zones, and the Prisoners of War—plus the overseas colonies.41 The fact that Germany allowed France to keep its army and colonies underscored this multifaceted

5

BETWEEN FRANCE, GERMANY, AND THE UNITED STATES …

89

approach to domination. German thinking about France was divided between a military tendency favoring the enslavement and destruction of the population and a “political” camp oriented toward cultivating French collaborators. Aron discussed the emergence of a “Europeanist” Nazi discourse entailing a new “Charlemagnian” empire in which “the Franks of the east” would dominate “those of the west.”42 According to this theory, Europe equaled the Reich, or was part of the German Reich.43 While all of the French were “condemned to a subordinated status,” they “oscillate between the status of slaves and that of free subjects”—albeit subordinated ones.44 Aron developed several additional themes in these initial analyses of imperialism. He also immersed himself in geopolitical theory.45 As the leading French expert in German social science, Aron followed the emerging theories of “Great Spaces” (Grossräume) that were being propagated by Karl Haushofer and Carl Schmitt and used by Franz Neumann in Behemoth.46 These ideas led Aron to argue that some form of German imperialism was inherent in the notion of the Reich. Bismarckian and Wilhelmine Germany was constituted as an empire, or empire-state, in contrast to the national format of the modern state system of Europe.47 As France began to recover from the occupation after 1944, Aron discussed the “return to favor” of the idea of empire in some circles.48 These circles included Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-born émigré philosopher whose lectures on Hegel had fascinated the Parisian intellectual world between 1933 and 1939, and who promoted the idea of the obsolescence of nation-states and the need for a “Latin Empire,” a vast “imperial” union of culturally similar nations.49 Aron suggested in the introduction to his 1945 volume The Age of Empires that these ideas of a Latin Union or Latin empire were “discredited in France due to the use made of them by rightwing parties.”50 Aron also returned to his earlier studies of Weber and German historical philosophy in making sense of Nazi imperialism. He analyzed Hitlerism as “plebiscitary Caesarism,” drawing on Weber’s studies of Caesarism.51 Turning to the theories of bureaucracy in Max and Alfred Weber, Aron analyzed the Nazi empire as a hypertrophic bureaucracy spread “across all territories” and attaching them to “the metropole.”52 This form of bureaucracy entailed the “administration of persons ” rather than the “government of societies.”53 Finally, Aron integrated his historicist epistemology into his analysis of Nazism. His rejection of the Leninist

90

G. STEINMETZ

theory of imperialism was based on his critique of universal and monocausal theories of history in general, in addition to evidence against the claim that imperial conquest and war were driven mainly by the interests or needs of capitalism. Although it was possible provide a causal explanation of every war and every imperial conquest, Aron argued, such explanatory accounts could not take the positivist form of “general laws.” Instead, every episode was the result of contingently intersecting historical series, combined with decisions, yielding events that were “unique, irreversible, and linked.”54

On French Colonialism and Decolonization In 1945 Aron argued that France’s colonial empire and the German question were the two key foreign policy issues for France.55 However, a decade later he predicted that the “events of historical importance in the coming years would occur in Africa rather than in Europe or even in Asia.”56 Aron referred only episodically to the colonies in his wartime writings for La France Libre. He discussed the colonies’ contributions to provisioning the metropole (and Germany); their use as base of military and political operations for the Free French and the Allies; and the Nazis’ attempt to gain the allegiance of French collaborators by allowing France to keep its empire and army. Aron still believed at the time that France could and should maintain itself as a great power, and as part of this it needed to keep its colonies in the Western Mediterranean and western Africa, albeit with “reforms of a liberal nature.”57 At the same time Aron recognized that France would not have the necessary resources to function as a great power at least for several years.58 Aron’s postwar discussions of colonialism emerged organically from his wartime writings. He often used concepts and terminology first deployed in his writings on Nazism to make sense of colonialism, which he analyzed in terms of relations between conquerors and conquered, racism and humiliation. He noticed the hollowness of the colonizers’ claims to promote the assimilation of the colonized, just as he had dismantled Nazi discourses about a European peace and French collaboration. Nonetheless, Aron insisted that “despite the bloodshed,” Europe’s colonial “conquests in Asia and Africa do not belong to the same category as Hitler’s project.”59

5

BETWEEN FRANCE, GERMANY, AND THE UNITED STATES …

91

Aron abhorred colonialism on moral grounds, but focused on developing arguments against it grounded in economic rationality and political raison d’état. His aim was to convince conservatives, who still believed in the viability of the French Empire, rather than preaching to those already opposed.60 Aron began adapting his earlier critique of the Marxist account of Nazism to the problem of colonialism, starting in 1950 with an article on “The Leninist Myth of Imperialism.”61 Here he explained that Lenin’s equation of “economic imperialism” with imperialism per se was empirically flawed: the conquest of Africa by Europe did not result from an expansion of capitalism; wars in general had not been provoked by colonialism; and colonialism was not profitable or necessary for the functioning of modern industrial European economies.62 It “would be futile to hunt for ‘compelling reasons of economic necessity’ to explain those military and naval expeditions which planted the tricolore at … Brazzaville,” and one should stop “prating about ‘monopoly capitalism’.” German colonialism had been driven by “jealous bitterness inspired by the conquests of other nations,” while the impulse behind French conquests was “military logics” and “the pioneering spirit of adventure and exploration.” Empire stemmed from “the will to power among nations” and offered “a field of glory for the fighting services rather than an outlet for economic products.”63 Citing Lenin’s earlier critic Joseph Schumpeter, Aron suggested that modern colonialism resurrected practices from precapitalist eras. By the same token, Nazi barbarism had involved a resurgence of atavistic warrior practices.64 Inverting the “Leninist” argument, which claims to unmask the true economic reasons for imperialism behind the high rhetoric of statesmen, Aron contended that statesmen exploit economic arguments “rationally acceptable to their contemporaries in order to disguise their dreams of political grandeur.”65 Aron recognized that France had been reduced to the status of a “second-rate power” located in an “intermediate position” between “Great Powers” and “satellite countries.”66 This diminished stature cast doubt on the viability of empire. In 1946, he wrote that colonialism “from now on belongs to a bygone era,” and that there was “no task more urgent than to elaborate a program to take the place of colonialism.” This alternative program would have to be “something rather than independence pure and simple,” since that “would deliver territories to another form of imperialism”—i.e., Soviet imperialism.67 Yet in another 1946 article Aron described the “movement of the victims of colonialism toward freedom” as inevitable.

92

G. STEINMETZ

The European nations’ loss of power and prestige, the diffusion of ideas borrowed from the colonizers themselves, the awakening or reawakening of political conscience among the indigenous populations, the distant or proximate propaganda from the grand empires of the 20th century, the USSR and the United States, whose contradictory ideologies equally reject the maintenance of the status quo—all of these “realist” reasons are sufficient to condemn the absurd pretense of prolonging the [colonial] order, without even invoking moral arguments…68

Aron concluded that “this system”—colonialism—“is dead.”69 Aron returned to colonial problems during a trip to Asia for Le Figaro and the CCF in 1953, where he again concluded that “our resources are no longer equal to the effort” despite American aid covering most of the costs.70 He argued that France should grant independence to Vietnam in order to better ally with Saigon to defend against Ho Chi Minh and the Communist threat.71 In 1954 Aron turned to the emerging crisis of French rule in North Africa. He supported “autonomy” for Tunisia and Morocco while insisting that the exact nature of autonomy needed to be clearly defined and that France should continue to work for the “peaceful coexistence of the different communities in North Africa and to accelerating economic development.”72 In 1956, the Suez crisis convinced Aron that the United States was willing to turn against its European allies in order to wean developing countries like Egypt away from Soviet influence.73 The Suez episode reduced France to the status of a “protected state” that “cannot lay claim to freedom of external military action.”74 France had clearly forfeited any claim to Great Power status. Aron’s logic led him to the inexorable conclusion that it made little sense for a second-rate power to maintain a colonial empire. Algeria, however, was a more difficult case, he believed, due to the presence of “a million French citizens and the inextricable intermixing of diverse communities.”75 Yet Aron ultimately argued that Algeria was not, in fact, unique. In May 1956, he signed a petition supporting military action and calling for the “renewal of French Algeria.”76 The same year, however, Aron supposedly argued in a private interview with the French President that Algeria should be granted independence.77 By 1957, Aron publicly defended Algerian independence in a short book, La Tragédie algérienne, followed in 1958 by L’Algérie et la République, where he reached the same conclusion. These books brought Aron into

5

BETWEEN FRANCE, GERMANY, AND THE UNITED STATES …

93

direct conflict with his editor at Figaro, Algeria’s former governor Jacques Soustelle, and most of the political right and center.78 Aron was “carried into” the most intense “political uproar” of his life.79 Aron introduced La Tragédie algérienne by quoting Montesquieu to the effect that while “every citizen is obligated to die for his country, no one is obligated to lie for it.”80 The revolt of the African and Asian people, he continued, was directed above all against foreign domination. The “people of color, whom the West humiliated, are using the western vocabulary to express their demands.”81 Aron then shifted to his practical register in an effort to reach readers who were not already anticolonialists. He had already pointed out that the assimilation of Algeria into France— the program of some colonial “reformers”—would lead to 150 Algerian deputies in the Assemblée nationale.82 In La Tragédie algérienne Aron predicted that the integration of millions of impoverished Muslim citizens would lead to the “ruin of French grandeur,” bankrupting France.83 Yet it was clear that Aron was not endorsing conventional definitions of grandeur, since he reminded readers of his standing argument since 1945 that France had lost the “greatness of power.” Yet France could continue to radiate power through its intellectual and cultural life, as long as the country did not “ruin itself in sterile adventures.”84 Aron pursued his argument about the “disparity between great empires and mid-sized states and nations” in L’Algérie et la République. Reprising his critique of the “Leninist” theory, Aron argued that the French empire was not determined causally by economics and concluded that colonial empires “are now widely seen as losing ventures.”85 Aron concluded this book with quasi-Spenglerian musings about decadent elites’ failure to understand that self-determination is the wave of the future. Aron wrote the book’s final section after the failed “coup d’état” of May 1958, when De Gaulle was hoisted into power by the French Army.86 These events justified Aron’s statement that “the Fourth Republic died of …. colonial wars.”87 Aron developed a sociological explanation of the 1958 “revolution” of the generals as resulting from the increasing precariousness of institutions and the sequence of national defeats. France might have consented to the loss of empire, or at least a transformation into some sort of free association, if it had not been so badly humiliated by World War II and the German occupation.88 Foreign policy—or in this case, colonial policy—was driven more by “ideology” than the sorts of rational calculus central to both the Leninist theory of imperialism and realist international relations theory.

94

G. STEINMETZ

Aron then turned to the question of anticolonialism. The national liberation movements were not, he argued, the result of Soviet, American, or Egyptian interference, as some conservatives were suggesting at the time, but were traceable to several “causes internal to Africa itself”: 1. The divergence between demographic growth and economic torpor and a system of vast inequalities between the “disinherited” and the “privileged”—i.e., the French.89 2. Colonialism led to the “the disaggregation of traditional frameworks and the concentration of masses in the cities.” 3. The French monopolized lower and mid-level civil service posts. The government should have limited migration of “les petits Français” to the colonies and allowed only experts to immigrate. This would have opened up lower and middle-level government positions to the colonized.90 4. The French proclaimed the “fiction” of assimilation “without according the substance.” European colonial rulers did not dare to pursue a resolute assimilation policy, but tended to rely on indirect rule and protect traditional customs. Aron noted that polygamy was never banned in Tunisia by the “assimilationist” French but was only outlawed by the Tunisians themselves after independence.91 5. The French educated “young men from the colonies” in metropolitan universities, giving them the “taste of liberty” and revolt. 6. Finally, Aron insisted on the importance of the racism that permeated colonial structures. The colonizers justify their disdain for the colonized by embracing “racist ideologies,” precipitating a “vicious circle of hatred.”92

On the United States as Rising and Declining Empire Aron argued that contemporary empires included colonies, or so-called “non-autonomous territories, to use the United Nations jargon–which are, for the most part, underdeveloped, and which are under the sovereignty of a developed country.”93 In addition to colonial empires, Europeans defined two other political entities as empires: the Roman type, and multinational empires like the Hapsburgs. Aron also distinguished

5

BETWEEN FRANCE, GERMANY, AND THE UNITED STATES …

95

between overseas empires and terrestrian empires such as Russia and the United States. Colonial empires tended to be transitory, even in terms of their own self-understanding, whereas the empire of the Tsars and Lenin might last much longer. One reason for the greater potential stability of continental empires was that they allowed the elites of the populations they conquered to accede to administrative positions.94 Aron described the Second World War as an “imperial war” rather than a European hegemonic war in the conventional sense.95 What he meant by “imperial war” was one that was carried out to obtain an empire over its rivals.96 Here the nineteenth century “concert of Europe,” grounded in a system of equal nation-states, was replaced by a “world system” dominated by vast hegemons that were also empires.97 What made them empires was that they were both expansionist and “multinational states” or “heterogeneous political units that included a variety of nations, peoples and communities.”98 And because the United States and the USSR were empires the post-World War II era was an “age of empires.”99 Aron observed in 1945 that “[a]lready in the last war, some prescient thinkers recognized that the hegemony of the United States was as inevitable as Rome’s after the Second Punic War.”100 Several years later Aron attributed this idea to Max Weber. The reason for the inevitability of American hegemony, he suggested, was American “economic supremacy,” although political hegemony could not be assumed to follow automatically.101 By defining the United States as an empire, Aron also called attention to its role as a military power and conqueror. According to Aron, “the major historical fact of the past half century is the decline of Europe, especially western Europe” and the “rise of the peripheral states, Russia and the United States.”102 These two facts were closely connected. Europe had been reduced to a “fragment of the empire involuntarily created by the United States.”103 Every attempt to create a European empire in response to these pressures had failed.104 Aron called the polarization between the US and the USSR the “great schism.” The balance between the two great powers produced something between war and peace, a “warlike peace” (une paix belliquese). The Soviets’ attainment of nuclear weapons in 1949 made “a return to total war unlikely.”105 For Aron the US and the USSR were both empires, hegemons, and nuclear powers. But they were not identical. Aron used the concept of totalitarianism to differentiate them. He first began describing the USSR as totalitarian already in 1939. He saw “a kinship” between

96

G. STEINMETZ

the Nazi and fascist regimes and the Soviet empire.106 Imperialist states were not necessary totalitarian, but totalitarian states were always imperialist, according to Aron.107 He never described the United States as totalitarian. Aron analyzed American foreign policy in a series of newspaper articles during the 1952–1958 period. He consistently supported US military interventions, including in Vietnam during the French conflict there. Aron understood US military hegemony as necessary for protecting Europe (and its former colonies) from communism. He frequently expressed exasperation with particular American foreign policies, and his frustration reached a peak during the Suez Crisis, although he later regretted his anger toward the United States for abandoning its European allies.108 He criticized President Harry Truman’s Point Four program and John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress program as “myopically prioritize[ing] an American ideology over the particularity of geographical, political, cultural, and religious conditions.”109 He criticized the modernization-theoretic doctrines of American policy as being “shocking to the historian.” 110 Aron’s critiques of American international relations theory and modernization theory were in line with his criticism of scientistic positivism more generally. Both of these approaches were predicated on notions of universal forms of rationality and social “laws,” ideas that Aron had already rejected in his doctoral theses. In an article criticizing the UNESCO “Tensions” project, which attempted to develop a general theory of war, Aron countered that war cannot be “treated mathematically” or using game theory.111 Since these approaches undergirded US foreign policy in this period, Aron’s epistemological critiques were simultaneously critiques of American policy. Aron turned his full attention to the United States with the publication in 1973 of La République impériale (The Imperial Republic. The United States and the World, 1945–1973). He opened by discussing the two main views of US foreign policy: the older “realist school” and the more recent “paramarxist” approach represented by scholars such as William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, and Harry Magdoff. Both perspectives were similar to theories that Aron had been criticizing for decades. Against the first, he argued that US policy was not typically dictated by an amoral raison d’état but on the contrary by deeply moralizing forms of ideology. Indeed, the United States was typically “guilty not of any will to power, but of a failure to recognize the role imposed on it destiny,” especially in its hesitation to enter World War II. Echoing Carl Schmitt

5

BETWEEN FRANCE, GERMANY, AND THE UNITED STATES …

97

in Der Nomos der Erde (1950), Aron argued that there was a perennial American refusal of the “existence of the inter-state universe.”112 The Korean War finally led the United States to resign itself “to the European practice of maintaining a large standing army, not merely a navy and air force” and “precipitated the formation in Europe of two military blocs, and in Asia the quarantining of Communist China.” American policy in the Vietnam War then became openly imperialist, “reviving the ancient practice of ‘punishment’—attacking the adversary’s territory to weaken his morale even more than to destroy his resources.”113 Aron argued further that contemporary American imperialism was characterized by the pervasive influence of academics on defense policy. The “armaments race was spawned by scientists, not the armed forces”— or the capitalists.114 Aron insisted that “the initiative throughout the period lay with the politicians, civilians, and academics rather than the generals,” even if was “undeniable” that “corporations used lobbyists to obtain defense contracts.” There had been a “militarization of the … thinking of the civilian policy-makers.”115 The mobilization of liberal intellectuals for the Cold War and the movement of academics into the Pentagon from universities represented more important policy determinants than “capitalism,” the defense industry, or the “hiring of retired generals by General Dynamics.”116 The current “paramarxist” theories of American imperialism were just as inaccurate as the earlier wave of “Leninist” theories of European imperialism.117 Aron went on to distinguish the American form of empire from European colonialism. While the latter was “Paleo-Imperialism,” the American form was predominantly “Neo-Imperialism,” since it did not attempt to replace the sovereign rulers of independent states with its own rulers.118 Europeans, including the French, generally perceived the United States as imperial but not imperialist, since the United States was protecting Europeans at their own request rather than forcing a protectorate upon them.119 By contrast, in the Caribbean and Central America, where the United States intervened to create or to uphold pro-American regimes and to overthrow or frustrate hostile ones, American policy was perceived as straightforwardly “imperialist.”120 The United States could therefore be most accurately described as a “quasi-imperator of a quasi-empire.”121 The American imperial structures Aron identified began to crumble just as La République impériale was published. Aron was acutely aware of the “economic and military decline of the United States” after 1973. He believed that “U.S. military failures in Vietnam, the collapse of the Bretton Woods systems, and Nixon’s détente policies had resulted in la fin du système bipolaire.”122 The United States was clearly “giving up its

98

G. STEINMETZ

imperial responsibilities.”123 This analysis of the end of the US empire clearly anticipates Immanuel Wallerstein’s account, which situates the onset of the US hegemonic decline at exactly the same historical moment and explains it in similar terms.124

Conclusion: Aron’s World of Empires Aron’s work on empire contains a number of important elements. Most obviously, he provided original accounts of Nazi imperialism, French colonialism, and American imperial politics. He attempted to develop historically sensitive definitions of imperial processes and phenomena. He revived the concept of empire for the contemporary world, and showed that not all empires were imperialist, much less colonialist, at least in the sense of “colonial imperialism” or “Paleo-Imperialism.” Aron’s insistence on the primacy of politics had salutary effects on the perennially popular economistic theories of imperialism. He examined various causal factors to explain the origins, dynamics, and endings of empires and colonies, while his imperial analysis was embedded within a larger theory of international relations. Not only was there a continuous spectrum of imperial forms, but there was a continuous spectrum of diplomatic forms running from empire to non-imperial hegemony. In all, Aron’s imperial writings bring together combined Weimar-era epistemology, with an insouciance toward disciplinary boundaries that was much more commonplace among French scholars and intellectuals than their German and American colleagues at the time. Recent discussions of colonialism, postcolonial, and decolonial theory are encompassed within the writings of Aron and other French sociologists of the 1950s, such as Jacques Berque and Georges Balandier, along with sociologists who were born as colonized subjects and trained in metropolitan or overseas universities, such as Albert Memmi and Abdelmalek Sayad.125 Berque coined the critical concepts “decolonial” and “Europo-centrism,” and advocated a form of knowledge he called “transcolonial,” defined as a phase of “reciprocal knowledge.”126 Aron almost seemed to echo Berque in his 1957 Espoir et Peur du siècle, where he suggested that an assessment (bilan) of European colonialism could only be “established later, once …. masters and slaves, having become equal, can engage in an equitable dialogue about the meaning of their shared

5

BETWEEN FRANCE, GERMANY, AND THE UNITED STATES …

99

experience.”127 Aron as a postcolonial, post-imperial, self-reflexive theorist? Perhaps, given what we know about his intellectual context, this is not too far-fetched.

Notes 1. Two exceptions are Matthias Oppermann, Raymond Aron und Deutschland. Die Verteidigung der Freiheit und das Problem des Totalitarismus (Ostfildern: Thorbecke Verlag, 2008), who discusses Aron’s writing on Nazi imperialism in detail, and Robert Colquhoun, Raymond Aron (London: Sage Publications, 1986), who discusses Aron’s views of the French empire. 2. Sophie Marcotte-Chenard, “Thinking in Uncertain Times: Raymond Aron and the Politics of Historicism,” in Herman Paul and Adriaan van Veldhuizen, eds., Historicism: A Travelling Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2020 [forthcoming]). 3. Carsten Klingemann, Soziologie und Politik: Sozialwissenschaftliches Expertenwissen im Dritten Reich und in der frühen westdeutschen Nachkriegszeit (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2009); George Steinmetz, “Ideas in Exile: Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Failure to Transplant Historical Sociology into the United States,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 23.1 (2010), 1–27. 4. Mitchell L. Stevens, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, and Seteney Shami, Seeing the World: How U.S. Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); George Steinmetz, “Methodological Homelandism,”Contemporary Sociology 48.3 (2019), 244–248. 5. George Steinmetz, “The Genealogy of a Positivist Haunting: Comparing Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology,” Boundary 2 32.2 (2005), 107– 133. 6. Marc Joly, “Excellence sociologique et ‘vocation d’heterodoxie’: Mai 68 et la rupture Aron-Bourdieu,” Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines 26 (2015), 17–44; Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, The Other Intellectuals. Raymond Aron and the United States (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2016), 164; Idem.,“Why Did Raymond Aron Write That Carl Schmitt Was Not a Nazi? An Alternative Genealogy of French Liberalism,” Modern Intellectual History 11.3 (2014), 549–574. 7. Aron, “Lettre ouverte d’un jeune français à l’Allemagne,” L’Esprit 1.5 (1933), 735–743, 735. See Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les nonconformistes des années 30. Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001); Gilbert Merlio, Ni

100

G. STEINMETZ

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

gauche, ni droîte. Les chassés-croisés idéologiques des intellectuels français et allemands dans l’Entre-deux-guerres (Talence: Edition MSHA, 1995). See Christophe Prochasson, “Raymond Aron est-il un intellectual de gauche?,” in Serge Audier, et al., Raymond Aron, philosophe dans l’histoire (Paris: Fallois, 2008), 219–228. None of the writing on Aron as a moralizing political moderate by American and British writers addresses his analyses of imperialism, colonialism, or Empire. Hans Manfred Bock, “Raymond Aron und Deutschland. Aspekte einer intellektuellen Generationsanalyse,” Lendemains 36.141 (2011), 43–58. Aron, Essai sur la théorie de l’histoire dans l’Allemagne contemporaine. La philosophie critique de l’histoire (Paris: Vrin, 1938), 291. George Steinmetz, “Historicism and Contingency: Beyond Positivism in the Social Sciences,” in Herman Paul and Adriaan van Veldhuizen, eds., Historicism. Aron, Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1961 [1938]), 343. For discussion of Aron’s historical epistemology see Pierre Hassner, “Raymond Aron and the History of the Twentieth Century,” International Studies Quarterly 29.1 (1985), 29–37, 32. Aron’s notion of the meeting of independent causal series in contingent historical explanation was borrowed from Cournot; see Raymond Aron, Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Thought (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990 [1983]), 205. David Drake, “Raymond Aron and La France Libre: June 1940– September 1944,” in Debra Kelly and Martyn Cornick, eds., A History of the French in London: Liberty Equality, Opportunity (London: University of London School of Advanced Study Institute of Historical Research, 2013), 373–390, 276; Michael Curtis, “Raymond Aron and La France Libre,” in Bryan-Paul Frost and Daniel J. Mahoney, eds., Political Reason in the Age of Ideology: Essays in Honor of Raymond Aron (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 147–174. Aron’s article for La France Libre are collected in Aron, Chroniques de guerre: La France libre, 1940–1945 (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). Yves-Marc Ajchenbaum, “Combat”, 1941–1974: une utopie de la Résistance, une aventure de presse (Paris: Gallimard, 2013). Aron’s articles for Le Figaro are collected in Aron, Les articles de la politique internationale dans “Le Figaro” de 1947 à 1977 , 3 vols. (Paris: Éd. de Fallois, 1990). Aron, Memoirs, 139, 229–239. Brigitte Mazon, Aux origines de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales: Le rôle du mécénat américain, 1920–1960 (Paris: Cerf, 1988); Jacques Revel and Nathan Wachtel, eds., Une école pour les sciences

5

20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

BETWEEN FRANCE, GERMANY, AND THE UNITED STATES …

101

sociales: de la VIe section à l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1996). Aron, Memoirs, 141. Allan Bloom, “Raymond Aron-The Last of the Liberals,” in Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960–1990 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 256–267, 266. Franz L. Neumann, Behemoth. The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951). Aron, “L’Allemagne: une révolution antiprolétarienne: Idéologie et réalité du national-socialisme,” Inventaires I (1936), 24–55, 14, 54. Aron, “L’ère des tyrannies d’Elie Halévy,” Revue de metaphysique et de morale 46.2 (1939), 283–307, 288, 291, 302. See discussion in Oppermann, Raymond Aron, 149. Aron, “Etats démocratiques et états totalitaires [Juin 1939],” Commentaire 24 (1983–1984), 701–719, 706–707. Aron, “ L’ère des tyrannies,” 302. Aron used the word “totalitarianism” several times in his 1939 text on Halévy and had already used it in 1934, according to Oppermann, Raymond Aron, 118. Aron, “Les racines de l’impérialisme allemand [1941],” in L’Homme contre les tyrans (New York: Éditions de la Maison française, 1944), 285–301, 288–292. Aron, “Le Machiavélisme, doctrine des tyrannies modernes (1939),” in L’Homme contre les tyrans, 15–29, 21. Italics in original. Aron, “Le Machiavélisme,” 26; Idem., “Le Romantisme de la violence (1941),” in L’Homme contre les tyrans, 30–49, 45. Aron, “La Menace des Césars [1942],” in L’Homme contre les tyrans, 266–284, 269. Aron, “La Menace des Césars,” 276. Aron, “Dynamisme de la guerre totale,” in Aron, Les guerres en chaîne (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 37–62, 47–48. Aron, “La Stratégie totalitaire et l’avenir des démocraties” [1942], in L’Homme contre les tyrans, 227–247, 228–229; “Le Romantisme de la violence [1941]”, in L’Homme contre les tyrans, 30–49, 47. Aron, “Le Romantisme,” 41; Aron, “Les racines,” 293. Aron, “Philosophie du pacifisme [1941],” in L’Homme contre les tyrans, 111–127, 123; Aron, “Bataille des propagandes [1942],” in De l’Armistice, 248–265, 250. Aron, “La Menace des Césars,” 282. Aron, “La Menace des Césars,” 282; Aron, “Dynamisme de la guerre totale,” 51.

102

G. STEINMETZ

39. Aron, “L’âge des empires [1945],” in Aron, L’Âge des empires et l’Avenir de la France (Paris: Défense de la France, 1945), 355–369, 359. 40. Aron, “Dynamisme de la guerre totale,” 51. On hybrid imperial forms see George Steinmetz, “Return to Empire: The New U.S. Imperialism in Theoretical and Historical Perspective,” Sociological Theory 23.4 (2005), 339–367. 41. Aron, “Le Problème du ravitaillement,” De l’Armistice, 72–80, 73. 42. Aron, “Empire de Charlemagne et testament de Richelieu [1943],” in Aron, De l’armistice à l’insurrection nationale (Paris, Gallimard, 1945), 272–283, 274. 43. Aron, “Empire de Charlemagne,” 276. 44. Aron, “La Menace des Césars,” 281. 45. Aron, “Pour l’alliance de l’Occident [1944],” in L’Âge des empires, 319– 326, 321–322. 46. Joël Moric, Raymond Aron et l’Europe (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013), ch 5, 109ff.; Aron, “Destin des nationalités,” in L’Homme contre les tyrans, 302–324, 303; Aron, “L’âge des empires,” 357. Aron corresponded with Schmitt and met him once after the war, and he mentored the French Schmittian sociologist (and former member of the Resistance) Julian Freund. Piet Tomissen, “Raymond Aron face à Carl Schmitt,” Schmittiana 7 (2003), 111–129. 47. Aron, “Les racines,” 295. 48. Aron, “L’âge des empires,” 357. 49. Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève: la philosophie, l’Etat, la fin de l’histoire (Paris: B. Grasset, 1990), 225–231, 253–263, 283; see Alexandre Kojève, “Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy,” Policy Review (August–September 2004); Robert Howse, “Europe and the New World Order: Lessons from Alexandre Kojève’s Engagement with Schmitt’s ‘Nomos der Erde’,” Leiden Journal of International Law 19 (2006), 93–103. 50. Aron, “Introduction,” in L’âge des empires, 1–27, 26. 51. Aron, Memoirs, 129. 52. Aron, “La Menace des Césars,” 281. 53. Aron, “Bureaucratie et fanatisme,” in L’Homme contre les tyrans, 68–88, 75. Italics in original. 54. Aron, “La Menace des Césars,” 282. 55. Aron, “Remarques sur quelques préjugés politiques [1943],” in L’Âge des empires, 327–354, 346, 349. 56. Aron, “La France joue sa dernière chance en Afrique. I [1955],” in Aron, Les articles, Tome 2, 86–90, 86. 57. Aron, “Reflections on the Foreign Policy of France,” International Affairs 21.4 (1945), 437–447, 445.

5

BETWEEN FRANCE, GERMANY, AND THE UNITED STATES …

103

58. Aron, “Remarques sur quelques préjugés politiques,” 346; “Reflections on the Foreign Policy,” 443. 59. Aron, Espoir et peur du siècle. Essais non partisans (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1957), 210. 60. Aron, The Committed Observer: Interviews with Jean-Louis Missika and Dominique Wolton (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1983), 164. 61. Aron, “Le Mythe léniniste de l’impérialisme,” in Les Guerres en chaîne, 63–84. 62. Aron, “Le Mythe léniniste,” 65, 69; Aron, “What Empires Cost and What Profits they Bring,” in The Dawn of Universal History (New York: Basic Books, 2002 [1962]), 407–418. 63. Quotes from Aron, Imperialism and Colonialism (Leeds: Jowett and Sowry, 1959), 4–6; Aron, “Le Mythe léniniste,” 70. 64. Aron, “Le Mythe léniniste,” 68. 65. Aron, Imperialism and Colonialism, 6. 66. Aron, “Reflections on the Foreign Policy,” 443. 67. Aron, “L’industrialisation de l’Empire,” Combat, June 24 (1946); “A propos de l’Union française,” Combat, September 15 (1946), quoted in Colquhoun, Raymond Aron, vol. 1, 439. 68. Aron, “Le courage d’innover,” Combat, April 3 (1946), quoted in Colquhoun, Raymond Aron, vol. 1, 441. 69. Ibid. 70. Aron, “La tragédie d’Indochine [1953],” in Aron, Les articles de la politique internationale dans “Le Figaro” de 1947 à 1977 , Tome 1 (Paris: Éd. de Fallois, 1990), 1114–1119, 1116. 71. Colquhoun, Raymond Aron, vol. 1, 443. 72. Aron, “Perspectives nord-africaines,” Evidences (September–December 1954), 3–4, 4. 73. Aron, “L’unité atlantique, enjeu de la crise de Suez,” in Les articles, Tome 2, 231–233; also “Une fois de plus,” in Les articles, Tome 2, 240–242. 74. Aron, The Imperial Republic. The United States and the World, 1945– 1973 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 56. 75. Aron, “Perspectives nord-africaines,” Evidences (September–December 1954), 3–4. 76. Lucia Bonfreschi, “Raymond Aron face au processus de la decolonisation française sous la Quatrième Republique,” Outre-mers 95: 354–355 (June 2007), 271–284, 280. 77. Bonfreschi, “Raymond Aron,” 279, note 38. 78. James D. Le Sueur, Uncivil War. Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 132–142. 79. Aron, Memoirs, 248.

104

G. STEINMETZ

80. Aron, La tragédie algérienne (Paris: Plon, 1957), iii. 81. Aron, La tragédie algérienne, 7. 82. Aron, “La France joue sa dernière chance en Afrique, III [1954],” in Aron, Les articles, Tome 2, 94–98, 98; Aron, “La France joue sa dernière chance en Afrique, IV [1954],” in Aron, Les articles, Tome 2, 98–103, 100. 83. Aron, La tragédie algérienne, 51, 44, 45. 84. Aron, La tragédie algérienne, 72. 85. L’Algérie et la République (Paris: Plon, 1958), 56, 60–61. 86. Pierre Abramovici, Le putsch des généraux: De Gaulle contre l’armée, 1958–1961 (Paris: Fayard, 2011). 87. Aron, L’Algérie et la République, 113. 88. Aron, L’Algérie et la République, 123, 114–115. 89. Aron, “La France joue sa dernière chance en Afrique, I (1955),” in Aron, Les articles, Tome 2, 86–90, 86. 90. Aron, Espoir et peur, 203. 91. Aron, “Nations et empires,” in Encyclopédie française, Vol. 11 (Paris: Société nouvelle de l’Encyclopédie française, 1957), 11.04–1-11.06.8. 92. Aron, “La France joue sa dernière chance en Afrique, I,” 88–89. 93. Aron, “What Empires Cost,” 407. 94. Aron, Espoir et peur, 210–211. 95. Aron, “Destin des nationalités (1943),” in L’Homme contre les tyrans, 302–324, 309. 96. Oppermann, Raymond Aron, 241; Aron, Peace and War (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 154. 97. Aron, “Reflections on the Foreign Policy of France,” 442. 98. Or Rosenboim, “Repenser l’État dans un espace devenu mondial. La pensée de Raymond Aron sur les relations intemationales 1940–1949,” in Fabrice Bouthillon, et al., Raymond Aron et la défense de la liberté (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 2016), 41–64. 99. Aron, “L’âge des empires,” 358. 100. Aron, “Nouvelle carte du monde,” Point de vue 1.7 (May 4, 1945), n.p. 101. Aron, “The Rise of the Peripheral States,” in The Century of Total War (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 101–115, 101–102. 102. Aron, “Transformations du monde de 1900 à 1950: déplacement du centre de gravité international,” Réalités 47 (1949), 70–111, 70–71. 103. Aron, Espoir et peur, 222. 104. Aron, “Reflections on the Foreign Policy of France,” 442. 105. Steinmetz-Jenkins, The Other Intellectuals, 122; Aron, “Transformations du monde de 1900 à 1950: déplacement du centre de gravité international,” Réalités 47 (1949), 70–111, 70–71; Aron, The Imperial Republic, 56; Aron, Le Grand Schisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 32; Aron, The Great Debate: Theories of Nuclear Strategy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965).

5

BETWEEN FRANCE, GERMANY, AND THE UNITED STATES …

105

106. Claude Lefort, “Raymond Aron et le phénomène totalitaire,” in Christian Bachelier, ed., Raymond Aron et la liberté politique (Paris: Fallois, 2002), 87–92, 88. 107. Oppermann, Raymond Aron, 216. 108. Colquhoun, Raymond Aron, Vol. 2, 33; Les articles, Tome 2, 153–155, 226–244. 109. Steinmetz-Jenkins, The Other Intellectuals, 101. Truman’s Point Four Program was a policy of economic aid and technical assistance to developing countries, starting in 1950. The Alliance for Progress, initiated in 1961, was a US foreign aid program for Latin America that was explicitly grounded in modernization theory. 110. Aron, “The Diffusion of Ideologies,” Confluence 2.1 (1953), 3–12, 7. 111. Aron, “Conflict and War from the Viewpoint of Historical Sociology,” in International Sociological Association, The Nature of Conflict. Studies on the Sociological Aspects of International Tensions (Paris: UNESCO, 1957), 177–203, 199. 112. Aron, The Imperial Republic, xxxvi; Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus publicum Europaeum (Köln: Greven, 1950). 113. Aron, The Imperial Republic, 48, 101. 114. Aron, The Imperial Republic, 265. 115. Aron, The Imperial Republic, 266. 116. Aron, The Imperial Republic, 271. 117. The second part of La République impériale marshals a mass of historical and economic evidence to counter the “paramarxist” historians. 118. Aron, The Imperial Republic, 175. 119. Aron, The Imperial Republic, 257. 120. Aron, The Imperial Republic, 185, 258. 121. Aron, The Imperial Republic, 279. 122. Steinmetz-Jenkins, The Other Intellectuals, 162. 123. Steinmetz-Jenkins, The Other Intellectuals, 168–170. 124. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New York: New Press, 2003). 125. George Steinmetz, “Sociology and Colonialism in the British and French Empires, 1940s–1960s,” Journal of Modern History 89.3 (2017), 601– 648. 126. Jacques Berque, “Décolonisation intérieure et nature seconde,” Etudes de sociologie tunisienne 1 (1968), 11–27, 13, 19, 24; Idem., “Préface,” Ibla: Revue de L’institut des belles lettres arabes 79 (1960), 351–356, 352. 127. Aron, Espoir et peur, 211.

PART II

Passages

CHAPTER 6

“A Truly Exquisite Little Phrase:” Global Colonialist Visions vs. The “Drang nach Osten” Jens-Uwe Guettel

During the 1890s, Carl Peters, Germany’s most famous, or infamous, colonialist, published tirelessly on the state of his country’s current and future colonial expansion. In these writings, he made fun of expansionists who imagined a different geographical direction for the German Empire’s impending colonial enlargement than the one preferred by him. Peters dreamt of more German colonies across the Atlantic Ocean, in Africa, or elsewhere outside of Europe, while those that he ridiculed advocated for Germany’s contiguous enlargement eastward. Peters made very clear that he believed such ideas to be preposterous: “‘We should rather Germanize the East instead of reaching across the oceans.’ But 200,000 people emigrate annually and unstoppably across the ocean! So, even if we begin to ‘Germanize the east’ (a truly exquisite little phrase), these 200,000 fellow citizens are still lost to us.”1

J.-U. Guettel (B) The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_6

109

110

J.-U. GUETTEL

Of course, in order to present his own ventures in German East Africa (Tanzania) in the best possible light, Peters overestimated the attractiveness of African colonies for German settlers. But he was nevertheless correct that at least until the 1890s hundreds of thousands of Germans left the Kaiserreich for destinations across the Atlantic. At least indirectly Peters also made a broader argument about the overall unattractiveness of Eastern Europe, whether under German control or not, for ethnic Germans. Imperial Germany possessed large portions of what after 1918 (and even more so after 1945) would become part of a newly created Poland. Before 1914 both the Prussian state, which was the largest political entity within the federal structure of the German Empire, and various private organizations attempted to make these nominally German/Prussian regions appealing to German immigrants. These efforts failed miserably, however. Instead of feeling the “urge to go east,” [Drang nach Osten], Germans left Prussia’s eastern provinces in droves in order to either move to the country’s capital Berlin, to Germany’s other industrial centers, or, of course, to the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, and other places across the Atlantic ocean.2 This essay scrutinizes nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German debates about which direction German colonialism was supposed to take. Should it have a global focus? Should it heed the examples of other Western imperialist powers—including the United States—and look for territory all over the planet, and especially in Africa? Or should Germany turn eastward instead? A number of scholars have recently stressed the importance of nineteenth-century European imperialist and American westward expansion for the Nazis’ Eastern-Europe-focused colonial fantasies and practices, among them David Furber, Mark Mazower, Timothy Snyder, and Jürgen Zimmerer. Yet as this essay shows, at least during the era in which both global and Eastern-Europe-focused expansionist concepts originated, they often existed as argumentative and practical opposites, both politically as well as ideologically.3

Eastern and Western Dreams, 1815 and 1871 Long before the term “fake news” became widespread, Peters’ mocking statement quoted at the beginning of this chapter points to a similar phenomenon in the late nineteenth century. Peters’ derision for promoters of Eastern colonization stemmed from the fact, often willingly ignored by his opponents, that real-life developments did not at

6

“A TRULY EXQUISITE LITTLE PHRASE:” GLOBAL …

111

all support their expansionist hopes—and had not for quite some time. It was indeed true that German migration to east-central Europe, a region spanning large parts of what in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries belonged to the Russian Empire, had transformed these lands. Between the late Middle Ages and the early nineteenth century, many generations of ethnic Germans had sought a better life by going east, bringing their language, cultures, and know-how with them. However, the influx of Germans into these regions came to an abrupt end by the mid-1800s. The main reason for this termination of a centuries-old process was that by then crossing the Atlantic westward to the Americas had become affordable and relatively easy. As a result, a mass migration of European—and often German—immigrants to North and also South America set in. By the 1850s, both the feasibility of “going west” rather than east as well as the continuously increasing practical and imagined attractiveness of the American West had eliminated Eastern Europe as a destination for German emigrants.4 In 1817, Hans Christoph von Gagern, the father of the first president of the revolutionary 1848 Frankfurt Parliament Heinrich von Gagern, sent an envoy to the United States in order to sound out whether it would be possible to establish German settler colonies on North American soil. Neither Eastern Europe more generally nor Prussia’s eastern provinces more specifically interested Gagern. Instead, it was American westward expansion that inspired him. Like Thomas Jefferson, Gagern had been heavily influenced by English scholar Thomas Malthus’ prediction that population growth would always outpace food production. As a remedy for this predicament Gagern believed spatial expansion to be of utmost importance for a future German nation state. Like so many of his liberal-nationalist contemporaries Gagern looked west- not eastward for answers to this perceived problem. However, Gagern quickly realized that the United States would not accept the establishment of German colonies on North American soil. While his plans were therefore never realized, they nevertheless showcased the lure of “the West” for German expansionists in the early 1800s. Not everybody was as realistic as Gagern, however. The Mainzer Adelsverein, an organization of expansion-minded German noblemen, tried to organize an ill-fated German colonial settlement in Texas between 1842 and 1853. Others also looked to the US as a model for colonization. In the French colonial context, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville (a contemporary of Gagern) viewed France’s ongoing conquest of Algeria during the 1830s and 1840s

112

J.-U. GUETTEL

as following the American model. For Tocqueville, Algiers appeared to be “Cincinnati transported onto the soil of Africa.”5 During the first half of the nineteenth century, German expansionists were so enthused by US westward expansion that even by the time of the 1848 revolution they still wanted to establish German colonies on the North American continent, despite the conclusions Hans Christoph von Gagern had reached decades earlier. The revolutionary Frankfurt parliament therefore discussed the future colonial expansion at length for what they perceived as soon to be united German nation state. As in the preceding decades, these discussions centered around the establishment of settler colonies not in Eastern Europe, but globally, ideally on North American soil. Such America-focused fantasies, however, soon disappeared. On the one hand, the prospect of a united German nation state proved illusionary, at least in 1848/1849. On the other, more and better knowledge of US politics and political objectives soon made expansionists realize that the United States would not allow German colonialist activities to occur on North American soil.6 Yet the colonialist debates in the 1848/1849 Frankfurt parliament had shown that when push came to shove, i.e., when those interested in German expansion were able to make themselves believe that they were discussing actual possibilities to translate visions into actions, “the East” played only a negligible role with respect to where German colonies should be established. During the discussions about the future united Germany’s eastern borders, representatives of the Frankfurt parliament did invoke the trope of a historical “German colonization of the East” [deutsche Ostkolonisation]. Yet, while, for example, the question of splitting up the duchy of Posen in order to include its western and largely ethnically German parts in a newly created German nation state generated contentious debates, the Frankfurt parliament’s plans to fund the construction of a German navy for the protection of Germany’s future overseas colonies rested on a broadly shared consensus. On balance, the parliamentarians’ tendency to focus on trans-Atlantic spaces when discussing Germany’s expansionist plans therefore closely followed the trend set by German migrants, who by 1848 had chosen to move westrather than eastwards.7

6

“A TRULY EXQUISITE LITTLE PHRASE:” GLOBAL …

113

European or Global Expansion, 1871–1914 Not everybody accepted this development. Responding both to lobbying efforts by agricultural entrepreneurs and steadily growing nationalist sentiments, in the 1860s the Prussian state began to enact various colonialist measures in its eastern and ethnically majority-Polish regions, among them the suppression of the Polish language and the support of socioeconomic Germanization schemes. Three decades later, the agricultural economist Max Sering, who had traveled North America extensively, demonstrated that these settlement measures, which as of 1886 were sponsored and organized by the Prussian Settlement Commission, had mostly failed, simultaneously surmising that the “transfer of [American] institutions and economic methods to other countries is rarely possible.” Sering’s comprehensive study on “inner colonization” attempts in the Prussian East, entitled Die innere Kolonisation im östlichen Deutschland (1893), is one of the few scientific treatises on German settlement projects in Prussia’s Polish provinces. Highlighting the most important objective of Eastern settlement schemes—the Germanization of Polish areas—Sering concluded that in addition to the fact that American agricultural methods were inapplicable there, the sociocultural organization of American settlements along the frontier was also unsuitable for Prussia’s Polish regions. “In North America, nothing helped along the quick Anglicization of foreign colonists more than their spatial distribution and settlement on individual farms among usually much greater numbers of native farmers,” he noted, adding that “This system is required by local land laws.” However, Sering continued, “in Posen-Western Prussia the goal is to establish nationally conscious colonies. As of that reason, the authorities have backed away from applying a single-farm system.” Ultimately, Sering pointed out that the main reason for the failure of the Eastern colonization efforts was in fact predetermined by their basic purpose: “German colonization appears to be a means to fight Polish-ness (…).” Yet in Sering’s view, only ethnically blind colonization measures could be economically successful. Sering accepted Poles as inhabitants of the Prussian East, alongside ethnic Germans. Any sensible colonization efforts had to consider this demographic fact. Sering argued that the only way to attract settlers to Prussia’s eastern provinces was state assistance regardless of ethnicity. As a result, a colonization of “the East” might be possible, but not its full-blown Germanization. Sering pointed out that the Polish resistance to Prussian settlement schemes stemmed

114

J.-U. GUETTEL

from the fact that Poles were treated as less worthy of state assistance than ethnic Germans. Polish inhabitants of Prussia’s eastern provinces were thus well aware of the fact that metropolitan discourses and practices constructed them as lesser—colonial—subjects of the Prussian and German state and fashioned their home regions as spaces to be colonized by superior Germans.8 This discursive colonization of Prussia’s Polish subjects and lands was not limited to the state’s administration. Gustav Freytag’s popular novel Debit and Credit (1855) also imagined the Polish areas of Central Europe as frontier regions for German colonizers and settlers, and Paul Langhans’ Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas (1893) mapped the medieval and early modern “German colonization in the East.” Moreover, while Langhans charted the past of the “German urge to go East,” Paul de Lagarde, a nationalist and anti-Semitic cultural critic and professor of orientalism at the University of Göttingen, envisioned Germany’s future as tied to the colonization and Germanization of Eastern Europe. According to Lagarde, “German emigration to these areas has to be directed systematically and according to a plan conceived of the basis of strategic goals towards Istria, towards the Slovakian and Magyar parts of Hungary, towards Bohemia and Galicia, towards the Polish parts of Silesia and towards Posen. (…) Why all of this material that moves to America year after year should be lost to us is not really understandable.” Lagarde was notoriously combative and his influence remained limited before 1914 outside the small “völkisch” movement and parts of the Pan-German League, an organization initially founded to lobby for German overseas colonialism. After 1900, the League started losing members and began to increasingly promote radically right-wing political and racial ideas and German expansion within Europe. However, Lagarde was read widely enough so that we can recognize how Carl Peters had Lagarde in mind when he wrote the polemic cited at the beginning of this essay. Of course, the real-life goals of tens of thousands of ethnic Germans living in Posen or West Prussia were antithetical to the ones formulated by the Göttingen professor: If these Germans’ objective was to become colonists at all, they certainly did not want to realize their aspiration in the regions from which they hailed. Instead, they moved westwards, a direction Germans had preferred for decades already.9 Lagarde’s discursive colonization of Eastern Europe was plainly visible as he directly described it as a future colony for German settlers. And indeed, as highlighted by the case of Friedrich Fabri’s often referenced

6

“A TRULY EXQUISITE LITTLE PHRASE:” GLOBAL …

115

colonialist pamphlet Does Germany Need Colonies? (1879), discursive colonization could become one of the preconditions for “successful” actual colonization, as liberal German colonialists like Fabri were eventually able to successfully lobby the German government to support their demands for German overseas colonies. The actual establishment of government-protected “Schutzgebiete” that began in 1884 can be—and was by contemporaries—seen as a clear success of the German liberal colonialist movement. With respect to the settlement measures in Prussia’s eastern provinces, however, discursive colonization merely underwrote continuously failing attempts to turn dreams into reality.10 The key difference between ideas about, as phrased by Paul Langhans, the “German colonization in the East” and Germany’s establishment of the fifth largest global colonial empire by the late nineteenth century was therefore this: The appeal of the former was limited to the members of small intellectual and economic elites and remained almost entirely discursive in so far as eastern-focused colonization schemes failed to achieve their objective. There were individual success stories, but those did not change the larger demographic trends that made Germans (and many Poles as well) leave West Prussia and Posen rather than moving there. The establishment of actual German colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific on the other hand occurred successfully in so far as it happened at all. In addition, as shown by historians David Ciarlo, John Phillip Short, and others, Germany’s global colonial efforts achieved genuine and widespread popularity before 1914 and substantially shaped how Germans perceived both their homeland and its global possessions, for example through the use of new and exciting forms of entertainment and successful advertising campaigns.11 The reason why liberal colonialism and its dreams and realities of German colonies in Africa and elsewhere around the globe was more successful than its Eastern-Europe-focused counterpart had both discursive and material reasons, among them maybe most importantly the fact that liberal colonialism was not narrowly German. Instead, its concepts and fantasies connected its German adherents to similarly minded expansionists elsewhere in Western Europe and the United States. As a result, the discursive colonization preceding and connected to liberal colonialism was vast and spanned all genres, from literature to scientific tracts. By the time Germany began to acquire its own overseas possessions, the liberal colonial imaginary had been constructed and shaped by literary works such as Robinson Crusoe, the accounts of James Cook’s and Georg

116

J.-U. GUETTEL

Foster’s travels, authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Jules Verne, and, specifically in the German Empire, Karl May (though this German author of Westerns became well-liked in Italy and Spain as well). In turn, popular works such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula depicted Eastern Europe as a space to avoid, lest one wanted to be reverse-colonized (i.e., turned into one of Dracula’s minions). As literary scholar Kristin Kopp has shown, proponents of eastern colonization on the other hand could at the most point to Gustav Freytag’s Debit and Credit as a widely read novel that explicitly described Eastern Europe as colonial space and beginning in the late nineteenth century to the not particularly successful “Eastern Marches dime novels” [Ostmarkenromane].12 Both “the West” and other colonial destinations around the world thus loomed larger than anything or anybody contributing to the promotion of the “German East,” whether by intellectuals and artists such as Paul de Lagarde and Gustav Freytag, state institutions like the Prussian Settlement Commission, or lobby organizations such as the Eastern Marches Society (another organization promoting and sponsoring the Germanization of the German Empire’s Polish regions) and segments of the Pan-German League. Yet even in the League, which is often (and wrongly) associated exclusively with eastern expansionism, global expansionists remained influential. During a League convention in 1905, a fight erupted between promoters of global colonialist goals and proponents of eastern-focused expansionist visions. In the German Empire “colonizing the East” was a project that existed almost exclusively within far-right corners—and even these corners it had to share with global colonialism.13 German imperialist ventures before 1914 connected German overseas territories to not only the general European and Western colonial imaginary, but also to international economic, business, agricultural, and military interest spheres. As a result, those involved in the German colonies’ administration, exploitation, and settlement saw themselves as dyed-in-the-wool realists and pragmatists, who grounded their activities in science and empiricism, not in middle-age inspired dreams about the alleged “German urge to go eastwards.” One of the most well-known proponents of empiricist and scientific approaches14 toward German expansionism was the journalist-turnedgeographer Friedrich Ratzel, the creator of the term Lebensraum [living space], which would later be adopted by Nazi ideologues. The main inspiration for Ratzel’s preoccupation with German and Western colonialism were his travels through the American West during the mid-1870s. From

6

“A TRULY EXQUISITE LITTLE PHRASE:” GLOBAL …

117

these personal experiences Ratzel extrapolated supposedly general rules about the necessity of spatial expansion for states and nations. Because of his colonialist convictions, Ratzel became involved in Imperial German politics on behalf of the National-Liberal Party. Just like Carl Peters, Ratzel was focused not on eastward but on overseas expansion and scoffed at those who either embraced different ideas of where German should expand or at those who did not want the German Empire to be involved in imperialist activities at all. For Ratzel, expansionism had to both look westwards and be global in scope. This attitude is best encapsulated in a remark Ratzel made during a speech at a National-Liberal-Party meeting in 1884: “if we had had the option 200 years ago, we too would have preferred to carve a New Germany out of North America (…). However, today we do not have this choice and it would be foolish to turn down black bread just because we did not reach the white bread in time.”15 For Ratzel, the path toward Germany’s successful colonialist future was clearly laid out: The place for German expansion was Africa, as there existed no territorial alternative. In addition, the methods and the means with which to effectively accomplish this expansion should be based on American examples. The overall discourse about expansionism to which Ratzel contributed thus painted “the West” as positive, while depictions of “the East” often had negative connotations. For example, in Ratzel’s view the American settlers’ exposure to the “greatness of space” of the American West had contributed to the “wonderful stability” of the democratic US constitution. As a result, settling the allegedly empty spaces of the American West, or, in the case of the German Empire, occupying comparable spaces in German Southwest Africa or German East Africa (today’s Namibia and Tanzania), resulted both in liberal political benefits and in a “enlivening” of the settlers’ characters.16 In turn, the German East was often depicted as having the opposite impact on its settlers. Theodor Fontane’s widely read novel Effi Briest is a case in point. Its main character Effi relocates from the fictional town of Hohen-Cremmen north of Berlin to the Prussian East, where she not only believes she is haunted by a Chinese ghost, but also falls victim to the seductive powers of a Polish nobleman. Effi’s affair results in her social ostracism, and finally in her premature death. Fontane’s novel thus links the dangers of contagion and reverse-colonization to a specific space, namely Eastern Prussia.17 And what was merely implicit in Effi Briest was made explicit in increasingly popular narratives of vampires and vampiric possession. Pointing

118

J.-U. GUETTEL

out that the Slavic inhabitants of the Prussian and Austro-Hungarian East believed in vampires (while their German neighbors, being people of reason, did not) turned Slavs into culturally backward natives in need of civilization and colonization. This discursive colonizing occurred for example in widely publicized legal proceedings against the perpetrators of a series of grave desecrations in the Prussian East during the early 1870s. The defendants claimed they had defiled the corpses in order to kill vampires. The metropolitan judges did not accept the defendants’ “superstition” as excuse for their actions, although the offenders’ sentences were eventually commuted. The judges based their deliberations on views of the culprits as culturally inferior natives, thereby directly supporting colonialist attitudes toward the Prussian East. Yet the colonialist fascination emanating from the vampire narrative did not help the proponents of eastern-colonization schemes. Instead, it established and popularized the modern storyline of Eastern-Europe-based vampires, who were able to reverse-colonize Western-European cities with their minions, whether London in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula or the fictitious German town of Wisborg in Wilhelm von Murnau’s movie adaptation of Stoker’s story. In both cases, the Prussian and/or Austro-Hungarian East is depicted as a region into which Western and “civilized” Europeans better not venture, thereby deepening negative perceptions about the Prussian East, a region already known for its very real social and economic problems.18 While proponents of Eastern colonization schemes had to combat both economic and fictional obstacles, the discourses connected to German Weltpolitik and overseas colonialism tended to veer in the opposite direction, toward a naïve scientific optimism and positive ideas of cooperation between white, western colonizers, which supposedly invigorated individual colonists and helped them to succeed. This globally focused, expansionist optimism was most apparent in the many intersections between German and American colonialist discourses and practices. The racist (and ultimately disastrous) attempts of German colonial administrators to introduce American sharecropping methods in the German colony of Togo are a case in point, as they were undergirded by an unwavering trust in the new social sciences and the social and economic engineering methods derived from them. As a result, German colonial administrators believed that the Togolese could be easily turned into allegedly pliant and hardworking African-American sharecroppers.19 Other ventures also underscore the lure and appeal of “the West” for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonialism. During the

6

“A TRULY EXQUISITE LITTLE PHRASE:” GLOBAL …

119

years of war and genocide in Southwest Africa between 1904 and 1907, the German Colonial Association sponsored German research in the American West in order to analyze the “civilizing” techniques applied in the United States’ western states first hand. The techniques studied by German engineers included both methods of social, demographic, and racial control, among them Indian reservations, as well as irrigation methods for arid climates. Ultimately, all of these “technologies” were deemed relevant for the German colonial context. Moreover, “the West” as a focal point for both colonialist dreams and realities was not limited to the American West. Even the German Empire’s supposed “arch enemy” [Erbfeind] France was a source of inspiration and learning for globally focused German colonialists. As a result, one of the main media outlets for the German colonialist “scene,” the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, repeatedly pointed to the colonial policies of Germany’s western neighbor in order to encourage Germans to emulate French methods: “One can see how energetic and determined the French are acting in this colony and how they are not sparing any cost in order to make it blossom. For us this behavior is both instructive and a source of shame. How different our capitalist circles act when it comes to the German colonies! Money is always available for all kinds of outlandish enterprises, but not for our colonies.” This article even went to conclude that “Yes, if only we Germans were as progressive as the French.” Western- and globally focused German colonialism was many things, yet, as these examples show, it certainly was not a narrowly German phenomenon. Instead, it was tied to European, American, and trans-Atlantic debates, networks, economic- and sociopolitical interests and individuals. Not only did Germans attempt to copy American and French expansionist techniques in their colonies, the findings of German social scientists connected to colonization topics were also eagerly read especially within American progressivist circles.20

From Colonization Schemes to Total Destruction: Eastern Expansionism Between 1914 and 1945 After 1918, Eastern Europe did not suddenly become a dream destination for potential German migrants. However, the fact that many of the territories that before the war had been Prussian and German were now Polish significantly changed attitudes toward Eastern Europe. Calls to return to Germany what was supposedly rightfully hers became popular and merged with older eastern-colonization ideas, thereby allowing the latter

120

J.-U. GUETTEL

to become part of the frettingly nationalist and irredentist atmosphere of Weimar Germany. In addition, wartime developments had also infused eastern-colonization fantasies with new meanings for those radicalized by the war and its, from their perspective, disastrous conclusion. Among those wartime “revelations” was that Germany’s navy was neither capable of protecting Germany’s global trade nor the country’s connections and access to its colonies. During the war, raw materials such as crude oil as well as agricultural products could only be obtained from the occupied areas of Eastern Europe, which eventually included large portions of the Russian Empire and formerly independent states such as Romania. Between 1914 and 1918, Eastern Europe therefore became much more important economically than it had ever been before the war. It also gained a new emotional popularity as “the East” was the only region in which German armies operated successfully. As a result, the troops’ exploits on Russian territory, especially the first successes against Russian troops during the fall of 1914, became popular subjects of German propaganda. Erich Ludendorff’s short-lived attempts to turn the areas controlled by German troops under his command (“Ober Ost”) into an Eastern-European German settler colony also lend new credibility to what before 1914 was merely a pipe dream. And finally, the even more short-lived Treaty of Brest-Litovsk sparked hopes of a vast “Eastern Empire” after the end of the war, as it put large swaths of Eastern-European territory reaching all the way to the Black Sea under German control.21 All of these developments created, in the words of historian Timothy Snyder, “the possibility for a vague and malleable nostalgia about racial mastery” on eastern-European soil—and it was this mood that during the early 1920s began to inform core elements of Nazi ideology. Adolf Hitler believed that an Eastern Empire adjacent to Germany would solve all of the problems that had led to Germany’s defeat in the Great War. In his view, the British naval blockade of Germany during the First World War had laid bare the folly of the pre-1914 liberal, global (-ist), and westernfocused colonial policies of the German Empire. Germany’s defeat made abundantly clear that Germany needed to acquire, in Hitler’s words, “living space” and that a “policy of the soil” [Bodenpolitik] undertaken with the explicit goal of enlarging the country’s territory could not be “fulfilled in Cameroon, but nowadays almost exclusively within Europe itself.”22

6

“A TRULY EXQUISITE LITTLE PHRASE:” GLOBAL …

121

In many ways, Hitler’s fetishization of “living space in the East” highlights the most important changes that eastern-focused colonialism had undergone between 1914 and 1918. First of all, it had become more radical, as the Nazis—and especially Hitler himself—simply denied the validity of the new Eastern-European borders. This kind of thinking was informed by the German army’s deep incursions into Russian territory during the war and the unfulfilled hopes of a sweeping political, economic, and demographic reorganization of the occupied areas. Before 1914, most discourses and activities concerning the “colonization of the East”—that was true for the policies of the Prussian Settlement Commission, Max Sering’s analysis of these policies, and Gustav Freytag’s colonialist fantasies—were focused on nominally Prussian and German territory. Yet during the 1920s especially the loss of the Prussian province of Posen created intersections between “regular” irredentism (i.e., demands to reestablish Germany’s pre-1919 borders) and the Nazis’ much more radical expansionist designs. These intersections helped to conceal the radicality of Hitler’s visions for Eastern Europe from more traditionally nationalist backers of the Nazis. Among them was Hitler’s almost-assassin Claus Schenck Graf von Stauffenberg, who was excited about Nazi Germany’s attack on Poland in 1939 and only changed his mind about the regime and its expansionist designs during the campaign against the Soviet Union two years later.23 National Socialist ideas of “living space in the East” were of course indebted to pre-1914 eastern-focused fantasies, especially those dreamt up by Paul de Lagarde—and Nazi ideologues readily acknowledged Lagarde’s influence. Yet at the same time, Hitler defined his colonialist and racialized visions for Eastern Europe explicitly against the backdrop of Germany’s pre-1914 colonialism in Africa and elsewhere. It is not without irony that Friedrich Ratzel, who coined the term “living space” that Hitler and other Nazi expansionists used so readily, squarely belonged to the “liberal-capitalist” camp of old-school colonialists so detested by the Nazi leader. Nazi leaders explicitly rejected nineteenth-century liberal colonialism—and therefore by necessity also the United States, which played a prominent role in pre-1914 liberal-imperialist discourses. Because of their scattered and entirely emblematic qualities, even the few pithy references by Hitler and other leading Nazis to the American West thus represent an obvious break with previous generations of German imperialist scholars who engaged with the American frontier in great detail and traveled the United States widely to do so. Among them

122

J.-U. GUETTEL

were Ratzel, Max Sering, the national-liberal imperialist Carl Peters, and the famed Max Weber. Before 1914, the United States was important for the German colonial enterprise in very practical terms as well: The American South served as a model for efforts to turn German Togo into a profitable, cotton-exporting colony. In addition, German scientists and engineers traveled the American West, recommending, among other places, the state of Arizona as a tangible example for German Southwest Africa. Pre-1914 German colonialists thus looked for actual instruction in the American South and West, while the Nazis’ hatred of the “liberalist” and “Jew-infested” United States was so deep that they even disparaged American racial segregation measures instead of using them as models. Along similar ideological lines, Nazi leaders intended their “Eastern Empire” to be the direct opposite of Imperial Germany’s “liberalist colonialism” before 1914: No more pointless adventures in faraway lands, no more diplomacy or cooperation with either natives or other European powers, and, unlike in the American West, no individual freedom for “the East’s” future settlers. Instead, in Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe a radically different way of maintaining conquered lands was to replace the often politically liberal and laissez-faire practices (at least in respect to white settlers) of traditional German and European colonialism. To solve the “space emergency” of the German people, a “greater living space” had to be gained—but only under tight state control and supervision not, as Hitler made very clear, “based on liberal-capitalist notions.”24 While the core hopes remained the same, namely that German settlers would take over lands tilled by Slavs, after 1918 other beliefs and issues began to overlap with this basic idea, among them the notion that conquering Eastern land was also a way to solve the “Jewish problem.” After 1917, Russian counterrevolutionaries blamed Jews for the fall of the Tsarist Empire, while Lenin thanked Jews in Moscow for their decisive support of the revolution. These stories and sentiments were woven together in the so-called Judeobolshevik myth, a conspiracy theory that attributed the Russian Revolution to both Russian Jews and a global Jewish intrigue. For Hitler and his party’s other main proponent of eastward expansion Alfred Rosenberg, the Eastern-European territories that in 1918 briefly appeared to be Germany’s prize for four years of suffering thus not only constituted a promised land for German settlers. Having eaten up the Judeobolshevik myth, they also believed that controlling this land and getting rid of its Jewish population would result both in the

6

“A TRULY EXQUISITE LITTLE PHRASE:” GLOBAL …

123

destruction of the supposedly Jewish-controlled Soviet state and simultaneously constitute a fatal strike against Jewish networks of global control everywhere else.25 After the First World War, a changed concept of “living space in the East” thus brought together anti-Semitism and European colonial expansionism, which simultaneously became the two main pillars of Nazi ideology. During the 1920s, these beliefs motivated Nazi leaders and their core followers, while traditional liberal colonialists were rapidly losing the ground they previously had stood on so firmly. Before 1914, with some justification liberal colonialists could accuse Eastern-Europe-focused expansionists of being unrealistic dreamers, while simultaneously showing off their contacts to their American counterparts and holding up American expansionist examples as proof of their own realism. In their view after all, the United States was the most successful colonial empire the world had ever seen. Yet the United States’s intervention in the First World War on the side of France and Great Britain irreparably damaged the country’s attractiveness specifically for German liberals and their global expansionist visions. This does not mean that overseas colonial, as opposed to Eastern-Europe-focused, irredentism was politically unimportant during the Weimar years. Yet the biggest supporters of claims to return Germany’s colonies—Germany’s liberal parties—were facing a steep and consistent decline of their popularity, so that by the early 1930s the liberal political foundation on which German overseas expansion had previously rested had almost completely collapsed. The reverse was true for the National Socialist’s popularity; and while the party’s growing number of supporters rarely voted for the Nazis because of the party’s ideologues’ clamoring for “living space in the East,” once the Nazis had been handed Germany’s political reigns traditional global and liberal expansionism had little chance of becoming official policy. To be sure, party leaders did not believe traditional procolonialists to be their adversaries, and the regime was quite happy to pay lip-service to those individuals and groups that pushed for a return of Germany’s colonial possessions. Behind closed doors however, high-ranking Nazis ridiculed overseas colonialism, with Joseph Goebbels revealing the regime’s true attitude toward pro-colonialist groups and their activities when stating that “colonial propaganda is a low-priority, non-essential question for our people.”26

124

J.-U. GUETTEL

Conclusion When the Nazis came to power, eastward-focused expansionism finally carried the day, as most leading National Socialist figures rejected classic liberal, global colonialism. Yet Hitler’s, Rosenberg’s, and Heinrich Himmler’s penchant for “living space in the East” was not the logical culmination of German expansionist debates in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before 1914, those clamoring for a German colonization of Eastern Europe were often the laughing stock of global—and genuinely popular—colonialists like Carl Peters. Moreover, their efforts to make the regions so coveted by them attractive for anybody outside of their small social and economic circles were unsuccessful. It took the Nazis’ ruthless makeover of the German state and its domestic and international policies to finally try to realize the long-standing dream of this small intellectual and economic elite. In much more extreme and genocidal ways than those tried out by the Prussian Settlement Commission or the Eastern Marches Society, during the Second World War the Nazi regime attempted to Germanize and “Aryanize” vast portions of Eastern Europe. Max Sering could never have imagined the genocidal lengths to which the Nazis were willing to go in order to achieve this goal. Yet long before even the outbreak of the First World War Sering had pointed out that attempts to turn colonization efforts in these regions into endeavors aimed at reshaping these areas’ demographics were inevitably bound to fail. And fail they did, albeit not without leaving a legacy of terrible human, cultural, and economic destruction in the areas coveted by the champions of “the German urge to go east.” Nazi colonialism unmasked the visions of generations of eastern-focused German colonialists as what the local Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian populations had long known not to be dreams but nightmares.

Notes 1. Carl Peters, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1 (München: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1943), 338. This essay contains arguments and source quotations previously made in Jens-Uwe Guettel, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States, 1776–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Guettel, “‘Between Us and the French There Are No Profound Differences:’ Colonialism and the Possibilities of a Franco-German Rapprochement before 1914,” Historical Reflections 40.1 (March 2014), 29–46; Guettel, “The U.S. Frontier

6

2. 3.

4.

5.

“A TRULY EXQUISITE LITTLE PHRASE:” GLOBAL …

125

as Rationale for the Nazi East? Settler Colonialism and Genocide in Nazioccupied Eastern Europe and the American West,” Journal of Genocide Research 15.4. (December 2013), 401–419. Guettel, German Expansionism, 165. John Toland and Adolf Hitler (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 702; Norman Rich, “Hitler’s Foreign Policy”, in Gordon Martel, ed., The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered: The A. J. P. Taylor Debate After Twenty-Five Years (Winchester, MA: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 136; Alan E. Steinweis, “Eastern Europe and the Notion of the ‘Frontier’ in Germany to 1945,” Yearbook of European Studies, 13 (1999), 57; Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections of the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000), 145; Lilian Friedberg, “Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust,” American Indian Quarterly 24.3 (January 2000), 360–361; Ward Churchill, Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Colonization (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2002), 352–353; Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire. Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 584; Carroll P. Kakel, The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2, 215–216; Robert Cribb, “Genocide in the Nonwestern World,” in Steven L. B. Jensen, ed., Genocide: Cases, Comparisons and Contemporary Debates (Copenhagen: The Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2003), 137; Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in the Ukraine (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 3, 19; David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 153; Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: The Duggan Books, 2015), 11–29. Gregor Thum, “Mastering the East: The German Frontier from 1800 to the Present” (book manuscript, work in progress) June 2019; Gregor Thum, “A German School for Russia and the Erosion of the Baltic German Community,” conference paper, GSA panel: “Drang nach Osten?’ Imperial fantasies, population politics, and the changing patterns of global migration” (Pittsburgh 2018). I would like to thank Gregor Thum for making these manuscripts available to me. Guettel, German Expansionism, 46, 73; Alexis de Tocqueville, “Entry of May 7, 1841,” in Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. 5.2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1958– 1998), 191 quoted in Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 196. On Mainzer Adelsverein, see Louis E. Brister, “Adelsverein,” in The Handbook of Texas Online, https://tshaonline.org/ handbook/online/articles/ufa01 (accessed April 9, 2020).

126

J.-U. GUETTEL

6. Hans Fenske, “Imperialisitische Tendenzen in Deutschland vor 1866: Auswanderung, überseeische Bestrebungen, Weltmachtsträume,” Historisches Jahrbuch 97/98 (1978), 344–47, 370–371; Frank Lorenz Müller, “Imperialist Ambitions in Vormärz and Revolutionary Germany,” German History 17.3 (1999), 356. 7. Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884 (New York: Berghahn, 2008), 37, 38; Günter Wollstein, Das Großdeutschland der Paulskirche. Nationale Ziele in der bürgerlichen Revolution 1848/49 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1977), 136–138. 8. Max Sering, Die innere Kolonisation im östlichen Deutschland (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1893), 166, 212, 213, 240. For more on Sering, see Nelson in this volume. 9. Paul de Lagarde, “Über die gegenwärtigen Aufgaben der deutschen Politik,” in Karl August Fischer, ed., Paul de Lagarde: Deutsche Schriften (München: J. F. Lebmanns Verlag, 1934), 33; On Langhans and Freytag, see Kristin Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012), 1, 29–57. 10. Kopp, Germany’s Wild East, 6; Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism, 122–123; H. Washausen, Hamburg und die Kolonialpolitik des Deutschen Reiches, 1880–1890 (Hamburg: H. Christians, 1968), 142. 11. On Langhans, see Kopp, Germany’s Wild East, 1–6; David Ciarlo, Advertizing Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); John Phillip Short, Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). 12. Antje S. Anderson, “Ein Kaufmann ‘von sehr englischem Aussehen:’ Die literarische und soziokulturelle Funktion Englands in Soll und Haben,” in Florian Krobb, ed., 150 Jahre Soll und Haben: Studien zu Gustav Freytags kontroversem Roman, 210, 211. Kristin Kopp points out that the so-called Ostmarkenromane, were barely concealed vehicles for promoting Prussia’s settlement measures in the state’s eastern provinces. Kristin Kopp, “Constructing Difference in Colonial Poland,” in Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz and Lora Wildenthal, eds., Germany’s Colonial Pasts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 80. 13. Theodor Reismann-Grone and Eduard von Liebert, “Überseepolitik oder Festlandspolitik?,” paper presented at the Alldeutscher Verbandstag, Worms, 1905, 20–21; Stefan Frech, Wegbereiter Hitlers? Theodor Reismann –Grone. Ein völkischer Nationalist (1863–1949) (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2009), 413; Heinz Hagenlücke, Deutsche Vaterlandspartei: Die nationale Rechte am Ende des Kaiserreiches (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1997), 408–409; Peter Walkenhorst, Nation – Volk – Rasse. Radikaler Nationalismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1890–1914

6

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

“A TRULY EXQUISITE LITTLE PHRASE:” GLOBAL …

127

(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 216; Ernst Hasse, Deutsche Politik, Vol. 2 (München: J. F. Lehmann’s Verlag, 1908), 65. The terms “scientific” and “empiricist” are used here in their contemporaneous sense. Friedrich Ratzel, Wider die Reichsnörgler: Ein Wort zur Kolonialfrage aus Wählerkreisen (München: np, 1884), 23. Friedrich Ratzel, Politische Geographie der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (München: Oldenbourg, 1893), 95. This interpretation of Effi Briest is based on Kopp’s in Germany’s Wild East, 96; Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft, 1974), 84–85, 231–237. Thomas M. Bohn, “Vampirismus in Österreich und Preußen. Von der Entdeckung einer Seuche zum Narrativ der Gegenkolonisation,” Jahrbücher für die Geschichte Osteuropas 56.2 (2008), 170–177. Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Alexander Kuhn, Zum Eingeborenenproblem in Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Berlin: Dierich Reimer, 1905), 3; Ferdinand Gessert, “Das Wasserrecht des amerikanischen Westens mit Bezug auf Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” Zeitschrift für Kolonialpolitik, Kolonialrecht und Kolonialwirtschaft 8.7 (1906), 441–446; Deutsche Kolonialzeitung quoted from Guettel, “‘Between Us and the French,” 29; Guettel, German Expansionism, 100, 150–154, 120–123. Snyder, Black Earth, 11–16. Snyder, Black Earth, 11–16; Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (München: Zentralverlag der N.S.D.A.P. Franz Eher Nachfahren, 1936), 152. Heinrich August Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen (München: C.H. Beck, 2000), Vol. 2, 103. This paragraph is adapted from Guettel, “The US frontier as Rationale for the Nazi East?,” 415. Snyder, Black Earth, 24; Guettel, “The US Frontier as Rationale for the Nazi East?,” 406–407. Goebbels quoted in Peter Zimmermann, “Kampf um den ‘Lebensraum’. Ein Mythos der Kolonial- und Blut-und-Boden-Literatur,” in Horst Denkler & Karl Prumm, eds., Die deutsche Literatur im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1976), 170.

CHAPTER 7

Ruling Classes and Serving Races: German Policies on Land, Labor, and Migration in Trans-Imperial Perspective Dörte Lerp

In 1903 the German historian Otto Hintze published a series of articles in Das Deutschtum im Auslande (Germaness Abroad), the monthly paper of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein (General German School Association), a nationalist organization aimed at “protecting” and promoting German culture, language and interests abroad. Concluding his musings

This paper builds on my published phd-thesis: Dörte Lerp, Imperiale Grenzräume: Bevölkerungspolitiken in Deutsch-Südwestafrika und den östlichen Provinzen Preußens 1884–1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2016). Thanks to the South African Contemporary History and Humanities Seminar at the University of the Western Cape and to Sarah Bellows-Blakely, Samuël Coghe, Marie Huber, Christoph Kalter, and Marcia C. Schenck for reading and commenting on earlier versions. D. Lerp (B) Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_7

129

130

D. LERP

on “Race and Nationality and their Significance in History,” Hintze proclaimed that there was “nothing more immediate for expansionist world politics than strong and firm unity in the homeland.” Current labor policies, he argued, especially the employment of Polish migrant workers in the eastern parts of the country, threatened this unity. He therefore called for a “sort of racial politics with a front against the East.” Some powers, he went on, were willing to let “the foreign element stream in to do the dirty work” and “let those people settle with us as a lower, serving race, as a basis for a German ruling class.” He deemed those claims not only untrue but also “very dangerous.” Still, despite his criticism, Hintze was convinced that Germany could become “a strong, unified nation.” To him England, France, and the United States demonstrated that such a feat was possible even “in the modern world.”1 Hintze’s remarks convey several elements that shaped German imperial discourses and practices throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but especially from the mid-1880s onwards. First, he exposes the close relationship between nation building and imperial expansionism. To German imperialists “unity in the homeland” and “world politics” were two sides of the same coin. Secondly, he points to the centrality of labor and migration within the German nationalist and expansionist debates and to the fact that those debates were deeply racialized (even when not dealing with colonial subjects). And last, Hintze reveals that discussions about migration, national unity and colonial expansion took place not only in a national or inner-imperial space, but instead were linked to developments and debates in other empires. By the time Hintze made his remarks, the United States figured prominently in German imperial discourse. For one, it had for decades been a key destination for migrants leaving Germany.2 As liberal politicians and scholars lamented this as a painful loss to the vitality of the German nation,3 they also looked over the Atlantic for inspiration on how to reconcile liberalism, nationalism and expansionist politics.4 Indeed, connections existed in a wide range of imperial thinking and policies, for example between the share cropping system of the southern United States, liberal agendas to modernize Prussia’s agriculture, and German colonial policies in Togo, as historian Andrew Zimmerman has demonstrated.5 Building on Zimmerman’s work, this paper further complicates our grasp of inter-imperial exchanges by demonstrating that the American South was not the only reference point for German imperialists, and Togo was not the only German colony with ties to the Prussian East.

7

RULING CLASSES AND SERVING RACES …

131

As Hintze‘s statement indicates, German imperialists did not limit themselves to comparing Germany to one specific empire. Instead, they sought directions and practical advice from various places. And while scholars and politicians invested in the transfer of ideas and concepts from one context to another, it was generally the local administration who determined how policies were implemented and what actions were taken. Thus, even though comparisons to and exchange with the US Empire did influence German migration and labor policies, they took place within what anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler and historian Carol McGranahan have termed “imperial formations,” relations of force that extended beyond the spatial and temporal frames of separate empires.6 In short, imperial influencing took place in a global setting that encompassed overseas and continental empires at the time of (high) imperialism. In order to understand the particular imperial formation at work here I investigate ideas and policies on land, labor, and migration by connecting them to various settings within and beyond the German Empire and by identifying the global developments and discourses that advanced their spread. My paper pays particular attention to two regions of the German Empire that were largely dominated by the agrarian sector: the four eastern Prussian provinces of Silesia, Posen, and West and East Prussia, often referred to in Germany as the “Eastern Marches,” and German Southwest Africa, today’s Namibia. Both regions were situated at the geographical margins of the German empire, but they frequently stood at the center of imperial debates. As areas of Prussian-German expansion their status within the empire remained contested and the state’s rule over territory and people—many of them non-Germans—was fragmentary. Thus, discussions about imperial expansion, nationality, race, work, and migration turned especially virulent. I will first take a look at how global migration flows and trans-imperial discourses shaped German debates about the so-called agrarian and colonial labor question. Next I will deal with policies that encouraged white Germans to settle in both regions, while the third part focuses on how politicians and administrators restricted land access for Africans and Poles. In the final subchapter, I explore the development of passport and surveillance systems. Analyzing these interrelated imperial policies this paper explains how agrarian labor regimes were rearranged along ethnic and racial lines, dividing workers into “ruling classes” and “serving races.” In the process, it puts German imperialism in a global context.

132

D. LERP

Labor Questions During the nineteenth century the agrarian sector within Europe changed drastically. This change is generally described as a socio-economic process brought about by the capitalization and industrialization of agriculture. Historical scholarship has identified several key transformations within the agrarian sector: the mobilization of rural populations in the wake of the abolition of serfdom in Europe, the spread of wage labor, and an increase in social inequalities.7 However, those narratives generally neglect or at least underestimate the impact of imperial expansion as well as globalization. In the case of Germany, the transformation of the agrarian sector took place at a time when the German states expanded into a continental and overseas empire that was deeply imbedded in global economic and political processes.8 This globalization was partly an outcome of German imperialism, but resulted also from a growing integration of production, and consumer and labor markets. New transport and communication technologies facilitated exchanges of goods and information that were faster and reached farther than in previous decades. They increased the mobility of people as well.9 Yet, globalization “did not spin the world’s peoples into a single web,” as historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper remind us. Integration was neither all-inclusive nor symmetrical. Instead, a growing rift between a small number of empires and the rest of the world characterized the last decades of the nineteenth century. Competing for raw materials, consumer market shares and labor, those empires left “fragmented societies and great disparities of economic condition” in their wake.10 While industrialization produced a growing need for workers in some regions of the world, particularly in Western Europe, the number of landless people grew in the agrarian regions of (Eastern) Europe and Asia. Many of them migrated to industrial centers to work in the mining, textile, and heavy industries. At the same time, agrarian work in some regions of the world quickly industrialized and became more and more seasonal. This, in turn, contributed to the transnational migratory movements.11 Thus, expansive and dynamic migration systems developed that connected societies and regions with surplus of labor with those experiencing labor shortages.12

7

RULING CLASSES AND SERVING RACES …

133

The impact of these forms of globalization were also evident in the Prussian East and in the German colonies. Both relied heavily on a nonGerman and highly mobile workforce, and labor shortages constituted one of their biggest problems, especially in the agricultural sector. From an administrative standpoint mass mobility was a necessity but also an economic and political risk factor. Confronted with dismal working and living conditions, African and Polish workers frequently quit their jobs and ran away to take up work elsewhere. Those breaches of contract did not pose a real danger to the economy, but they served as a constant reminder of how Germans depended on African and Polish workers. This control, or lack of it, over the mobility of workers was central to the so-called “agrarian labor question” in Germany. Two organizations dominated the debate: the Verein für Socialpolitik (Society for Social Politics) under the auspice of economist Gustav Schmoller, and the Evangelisch Sociale Kongress (Protestant Social Congress) led by the antiSemitic court chaplain Adolph Stöcker. These “academic-political ‘think tanks’ of the Wilhelmine era”13 brought together administrators, politicians, journalists, and academic scholars. Most of them shared a disdain for Manchester liberalism as well as socialism and were convinced that they could improve the social and economic situation of the German Empire through science-based political interventions.14 In the winter of 1891–1892, the Verein für Socialpolitik conducted a comprehensive survey on the “conditions of farm workers in Germany.” Based on information obtained solely from employers, the survey was supposed to shed light on the correlation between agricultural work, migration, and trade in the German Empire.15 No one less than Max Weber investigated the situation in the eastern Prussian provinces. He even conducted a second survey on behalf of the Evangelisch Sociale Kongress together with theologian and economist Paul Göhre. Thus, Weber became the leading expert on the labor question in the Prussian East. Nationality and race were central to Weber’s analysis. He concluded that Polish workers were more likely to adapt to the minimal living standards in the East, because of their “physical and psychological racial qualities.”16 If left unchecked, he continued, Poles would eventually displace the German population and force it to migrate to central or western Germany. To Weber the alleged displacement of Germans was more than a “question of agrarian policy.” 17 It was a question of national supremacy. In his inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg, Weber

134

D. LERP

pointed out that his aim was an economic policy that privileged national interests, not just within Germany but on a global scale.18 He therefore proposed to permanently ban Polish seasonal workers of Russian or Austrian citizenship from the eastern provinces. Karl Kärger, a lawyer, economist, and friend of Weber, who was also involved in the survey, suggested replacing the Poles with workers from the German colonies.19 Others continuously proposed to hire and import workers from China as several empires had been doing.20 While these plans were not realized, Weber’s displacement theory became widely accepted among Prussian politicians. And the idea that workers could be directed from one place in the world to another to replace others remained attractive to imperialist politicians and scholars alike. Meanwhile, there was also a debate about the so-called “colonial labor question.” It focused mainly on the tropical colonies, especially on German East Africa and Cameroon. Some scientists, like the renowned anthropologist and medical doctor Rudolf Virchow, claimed that white people were not suited to perform physical labor under tropical conditions and therefore the colonies needed to rely on an African workforce.21 These same scientists were not concerned about the climate in the southern parts of Africa, though. Karl von Stengel, a colonial legal expert, saw no need to discuss the labor question in German Southwest Africa since “the colony’s climatic conditions allowed Europeans to do any kind of physical work and the native population, at least in part, offered efficient and willing workers.”22 This second assessment, however, was far off the mark. In late nineteenth century Southwest Africa, unlike in Germany, only few people’s livelihood depended on wage labor. Prior to the cattle plague in 1897, the economic situation in the central parts of the colony was relatively stable. Herero (Ovaherero) traders often met the German settlers as equal, if not predominant, partners and competitors in the cattle trade.23 Like the Europeans, the Herero recruited their workers mostly among Damara groups, who had fallen into economic dependency throughout the nineteenth century. But even those workers rarely relied on wage labor alone. They also supported themselves through hunting, small livestock farming, and the production of special trading goods.24 This afforded them some degree of independence from their employers, an autonomy that Germans generally read as an “unwillingness” to work. One of the early settlers, Helene von Falkenhausen, noted that “Especially people in

7

RULING CLASSES AND SERVING RACES …

135

possession of some goats are unreliable in their service. They feel in no way compelled to care for their livelihood […].”25 Far more than in the eastern Prussian provinces, race was central to the debates about the colonial labor question. While experts like Virchow or Stengel distinguished first and foremost between white labor and black labor, they drew other lines as well. As George Steinmetz and Robert J. Gordon have pointed out, anthropologists generally considered the Witbooi-Nama and various San communities to be unfit for physical labor.26 In doing so they implicitly equated them with other indigenous groups around the world, like the Native Americans. Those racialized labor discourses were not just academic. The German government, imperial organizations, and local officials translated them into actual policies. Together they fostered programs to support and increase the number of white German propertied farmers. At the same time, policymakers restricted Poles and Africans’ access to land. They also tried to control mobility through passport systems that aimed at locking some people in place while mobilizing others. In doing so policymakers looked towards the United States for models but also to neighboring regions in South Africa, Russia, and Austria.

Settling People, Creating Landowners In January 1885, while Otto von Bismarck tried to present Germany as an imperial power at the Berlin Africa Conference, Eduard von Hartmann, a popular German philosopher, published an article in Die Gegenwart (The Present). In the article he lamented the “decline of Deutschtum [Germanness] in Russia and Austria” and questioned whether the German people had lost “their previous inherent colonizing power.” To secure German rule at least within the borders of the Kaiserreich he proposed to settle Germans in the eastern parts of Prussia, while at the same time sending Polish farmworkers residing within the German borders to the new colonies in Africa.27 The government did not follow Hartmann’s suggestion, but in April 1886 the Prussian parliament adopted a settlement law aimed at the “strengthening of the German element” in Posen and West Prussia, the two provinces with the largest Polish-speaking population. It stipulated the establishment of the Prussian Settlement Commission that bought up land—preferably from Polish landowners— parceled the larger estates and then sold or rented the smaller lots to German farmers.28

136

D. LERP

This Program of Inner Colonization was clearly influenced by US and Canadian homestead legislation. Only a few years earlier the Prussian Ministry for Agriculture and the Agrarian Economics Council had sent one of Gustav Schmoller’s students, Max Sering, to North America to investigate settler colonization on the Great Plains.29 American settlement policies appealed to scholars like Sering, Schmoller, and other liberals, because they seemed to offer a recipe to reconcile imperialist ambitions with nationalist and economic interests. “The North American Republic’s economic history is that of a colonizing Nation,” Sering remarked after his return to Germany. “A unified plan governs the settlement of the central and western parts of North America, a plan that finds its expression in the federal legislation on public land.”30 Still, he criticized the legislation as too liberal and prone to land speculation and concluded: “In our colonies we’ll have to do better.”31 In the end, however, Sering never joined the colonial movement. Instead, he became a long-time advocate for the “internal colonization” of the Prussian East.32 Sering and other liberal imperialists supported small-scale propertied farming as a means to replace the large estates in the eastern Prussian provinces, owned and managed by German or Polish nobility, called Junker, and heavily reliant on migrant farmworkers from Russia and Galicia. They entered an uneasy alliance with the Prussian administration that sought to get rid of Polish landowners and migrant workers by increasing the German population. Under these circumstances the final settlement program bore only a faint resemblance to those in Canada and the United States. Whereas the North American homestead legislation followed the principle of minimal political intervention, the Prussian settlement commission selected the settlers carefully and micromanaged the settlement process to prevent land speculation. However, it faced severe problems in buying up estates from Polish owners. Consequently, it fell way short of its aim to settle 40,000 families. In 1918, after 32 years of efforts, only 21,886 German families had migrated to Posen and West Prussia, while the Homestead Act in the United States managed to relocate nearly 400,000 families in the same number of years between 1869 and 1900.33 In addition, the program never stopped the emigration of German farmers from the East and thus did not increase the percentage of Germans in Posen and West Prussia.34 However, those failings seem to have been of no regard to the Kolonialabteilung des Auswärtigen Amtes

7

RULING CLASSES AND SERVING RACES …

137

(Colonial Division of the Foreign Office), when it suggested the establishment of a similar settlement commission for German Southwest Africa in 1903.35 Before 1903 there had existed no colonial settlement policy to speak of.36 Given his limited resources, Theodor Leutwein, territorial captain and later governor of Southwest Africa, contented himself with trying to persuade discharged colonial soldiers to stay permanently. The government provided them with cheap farmland, sometimes also with livestock and funds. By 1898, it was even giving land away for free. As with the homestead legislation, the only condition was that the former soldiers had to settle on and cultivate their land as farmers.37 Around 1900 the situation changed, though. In Britain social imperialist began to advocate for state-aided settlement programs as part of systematic development of the empire.38 The South African war strengthened those positions and eventually resulted in the implementation of state-funded settlement schemes in Transvaal and the Orange Free State.39 The Colonial Division of the Foreign Ministry in Berlin observed these developments closely.40 Eventually, they revised their own position on state-aided migration as well. As the Prussian administration did not replicate the homestead model, the German Colonial Division did not simply adopt British policies. Instead, it argued that German farmers were used to more stable conditions than the South African government offered its settlers.41 Consequently, the Colonial Division suggested the establishment of a government agency modeled on the Prussian Settlement Commission. It was supposed to acquire land, recruit settlers, regulate the settlement process and manage the finances. Its director was to be a former member of the Prussian Settlement Commission who might not be familiar with “the African conditions,” but would “exactly know the needs of the German settlers.”42 The Colonial Division also suggested selling the land for an annual rent or installing other provisions to prevent land speculation similar to those in Posen and West Prussia. However, none of those ideas were realized. The conditions in the far less populated colony were not comparable to those in the Prussian East. In addition, the German parliament only allowed 300,000 Marks for the scheme. And then in 1904 the German-Herero War brought all plans to an abrupt end. While the Settlement Commission for German Southwest Africa was never established, Leutwein did appoint a settlement commissioner. He suggested Hans von Tecklenburg for the job, who had worked for

138

D. LERP

the provincial government in Posen before becoming a colonial official. Instead, the Colonial Division appointed Paul Rohrbach, considered an expert on settlement issues since he had published on Turkish settlement projects in Mesopotamia and on the Russian settlement programs in Siberia.43 He was also the former president of the Evangelisch Soziale Kongress . However, Rohrbach had never been to Africa or the German colonies. Because of that he began his service with an extensive tour through German Southwest Africa and the Cape colony. His detailed reports, much more than any North American, South African, or Prussian precedents, determined the further course of German settlement policy in Southwest Africa. In those reports, Rohrbach argued against small-scale propertied farming and claimed that the colony was a place for wealthy Germans with means to buy and manage large estates. Giving financial support to settlers in order to advance mass migration “would do little to serve the colony and its development.”44 When the government resumed its settlement efforts after the German-Herero War it followed Rohrbach’s premise. Consequently, the number of Germans in the empire’s sole settlement colony remained comparatively low. In 1913, only 12,292 Germans were counted, even though approximately 6.4 million hectares of government land had been sold or rented out.45 In terms of settler numbers, the settlement scheme for Southwest Africa was therefore even less effective than the one for the Prussian East. Compared to the United States both of these attempts by the German administration to increase the number of propertied settler-farmers in the Prussian East and in Southwest Africa seem rather insignificant. But with their aim to create a German ruling class, the policies nevertheless heavily impacted peoples’ lives. Not only did the two settlement schemes facilitate the displacement, deportation, and expropriation of Poles and Africans, they also gave rise to further policies of segregation within the agrarian sector.

Unsettling People, Producing Workers As in the United States, the proponents of German settlement schemes legitimized their projects by claiming that indigenous people did not tend the land properly and thus neglected their duties as landowners. Their policies were based on the fabrication of terra nullius, a legal concept most famously applied in British Australia that declared areas that were not governed by a sovereign state or appeared literarily and figuratively

7

RULING CLASSES AND SERVING RACES …

139

uncultivated as empty space. These constructs served to obscure the often-violent ways by which land was acquired. German settlement advocates did not see a contradiction in the fact that they had to buy or forcefully annex the places they had previously declared empty. In fact, ousting Poles and Africans from the land they had owned, cultivated, or lived on for generations served a dual purpose: it provided land for the settlement of Germans and forced non-Germans to take up wage labor. German imperialists employed the idea of terra nullius more effectively in the colonial context in Southwest Africa, because there two very different concepts of land use collided. When Heinrich Vogelsang, the official representative of the German businessman Friedrich Lüderitz, bought the land around Angra Pequena from the indigenous Nama leader Josef Fredericks in 1883 he not only cheated by measuring the territory in Prussian instead of British miles.46 He also introduced a concept of land ownership that went far beyond the usage and tenure rights Fredericks thought he had ceded to the German.47 The same was true for the so-called Schutzverträge (protective contracts) that the colonial administration signed with Nama and Herero groups from 1884 onwards. To the Germans those contracts permanently demarcated the borders between “tribal land” and apparently ownerless areas that were declared “crown land.”48 But they fundamentally contradicted precolonial land usage patterns within the region, especially those of the pastoralist Herero who moved within a network of watering places.49 The colonial administration thus created landowners, where previously there had been none. To further the settlement of the colony the colonial government also allowed settlers to buy not just “crown land” but “tribal land” as well. After the cattle plague in 1897 many Herero chiefs desperate to replenish their herds sold land much cheaper than concession companies or the government. Their situation deteriorated even further when white traders started selling them consumer products on credit and later forced the Herero, often violently, to repay their debts in cattle and land.50 Turning more and more land into private property had devastating effects for most Herero, Nama, Damara, and San peoples. With the land they lost their access to resources to owners whose interests were protected by the colonial government. People who watered or grazed their cattle on foreign property, for example, could lose up to five percent of their cattle as punishment.51 Thus, colonial land policies restricted the mobility of Africans and threatened their livelihoods at the same time.52

140

D. LERP

The economic decline of the local communities was in the interest of the colonial administration and the settlers because it forced Africans to take up wage labor. Other colonial powers in Africa, in particular the British, employed this strategy as well.53 Initially, only the Rhenish Missionary Society—trying to protect its own status quo—warned against excessive land grabbing. “Without a vital native population that is willing to work” the colony was worthless, mission inspector August Schreiber argued. “Yet, to keep the natives in German Southwest Africa from degeneration and ruin, they absolutely need to keep the land they need for their existence.”54 To “protect” Africans from carelessly selling all their land to greedy settlers Schreiber asked the government to follow the US example and create reservations governed by the missionary societies. And much like the US reservation policies insisted the Native American should do, he also proposed to teach the Herero how to grow crops, since there was no longer enough space for their “former way of living subsisting simply on cattle breeding.”55 Schreiber’s propositions were likely influenced by Ulysses S. Grant’s “Peace Policy,” which had strengthened the influence of Christian missions on Indian reservations in the late 1860s and 1870s. In return, the missions had promised to prevent conflicts between settlers and Native Americans and lead the latter to a life of “settled agriculture, education, Christian practice, and eventually individual landholding.”56 While the US government had begun placing the reservations under civil administration in the 1880s protestant missionary circles continued to believe in their efforts.57 For example, at the Ecumenical Missionary Conference in New York, where Schreiber had represented the Rhenish Missionary Society in 1900, Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of the State of New York, had lauded the missionary work on Indian reservations in highest terms.58 In German Southwest Africa reservations under missionary rule were never established, but the idea alone had devastating effects. As the colonial administration considered the possibility, protests arose from Herero chiefs as well as white settlers. The land conflict quickly escalated and became one of the main causes for the German-Herero War in 1904 and the subsequent genocide.59 The German administration used the colonial war as a pretext for the complete restructuring of the colony along racial lines. In December 1905 the government passed an extensive expropriation order. It did not only seize the property of the Herero and

7

RULING CLASSES AND SERVING RACES …

141

Nama groups who were at war with the German occupiers but expropriated nearly all other communities in the southern and central parts of the colony as well. As vice-governor Hans von Tecklenburg explained the rationale: “It would be a weakness that would get back to us, if we let the current opportunity to declare all native land crown land go by unused.”60 In addition to losing their land the survivors were forbidden to own cattle and thus forced to turn to wage labor for their subsistence. In the Prussian East the authorities proceeded more cautiously, because they had to act within the bounds of civil law that protected those Poles that held German citizenship. Still the government and administration managed to circumvent laws that guaranteed equal property rights. In 1904, the Prussian parliament passed a general settlement law for the eastern provinces. It did not expropriate Prussian citizens of Polish nationality but empowered the district presidents to refuse them the right to build and settle on their own property.61 As historian Wolfgang Hofmann has shown, the authorities made use of this opportunity to restrict Poles from settlement quite regularly.62 Three years later the parliament also approved the expropriation of 70.000 hectares of land to settle German farmers. As has been pointed out by several scholars, this measure was strongly criticized and it was implemented in only four cases in 1912.63 It was also not comparable to the Southwest African case since the Polish owners were financially compensated for their loss. However, the measures clearly showed the authorities’ willingness to circumvent citizenship rights in the name of nationalization. As the other policies described so far, they were aimed at settling Germans and unsettling Poles and Africans and organizing the agrarian sector along racial lines at the same time.

Controlling People, Directing Migration German imperialist flanked their settlement and expropriation schemes with another set of policies aimed at controlling the movement and distribution of workers. The Prussian government was torn between the aim to rid the eastern provinces of all Polish nationals without German citizenship and the landowners’ economic dependency on foreign labor. The colonial administration faced labor shortages, particularly after the genocidal war against Herero and Nama. Both were pressured by German farmers to increase control over workers’ mobility. And they developed

142

D. LERP

comparable measures to achieve this control, even though there seems to have been no direct exchange about the matter between them. The Prussian government initially accompanied the settlement scheme by a large wave of deportation. Between 1885 and the end of 1887 it forced approximately 30,000 people without German citizenship to leave the eastern provinces for Russia and Galicia.64 Police and administration based their expulsion orders on who had been declared of “Polish descent” by previous statistical surveys accepting neither language nor national self-identification as an identifier of nationality.65 About onethird of the emigres were Jewish, the rest mostly catholic Poles, the majority of them agricultural workers.66 For a few years none of them were allowed to reenter Prussia. When the border was opened again, following vehement protests by German estate owners, the government passed a set of regulations to prevent foreign Polish workers from settling permanently in Germany. It restricted immigration to young, unmarried men and women, ordered them to return to Russia or Galicia each year during the winter months, and explicitly excluded Jews.67 The State Ministry was in agreement “that the Jewish immigration from Russia needed to be staved off,” since “no advantage could be expected from the admission of Jews, because they are not the kind of workers we need.”68 Thus race and nationality—not citizenship—became defining factors in the new border regime. For the new regulations to be effective, documents were needed that allowed immigration and police officials as well employers to distinguish Polish migrant workers from other nationals of Russian or Austrian citizenship. The Prussian Ministry of Interior instructed the provincial presidents of the eastern provinces to ensure that the “foreign workers” were in possession of papers informing about their country of residence and nationality, so that their annual “removal over the border” could be secured.69 However, many migrants managed to enter Prussia without documents, some of them by bribing officials, others secretly at night and under great risks.70 Besides that, German officials were often not able to decipher Cyrillic letters. It was therefore possible for workers to enter the country with false or several sets of papers.71 Documentation served a dual purpose. It was not only aimed at securing the new border regime, but also at preventing workers from moving between workplaces. Employers—while not always complying with the law—profited from the introduction of obligatory papers, because they could confiscate and keep them until the labor contract was

7

RULING CLASSES AND SERVING RACES …

143

fulfilled.72 To control internal migration was also the main reason why Theodor Leutwein suggested registering and handing out passports to all Africans in German Southwest Africa in 1900.73 However, his idea was met by heavy criticism at the time, so the government eventually left it to the local administrators whether they wanted to document the people in their districts or not.74 Eventually both governments—the Prussian as well as the Southwest African—established pass systems independently from each other in 1907. The Prussian government ordered seasonal workers from Russia and Galicia to obtain color-coded pass cards that contained personal data, including a physical description of the worker, and stated the name of the designated employer.75 Regardless of their Russian or Austrian citizenship Polish nationals received red cards, Ukrainians (or Ruthenians as they were called) yellow cards and Germans white cards. These cards were handed out at special border stations operated by the German Farm Workers’ Office (Deutsche Feldarbeiter-Centrale), which also kept a central registry. Two years later the administration extended the obligation to obtain pass cards to all foreign workers with new colors added to the nationality spectrum: blue for Dutch and Belgian workers, green for Italians, brown for Norwegians and Swedes, white for all others.76 Most of the German states, with the exception of the German South, followed the Prussian example.77 What had been introduced as a measure to segregate Polish workers in the Prussian East quickly developed into a surveillance system to control the whereabouts of all foreign workers. At the same time the colonial administration in Berlin enacted a pass edict for German Southwest Africa as part of the so-called “Native Laws.” It stipulated that every African over the age of seven (which apparently was considered the minimum age for workers) had to carry a pass disc around his or her neck. The tin badges were stamped with the district’s name and an identification number. Every district kept a registry linking each identification number (at least theoretically) to personal data, including the ethnicity of the workers. To cross district borders people had to apply for additional papers.78 While the regulations were not always effective in practice, as historian Jürgen Zimmerer has argued,79 they were part of a set of regulations that disenfranchised and expropriated Africans, severely restricted their freedom of movement and segregated colonial society along racial lines. Pass systems like the two described above were not an invention of German imperialists. In the Canadian West members of First Nations

144

D. LERP

who wished to leave their reservations had to obtain passes from the local Indian agents or the police could take them into custody and forcibly return them. The system had no legal basis but was in place nevertheless from the 1880s until the mid-1930s.80 Several decades earlier, in 1847, Henry W. Halleck, California’s secretary of state under US military rule, had instituted a statewide Indian pass system that criminalized all Native Americans that were not employed by Non-Native-Americans or left their employers without permission.81 Similar to the Southwest African (and to a lesser degree the Prussian) pass system, the North American policies were meant to segregate indigenous people and restrict their mobility. Additionally, securing labor for settlers was a main objective in California as well. Still, neither the US nor the Canadian example played any visible role in the German debates. Instead, the Prussian pass cards were first introduced by a Ukrainian nationalist association based in Galicia out of worry that Ukrainians would be mistaken for Polish workers and expelled from Prussia during the winter. It offered to cooperate with the German Farm Workers’ Office by handing out color-coded pass cards and the office quickly took over the system. For German Southwest Africa the pass regulations of the Transvaal and Orange Free State most likely served as a blueprint.82 The use of tin disks instead of paper documents (as early as 189483 ) however, not only distinguished the German colonial pass system from the Prussian and South African models, it was also a clear reference to older surveillance systems, in particular to the badges that slaves and freedmen were forced to carry in some North American cities in the eighteenth century.84 Marked with merely a number, those badges were meant to strip their owners not only of their rights to move freely or chose their employer, but of their humanity as well.

Conclusion German policies on land, labor, and migration developed within an imperial formation that connected various actors, settings, and discourses within and beyond the German Empire. The United States served as an example in some instances, most visibly for the Prussian settlement scheme. In other cases, like the debate about reservations, they were merely a point of reference or played no role at all. To local administrators the neighboring British colonies or border regions of the Russian and

7

RULING CLASSES AND SERVING RACES …

145

Austrian empire often lay closer at hand. However, even in those circumstances imperial officials in Germany and the United States perceived certain issues, like the mobility of slaves, Native Americans, Africans, and Poles, as problems and approached them in similar ways leading to comparable answers, as the example of the pass systems demonstrates. Since settler colonialism and slavery shaped the United States in such fundamental ways, it is not surprising, that race played a decisive part in the agrarian economy. However, after Germany had become a colonial power in 1884 class distinctions in the agrarian sector were increasingly drawn along racial lines as well. The policies described above were meant to turn white Germans into a ruling class of independent farmers. At the same time they forced Africans and Poles to become what Hintze had called the “serving races”—a flexible and highly mobile workforce, that was disenfranchised and subjected to bad working and living conditions, state policing, and physical punishment.

Notes 1. Otto Hintze, “Rasse und Nationalität und ihre Bedeutung für die Geschichte,” Das Deutschtum im Auslande (March 1903), here quoted after Otto Hintze, Soziologie und Geschichte: Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Soziologie, Politik und Theorie der Geschichte, 3rd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982), 46–65, 64. 2. Bruce Levine, “Immigrants and Refugees. Who Were the Real FortyEighters in the United States?,” in Sabine Freitag, ed., Exiles from European Revolutions: Refugees in Mid-Victorian England (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 234–252. 3. Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy (London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1909 [1841]), 345. See also Gregor Thum in this volume. 4. Jens-Uwe Guettel, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 44. See also Jens-Uwe Guettel in this volume. 5. Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 6. The idea of an “imperial (social) formation “ has been introduced independently—and with slightly different connotations—by Mrinalini Sinha as well as Ann Laura Stoler and Carole McGranahan. Mrinalini Sinha, “Mapping the Imperial Social Formation: A Modest Proposal for Feminist History,” Signs 25.4 (2000), 1077–1082; Ann Laura Stoler and Carole

146

D. LERP

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

McGranahan, “Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Terrains,” in Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue, eds., Imperial Formations (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 3–42. For further discussion of the concept, see Ulrike Lindner and Dörte Lerp, “Introduction: Gendered Imperial Formations,” in Ulrike Lindner and Dörte Lerp, eds., New Perspectives on the History of Gender and Empire: Comparative and Global Approaches (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 1–27. David Brian Grigg, The Transformation of Agriculture in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2006), 44. Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Geschichte der Globalisierung: Dimensionen, Prozesse, Epochen (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2016). Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 288–289. Aristide R. Zolberg, “Global Movements, Global Walls: Responses to Migration, 1885–1925,” in Wang Gungwu, ed., Global History and Migration (Oxford: Westview Press, 1997), 279–307; Dirk Hoerder, “Migrations and Belongings,” in Emily S. Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2012), 435–489. Hoerder, “Migrations and Belongings,” 439–440. Geert Naber, “‘Ausgangspunkt einer deutschen Weltmachtpolitik’ – Kolonialismus, Rassismus und Deutschtum bei Max Weber,” March 2007, https://www.freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/maxweber. htm (accessed November 27, 2019). Martin Riesebrodt, “Einleitung,” in Martin Riesebrodt, Horst Baier and Mario Rainer Lepsius, eds., Max Weber: Die Lage der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland. 1892 (= Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/3,1), (Tübingen: Mohr, 1984), 1–17, 1. Martin Riesebrodt, “Editorischer Bericht,” in Riesebrodt, Baier and Mario Lepsius, eds., Max Weber. Die Lage der Landarbeiter, 18–33. Max Weber, “Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik. Akademische Antrittsrede,” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Rita Aldenhoff, eds., Landarbeiterfrage, Nationalstaat und Volkswirtschaftspolitik. Schriften und Reden 1892–1899 (= Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/4,2), (Tübingen: Mohr, 1993), 693–711, 548. Ibid., 557. Ibid., 571. Verein für Socialpolitik, ed., Verhandlungen der am 24. und 25. September 1886 in Frankfurt a. M. abgehaltenen Generalversammlung des Vereins

7

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

RULING CLASSES AND SERVING RACES …

147

für Socialpolitik über die Wohnungsverhältnisse der ärmeren Klassen in deutschen Großstädten und über Innere Kolonisation mit Rücksicht auf die Erhaltung und Vermehrung des mittleren und kleineren ländlichen Grundbesitzes (= Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitik 32). (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1886), 99. Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation, 168–228. Ibid., 76–79. Karl von Stengel, “Die Arbeiterfrage in den Kolonien,” Jahrbuch der Internationalen Vereinigung für Vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft und Volkswirtschaftslehre zu Berlin 4 (1898), 245–261, 253–254. Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923 (Oxford: James Currey, 1999). Martina Gockel, “Diversifizierung und politische Ökonomie der Damara im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Wilhelm J.G. Möhling, ed., Frühe Kolonialgeschichte Namibias 1880–1930 (= History, cultural traditions and innovations in Southern Africa 9) (Cologne: Köppe 2000), 97–135. Helene von Falkenhausen, Ansiedlerschicksale. Elf Jahre in DeutschSüdwestafrika 1893–1904, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Reimer, 1906), 22–23. George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 119–121, 146–179; Robert J. Gordon, “Hiding in Full View: The Forgotten Bushmen Genocides of Namibia,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 4.1 (2009), 29–57. Eduard von Hartmann, “Der Rückgang des Deutschtums,” Die Gegenwart 27 (03.01.1885), 1–3 and 19–22. “Gesetz betreffend die Beförderung deutscher Ansiedlungen in den Provinzen Westpreußen und Posen, vom 26. April 1886,” Archiv für Innere Kolonisation 1 (1909), 300–302. Robert L. Nelson, “From Manitoba to the Memel. Max Sering, Inner Colonization and the German East,” Social History 35.4 (2010), 439– 457, 442–445. Max Sering,“Die Landpolitik der Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika,” Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich 8.2 (1884), 95–151, 95. Max Sering to Gustav Schmoller, 14.09.1883, 181–184, 183–184, file 141, VI HA, Nachlass Schmoller, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (hereafter GStA PK). Nelson, “From Manitoba to the Memel,” 447–451. Brigitte Balzer, Die preußische Polenpolitik 1894–1908 und die Haltung der deutschen konservativen und liberalen Parteien (unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Provinz Posen) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990), 59–63; Paul S. Boyer, et al., The Enduring Vision. A History of the

148

34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

D. LERP

American People, vol. 1: Since 1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 376. Scott M. Eddie, “The Prussian Settlement Commission and its Activities in the Land Market, 1886–1918,” in Robert L. Nelson, ed., Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 39–63; Uwe Müller, “Wirtschaftliche Maßnahmen der Polenpolitik in der Zeit des Deutschen Kaiserreichs,” in Johannes Frackowiak, ed., Nationalistische Politik und Ressentiments. Deutsche und Polen von 1971 bis zu Gegenwart (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 39–62, 60. “Denkschrift zur Siedlungspolitik”, n.d. [1903], 48–66, folder 1137, R 1001—Reichskolonialamt, Bundesarchiv Berlin (hereafter R 1001, BAB). Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten: Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 51–52. Daniel J. Walther, Creating Germans Abroad: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Namibia (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), 14–15. Keith Williams, “The Politics of Empire Settlement, 1900–1922,” in Steven Constantine, ed., Emigrants and Empire: British Settlement in the Dominions Between the Wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 22–24. Ibid., 23. “Aus unseren Kolonien. Besiedelung des Transvaals und Orange-Freistaats durch britische Staatsangehörige,” n.d.[1901], 4–13, folder 8749, R 1001, BAB; Colonial Division to Leutwein, 11.10.1901, 16, folder 8749, R 1001, BAB; Lindequist to Colonial Division, 7.10.1902, 127–131, folder 8749, R 1001, BAB; Colonial Division to Lindequist, n.d., 139, folder 1136, R 1001, BAB. “Denkschrift zur Siedlungspolitik,” 51, folder 1137, R 1001, BAB. Ibid., 61. Horst Bieber, Paul Rohrbach. Ein konservativer Publizist und Kritiker der Weimarer Republik (München-Pullach: Verl. Dokumentation, 1972), 18–19. Paul Rohrbach, “Bericht des Ansiedlungskommissars Dr. Paul Rohrbach,” 16.08.1904, 46, folder 82‚870, L.II.A.3. Vol. 2, R 151F—Kaiserliches Gouvernement in Deutschsüdwestafrika (hereafter R 151F), BAB. Hans Oelhafen von Schoellenbach, Die Besiedelung Deutsch-Südwestafrikas bis zum Weltkriege (Berlin: Reimer, 1926), 110–113. Initially Vogelsang bought all land within five miles around Angra Pequena for Lüderitz. A few months later he acquired a coastal strip of twenty miles in width, that stretched between the Orange River in the South and the 26th degree longitute in the North. Both times he deliberately left Fredericks in the dark that he was referring to Prussian miles

7

47.

48. 49.

50.

51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59.

60.

RULING CLASSES AND SERVING RACES …

149

of 7500 m length, not British miles of only 1500 m. Horst Drechsler, Südwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft. Vol. I: Der Kampf der Herero und Nama gegen den deutschen Imperialismus 1884–1915, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Akademie, 1966), 34–35. Malte Thran, “Die Kategorie der Enteignung im Kontext der kolonialen Landnahme in Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” Stichproben. Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien 9 (2009), 16, 87–106, 88. Drechsler, Südwestafrika, 77–117. Reinhardt Kößler, “Streben nach Heimat und Freiheit. Zur Territorialisierung von Ethnizität in Süd- und Zentralnamibia,” Peripherie 27 (2007) 108, 393–410, 397–399. Dominik J. Schaller, “Kolonialkrieg, Völkermord und Zwangsarbeit in ‚Deutsch-Südwestafrika,’” in Dominik J. Schaller, Rupen Boyadjian, and Vivianne Berg, eds., Enteignet, Vertrieben, Ermordet. Beiträge zur Genozidforschung (Zurich: Chronos, 2004), 147–232, 158. Thran, “Kategorie der Enteignung,” 89; Helmut Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1894–1914 (Hamburg: Leibnitz, 1968), 157. Thran, “Kategorie der Enteignung,” 90–91. Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labour and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). Schreiber to Colonial Division, n.d.[12.02.1901], 11–15, folder 82,683 W.II.E.4 Vol. 1, R 151F, BAB. Ibid. Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 79–80, quote 81. See also Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers & Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 15–20. Graber, The Gods of Indian Country, 124–126; Cahill, Federal Fathers & Mothers, 42–45. Ecumenical Missionary Conference New York 1900, ed., Report on the Ecumenical Missionary Confernce on Foreign Missions, Held in Carnegie Hall and Neigboring Churches, April 21 to May 1, Vol. 1 (London and New York: Religious Tract Society 1900), 40–43. Jan-Bart Gewald, “Kolonisierung, Völkermord und Wiederkehr. Die Herero von Namibia 1890–1923,” in Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller, eds., Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2003), 105–120. Tecklenburg to Colonial Division, 17.07.1905, 30, folder 1220, R 1001, BAB.

150

D. LERP

61 “Gesetz, betreffend die Gründung neuer Ansiedlungen in den Provinzen Ostpreußen, Westpreußen, Brandenburg, Pommern, Posen, Schlesien, Sachsen und Westfalen vom 10. August 1904,” Archiv für innere Kolonisation 1 (1909) 4, 313–318. 62. Wolfgang Hofmann, “Das Ansiedlungsgesetz von 1904 und die preußische Polenpolitik,” Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 38 (1989), 251–285, 271–283. 63. Wolfgang Hofmann, “Das Ansiedlungsgesetz”; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Polenpolitik im Deutschen Kaiserreich,” in ed. Idem, Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs 1871–1918. Studien zur deutschen Sozial- und Verfassungsgeschichte, 2. rev. ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979), 184–202. 64. Helmut Neubach, Die Ausweisung von Polen und Juden aus Preußen 1885/86: Ein Beitrag zu Bismarcks Polenpolitik und zur Geschichte des deutsch-polnischen Verhältnisses (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1967). 65. Deportation order to Michael Tarka, 09.09.1885, in Neubach, Die Ausweisungen, 233. 66. Kathrin Roller, Frauenmigration und Ausländerpolitik im deutschen Kaiserreich. Polnische Arbeitsmigrantinnen in Preußen, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Bertz 1994), 41. 67. Herrfurth to the presidents of East Prussia, West Prussia, Poznania, and Silesia, 26.11.1890, 66–67; Herrfurth to Seydewitz, 10.12.1890, 71, file 106 vol. 1, I HA, Rep. 120 Ministerium für Handel und Gewerbe, C VIII 1 (hereafter I HA, Rep. 120, CVIII 1), GStA PK. 68. “Protokoll der Sitzung des Königlichen Staatsministeriums,” 11.11.1890, 58–63, file 106 vol. 1, I HA, Rep. 120, CVIII 1, GStA PK. 69. Ministry of Interior to the presidents of East Prussia, West Prussia, Poznania, and Silesia, 24.04.1895, 185–187, file 106 vol. 1, I HA, Rep. 120, CVIII 1, GStA PK. 70. Julius von Trzcinski, Russisch-polnische und galizische Wanderarbeiter im Grossherzogtum Posen (Stuttgart: Union 1906). 71. Von Moltke to the Provincial Presidents and the Police President, 21.12.1907, file 1187, XVI HA, Rep. 30, Regierung zu Bromberg (hereafter XVI HA, Rep. 30), GStA PK. 72. Ministy of Interior to Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, 03.02.1895, 132–135, 134–135; Herrfurth to Stolberg-Werningerode, 21.12.1891, 107–111, 108, file 106 vol. 1, I HA, Rep. 120, CVIII 1, GStA PK. 73. Leutwein, “Verordnung betreffend die Paß- und Meldepflicht der Eingeborenen [draft]” 30.08.1900, 7–8, file 82‚690, W.III.K.1, vol. 1, R 151F, BAB. 74. District Captain of Keetmanshoop to Colonial Gouvernement, 07.02.1902, 15–16, file 82‚690, W.III.K.1, vol. 1, R 151F, BAB; Leutwein, “Verordnung,” 02.06.1902, 22, file E.1.b, vol. 1, BWI

7

75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

80.

81.

82.

83. 84.

RULING CLASSES AND SERVING RACES …

151

Bezirksamt Windhoek (hereafter BWI), National Archives of Namibia, Windhoek (hereafter NAN). Von Moltke to the Provincial Presidents and the Police President, 21.12.1907, file 1187, XVI HA, Rep. 30, GStA PK. Von Moltke to the Provincial Presidents and the Police President, 30.12.1908, file 1187, XVI HA, Rep. 30, GStA PK. Johannes Nichtweiß, Die ausländischen Saisonarbeiter in der Landwirtschaft der östlichen und mittleren Gebiete des Deutschen Reiches: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der preußisch-deutschen Politik von 1890 bis 1914 (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1959), 138–154. Colonial Gouvernement, “Verordnung betreffend Paßpflicht der Eingeborenen,” 12–14, file 82‚688, W.III.A.1, vol. 1, R 151F, BAB. Jürgen Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner. Staatlicher Machtanspruch und koloniale Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia, 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Lit, 2002), 126–147. Keith Douglas Smith, Liberalism, Surveillance, and Resistance: Indigenous Communities in Western Canada, 1877–1927 (Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University Press 2009), 60–37. Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 147–148. Rob Turrell, “Kimberley: Labour and Compounds, 1871–1888,” in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, eds., Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa. African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness, 1870– 1930 (New York: Longman, 1982), 45–76, 54; Peter Richardson and Jean Jaques Van-Helten, “Labour in the South African Gold Mining Industry, 1886–1914,” in Marks and Rathbone, Industrialisation and Social Change, 77–98, 89. Kaiserlicher Bezirkshauptmann Windhuk an von Giese, 14.03.1895, Bl. 6, file E.1.a, vol. 1, BWI, NAN. Stephanie M.H. Camp, “Passports,” in Junius P. Rodriguez, ed., The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery. Volume1: A-K (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1997), 492–493.

CHAPTER 8

How the Südwest Was Won: Transnational Currents of American Agriculture and Land Colonization in German Southwest Africa Jeannette Eileen Jones

In 1906, the organizers of the Fourteenth National Irrigation Congress invited representatives from various countries to attend its annual gathering in Boise, Idaho. Despite being a US-based organization that congregated yearly in the Western states, the Congress believed that the three-day conference—filled with lectures, “practical” demonstrations, and deliberations—could be of use to nations possessing strong agricultural economies or those where industrialization had not completely displaced farming as a source of income. German Ambassador to the United States, Baron Hermann Speck von Sternburg declined the invitation, sending his regrets to the conference organizers. However, he asked to “be furnished with the publications which the Congress may issue during the sessions on a question in which” he was “highly interested.”1 A year later, the German Consul for San Francisco, Franz Bopp,

J. E. Jones (B) University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_8

153

154

J. E. JONES

attended the Fifteenth National Irrigation Congress held that September in Sacramento, California. German officials had decided that American irrigation engineers and experts possessed knowledge from which the German Empire could benefit. Accordingly, Bopp (referred to as the Imperial German Consul in the conference proceedings) stated his pride in representing Germany and explained to the audience his purpose for attending the gathering: I believe it is the first time that a German representative has officially attended a National Irrigation Congress…My mission here is to learn and not to teach. We in Germany have not such problems to solve as you have in your arid lands. Nowhere in Germany do we complain of too little rain. On the contrary very often we have to complain of too much rain. Only it is different in some parts of our colonies where large areas may be compared with your arid lands…I hope that I will receive here some hints that may prove profitable to our German colonies in Africa.2

Bopp closed his speech by wishing the United States success in irrigating its arid lands, as such a feat, he argued, would provide “the world” with “new proof of the true American progressive spirit.”3 Bopp’s attendance at the 1907 conference came after a major turning point in the ongoing German invasion of Herero lands in Southwest Africa: the genocidal war against the Herero. Through a proclamation issued on October 2, 1904, General Lothar von Trotha authorized German troops, the Schutztruppe, to “shoot to death” “every male Herero, armed or unarmed,” and to shoot women and children who did not return “to their people.”4 By 1906, the Schutztruppe had reduced the Herero, once numbered at 80,000 people, to less than 20,000 persons. Those Herero who survived the genocidal campaign faced two equally traumatic punishments–“employment” as cheap labor for white settlers and/or internment in concentration camps.5 The campaign to suppress Herero resistance through genocidal warfare unfolded concurrently with efforts to “pacify” the indigenous Nama. German colonial officials had begun negotiating the creation of “native reserves” for the Nama and the Herero as early as 1901, with discussions commencing earnestly in 1903. The Germans hoped to acquire as much land as possible to encourage greater German settlement in the colony. The Nama’s decision to accelerate their resistance against German colonial rule ended by 1907 with approximately fifty percent of the Nama

8

HOW THE SÜDWEST WAS WON: TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS …

155

dead.6 Thus, when Bopp stated that he needed to learn from Americans how to make the African colonies “profitable,” he hoped that Herero and Nama lands—now firmly under German control—could be transformed into Western-style farmsteads. As historian Jens-Uwe Guettel notes, “American expansionism and racial policies were seen as models that European colonizers should and could reproduce elsewhere in the world – in particular in Germany’s own colonies.” Proponents of German empire-building looked to the United States as not only a model of expansion and colonization rooted in “social exclusion, expulsion, and extinction,” but also as a source for policies concerning white settlement, “native” removal, and mixedrace marriages.7 German officials in the Reichskolonialamt (established in 1907)8 paid particular attention to US policies regarding land seizure from indigenous peoples and the creation of reservations, as well as to American racialized labor practices and technologies that transformed arid lands into fertile, cultivatable pastures. For example, in Alabama in Africa, historian Andrew Zimmerman explores how the German desire to mobilize the colonized “native” population in West Africa, led them to look westward across the Atlantic to the US South for aide. German officials sought American cotton experts—black and white—who could teach Africans in Togo to cultivate cotton.9 Colonial administrators in German South West Africa utilized comparable strategies to create a thriving settler colony for German emigrants. This paper examines how and why German officials and nonstate actors searched for and considered American expertise to strengthen German rule in Southwest Africa, especially in the aftermath of “native” removal and the seizure of indigenous land. More specifically, I analyze the role of the Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee (Colonial Economic Committee) and the Reichskolonialamt in gathering intelligence on American agricultural practices—primarily irrigation and dry farming in the American West—as examples for the effective transformation of colonized indigenous lands into white settlements. German businessman Karl Supf and eleven other men founded the Komitee in 1896 as the Committee for the Importation of Products from the German colonies, changing its name in 1897. The Komitee “sought to foster the economic development of the German colonies” and requested support and funding for its ventures from the German government, with some success. Its members prioritized agricultural research and innovations that could benefit the colonies.10 As

156

J. E. JONES

Zimmerman argues “German colonial science, like its European counterparts, privileged agriculture both as an object of scientific inquiry…and as a model for colonial rule in general.”11 As historian Maurits W. Ersten notes, “Colonial efforts to develop irrigation in African colonies aimed to improve the colonies’ productive capacity.” He adds that “ideologies of creating new social and geographical landscapes” of “bringing order in the wildness by filling the empty African landscape with modern irrigation facilities” dominated “the colonial irrigation discourses and practices in African colonies.”12 German officials and the Komitee corresponded with individual American farmers, American agricultural and mechanical colleges, and the US Department of Agriculture to accumulate and evaluate information about the latest innovations in agricultural science, specifically techniques pertaining to soil cultivation and irrigation in the American West. In 1907, the Komitee collected information about “the so-called Campbell system of soil culture” and innovations in irrigation. The Reichskolonialamt followed suit, gathering materials about the irrigation of Yakima Valley, Washington. Like Bopp, some German bureaucrats traveled to the United States to attend conferences, expositions, and lectures where they could learn directly from American experts. Collectively, these activities entangled the two empires: the American empire—predicated on the elimination of indigenous people and westward expansion, and furthered by ongoing settler colonialism and overseas imperialism—and the German empire, which until the so-called “scramble for Africa,” had confined its expansion eastward on the European continent. As historian Stephen Tuffnell argues, placing American empire in global context demands our attention to the “transimperial flow of strategies of rule between and across empires at the center of analysis.” American experts, whether “globe-crossing” or stationary, became part of an elaborate matrix of what Tuffnell identifies as “nonstate actors and institutions involved in these exchanges” of knowledge and in “the exercise of power.”13 Germany’s response to the “colonial question,” during the late nineteenth century, drew on American expansion as historical and contemporary analogues to its colonization movement in Africa, creating new nodes in the transimperial connections between the two nations.

8

HOW THE SÜDWEST WAS WON: TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS …

157

German Imperialism and Africa The “scramble for Africa” began in earnest in the 1860s, decades after Great Britain and the United States launched transatlantic campaigns in 1807 to suppress the transatlantic slave trade, in favor of so-called “legitimate trade.” These two nations’ decision to abandon slave trading with Africans constituted a watershed moment in commercial relationships between European, American, and African merchants. Anti-slave trade advocates and nations, as well as merchants with no previous ties to slave trading, pursued commodity trade. Many European merchants used their access to this trade to promote the colonization of Africa, believing that possessing colonies or protectorates would further safeguard their access to African commodities. German merchants traded with Africans during the period preceding German colonization of Africa. For example, as early as the 1840s, independent merchants, as well as German-based trading companies operated in West Africa in territories that later would become protectorates of France and Great Britain, and the German colonies of Togo and Cameroon. In East Africa, German merchants vied for the Zanzibar copal trade alongside British and American traders. In Southern Africa, German merchants operated in Cape Colony, but other traders pursued commerce in the southwest region of the continent.14 Some of these merchants emerged as vocal promoters of German overseas imperialism. German politicians and academics debated the value of empire-building long before unification in 1871. Some German reformers and liberals during the 1848–1849 revolutions advocated for German acquisition of overseas territories. These liberal expansionists envisioned German settlement as concomitant to imperialism, favoring the establishment of German colonies in temperate climates including the American West (for instance, in Texas) and subtropical South America. (Africa’s reputation as “the white man’s grave” might have deterred some expansionists from promoting German emigration to the continent.) After Germany unified in 1871, German imperialists increasingly spoke of establishing colonies in tropical regions outside the Americas. Where Africa fit into these conversations about German settler colonialism and imperialism remained unknown until the 1880s.15 By 1880, it became clear that European nations competed, rather than cooperated, in trading with Africans. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who

158

J. E. JONES

at times appeared lukewarm about the prospects of German colonization of Africa, took notice. In consultation with Kaiser Wilhelm I, he convened the Berlin Conference in the winter of 1884/1885, bringing the “colonial question” temporarily to the forefront of German international relations. Bismarck sought an “international” group of participants that included the United States,16 several European countries, and the Ottoman Empire—but excluded all African leaders and regents. Months before the Berlin Conference, German tobacco merchant Adolf Lüderitz had declared a protectorate over South West Africa (present-day Namibia) on April 24, 1884. The Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft für Süd-West Afrika (DKGSWA), which organized in February 1885, began endorsing German emigration to the colony. Lüderitz and the DKGSWA’s boosterism of German colonial projects did not occur in a vacuum. On March 28, 1885, Carl Peters issued the “founding manifesto” of the Gesellschaft für deutsche Kolonisation (Society for German Colonization), a little more than a month after the close of the Berlin Conference. Peters, an explorer and “the leading exponent of colonialism” in Germany, played a major role in founding the German East Africa colony.17 Peters’ manifesto addressed several issues, including German immigration abroad and tariffs. Peters bemoaned the state of “Germandom outside of Europe,” explaining that hundreds of thousands of German immigrants settled in “foreign lands” and allegedly “assimilated into foreign races and disappeared within them.” According to Peters, these Germans rejected German culture and language to “adapt” to cultures that expressed either indifference or outright hostility toward Germany. Addressing exports and imports, the manifesto claimed that Germany suffered from unjust import tariffs on goods from “tropical zones,” much of which, European nations already colonized. Other nations enjoyed reciprocal trade agreements with uncolonized polities that exempted them from paying tariffs. Peters argued that since Germany did not share in the “partitioning of the world” that took “place from the beginning of the fifteenth century up to today,” it lost and continued to lose “millions in German capital” to foreign nations. Peters found this situation deplorable, given Germany’s status as the leading economic power in Europe. He proposed colonization as the solution to both the immigration and tariff questions.18 Invoking patriotism and nationalism, Peters warned Germany not to tarry in building its overseas empire. “Every German whose heart beats

8

HOW THE SÜDWEST WAS WON: TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS …

159

for the greatness and honor of our nation is asked to join our society. It is necessary to make up for centuries of oversight and to prove to the world that the German people have inherited not only ancient imperial glory from our forefathers but also their old German-national spirit!”19 Peters viewed overseas colonization as building upon Germany’s imperial past of continental expansion. Several elite Germans subscribed to the idea that Germany’s political futures depended on expanding its Empire, and they advocated for overseas empire-building. For example, missionary Friedrich Fabri and lawyer Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden envisioned a substantial German Empire. Fabri’s imperial vision entailed the creation of German settler colonies, which targeted farmers and middle-class professionals alike for emigration. Similarly, Hübbe-Schleiden championed colonization in lands where German culture and language could thrive. Both men asserted that German settler colonialism would differ starkly from immigration to nonGerman spaces, which often led to German “assimilation” into foreign cultures. While Peters and Lüderitz agreed that German colonies should foster white settlement, they encouraged founding trading colonies as well, to boost Germany’s international standing and economic expansion.20

A “New Germany” in Africa Convinced of the value of joining their European rivals in colonizing Africa, the Auswärtiges Amt (German Foreign Office) had to determine whether to create extractive colonies, settler colonies, or protectorates— or some combination thereof—on the continent. German private settler societies—like the DKGSWA and the Society for German Colonization— presented plans to the government, describing the most favorable climates and geographies for white settlement, outlining the essential components for building colonial towns and cities, and detailing the amount of capital required to ensure a colony’s profitability. German officials pushed for the settlement of Southwest Africa by German citizens because they believed that the settlers could bring “nationality” and intentionality to the existing farming and ranching practices of indigenous groups like the Nama, Ovambo, and Herero. Essentially, they anticipated that German emigrants could transfer their agricultural knowledge to the colony, and if successful as farmers, they would remain permanently in Africa, raising future generations of Germans on the continent.21

160

J. E. JONES

German settlers, settler societies, and colonial officials agreed that Herero, Ovambo, and Nama control of most the colony’s land prevented full-scale white settlement. Herero “cattle breeders” owned most of the cattle in the colony, posing an additional obstacle for settlers who wanted to ranch. Yet, even if settlers obtained vast acres of land and thousands head of cattle, they required laborers to move from subsistence to commercial farming and ranching. Without German immigration, these laborers would be Africans. Reportedly, many settlers did not hold such ambitions, preferring instead to work their own small settlement.22 Those Germans who set sail for Southwest Africa reasoned that as long as the Africans constituted a “dependent” labor class, theoretically, the settlers could make the colony a “white man’s land,” creating an “African Germany” or “New Germany in Africa.” Historian Dominik Schaller argues that initially German settlers did not seek to annihilate indigenous populations because the settlers depended on “cooperation with indigenous chiefs” for their physical safety. However, when it remained clear that Africans would not acquiesce to colonial rule and forced removal, German colonial officials enacted various measures and policies to control indigenous mobility and to marshal Africans as a colonial labor force.23 In 1898, the Germans created “native reserves” assigned to various ethnic groups with the goal of opening up land for white settlement. These reserves resembled reservations in the United States and reserves in Canada, both utilized to justify the appropriation of indigenous lands. “Outside the reservations, land was [parceled] for sale to settlers, leased to colonial societies, or retained as reserved land or Crown land.” These practices strongly resembled US homestead policies and the designation of former indigenous lands as “public land.” In 1900, German Southwest Africa (GSWA) issued an “Ordinance Requiring the Carrying of Passes and Registration for Natives,” and in 1907, the government revised the law to require that Africans explain the purpose of their travels outside the reserves.24 Anticolonial resistance intensified in 1904. For Herero peoples, land and territoriality lay at the heart of their resistance. As historian Dag Christensen writes, “Land shortage and the access to land—that is, pasture and wells, or more precisely, natural and artificially created water points—were a constant and principal issue for the pastoralists” who had already enacted measures for land use and water prior to colonization. Colonization disrupted these indigenous systems. German colonial officials were “fully aware of the fact that the land issue was not only central

8

HOW THE SÜDWEST WAS WON: TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS …

161

to African societies but also the basis for its violent scheme of European settlement and domination, containment, and exploitation.”25 Changes in the colonial leadership over GSWA from 1884 to 1904 resulted in the adoption of somewhat divergent policies for addressing the “native question.” Curt von François, Governor of the colony from 1891 to 1894, instigated a war against the Nama. His successor Theodor Leutwein advocated the seizure of indigenous lands as the ultimate solution to quell African resistance. Next, Lothar von Trotha assumed the position of “supreme commander” of GSWA in 1904 (one year before he became Governor) and openly expressed his racism, often referencing his experiences as colonial soldier in China and East Africa. Von Trotha argued that dealing with “African tribes” required unflinching brutality. He explained, “My policy, was and is, to exercise this violence with blatant terrorism and even cruelty. I finish off the rebellious tribes with rivers of blood and with rivers of money. Only from these seeds will something new and permanent be able to grow.”26 Von Trotha never wavered from his lethal approach to African resistance during this so-called “Hottentot uprising.” The genocidal wars against Nama and Herero reduced their populations to mere fractions of their numbers in 1884.27 The condition of the colony now appeared favorable to expansive German settlement. The “Hottentot elections” of 1907 in Germany brought the colonial question to the forefront of national debate, and in many ways served as a referendum on the ongoing settler colonial mission in GSWA. In 1907, Bernhard Dernburg—head of the Reichskolonialamt proclaimed, “Henceforth the native is the most important object…in the process of colonization.” Schaller explains that instead of pursuing a policy of extermination or genocide of Africans residing in the African colonies, Dernburg sought to introduce a “scientific” and “efficient” method of colonization. To achieve this Dernburg looked toward the United States, which he once declared to be “the biggest colonial endeavor the world has ever known.” For GSWA, this meant utilizing scientific methods of farming and creating, what historian John Noyes explains as “a frontier zone between native territories and the rest of the colony”—drawing heavily from American policies toward Native Americans.28

German Southwest Africa as a Western Frontier In 1896, Theodor Rehbock, a hydraulics civil engineer and professor at the University of Karlsruhe, and South African chemist J. C. Watermeyer

162

J. E. JONES

traveled to GSWA to explore the viability of agriculture using artificial irrigation in the colony’s most under-settled regions. Ernst Vohsen, the first German Consul for Sierra Leone (serving 1881–1887), proposed the trip. Vohsen consistently displayed his investment in the development of the German African colonies, traveling to German East Africa in 1888, under the auspices of the German Colonial Society. As a onetime advisor to the Colonial Division of the Foreign Office, Vohsen formed the Syndicates for Irrigation Systems in German Southwest Africa, which sponsored Rehbock and Watermeyer’s trip. Rehbock believed that the prospect of successful farming in GSWA would result in denser white settlement of the territory.29 The Syndicates charged Rehbock and Watermeyer with crafting proposals for the construction of large dams that would aid in founding agricultural colonies in GSWA. In addition, the reports of their findings should include photographs, maps, and plans. In 1898, Rehbock published a book detailing his trip to GSWA. Its first part is a narrative of Rehbock’s travels through Herero and Nama lands, east toward the border with Bechuanaland, and south to the Orange River. The second part provides much of the scientific data regarding GSWA’s climate, geology, and hydrographic features, as well as a summary of the colony’s economy. The third part explains the means by which the colony could “gain” the water necessary to foster agriculture. The book concludes with Rehbock’s ruminations on the economic future of the colony.30 Rehbock favored agriculture over animal husbandry, explaining that raising livestock required the building of artificial waterholes, which while providing sufficient water for animals, could not sustain farming. He proposed the building of more dams and wells, noting experiments in “East Namaland” around Windhoek and Gibeon where some white settler farmers constructed valley dams. Rehbock described in detail the construction of other dams in the colony and assessed their effectiveness in making the soil cultivatable. In discussing the colony’s Alluvialböden (residual soils), Rehbock compared them explicitly to the wheat-growing soil in North America, intimating that white settlers could grow similar wheat varieties with proper irrigation infrastructure. To test his theory, Rehbock proposed creating a state-sponsored agricultural colony at Hatsamas, eighty miles southeast of Windhoek, in the Gubagub Valley.31

8

HOW THE SÜDWEST WAS WON: TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS …

163

Rehbock debated the pros and cons of state-supported individual settlements (perhaps similar to those allowed under the US Homestead Act of 1862) and state-funded colonies. He favored the latter because it would attract German farmers without capital who presumably could settle in the colony relatively cost-free. Rehbock estimated that the German government would spend approximately three million Marks (roughly 303,000 Marks per year for a decade) to fund his colonial experiment. The white farmers would grow a range of crops, primarily grains, potatoes, and vegetables, for their own subsistence and sell any surplus at the market in Windhoek. In addition, the farmers would raise a small number of livestock to meet their dietary needs. Importantly, the agricultural colony would not rely on the importation of food for its survival. Ideally, each settler would earn about 7800 Marks per year, of which 5000–5720 Marks would cover expenses. The net income for each farmer would be in the range of 2800–2080 Marks.32 In 1899, the Geographische Zetischrift, the German geography journal founded in 1895, reviewed Rehbock’s book. The author and geographer Adolph Schenck traveled to GSWA from 1884 to 1887 as part of a scientific expedition to survey the natural features of the colony. Schenck’s assessment of “das Rehbock’sche Projekt”—on behalf of the journal—revolved around one central question: “wie machen wir Deutsch-Südwestafrika für das Mutterland nutzbar?” How do we make GSWA profitable for the motherland? Schenck explained that “If realized, this project could be of great importance to the often derided, but also often praised, first Germany colony.” Rehbock’s proposal most likely would attract settlers with “no means” to GSWA, but the resulting agricultural economy would be domestic, incapable of yielding a surplus for export out to the colony. Schneck conceded that livestock could be exported, but only if settlers with wealth took up animal husbandry. The likelihood of such a development remained unknown. With no viable commercial agriculture on the horizon, Schneck concluded that Rehbock’s project would not solve the question of GSWA’s utility to the German state.33 Since the publication of Rehbock’s book, mobility outside of Germany increased in pace with the nation’s industrialization. Debates about Auslandsdeutsche (Germans aboard) and the strength of their ties to the “Mutterland” included speculations about German settlers’ ability to retain their Germanness in the colonies, surrounded by “natives,” especially in GSWA. As Schneck noted, celebrations of GSWA as the nation’s

164

J. E. JONES

first colony could not silence totally cynics who saw little benefit of the colony to the metropole. Rehbock’s project could serve as a partial answer to the colonial “labor question.” As historian Sebastian Conrad explains, German imperialists believed that “Redirecting [emigration] flows to the colonies would prevent the ‘loss of national energies’ and retain the products of ‘German work’ for the fatherland.”34 In this context, statesubsidized emigration to GSWA supported a wider push for “creating workers’ colonies” and agricultural colonies to redirect emigration from the United States to “New Germany.”35 The wars with the Herero and Nama temporarily halted much of German emigration to GSWA. Yet, by the wars’ end, colonial officials had in place plans to spur not only emigration to the colony, but also to adopt proven agricultural science to aid settler farmers. Nonstate actors (like Rehbock) also undertook this work. Both looked to the United States for this information based on similarities they saw between the deserts and plains regions in the American West and GSWA. Both regions faced challenges to building agricultural economies in arid and semi-arid terrains. GSWA’s topography included the Namib and Kahalari deserts, a plateau region with limited water sources, and a heavy rainfall region in the Northeast. The primarily dry climate made land prone to droughts. The northernmost parts of the colony contained the most fertile soil in the colony. In contrast, the soil in areas where German settlers clustered tended toward aridity or semi-aridity. Once in receipt of data on American soil science and irrigation (in the form of pamphlets, manuals, proceedings, reports, and letters), the Komitee and the Reichskolonialamt assessed the feasibility of applying these practices to GSWA based on the colony’s landscape and soil quality. The Komitee had already sponsored a small “outfit” for the drilling of wells and irrigated farming in GWSA in 1901.36 However, it sought more agricultural expertise, evaluating the Campbell system as a possible solution to the soil’s challenges to settler colonial “capitalist freehold farming.”37 Hardy Webster (H. W.) Campbell was born in Montgomery, Vermont, in 1850, but he moved to Bethany—a subdivision of Lincoln, Nebraska. Like many farmers and homesteaders in Nebraska, Campbell struggled to grow crops consistently. He realized that in some regions of the Great Plains the topsoil did not retain moisture even after heavy rain periods. After conducting extensive research on extant farming methods and repeating a series of experiments, Campbell created his Subsurface

8

HOW THE SÜDWEST WAS WON: TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS …

165

Packer in 1885. The packer, when used with a conventional harrow, made the soil finer, “firmer,” and increased “its water-holding capacity.” The packer alone, however, did not comprise the Campbell system, which involved the application of fertilizer and other steps necessary to ready the soil for seed and watering.38 Despite his success with the system, Campbell did not publish Campbell’s Soil Culture Manual until 1905, selling it for fifty cents (Fig. 8.1). That same year, The Irrigation Age (formerly The Irrigation Age and Western Empire) published an article about Campbell’s system, which had attracted “widespread attention throughout western Kansas, Nebraska, eastern Colorado, and the Panhandle of Texas.” The periodical highlighted the system’s “marvelous results” in growing corn, wheat, fruit trees, potatoes, and sugar beets in the arid plains over the last six years. It identified the system as “the principal factor in the vast increase of tonnage and bringing in hundreds of new families who are building up ideal and prosperous houses,” particularly in western Nebraska. Campbell’s system and results drew the attention of the United States Department of Agriculture, as well.39 In 1907, one could purchase Campbell’s Soil Culture Almanac (subtitled Star of the New West Scientific Soil Culture) for only twenty-five cents. Campbell planned to publish the almanac annually with “new and valuable matter,” asserting that the almanac’s “content is not and never will be of a local nature.” Whether or not Campbell expected his work to garner international attention among colonial powers is unclear. However, the Queensland Parliament of the recently formed Commonwealth of Australia requested “full particulars of his system” from the US Department of Agriculture. The Komitee also made a similar request, but also hoped to secure a visit from Campbell to GSWA. After reading Campbell’s manual and an article about the system in The World’s Work—a pro-business American periodical—the Komitee issued a point-by-point report that expressed some skepticism about the Campbell system.40 The Komitee’s report stated that “the system is not new, as Campbell himself admits,” explaining that the method harkens back to practices employed by old German farming “masters.”41 Indeed, Campbell’s manual explained, “It is, of course, true that many of the facts of the Campbell system were known long before Mr. Campbell’s time. Some of the methods used are applicable to the world over, and have been practiced for generations.” While conceding this, the manual made a bold claim. “If Campbell had done no more that collect, organize, and classify

166

J. E. JONES

Fig. 8.1 Campbell’s Soil Culture Manual Cover (1905) (Courtesy of History Nebraska)

8

HOW THE SÜDWEST WAS WON: TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS …

167

these disconnected facts and methods into a coherent system of practice adapted to conditions in the semi-arid belt, he would have accomplished a work of the very highest utility.” However, Campbell accomplished much more by creating new implements and employing the latest agricultural science in his system.42 Nevertheless, the Komitee questioned what innovations could the Campbell system offer to German settlers in GSWA.43 The Komitee appeared disturbed that the most consistent praise for the system came from business sources. The report warned, “It must also be considered, that the extraordinary advertising for the system comes from American railroad companies and speculators.” It continued, “Campbell, himself, has now accepted a permanent position in the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad Company, which exploits arid lands, particularly in Kansas, New Mexico, and Arizona.”44 Could German colonial officials trust testimonials from potentially unscrupulous speculators who presumably touted Campbell’s system to entice settlements along the railroad routes? The Komitee’s skeptical comments about Campbell’s dry farming techniques did not end their query or the report. The Komitee remarked: “Recently, Campbell has been negotiating with farmers in South Africa regarding the use of the system. Campbell believes that the system, despite the lack of snow cover in winter, is feasible.” Perhaps, this revelation caused additional consternation for the Komitee as Germans had a long history of settling in Southern Africa, dating back to the 1600s when the Dutch established a settlement in present-day Cape Town. When Cape Colony came under British control, Germans continued to settle there, particularly in the Eastern Cape, with the largest migration occurring after 1857.45 Conceivably, the prospect that other Southern African colonies would gain an economic advantage over GSWA by employing Campbell’s system, alarmed colonial officials at Windhoek. If Germans preferred settling in Cape Colony instead of in GSWA, they could potentially undermine the Komitee’s goals and inadvertently, heighten the inter-imperial rivalry between the British and the Germans. Thus, while somewhat unconvinced by the accolades heaped on the Campbell system, the Komitee could not afford to dismiss outright agricultural science that might help attract more settlers to GSWA. By all accounts, the Komitee remained vigilant in seeking remedies for poor soil quality. The Reichskolonialamt included the Komitee’s report on Campbell system in its files for developing GSWA.

168

J. E. JONES

Like the Komitee, the Reichskolonialamt realized that good soil required water for cultivability. As Campbell explained, his system only worked under certain conditions. “First—Catch the rainfall and store it where the roots of the plant can reach it. Second —Keep the soil always fine and loose. Third—Have a firm, solid foundation under the soil —a bottom to hold the water.”46 Given the lack of rainfall in the plateau regions of the GSWA, storing water and channeling water to farms required building a colonial infrastructure that could support both large and small irrigation projects. Thus, the Reichskolonialamt collected publications about various irrigation projects in the United States, specifically in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Washington. In 1907, the Reichskolonialamt received the proceedings of the aforementioned Fourteenth National Irrigation Congress.47 In the account, the organizers identified “four great objects to be accomplished…Save the Forests, Store the Floods, Reclaim the Desert, [and] Homes on the Land.”48 In the United States, Wyoming Senator Joseph M. Carey had proposed the Carey Act (also known as the Desert Land Act), which passed in 1894 to “aid the public-land States in the reclamation of the desert lands therein, and the settlement, cultivation and sale thereof in small tracts to actual settlers.” The act amended the 1862 Homestead Act, offering married couples 640 acres of land at $1.25 per acre if they irrigated the land in three years. Single men would receive only 320 acres at the same price under the same stipulations.49 Thus, irrigation became an important part of the “proving up” of the American homestead. Seemingly, two of the conference’s objectives applied directly to GSWA. Colonial officials certainly wanted to reclaim the deserts by creating irrigation projects that would allow farmers to grow food crops. Additionally, the Reichskolonialamt , which sent a copy of the proceedings to Windhoek, encouraged, “homes on the land”—that is, the building of permanent white settlements in GSWA. There are no notes to indicate that the Reichskolonialamt wanted to create homestead legislation to entice German citizens to move to GSWA, establish a homestead, and “prove up” the land seized from the Nama and Herero (Fig. 8.2). However, the Reichskolonialamt evidently recognized the role that irrigation projects, supported by the state (in the US case, the Bureau of Reclamation under the Department of the Interior) played in encouraging settlement in arid and semi-arid lands. The conference proceedings delivered testimonials and knowhow about innovative irrigation technologies,

8

HOW THE SÜDWEST WAS WON: TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS …

169

Fig. 8.2 Top Left: Oxcart on the Trek. Bottom Left: Rambouillet Sheep in Rehoboth. Top Right: Grazing Land of His Majesty’s the Emperor’s Farm. Bottom Right: Cattle Herd by the Open Water (Source Deutschland als Kolonialmacht: Dreißig Jahre deustche Kolonialgeschichte [1914])

providing a partial blueprint for GSWA irrigation plans. The Reichskolonialamt considered the Yakima Valley Irrigation Project, which offered a model for large-scale irrigation of hundreds of thousands acres of arid land.50 At core, the US-imposed irrigation of the Yakima Valley embodied America’s colonial project. Although, Yakama (Yakima) people began irrigating the land “after the creation of their reservation in the midnineteenth century,” when white settler farmers arrived to area in Washington state during the 1880s and 1890s, the US government pressed for the irrigation of the entire valley, which only received seven to eight inches of rainfall annually. White settler encroachment on “traditional Yakima summer grazing land outside the reservation” coupled with pressure from speculators (including railroad companies) for access to the valley, led

170

J. E. JONES

the Bureau of Indian Affairs to push for the application of the Dawes Act of 1887 for allotment of Yakama land. By 1907, the US government had not only facilitated the irrigation of much of the valley, but also promoted white settlement on over 800,000 acres of non-allotted Yakama Nation land. The valley comprised 80% of the irrigated land in Washington State.51 The Reichskolonialamt ’s files on the Yakima Valley Irrigation Project provides some insight into aspirations to irrigate parts of GSWA. The records include a letter of transmittal, dated April 15, 1907, referring to a report from the US Department of Agriculture Office of Experiment Stations detailing the technology used to irrigate the valley. The letter’s purpose went beyond the descriptive, explaining the need for additional legislation and attention to “legal questions” that would “encourage and aid irrigation development” in the American West. In addition, the report claimed to serve as “a valuable guide to new settlers by pointing out the best methods to be followed in reclaiming the land.”52 The report itself contains meticulous details about the canal systems built throughout the Yakima Valley. It explains the settlement patterns in the valley, particularly on the west side of the river where the Yakima Indian Reservation (present-day Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation) sits. Each member of the “tribe” lived on 80-acres allotments, which many leased to whites—who the report claimed, “do most of the farming.” The report surmised that if the Yakama, who owned “all the land,” sold 75% of their allotment to whites and “improved the remaining” 25%, whites would not only “own their own homes,” but also aid in the “rapid development” of the valley.53 The report uses a colonialist framework that posits “natives” as impediments to economic development and white self-determination in the West. German colonial officials and the Komitee viewed the colonized Africans similarly. However, the Reichskolonialamt ’s file offers no official commentary on the report. The Reichskolonialamt ’s work did not end in 1907. In 1910, it collected documents regarding the 1909 Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition, which highlighted how white settlers and the US government tied together the economies of the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and the American colonies in the Pacific Ocean, principally through trade. The exposition included a German Day on August 18, which featured a parade and celebration of German culture (e.g., music and food ways) in the American West. The Reichskolonialamt ’s mission most likely led it to

8

HOW THE SÜDWEST WAS WON: TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS …

171

elevate the economic aspects of the exposition rather than focus on the participation of German-Americans in the fair. Perhaps the Reichskolonialamt pondered whether the German Empire could celebrate a similar achievement linking the economies of its Pacific and African colonies to the metropole. Such a feat—to use Bopp’s words from his speech at the 1907 irrigation conference—would place Germany among the “progressive” nations of the world. Interestingly, the Komitee participated in expositions, conferences, and fairs where it displayed German colonial goods and agricultural technology.54 The economic success of GSWA proved indispensable to bolstering Germany’s status as a modern imperial nation.

Conclusion On May 22, 1912, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Kaiser Wilhelm II “has just enrolled himself among the farmers of German Southwest Africa.” Wilhelm II had experimented with raising sheep in East Prussia, to no avail. He decided to purchase land from a German settler in GSWA and breed sheep to produce wool. The article noted that the wool industry remained “in its infancy” in the district where the Kaiser established his farm; but colonial officials expected it would have “a great future.”55 The Kaiser had joined the ranks of Germans who believed that through the adoption of modern agricultural technologies (e.g., irrigation and soil science) GSWA could become a profitable colony for settlers and the metropole alike. In 1916, American journalist Herbert Adams Gibbons published a summary and assessment of European colonization in Africa, entitled The New Map of Africa. In discussing the German African colonies, he reported that from 1902 to 1914, the white population in GSWA grew substantially, from less than 3500 “Europeans” to 10,000 German settlers, not including soldiers in the army. Addressing the colony’s economy, he noted the discovery of diamonds; however, he emphasized the state of German farmers as vital to the colony’s prosperity. “On April 1, 1913, there were over twelve hundred farms in private hands.” That same year, the German government created a Land Bank that would “lend money at easy rates to farmers for the purchase of stock and for tiding them over bad years.”56 According to historian Woodruff Smith, “By 1914…the settler populations of East Africa and Southwest Africa had attained permanence and considerable influence in their colonies.”57

172

J. E. JONES

White settlers in GSWA had solidified their positions in the colony on the eve of World War I. To what extent their successes derived from the Reichskolonialamt ’s decisions to seek out and consult American agricultural practices in the American West remains unknown. Whether or not GSWA colonial officials implemented the Campbell system, modeled their irrigation systems after the Yakima Valley project, or adopted irrigation techniques and technologies discussed at the National Irrigation Congresses, does not minimize the importance of this circulation of colonial knowledge between the United States and Germany.58 The Reichskolonialamt recognized the United States as an established world power with a thriving transcontinental and overseas empire, and thusly, viewed it as an exemplar for implementing successful agricultural science and bureaucratic policies to strengthen colonial economies. When South African troops conquered GSWA in 1915, the Reichskolonialamt ’s work for the colony ended. However, the evidence of their and the Komitee’s inquiries into American agricultural and irrigation science remains in the archival record, demonstrating the entanglement of German and American thought in the age of empire.

Notes 1. Charles B. Adams, ed., Official Proceedings of the Fourteenth National Irrigation Congress, Held at Boise, Idaho, Sept. 3–8, 1906 (Boise, Idaho: Statesman Printing Company, 1906), 48. 2. “Address by Herr Franz Bopp, Imperial German Consul,” In W. A. Beard, ed., Official Proceedings of the Fourteenth National Irrigation Congress, held at Sacramento, California, September 2–7, 1907 (Sacramento, CA: News Publishing Company, 1907), 50–51. 3. Ibid., 51. In his praise of American advancement, Bopp made no mention of the violent settler colonial policies that resulted in the theft of millions of acres of arid lands from indigenous peoples, and the subsequent placement of those lands in the public domain. Yet, this history was common knowledge to those Germans who had long admired the ability of the United States to expand its continental empire westward. This omission is even more noteworthy considering that the conference coincided with the German imperial government’s violent seizure of lands from Africans in its Southwest colony. 4. Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), 56.

8

HOW THE SÜDWEST WAS WON: TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS …

173

5. Woodruff Smith, German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 64. 6. Smith, German Colonial Empire, 65; Hull, Absolute Destruction, 81; and Helmut Bley, Namibia under German Rule, Studies in African History, Vol. 5 (Münster: Lit Verlag, 1998), 138. It was not until 1908 that the Germans closed the concentration camps holding Nama prisoners, and in 1912, the last Nama returned to German Southwest Africa after imprisonment in other German colonies. See Jürgen Zimmerer, “Colonial Genocide: The Herero and Nama War (1904–8) in German South West Africa and Its Significance,” in Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of Genocide (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 323. 7. Jens-Uwe Guettel, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 4. 8. Guettel, German Expansionism, 82. When Germany began its overseas expansion, colonial matters fell under the purview of the Auswärtiges Amt (German Colonial Office). In 1890, the government created the Kolonialabteilung, which the Reichskolonialamt replaced in 1907. 9. See Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 10. Richard V. Pierard, “A Case Study in German Economic Imperialism: The Colonial Economic Committee, 1896–1914,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 16.2 (1968), 156–164. Pierard argues that the extent of government support for Komitee is debatable, despite Supf’s and other Komitee members’ claims that they had the full backing of the German government. However, there is evidence that the Komitee worked closely with the Colonial Office and received some funding. 11. Andrew Zimmerman, “Ruling Africa: Science as Sovereignty in the German Colonial Empire and Its Aftermath,” in German Colonialism in a Global Age, eds. Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 97. 12. Maurits W. Ersten, “Colonial Irrigation: Myths of Emptiness,” Journal of Landscape Research 31.2 (2006), abstract. 13. Stephen Tuffnell, “Crossing the Rift: American Steel and Colonial Labor in Britain’s East African Protectorate,” in Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton, eds., Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 47–48. 14. Smith, German Colonial Empire, 36, 92. 15. Guettel, German Expansionism, 3, 16, 30, 57–59. 16. John A. Kasson, the Envoy and Head of the U.S. Legation at Berlin, Germany and Henry Sanford, a close confidant of Leopold and former US Minister to Belgium, attended the conference. Kasson played a pivotal

174

17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

J. E. JONES

role in drawing up the General Act’s provisions for freedom of trade in the Congo Basin and drawing up the boundaries of conventional Congo Basin. Smith, German Colonial Empire, 22–26. “Society for German Colonization, Founding Manifesto (March 28, 1885),” https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/620_Soc%20German%20Colo nization_Manifesto_200.pdf. “Society for German Colonization, Founding Manifesto.” Smith, German Colonial Empire, 20–24. John K. Noyes, “Nomadic Landscapes and the Colonial Frontier: The Problem of Nomadism in German South West Africa,” in Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies, ed. Lynette Russell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 211. Noyes, “Nomadic Landscapes,” 199, 211. Dominik J. Schaller, “From Conquest to Genocide: Colonial Rule in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa,” in Dirk A. Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, 296–324 (New York: Berghahn, 2008), 298–302, 316; Smith, German Colonial Empire, 58; Noyes, “Nomadic Landscapes,” 208. Noyes, “Nomadic Landscapes,” 207–210. Dag Henrichsen, “Pastoral Modernity, Territoriality and Colonial Transformations in Central Namibia, 1860s–1904,” in Peter Limb, Norman Etherington, and Peter Midgley, eds., Grappling with the Beast: Indigenous Southern African Responses to Colonialism, 1840–1930 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 93–94. Lothar Von Trotha quoted in George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 180. Schaller, “From Conquest to Genocide,” 300–303; David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 270; Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 163. Schaller, “From Conquest to Genocide,” 297; Guettel, German Expansionism, 1; Noyes, “Nomadic Landscapes,” 208. Theodor Rehbock, Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika. Seine wirtschaftliche erschliessung unter besonderer berücksichtigung der nutzbarmachung des wassers. Bericht über das ergebnis einer im auftrage des “Syndicates für bewässerungsanlagen in Deutsch-Südwest-Africa” durch das Herero und Gross-Namaland unternommenen reise (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1898). Theodor Rehbock, Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika; A. Schneck, “Bewässerungsanlagen und landwirtschaftliche Kolonien in DeutschSüdwestafrika,” Geographische Zeitschrift, 5. Jahrg., 12. H. (1899),

8

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

HOW THE SÜDWEST WAS WON: TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS …

175

705–708. This is a review and summary of Rehbock’s book in the leading German geography journal. Schneck, “Bewässerungsanlagen und landwirtschaftliche,” 706. Schneck, “Bewässerungsanlagen und landwirtschaftliche,” 707. Ibid. Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 79. Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation, 10–11, 21, 79, 117, 281. For more on the increased rivalry and tension between the United States and Germany during this period, see Jörg Nagler, “From Culture to Kultur: Changing American Perceptions of Imperial Germany, 1871–1914,” in David E. Barclay and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt, eds., Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America Since 1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 131–154 and Reinhard Doerries, “Empire and Republic: German-American Relations Before 1917,” in Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh, eds., America and the Germans: Volume 2: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred Year History—The Relationship in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 3–17. Pierard, “German Economic Imperialism,” 163. Henrichsen uses the term “capitalist freehold farming” to describe the agricultural practices of Germans settlers seeking to make profit and not simply to subsist. Henrichsen, “Pastoral Modernity,” 89. H. W. Campbell, Campbell’s 1905 Soil Culture Manual (Lincoln, Nebraska: H. W. Campbell, 1905), 20. H. W. Campbell, “The Campbell System of Soil Culture: What Is It?” The Irrigation Age 22 (1905), 120. H. W. Campbell, Campbell’s Soil Culture Almanac (Lincoln, Nebraska: H. W. Campbell, 1907), n.p. (back cover); Parliamentary Papers Printed During the Fourth Session of the Fifteenth Parliament, Volume II (Brisbane, Australia: George Arthur Vaughan, Government Printer, 1906), 11. “Mitteilung des Kolonial-Wirtschaftlichen Komitees betr. des sogen. Campbellschen System(s),” in Wirtschaftliche Angelegenheiten der Amerikanischen Staaten, A. 1. K. 10. Band 1, Journal Nummer: 24973/07 Blatt: 81-84, R 151 75 82169 DSWA, Bundesarchiv, Berlin, Germany. H.W. Campbell, Campbell’s 1907 Soil Culture Manual: A Complete Guide to Scientific Agriculture as Adapted to the Semi-arid Regions (Lincoln, Nebraska: The Campbell Soil Culture Co. (Inc.), 1907), 309. “Mitteilung…Campbellschen System(s)” in Wirtschaftliche Angelegenheiten der Amerikanischen Staaten, 82. Ibid.

176

J. E. JONES

45. Ibid; Gisela Lesley Zipp, A History of German Settlers in the Eastern Cape, 1857–1919, Masters of Arts Thesis, Rhodes University, September 2012. 46. “The Campbell System of Cultivation,” Pacific Rural Press, 70.7 (August 12, 1905). The article quotes a letter sent by W. E. Curtis to the Chicago Record-Herald explaining the system. The reporter believed that California grain farmers should consider using the system. 47. “Reichskolonialamt übersendet: Official Proceedings of Fourteenth National Irrigation Congress,” in Wirtschaftliche Angelegenheiten der Amerikanischen Staaten, A. 1. K. 10. Band 1, Journal Nummer: 24416/07 Blatt: 85, R 151 75 82169 DSWA, Bundesarchiv, Berlin, Germany. There is no copy of the proceedings in the file. Blatt 86 begins the documentation on the Yakima Valley project. Sütterlin transcription and translation of Blatt 85 by Alexander Vazansky. 48. Adams, ed., Official Proceedings of the Fourteenth National Irrigation Congress, 8. 49. 43 U.S. Code § 641. Grant of desert land to States authorized. This is the Carey Act aka Federal Desert Land Act of 1894. 50 Donald J. Pisani, “Case Studies in Water and Power: The Yakima and Pima,” in Water and American Government (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 186. 51. Pisani, Water and American Government, 181–186. 52. “Bzgl. Irrigation in the Yakima Valley Washington,” in Wirtschaftliche Angelegenheiten der Amerikanischen Staaten, A. 1. K. 10. Band 1, Journal Nummer: 24243/07 Blatt: 86-87, R 151 75 82169 DSWA, Bundesarchiv, Berlin, Germany. The microfilm does not include a copy of the report, just a letter of transmittal. 53. Stephen Oscar Jayne, Irrigation of the Yakima Valley, Washington, Issue 188 (Washington, DC: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1907), 12. 54. Pierard, “German Economic Imperialism,” 157. 55. “Kaiser Keenly Interested in New Possessions,” Christian Science Monitor, May 22, 1912, 20. 56. Herbert Adams Gibbons, The New Map of Africa (1900–1916): A History of European Colonial Expansion and Colonial Diplomacy (New York: The Century Co., 1916), 177, 178, 181, 186. 57. Smith, German Colonial Empire, 210. 58. While this transfer of knowledge appeared unidirectional based on the Reichskolonialamt ’s files, its currents flowed bidirectional. For example, the US Department of Agriculture included Rehbock’s book (and other German-authored texts) in Ellen A. Hedrick, comp., List of References to Publications Relating to Irrigation and Land Drainage (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902), 109, 171.

CHAPTER 9

Practicing Empire: Germany’s Colonial Visions in the Pacific Northwest Eriks Bredovskis

On September 12, 1905, a writer for the Tacoma’s Daily Ledger marveled at the “friendly feelings” between the crew of the German cruiser the

The majority of this chapter was written in my office, which rests on the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The place I work is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and I am grateful to have the opportunity to live, learn, and write on this land. I thank the Michael Smith Foreign Studies Supplement-CGS from SSHRC and the special funding from JIGES-Munk School of Global Affairs, which provided me with the necessary funding to conduct this research, and the scholarly connections necessary to have participated in this edited collection. Thank you Janne Lahti, for the opportunity to contribute. Special thank you to Chris Baldwin, Katie Davis, Tom Peotto, Nisrine Rahal, James Retallack, Nastasha Sartore, and Rachel Trode for their comments and support. E. Bredovskis (B) University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_9

177

178

E. BREDOVSKIS

Falke and American settlers when it dropped anchor in Puget Sound. The Daily Ledger also observed that the mutual feelings of conviviality were amplified by “the two cub bears which were added to the family of mascots while the German vesel [sic] was up North.” These animals from Alaska “were the object of almost as much attention as the cruiser itself.”1 It was common for nineteenth-century European warships to crisscross oceans and stop at foreign ports to resupply and to demonstrate their ascendancy within the global imperial community.2 The Falke was one of two German warships to venture into the northeastern corner of the Pacific Ocean before World War I. From the traces of this voyage: three reports to the German Naval Office, a personal diary, and a scrapbook, we can track one attempt at casting Germany’s global entanglements. This chapter investigates how Germans practiced and fashioned themselves as colonial agents in non-German spaces in the decades leading up to World War I. Often historians have understood Germans abroad in the late nineteenth century either as colonists traveling to Germany’s formal colonies or to nations like the United States and Brazil. In both settings, historians examined the willingness or resistance of Germans to assimilate and have underscored the unidirectionality of German migration. As a result, the analysis of Germans living, thinking, and working in non-German spaces has generally fallen into histories of migration and nation-building rather than histories of colonialism and imperialism.3 Only recently has new scholarly attention been paid to the circulation and impact of Germans and their ideas back and forth between Germany and scores of colonies, independent former colonies, and other European empires. Part of this new historiographical path sheds light on German experts, military attachés, and self-proclaimed “explorers” who met, thought about and interacted with colonial actors from other empires.4 Thinking about the trans-imperial experiences of Germans, I turn the spotlight toward those traveling through non-German spaces and consider them not as distant observers but as active participants in the making of settler societies and the formation of Germany’s colonial imaginary landscape. It was not just letters or parcels sent back and forth from relatives, or scientists who conducted fieldwork, but also sailors and officers on ships like the Falke who carved out Germany’s place in the world. In addition to locating the Falke’s trip within the formation of Germany’s colonial imaginary, this chapter considers Germans’ peculiar

9

PRACTICING EMPIRE …

179

fascination with Native Americans, which pervaded German middleclass culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.5 The archival traces of the Falke’s voyage point toward the ship’s captain pursuing and preserving what he believed to be “authentic” examples of Pacific Northwest Indigenous nations and cultures. This broader phenomenon of producing “authenticity” was, as historian Paige Raibmon posited, “closely related to the myth of the vanishing Indian” and the transformation of social and economic networks of Indigenous peoples and settlers.6 In the Pacific Northwest, this transformation included imposed restrictions on fishing, a push toward industrial-sized canneries in settler and Indigenous towns, and aggressive suppression of Indigenous traditions and access to ancestral land. Ultimately for Europeans, “aboriginal people could not be ‘aboriginal’ and ‘modern’ at the same time.”7 Throughout the Falke’s voyage, we see assumptions of Pacific Northwest Indigenous cultures and lifestyles come to light in breaks in chronology in the ship captain’s scrapbook and in the lay-ethnography accompanying his photographs, postcards, and diary entries. Part and parcel with Germans fascination with Native Americans, Germany’s middle-class actively endeavored to establish and maintain ties with middle classes across national and imperial borders. As historians have recently pointed out, the formation of Europe’s middle classes can “be explained only by considering the increasing worldwide circulations of people, ideas, and goods [and that] the middle classes whether in European metropoles or colonial peripheries, were deeply affected by global entanglements.”8 The Falke’s visit to the west coast of North America, and the socialization between its officers and the European population, brought together the middle classes of Germany, the United States, and Canada, demonstrating how members of Germany’s middle class were keen on establishing and recording social networks with cultural elites across national and imperial boundaries. Members of Germany’s middle-class actively sought to establish social relationships because of, not despite, the colonial context of the Pacific Northwest. We cannot separate the drive to establish social networks across empires from the local circumstances in which they were forged. Official reports, a personal diary, and a scrapbook of the Falke’s captain, Paul Behncke (1866–1937) animated his voyage in the Pacific Northwest.9 His narratives of the Falke in the Pacific Northwest reflect only one voice in a multitude of experiences. However, the survival of three different genres of documents produced by one individual allows

180

E. BREDOVSKIS

us to see the overlap and separation of messaging, media, language, and the power of the audience in Behncke’s writing. All three documents tell their own story about Germans in the Pacific Northwest. Together, though, they form a harmony of Germans traveling to, and thinking about non-German colonial spaces. Behncke produced three documents for three different audiences. With that in mind, we can track his attempts to organize the knowledge he produced. Behncke needed to actively organize and record the information in front of him to suit what he deemed appropriate for the genre and audience.10 He believed that he stood as a representative of Germany’s middle class and its ideal, motives, its specific manners and social practices.11 In the context of the Pacific Northwest, this included narrating a journey complete with European settlements, idyllic landscapes and “traces” of Native American life, that would have matched the expectations of his fellow class compatriots in Germany and elsewhere. In all, this chapter encourages us to think about the constant production of a variety of documents by colonial agents and how intersecting these different source types contributes to our understanding of Germany’s sustained cultural fascination with North America during the Kaiserreich era.

“Just Like Frisco’s”: Social Networking in Victoria & Vancouver On July 11, 1905, the Falke left San Francisco northbound and traveled toward the Pacific Northwest, arriving at its first stop, the British naval base in Esquimalt, British Columbia, on July 15. Docked only 5 kilometers from Victoria, Behncke and the Falke’s crew traveled back and forth daily. Behncke’s official report to the Imperial Naval Office on Victoria contained all the typical features: military, economic, transport, and political significance, and industrial and economic “bounty.” He noted that only two Royal Navy ships were docked at Esquimalt, pointing out that the modest size of the fleet was only to offer protection to British ships and fishing interests in the Bering Sea. He was, however, quick to mention a planned expansion of the base.12 Behncke then turned to focus on the growth of settler life on Vancouver Island. His priority was to describe the expansion of extractive economies. He remarked that the wealth of Vancouver Island lay in its forests, fish, coal, and copper, before concluding that the island was “only partially developed.” Behncke continued to paint a meager picture of Vancouver Island when he turned

9

PRACTICING EMPIRE …

181

his eyes to Victoria. For him, Victoria’s society “enjoyed a similar reputation” as the rest of the island: “it is not very lively here.” Behncke reported that Victoria’s existence was “primarily based on the virtue as the seat of government and as a naval base.” His official report mentioned that he met with local notables such as the Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia, the mayor of Victoria, and the German consul Carl Lowenberg, who later joined the Falke for its entire voyage up the coast.13 In sum, Behncke’s official report described an uninteresting and unexciting city on an island peppered with mines, a few towns, military bases, and men. Behncke’s diary, on the other hand, paints Victoria as a lively and exciting city. Front and center were the social events and personal connections forged between Behncke and Europeans during his stay. On the Falke’s second day in Victoria (July 16), Behncke invited Victoria’s mayor George Henry Barnard, his wife Ethel Burnham Rogers, and the Nara family on board for a tour of the ship. The visit concluded with a “very merry mood by singing and music in the ship’s mess” with both parties, the crew and the guests, “highly satisfied.”14 Thereafter, Behncke participated in numerous social engagements with the local Anglo-European population. On the evening of July 17, Behncke and two of the Falke’s officers arrived at the Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia’s residence for a formal dinner. Behncke briefly noted the “posh” food, but took strides to illustrate the “beautiful, tasteful, fully furnished house, which sat in a well-chosen place at the top of a hill with a view of the mountains, the Juan de Fuca Strait and its islands…which generated an enchanting moonlit-landscape.”15 Behncke religiously kept an inventory of the women and men he met while mingling among Victoria’s socialites. In his diary, he provided their full names, professions, and for German settlers, a family genealogy.16 His diary entry for July 17 lists some of the individuals he met: “Sir and Lady Richard Musgrave, Miss Broft, both born Dunsmuir (Coal mine owners, rich family), Miss Powell, pianist, Miss Elfrida Foster, Major and Mrs. Bland, librarian.” Behncke provided additional information when he encountered someone with a German connection, however tenuous. At the same dinner, Behncke made a point of noting that a Miss Pemberton not only had two maternal aunts who grew up in Lübeck but that her family was related to Pastor Granthoff also from Lübeck. In a similar entry, Behncke jotted a Mrs. Menger-Morgan, whose father was a former Major in Rostock and Lübeck, and a Mrs. Bullen who told Behncke that

182

E. BREDOVSKIS

she attended school in Lübeck with a mutual friend of Behncke, proven by photographs in her family album that she gladly shared with him over tea.17 By the end of the dinner on July 17, Behncke felt that he had seen “the very best of Victorian society, fine through and through, just like Frisco’s [San Francisco] society.”18 Behncke seized the opportunity to establish and record in his diary the multiple social connections he was able to forge in Victoria. By recording these encounters, he would be able to recall at a later date the individuals he met and, if needed, follow up with any of them if he returned to the Pacific Northwest. The practice of recording, even if privately, of newly minted social connections reaffirmed for Behncke his ability and class position as an (albeit brief) interlocutor of Victoria’s white society. Vancouver Island kept coming to life in Behncke’s scrapbook. He kept letters, business cards, and postcards, further archiving his imperial connections. The seven postcards of Esquimalt/Victoria weave the Island’s natural landscape with human activity. The newly constructed British Columbia Parliament Buildings, the well-manicured Beacon Hill Park, and three postcards of ships in Esquimalt Harbor all narrate Esquimalt/Victoria as a place with oceanic connections, European settlement, and urbanization. Hand in hand with narratives of settlement and urbanization in the Pacific Northwest is the relocation of Pacific Northwest Indigenous cultures to ethnographic museums and anthropological exhibits. While in Victoria, Behncke visited the Landsberg Curio Collection, one of the largest collections of Indigenous artifacts on the west coast of North America. Preserved in his scrapbook are three postcards of unidentified (and uncaptioned) “totem poles” at the entrance of the Landsberg Collection and interior displays of artifacts from various Indigenous nations along the west coast of North America.19 Postcards served as an inexpensive visual alternative to personal photographs in the early twentieth century, and as a mimetic device for remembering and narrating one’s journey.20 The postcards of exhibits and cityscapes in Behncke’s scrapbook give a tourist-like quality to his time in Victoria and underscore a curated narrative of Europeanization and settlement on Vancouver Island (Fig. 9.1). On July 19, the Falke departed Esquimalt and headed north through the Juan de Fuca Islands, the Georgia Strait, and Burrard Inlet, and into Vancouver harbor. The Falke pulled into Vancouver, with its approximate population of 35,000 and since 1887 the western terminus for the Canadian Pacific Railway.21 Behncke observed in his report that

9

PRACTICING EMPIRE …

183

Fig. 9.1 Page from Paul Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer “Falke,” Auslandsreisen unter dem Kommando von Korvettenkapitän Paul Behncke (Fotoalben), Nordund Mittelamerika,” Bundesarchiv-Freiburg, BArch N 173/31, Bd. 31

unlike Victoria, Vancouver served as the central stopover for the movement of goods and people across North America and the Pacific.22 Behncke commended Vancouver’s resource-wealthy hinterland of lumber and minerals, but felt that it too was only “partially exploited.” The final thoughts in his report to the Naval Office were that Vancouver’s “favorable location for transport to and from East Asia and its hinterland would promise to make a quick and meaningful development.”23 Behncke interpreted Vancouver to be on the precipice of metropolitan status and rapid economic and social transformation. He, like other European visitors and settlers, saw Vancouver as a crossroads between urban (European) settlement, and nature, which was to either be “rationally” extracted or romantically admired.

184

E. BREDOVSKIS

As with Victoria, Behncke visited the homes of local notables and dined at the Vancouver Club in the company of Europeans like Vancouver’s consul Johann Wulfsohn, entrepreneur Edward Stolterfoht, and landowner Edward Mahon. Though in Vancouver, Behncke’s most enjoyed part of his stay was the daily strolls along the shores of English Bay and Stanley Park. He revealed in his diary that Stanley Park’s “beautiful, old stand of Douglas firs…which a few of these giants are 2 to 3 meters in diameter and bolt straight up 50 to 70 meters, [brought] a great joy.”24 Behncke’s attraction to Stanley Park is apparent in his scrapbook. Apart from the usual business cards and letters, he included three postcards of Stanley Park. One showed the park’s proximity to downtown Vancouver. It contrasted the park’s forested landscape in the background with the brick and cement of the Canadian Pacific rail terminal and downtown Vancouver in the foreground. The two others focus on the trees and the “unkempt” landscape of Stanley Park. Both postcards feature humans to compare the size of, as one postcard captioned it, “the forest giants [of] Stanley Park.”25 Behncke’s enjoyed Stanley Park so much that he also used personal photographs to remember it. Behncke captured three photographs in his scrapbook. One of Vancouver’s cityscape from Vancouver Harbor with the silhouette of the Canadian Pacific rail terminal visible—the photograph was most likely taken from the Falke’s deck. Another photograph of three German sailors in front of a Canadian Pacific train, and the third photograph of Deadman Island, a well-known feature of Stanley Park.26 Like with the commercial elements of Behncke’s scrapbooks—the postcards and purchased photographs—these personal photographs of Vancouver emphasized European industrial expansion and settlement. There is an added layer of significance in Behncke’s photographs that place Germans at the center of the region’s social and natural environment, as both subjects and photographer. We get a glimpse of what Behncke wanted to preserve as more “authentic” representations of this voyage than depicted in purchased photographs and postcards.

In Search of “Indianer:” Curating Authenticity on the Falke After spending five days in Vancouver, the Falke headed north across the Salish Sea. Apart from a description of replenishing coal at Union Bay rather than at Departure Bay, Behncke spilled little ink about the

9

PRACTICING EMPIRE …

185

voyage northbound in his official report. He offered brief waypoints, and minimal information about the towns the Falke passed by—he squeezed ten days of travel into one typed page. If we finished our reading of the Falke’s journey here with Behncke’s official report, we would see quick and rather uneventful days of travel. The official report flattened the Falke’s voyage north and reduced Behncke’s and the crew’s experience to waypoints and map coordinates. But if we read Behncke’s diary and peruse his scrapbook, we see that the landscape, settlements, and water emboldened Germans to engage in lay-ethnography and to perform as representatives of Germany’s imperial power. With the assistance of pilot Otto Buckholtz, the Falke passed by “fertile landscapes of forests with breaks of fields and meadows”27 and “cute [hübsch] forested valleys.”28 The Falke would drop anchor for a few hours, usually once every day or two. Such instances offered the ship’s crew a moment of rest, but also a chance to “explore” the area.29 At these rest stops, like on July 24, crew members of the Falke took a dinghy to shore to walk around on land or drive around to further “explore” the surrounding area. On July 26, the Falke arrived at Alert Bay/Yalis, about 350 kilometers from Vancouver. There, the crew was able to spend almost two full days onshore. Behncke was impressed at Alert Bay/Yalis’ trades school, its multiple churches, its cannery, and sawmills.30 As the Falke continued its journey north, so did the prevalence of personal photographs. Of interest for Behncke were the plank houses and house posts in Alert Bay/Yalis. His scrapbook devoted an entire page to the village. On the top left, he pasted an image of Alert Bay/Yalis from the water. We see a row of plank houses along the shore with forests in the background. Moving our eyes down the page, Behncke presented a close up of Chief Wakas’ house and pole (the house furthest to the right; see Fig. 9.2). When Behncke arrived in 1905, the Chief Wakas pole was about ten years old and he described it as having “bright representations of ravens, beavers, bears, seagulls, and wales.”31 Behncke complemented the photograph of the Chief Wakas pole with close-ups of three other posts. Without a caption (and with portions of the background removed), the untrained reader might assume that these posts were from Alert Bay/Yalis. However, these posts are from much further north. Two are Tlingit posts from Chief Shake’s house in Wrangell/Kaachxaana.áak’w, Alaska, and the third is the Kiksetti pole (also Tlingit) ¯from ¯Ketchikan/Kichxáan, Alaska, about 750 and ¯ page on Alert Bay/Yalis 600 kilometers north, respectively.32 Behncke’s

186

E. BREDOVSKIS

Fig. 9.2 Page from Paul Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer “Falke,” Auslandsreisen unter dem Kommando von Korvettenkapitän Paul Behncke (Fotoalben), Nordund Mittelamerika,” Bundesarchiv-Freiburg, BArch N 173/31, Bd. 31

underscores his assumptions of uniform meaning and cultural significance across nations and Indigenous peoples of North America. Here, he broke the chronological flow of his scrapbook to provide his readers with a collage of posts from multiple nations across the Pacific Northwest. The resulting pastiche on this page of his scrapbook would satisfy his and his compatriots’ visual expectations of “authentic” Pacific Northwest Indigenous cultures. In the early morning of July 27, the Falke left Alert Bay/Yalis and traveled through Queen Charlotte Sound. After 45 kilometers of open seas, the Falke entered Fritz Hugh Sound. There, Behncke noted that “the landscape adopts a changing, rolling character: Huge treeless granite peaks and rocks, which are often surrounded by deep valleys.” While the landscape may have changed according to Behncke, his interest in Pacific Northwest nations remained. Eight hours later, the Falke dropped anchor

9

PRACTICING EMPIRE …

187

near Bella Bella/Waglisla—about halfway between Vancouver and the British Columbia/Alaska border. Behncke and consul Loewenberg visited the town, which consisted “of modern, large, wooden homes, which offered nothing interesting. All [Heiltsuk living here] with their European doctor from the state-hospital went salmon-fishing.” So, Behncke and Lowenberg crossed the strait to Old Bella Bella/’Qelc about two kilometers southeast. There, Behncke satisfied his imagination. The village “had fewer houses, but [was] more interesting: A [Heiltsuk] cemetery with granite and marble headstones that stand in front of their homes next to their totem poles.”33 Two days later, a similar incident occurred. The Falke dropped anchor at Port Simpson/Lax Kw’alaams. Behncke and his crew went in town, and was surprised that “the [Tsimshian] village is completely deserted, everyone had gone salmon fishing in the Skeena River, whose delta we passed two days ago, as here the salmon has almost entirely left [fast ganz ausgebleiben]; great calamity!”34 Disappointed that it did not satisfy his imagination of a Tsimshian village, Behncke ventured into the cemetery. There, he recorded in his diary and in detail a tombstone epitaph. As with Bella Bella/Waglisla, we should be rightfully suspicious that Behncke and his crew encountered no one. The settlements were not “abandoned,” rather new economic demands forced communities dependent on salmon fishing to travel farther and farther from home. The new economic and social environment in the Pacific Northwest created new relationships between Indigenous peoples and Europeans, between themselves and the land—a transformation that, as a lay-ethnographer, Behncke either was not aware of or ignored. Though Behncke’s scrapbook carefully follows chronological order, he broke chronology when curating his first page exclusively depicting life north of Vancouver. This break in chronology reveals underlying assumptions of German middle-class imagery of Indigenous cultures from the Pacific Northwest. Behncke omitted details such as the cultural significance of photographed objects or nation origin, nor was he conscious of the transforming social and economic landscape of the Pacific Northwest. Behncke selectively recorded his experiences to curate a journey along the Pacific Northwest coast that contrasted urban, European settlements and an imagined idyllic “pre-European” world.

188

E. BREDOVSKIS

The Right to Fish: Salmon Fishing and the Falke Notwithstanding the “great calamity” of lost salmon in for the Tsimshian in Port Simpson/Lax Kw’alaams, the crew of the Falke caught, smoked, ate, and photographed scores of salmon. In the official report, Behncke mentioned the coastal canneries but never recorded that he and his crew, including non-officers, fished excessively. In Behncke’s diary and scrapbook, however, fishing punctuated the monotony of travel. As on July 26, Behncke went trolling “to catch the biggest salmon.” Behncke photographed the event: a faded photograph in his scrapbook of twelve Falke crew members on a dinghy, all posing for the camera. The caption reminds the viewer of the date, location, and event. The photograph shows the crew members of the Falke off the main ship and traveling on a smaller, more intimate vessel.35 The crew captured plenty of fish, thus playing into the narrative of “limitless bounty” of remote regions of the world, which, according to Behncke’s official reports, were “only partially exploited.” At the same time, the Falke’s crew was fishing in Tsimshian, Kwakwaka’wakw, Heiltsuk, and Tlingit waters, the Indigenous inhabitants of the region suffered under strict resource and fishing control. The Indian Food and Fish Regulation of 1888 severely limited access to water and fish for coastal nations. Fishing salmon with nets and spears, as well as for personal or family consumption, was heavily regulated if not entirely banned. This disrupted centuries of established fishing and dietary practices and forced Indigenous people across the Pacific Northwest coast to move to larger settlements and to become workers in canneries, thus radically changing their relationship with the water, fish, and land.36 Yet, the Germans on the Falke were able to ignore state regulation, and Indigenous land and water sovereignty without repercussion. Salmon fishing in the waters of the Pacific Northwest was an ordinary pastime for the crew and persisted during the ship’s voyage. On August 1, Behncke and others went fishing and returned to the Falke with “another dinghy full of salmon, which could feed the crew for several days.”37 To the “great joy of the crew,” they pickled some salmon and smoked the rest.”38 Behncke recorded the haul visually. The photograph has about forty crew members facing the camera and surrounding at least thirty salmon lying on the deck or in pails of brine. The Falke was able to cruise through waters across the world and casually extract resources for fun without consideration for the local inhabitants and without recourse. The

9

PRACTICING EMPIRE …

189

selective policing along the coast of the Pacific Northwest further solidified the Falke as an instrument in the assertion of American and British control of the region. A quick reading of these images would induce notions of leisure and comradery among the ship’s crew, but underlying privileges of white European naval crews in colonial spaces permit such photographs to be taken and thus become visible in the scrapbook and diary. In short, if white people had the right to riot, they also had the right to fish.

Return to an “Urban” Setting: Sitka/Sheet’ká, an “American” Outpost On August 5, the Falke arrived in Sitka/Sheet’ká, the capital of Alaska and a critical political, social, and military settlement. Behncke met with the captain of the local Marine battalion and the governor of Alaska, John G. Brady, who remained resolute that despite its modest population of 1,300 and the “multiple administrative bodies [that] already moved to Juneau, [Sitka] remained the capital of Alaska.”39 For his readers in the Naval Office in Berlin, Behncke reminded them in his official report that Sitka’s position facing the open ocean gave it significant importance as a “jumping-port” to East Asia and as a coaling station for the United States, with “preparatory work for another [station] underway.”40 While Behncke’s official report poured over Sitka’s many advantages to the expansion of American power in the Pacific, his diary returned to focus on the social connections he could make. After giving a tour of the Falke, governor Brady invited Behncke to a dinner party that evening. Behncke narrated the jovial music playing throughout Brady’s home and how the officers “mingled around in a cramped, hot room [with] the conversation going well and bad.”41 Like in Vancouver, Behncke took strides to list everyone in the local community with a German connection. On August 6, he visited the observatory of C. K. Edmonds, a German physicist, whom he met the night before. Behncke jotted Edmonds’ scientific interests, underscored that his degree was from a German university and that Edmonds’ “well equipped” observatory contained a majority of German instruments.42 The undercurrent in Behncke’s diary was to insert himself into the local middle-class society. As a ship captain constantly in motion, Behncke felt the need to reaffirm his middle-class status when on land.

190

E. BREDOVSKIS

Upon returning to a large town, Behncke’s depictions of Indigenous peoples changed. Despite being a majority of the population in contemporary Sitka/Sheet’ká, photographs and notes about local Tlingit are missing. In an urban setting, he no longer recorded encounters with Indigenous peoples and cultures as in-person. Instead, Behncke archived any encounter with “authentic” Indigenous elements in Sitka/Sheet’ká within the settings of parks, museums, or souvenirs.43 Behncke visited the town’s museum and its “Inuit” collection. With items behind glass, he described them all as “ingeniously clean and ingeniously manufactured.”44 Like his visit to the Landsberg Collection in Victoria, Behncke consigned Indigenous peoples and their cultures to museum exhibits, away from the reality of Alaskan urban life. Seven photographs in Behncke’s scrapbook illustrate his understanding. Behncke kept four photographs (one personal, three purchased) of Sitka National Park. From his camera, we see a photograph of the Saanaheit Pole in the park’s southeast corner. Gifted from Haida at Old Kasaan/Gasa’áan on Prince of Wales Island, this pole is not from the local Tlingit, but from 250 kilometers south—though Behncke fails to mention this in his scrapbook or diary. Two of the purchased photographs are of paths and forest scenes from Sitka National Park, and another is of a bridge across Indian River, built by local Tlingit, also in the park. Accompanying Behncke’s photographs of Sitka National Park are two purchased portraits. Without caption or title in his scrapbook, he pasted a copy of “‘Tal-tan Billy,’ Indian Shaman of the North Pacific Coast in Ceremonial Dress,” a widely circulated portrait of a Tlingit male, often misused to represent all Indigenous nations of the Pacific Northwest coast. The second portrait, also missing a caption or title, records two Tlingit individuals with a Chilkat blanket in the background. The third image is a color printed postcard of a Hopi woman weaving baskets (from northeastern Arizona).45 Like in Alert Bay/Yalis, these photographs, presented with the limited context of Sitka/Sheet’ká, pushes the viewer to (incorrectly) accept that all images on this page as representations of Tlingit culture and of Sitka/Sheet’ká life. Behncke’s page on Sitka/Sheet’ká ignored the transformation of Tlingit ways of life after a century of Russian and American colonial rule and mobilizes prevailing cultural pan-Indigenous stereotypes circulating in German middle-class culture.

9

PRACTICING EMPIRE …

191

“Jumping-Ports to East Asia” and “Yankee Entrepreneurial Spirit”: Tourism and Extraction in Coastal Alaska On the evening of August 6, the Falke raised its anchor and continued north. Through poor, rainy weather and thick fog, the Falke continued to its next destination and, on August 9, arrived at Haines. On the south end of town, crew members visited a newly constructed US military base, Haines Mission. Guided by the base’s commanding officer Behncke was impressed at the “truly practical, almost luxurious well-made barracks [complete with] a library, gymnasium, showers and baths, and an outdoor exercise grounds.”46 While absent in Behncke’s official report on Haines Mission, the base’s overall “modern” quality and size certainly contributed to his conclusions about the importance of Alaska for the United States. He was impressed that modernity had arrived to Haines, Alaska. Later the same day, the Falke arrived at its northernmost point, Skagway. There, the Falke spent three full days. At the end of Chilkoot Inlet and couched between two mountains, Skagway was a key port for access to the Yukon and the main port of trade during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896–1899. When approaching Skagway, Behncke jotted a unique encounter in his diary. The Falke came across a “tourist steamer whose passengers enjoyed our music [playing to celebrate the Falke’s arrival]. Their send-off to the Falke [was] with waves and our hymn [Deutschlandlied], which we responded with their hymn [The StarSpangled Banners ].”47 While such prosaic narration did not make it to Behncke’s official report, his thoughts on the incident did. He wrote of the “great impression [the] visit of a German ship in these waters made,” but suspected that such welcome was because “apart from ships belonging to the US Pacific fleet, ships of other nations, even the British, rarely visit these waters.”48 Behncke’s personal and professional narratives of the voyage cross paths here. Both turn their readers’ attention to the settler population’s reception of German military presence in the Pacific Northwest. In such events, Behncke saw value in narrating cordial, jovial socialization between imperial strangers. Behncke and his crew also participated in the tourist economy. Behncke, Lowenberg, and three officers on August 10 traveled by rail through the White Pass to Bennett (in British Columbia), some 50 kilometers north of Skagway. In Bennett, Behncke was keen to record

192

E. BREDOVSKIS

its recent (and brief) existence as a massive camping site for prospectors during the Klondike Gold Rush before the White Pass and Yukon Railway decimated the town’s economy. Upon the return to Skagway, Behncke admired the “beautiful passes with snow-covered mountains and glaciers.”49 The impression of this short trip is evident in Behncke’s placement of the ticket in the center of his page for Skagway. Only three of the seven postcards are of locations which Behncke visited (Haines, Skagway, White Pass), the remaining four are of Whitehorse and Dawson, up to 500 kilometers away.50 The postcards from places that Behncke did not physically visit suggests that he desired to use the postcard as representations of what he, or his scrapbook’s audience, would have imagined the far northwestern corner of North America would consist of: prospectors panning for gold, and a mountainous and forested Yukon landscape. Similar to his practice of placing photographs from multiple Indigenous nations into one pan-Indigenous collage, Behncke purchased and pasted postcards of what he saw as requisite representations of Alaska and Yukon for posterity. The Falke began its journey south in the afternoon of August 11. The next day it arrived in Juneau, greeted by “rain, all grey in grey. Shame!” As the weather finally improved, Behncke and company were able to travel out of town and along the coast to enjoy the “cute forested valleys with high steep walls; summits with snow and ice fields.”51 When docked in Juneau, Behncke visited the neighboring Douglas City (just on the other side of the strait, less than two kilometers away) multiple times. He met with the managers and owners of the Treadwell Gold Mine, enjoying cocktails and lunch. One engineer, Oscar Erdal, chatted with Behncke about growing up between Johannesburg and Hamburg, as well as how the nearby mines resemble operations in other parts of the world.52 Behncke’s diary briefly described the landscapes surrounding Juneau, but also the global nature of mining operations as part of an extensive process of resource extraction where connections went beyond Alaska and to other sites around the world. Socialization and wealthy mining led Behncke to the conclusion that Juneau was the “most cultivated of all of Alaska’s cities.”53 On August 13, Behncke confided in his diary that his officers had forgotten his birthday and so he “condemned them myself” and then hosted a birthday meal in the officers’ mess (Behncke preserved the menu in his scrapbook).54 His crew, however, did not forget his birthday. Earlier that day, they purchased two bear cubs from a Mr. Keist, and

9

PRACTICING EMPIRE …

193

took them through Juneau to the Falke, a journey, which according to the local newspaper, generated “considerable fun on the streets.”55 Behncke enjoyed the bears and preserved three photographs for his scrapbook. They all narrate joyous feelings among the crew and closeness with the bears and the ship’s other mascots. One photograph, records nine crew members with five animals: two bear cubs, a hawk (also captured in Alaska), a parrot, and a chimpanzee. Another photograph captures one crew smiling crew member, with a glass bottle in hand, feeding the two bear cubs on deck.56 As with fishing—absent from Behncke’s official reports—the captured animals accentuate the performance of leisure and “nature as plaything” in Behncke’s diary and scrapbook. Both archived the German crew’s fond memories of celebration, but also assert their ability to visit non-German places while practicing colonial and middle-class behavior (Fig. 9.3). Departing Juneau in the evening of August 14, the Falke began its ten-day voyage south to Esquimalt/Victoria. Apart from scant observations such as the “nightly-glow of a forest fire” off the coast of Haida Gwaii (August 16), the “abandoned indigenous villages” (August 17), or

Fig. 9.3 Image from Paul Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer ‘Falke,’ Auslandsreisen unter dem Kommando von Korvettenkapitän Paul Behncke (Fotoalben), Nordund Mittelamerika,” Bundesarchiv-Freiburg, BArch N 173/31, Bd. 31

194

E. BREDOVSKIS

the Falke’s officer’s hunting wild geese (August 20), Behncke’s diary, his scrapbook, and his official report were silent.57 Like during the voyage northbound, the ambiguous official report from the return-trip could have been made on or about anywhere during the journey. However, the end of his official report about northern British Columbia and Alaska gives us a glimpse of the perceived importance of the region. His judgment of northern British Columbia and Alaska, however, moves beyond the immediate context of the cities and settlements he visited, and beyond the deck of the Falke, to consider the broader implications of AngloAmerican expansion into the northeast corner of the Pacific Ocean. Behncke wrote that “militarily, Alaska—as with the acquisition of the Philippines—has gained a new purpose, as becoming jumping-ports to the shortest way to East Asia.”58 He proclaimed that for Canada and the United States, this part of the coast would “without a doubt form a significant increase in power, and I believe that their development in economic and military terms are worth it, given the growing political interest in the Pacific Ocean.”59 Behncke’s thoughts about Alaska were never far from his thoughts about its broader position in the Pacific Ocean. Comparing Alaska with the Philippines shows how he understood the Pacific Ocean and American colonial presence in the Pacific Northwest as occupying a single geographic space. Given these developments and the “Yankee entrepreneurial spirit” of Alaska, Behncke predicted that: “In terms of the economic potential of the Pacific Northwest…the exploitation of the immense wealth in the water and in on land, is greatly facilitated by the outline of the coast.”60 Regarding Germany’s treatment in the Pacific Northwest, Behncke reported that “the general feeling here in this tucked-away part of the world [is] a quality of definite German-friendliness, like in the Californian harbors.”61 Oddly enough, when it comes to talking about German-Americans, Behncke was quick to dismiss them. He declared that Germans “were found in small numbers almost everywhere,” and that they “mainly belong to the tradesman class and have mostly forgotten their language…so that it is hardly possible to speak of the existence of Germanism and German interests here.”62 In spite of Behncke meeting Germans everywhere, and providing evidence that Germans are actively building modernity across the world, he scolds assimilated and emigrated Germans, whose energies he suspects might go to potential rival nations.

9

PRACTICING EMPIRE …

195

Conclusion Back in Esquimalt/Victoria, Behncke and the crew made an unexpected extended stopover—the Falke needed to use the dry dock at Esquimalt for minor repairs and washing.63 Behncke confided in his diary that he was relieved to be back in Victoria. His scrapbook was once again filled exclusively with business cards and postcards. His diary picked up on left behind social connections, intimacies, and friendships. Close to twenty business cards, letters addressed to Behncke, and postcards of Esquimalt and Victoria sat next to personal photographs. One personal group photograph of the Falke’s crew mingling with soldiers from the Esquimalt Corps of Royal Engineers, punctuated a social time for the Falke. Behncke’s final entry before traveling to Seattle asserted that “Victoria was really [and] socially the nicest place in the trip with many nice, educated and gracious people, who are enjoying their lives.”64 In mid-September, Behncke offered his thoughts on the Falke’s voyage in the Pacific Northwest in his diary: “Despite that, I saw too little of the cities and their sights,” Behncke wrote, “the friendships were remarkable. The important Kulturarbeit of Germany is gladly and with attention recognized in the press and in high society.” Behncke felt a sense of welcome and appreciation while in the Pacific Northwest: “The joyous affirmations between the ‘leading men’ of the world, their similarities in character are emphasized everywhere, and a desire for a close relationship with Germany is wished.”65 The Falke’s voyage up the Pacific Northwest coast and its archival traces highlight the ways that Germans practiced and performed as colonial agents at the start of the twentieth century. Behncke established social relationships with middle-class AngloAmericans in several towns along the coast. He actively produced archival traces of travel to these colonial spaces and of Germans actively building modernity across the world. When looking at German experiences in colonial spaces, historians now have the opportunity to move beyond typical representatives of Germany’s colonial empire, and examine how the experiences of formerly peripheral characters in its imperial project manifested Germany’s imperial culture as unofficial colonial agents. Germans on the Falke were no longer merely reading or hearing about far-flung places, instead they became active participants of making of colonies (German and non-German) around the world. With new research on comparative empire between the United States and Germany, historians have the

196

E. BREDOVSKIS

opportunity to trace formerly obscured connections between two of the most consequential empires of the twentieth century.

Notes 1. Attachment to report form Seattle consul, Alfred Geissler, “Falke’s officers are entertained,” The Daily Ledger, September 12, 1905, Politischen Archivs des Auswärtigen Amts-Berlin, PA AA R 17,131. 2. The United States’ “Great White Fleet” of 1907–1909 is a prime example. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 190–209. 3. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, eds., The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Russell A. Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Nancy Mitchell, The Danger of Dreams: German and American Imperialism in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 4. Harmut Berghoff, Frank Biess, and Ulrike Strasser, eds., Explorations and Entanglements: Germans in Pacific Worlds From the Early Modern Period to World War I (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019); Erik GrimmerSolem, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); JensUwe Guettel, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Janne Lahti, The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2019); Bradley Naranch and Eley, eds., German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 5. H. Glenn Penny, Kindered by Choice: Germans and American Indians Since 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 9; Hartmut Lutz, “German Indianthusiasm: A Socially Constructed German National(Ist) Myth,” in Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop, eds., Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 68–171. 6. Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the LateNineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Durham, NC: Duke University

9

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

PRACTICING EMPIRE …

197

Press, 2005), 198. Also see Jeffrey Sissons, First Peoples: Indigenous Cultures and Their Futures (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 28, 39. Raibmon, Authentic Indians, 201. Christof Dejung, David Motadel, and Jürgen Osterhammel, “Worlds of the Bourgeoisie,” in ed. Christof Dejung, David Motadel, and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 4. There is not much published information about Paul Behncke available. He was born in Schleswig–Holstein in 1866. He joined the Imperial Navy in 1883 and eventually rose to the rank of Vice-Admiral during World War I. During the interwar years, he continued working for the German Navy and for the German Military. He died in 1937 in Berlin. Heinz Kraft, “Paul Behncke,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie, Vol. 2 (1955), 9, https:// www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd117759872.html. This chapter’s methodological approach was largely inspired by Ann Stoler’s Along the Archival Grain, which reminds its reader about the production of sources destined for different archives to contain different “stories” about the same event. See Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 8–15, esp. 238–243. Dejung, Motadel, and Osterhammel, “Worlds of the Bourgeoisie,” 9. Paul Behncke, “Militärpolitischer Bericht über im Aufenhalt Euer Majestät Schiff “Falke” in Esquimalt und Vancouver,” August 4, 1905, Bundesarchiv-Freiburg, BArch RM 3/3018. Behncke, “Militärpolitischer Bericht,” August 4, 1905, BArch RM 3/3018. Consuls in the late-nineteenth century were relatively informal positions of local notables (usually businesspeople or shopkeepers) who acted as representatives of their respective state. They had minimal diplomatic power and often produced quarterly or annual reports for the country’s ambassador and for the German Foreign Office. Paul Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher. Tägliche Aufzeichnungen und Schilderung der Resieeindrücke, SMS Falke,” July 16, 1905, Bundesarchiv-Freiburg, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” July 17, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. One interesting observation, which I cannot do justice with in this chapter is the gendered aspect of Behncke’s reports. His official reports omitted any women whom he met, while his personal diary and scrapbook mentioned numerous women. For an excellent starting point concerning gender in British Columbia, see Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender Race, and the Making of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).

198

E. BREDOVSKIS

17. For the social function of photographs and scrapbooks, see Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 13–16. 18. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” July 17, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 19. Paul Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer “Falke,” Auslandsreisen unter dem Kommando von Korvettenkapitän Paul Behncke (Fotoalben), Nord- und Mittelamerika,” Bundesarchiv-Freiburg, BArch N 173/31, Bd. 31. 20. Ellen Gruber Garvey, “Scrapbook as Archive, Scrapbooks in Archives,” in Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Malgorzata Baranowska, “The Mass-Produced Postcard and the Photography of Emotions,” Visual Anthropology 7 (1995), 171–189; Aline Ripert and Claude Frère, La Carte Postale. Son histoire, sa fonction sociale (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1985), 65–91. 21. For comparison, Victoria’s population was 20,800 (1901); Seattle’s 80,600 (1900); Tacoma’s 37,700 (1900); Portland’s 90,400 (1900). The population of Juneau, Skagway, and Sitka were all under 2000. Behncke, “Militärpolitischer Bericht,” August 4, 1905, BArch RM 3/3018. Also see Robert McDonald, Making Vancouver: Class, Status, and Social Boundaries, 1863–1913 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1984). 22. Behncke, “Militärpolitischer Bericht,” August 4, 1905, BArch RM 3/3018. 23. Behncke, “Militärpolitischer Bericht,” August 4, 1905, BArch RM 3/3018. 24. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” July 20, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 25. Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer ‘Falke’ (Fotoalben),” BArch N 173/31, Bd. 31. See also Sean Kheraj, Inventing Stanley Park: An Environmental History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013), 72–74. 26. Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer ‘Falke’ (Fotoalben),” BArch N 173/31, Bd. 31. 27. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” July 25, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. The name of the pilot was not listed in the diary, but was listed in “Navigates a Warship,” Victoria Daily Colonist, July 27, 1905, 3. 28. Behncke disproportionately used the term “hübsch” (pretty, cute, quanit) to describe the Pacific Northwest’s landscape. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” July 26, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 29. The Falke did not always moor at villages along its journey—in several instances, the Falke dropped anchor in a protected cove. 30. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” July 26, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4.

9

PRACTICING EMPIRE …

199

31. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” July 26, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 32. Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer ‘Falke’ (Fotoalben),” BArch N 173/31, Bd. 31. 33. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” July 27, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 34. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” July 29, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 35. Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer ‘Falke’ (Fotoalben),” BArch N 173/31, Bd. 31. 36. Pamela Therese Brown, “Cannery Days: A Chapter in the Lives of Heiltsuk” (MA Thesis, Vancouver, University of British Columbia, 1993), 6; James Andrew McDonald, “The Marginalization of the Tsimshian Cultural Ecology: The Seasonal Cycle,” in Native People, Native Lands: Canadian Indians, Inuit and Métis, by Bruce Alden Cox (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1987), 206–208; Leslie A. Robertson and Kwagu’l Gixsam Clan, Standing up with Ga’axstalas: Jane Contance Cook and the Politics of Memory, Church, and Custom (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2012), 171. 37. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” August 1, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 38. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” August 1, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 39. Alaska would only achieve statehood in 1959. Sitka’s waning importance and geographic location (on Baranof Island facing towards the Pacific Ocean) due to the growing economic power of Juenau, caused the capital to move in 1906. 40. Paul Behncke, “Militärpolitischer Bericht über die Reise nach Alaska,” August 23, 1905, BArch RM 3/3018. 41. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” August 5, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 42. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” August 6, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 43. Jeffrey Sissons, First Peoples, 39–45. 44. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” August 5, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 45. Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer ‘Falke’ (Fotoalben),” BArch N 173/31, Bd. 31. 46. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” August 9, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 47. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” August 9, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4.

200

E. BREDOVSKIS

48. Behncke, “Militärpolitischer Bericht,” August 23, 1905, BArch RM 3/3018. 49. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” August 10, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 50. Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer ‘Falke’ (Fotoalben),” BArch N 173/31, Bd. 31. 51. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” August 13, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 52. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” August 14, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 53. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” August 12, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 54. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” August 13, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 55. Daily Alaska Dispatch, August 15, 1905, 1. 56. Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer ‘Falke’ (Fotoalben),” BArch N 173/31, Bd. 31. 57. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” August 16, 17, 20, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 58. Behncke, “Militärpolitischer Bericht,” August 23, 1905, BArch RM 3/3018. 59. Behncke, “Militärpolitischer Bericht,” August 23, 1905, BArch RM 3/3018. 60. Behncke, “Militärpolitischer Bericht,” August 23, 1905, BArch RM 3/3018. 61. Behncke, “Militärpolitischer Bericht,” August 23, 1905, BArch RM 3/3018. 62. Behncke, “Militärpolitischer Bericht,” August 23, 1905, BArch RM 3/3018. 63. “Falke Will Repair,” Victoria Daily Colonist, August 11, 1905, 3; “Falke Expected,” Victoria Daily Colonist, August 23, 1905, 8; “Falke in Dock,” Victoria Daily Colonist, August 26, 1905, 3; BArch RM 31/1245. 64. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” September 3, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. 65. Behncke, “Persönliche Logbücher,” September 16, 1905, BArch N 173/39, Bd. 4. “Leading men” was in English in the original.

PART III

Parallels

CHAPTER 10

Similarity in Appearance—“Chinaman” in German and American Satire Magazines Around 1900 Volker M. Langbehn

The development of satire magazines and their form of transnational communication reveals an important, yet often overlooked, aspect of globalization and empires of the late nineteenth century. The effects of print media and its visual documentation or commentaries on social and political topics validated them as key contributors to policymaking and public opinion. In the United States, satire magazines such as the highly successful Puck (1871), The Wasp (1876), or Judge (1881), newspapers such as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (1855), and or political

A big thank you to my colleagues Dr. Dane Johnson and Dr. Frederick Green, and my special friend Richard Lindheim for commenting on the various drafts. I learned a great deal from their insights. I am also highly appreciative of Dr. Lahti’s spot-on editorial comments. Thank you Janne. V. M. Langbehn (B) San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_10

203

204

V. M. LANGBEHN

magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, A Journal of Civilization (1857), had established themselves as movers and shakers of news, trends, and opinions amongst the reading public. Thomas Nast, a German-born artist, serves as the best example of the unusual power of political cartoons since his artistic skills elevated Harper’s Weekly to the greatest political influencer in postbellum publishing.1 Likewise, Joseph Keppler, who arrived in America in 1867 from Austria and, along with Adolph Schwarzmann, produced a German-language weekly, called Puck, known for its colorful covers and double-page centerfolds. “Puck” alludes to Shakespeare’s mischievous elfin character in Midsummer Night’s Dream. The English-language edition first appeared in 1877 and became the first American magazine printed in color. Along with Judge, led by James Wales, a former Puck artist, and later William Arkell, both satire magazines became highly important shapers of opinions in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.2 In contrast to the New York based Puck and Judge, The Wasp, founded by Francis Korbel, a Czechoslovakian immigrant, and based in San Francisco, was the most widely read weekly on the Pacific Coast. The Wasp established its reputation by excessive Sinophobia and anti-Chinese rhetoric and through a rather checkered history of political affiliation, initially supporting the Democratic Party and ending up Republican at a later stage of its existence.3 The caricaturist’s social and political commentaries addressed the shifting contours of the current socio-political global order on both sides of the Atlantic. The satirical exchanges with their European counterparts, such as the British humor magazine Punch (1841) and the German Kladderadatsch (1848), Der Wahre Jacob (The True Jacob 1884), and Simplicissimus (1896), highlighted the transnational dissemination of cultural and political practices and commentaries.4 Like their American counterparts, the German satire magazines contained a plurality of rivaling visions displayed in their commentaries. While Thomas Nast was an active advocate of the Republican Party, the German artist Thomas T. Heine, in contrast, illustrator for satirical Munich magazine Simplicissimus, was a supporter of the Social Democrats. He was critical toward the monarchy, especially Germany’s last emperor, Wilhelm II, and known for his biting commentaries of Germany’s existing social order. Heine followed in the footsteps of Germany’s pictorial satire tradition, especially shaped by the revolution of 1848 that triggered the “first great outburst

10

SIMILARITY IN APPEARANCE—“CHINAMAN” IN GERMAN …

205

of German political caricature in modern times,” even though the reimposition of censorship during the post-revolutionary period limited its rapid rise.5 According to German Studies scholar William A. Coupe, the tradition of European political caricature, an outcome of the Reformation, had a transnational character from the start. Political caricature emerged, developed, and was shaped by the socio-political developments in France, its “Wars of Religion” between 1562 and 1598, the Dutch war of independence from Spain, and the later satirical political illustrations of the British satirist William Hogarth. It reappeared in France in the early nineteenth century in form of La Caricature (1830) and Le Charivari (1832). Satirical cartoons became recognized elements of journalism, and French satire magazines became models of imitation throughout the world. But what makes caricatures so controversial, provocative, and influential? In comparing the visual depiction of Chinese in German and American satire magazines, I will delineate how the depiction of the so-called “Chinaman” reinforces racial stereotypes closely aligned with the sciences of heredity or eugenics, a hitherto underdeveloped link in current research. East Asians have played a significant role in the European construction of race since the Enlightenment, sparking various, sometimes conflicting, representations.6 Scholars tried to make sense of the exotic, erotic, and strange “Orient,” under the guise of tables, categories, and concepts, in order to define and control it. The term “yellow peril,” as Stanford Lyman notes, has a long history, whereby “the yellow thematic presents itself as a coded ethnomethodological discourse.”7 In the late nineteenth century, it mostly referred to China or Japan, with Japan becoming the principal target of this description after the RussoJapanese War (1904–1905). Like the Chinese, Japanese immigrants to the United States suffered under generalizing racialized descriptions such as “Asiatics,” “Orientals,” or “Mongolians.” Satire magazines and illustrations in newspapers are part of this network of transmitters of categories. They received their impetus not just from day-to-day social and political events, but also derived their information through developments in modern sciences. Important influences came from the typologies and hierarchies of race presented by anthropological findings and illustrated textbooks on the cultural history of the human races. Writings by the American ethnologist and anthropologist Samuel Morton, and his contemporaries, such as the physician Josiah C. Nott, or the German ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel and physician

206

V. M. LANGBEHN

Alfred Ploetz informed and shaped public discourse on the differences amongst races.8 Their success coincides with the rise of modern social sciences starting in the mid-nineteenth century, such as sociology, political economy, or social psychology. The new scientific disciplines provided distinctive categories of racial distinctions reflected in a range of civil institutions, whether medical, educational, legal, or penal.9 Satire magazines and illustrations in newspapers, such as Harper’s Weekly, therefore, serve as a perfect foil to examine the contemporary understanding of race and its visual depiction in public media. After all, race becomes visible in the visualization of assumed or invisible innate racial difference or lack thereof, illuminating the significance of print media because “prints have had a special power, owing to their direct visual appeal and accessibility even to the illiterate.”10 Seen within this context, caricatures in newspapers and satire magazines reveal a high degree of ambivalence in meaning. On the one hand they offer critical or biting commentaries on societal and political issues, while, on the other hand, their pictorial descriptions at times undermine the commentaries. Looking at things through an imperial and class-oriented prism, geographer James Tyner succinctly summarized America’s eugenically informed geopolitics: “[r]acist ideologies build social boundaries, national ideologies contribute to spatial boundaries.”11 Thus, racist and national ideologies have reinforced and influenced each other.12 They have shaped a social and political policy at home and abroad, building on the tensions of inclusion and exclusion. The social politics of difference informed the shifting contours of the American immigration laws, and like Germany, codified racial difference grounded in institutions and discourses about the nation. Whether the Spanish-American War (1898), the Caribbean interventions in Cuba and Puerto Rico (1898), or the American conquest of the Philippines (1898–1902), American imperialism reinforced racism at home and provided the scientific explanations for domestic racial divisions that “profoundly affected and shaped internal conceptions of what it meant to be an American.”13 The confluence of imperial geopolitics and eugenics in America and Germany unites American and German colonialists in their promotion of nationalism and discriminatory practices. At home and in their overseas conquest, imperial cultures sought to deflect racial and social degeneration such as miscegenation. Concurrently, they derived their impetus and definitions from mutual interdependencies of and influences by other imperial cultures.

10

SIMILARITY IN APPEARANCE—“CHINAMAN” IN GERMAN …

207

Irrespective of national particularities, the Euro-American conquest produced a unique blend of racially defined imaginaries driven by quests for power, control, and authority. While colonial racial preconceptions and politics in the United States date back to the Territorial Period, in Germany, according to historian Pascal Grosse, the formal empire (started in 1884) was the prerequisite in the development of a racial order. Grosse notes that the historical development of eugenics in Germany, as seen in the writings of Ploetz, for example, is impossible to envision without German colonial and world politics.14 The genesis of the eugenics movement triggered the transformation of liberal German anthropology from a positivistic, nomothetic science to a teleological social technology. The dialectic between the metropole and the periphery mutually influenced, informed, and shaped the biological conceptualization of a German society within the overall context of European colonialism and the American debates about genetic and racial purity.15 Similar to Germany, the making and remaking of race in the United States received its most important and powerful impetus via newspapers, travel books, novels, and the visual display of standardized preconceptions of the foreigner and different races. The unshakable belief in the visual demonstration of ethnological truths about nonwhites, whether abroad or at home, shaped the verbiage and imagery of the merging print and popular culture and information industries.16 The explosion of technological developments catapulted the success of the sciences and satire magazines to new realms, most notably in medial representation through news photography, cinema, picture postcards, advertisement, posters, and cartoons.17 To explore the transnational character of satire magazines, I analyze four caricatures from Harper’s Weekly, The Wasp, and Kladderadatsch to delineate the visual rhetoric embedded in the caricature of the “Chinaman.”

Celestial Ladies While the East Coast of the United States experienced huge waves of immigrants from Europe, starting in the 1850s the West Coast experienced an influx of Chinese immigrants. Many worked for the transcontinental railroads and in urban industry, primarily in manufacturing shoes, boots, and cigars.18 Shaping the consciousness of millions of Americans, political and editorial cartoons captured the role and life of Chinese in California, with representations ranging from vindictive

208

V. M. LANGBEHN

to condescending. Like today’s immigration debates in Europe and the United States, already in the 1860s and onward, anti-immigrant advocates perceived different ethnic groups as posing a threat to white employment. Employing many different visual strategies, satire and popular magazines disseminated images of Chinese as an indistinguishable and interchangeable single entity. They often did so by following certain set categories, such as Chinese as coolies, Chinese as opium addicts following the First Opium War (1839–42), or Chinese immigrants as hordes launching an invasion of America. Often the Chinese effectively functioned as scapegoats during hard times while also being perceived as a threat to modern white civilization19 (Fig. 10.1). Here we see a lithograph from Harper’s Weekly titled Celestial Ladies from 1858.20 The unknown artist and correspondents produced three lithographs appearing in an anti-immigrant article titled “Life in Hong Kong.” They sought to sketch “with a free pen some of the salient manifestations of Celestial character.” In three short segments of the article, divided into “THE COOLIES,” “A CHINESE VIRGIN,” and “COUNTERFEITING SMALL FEET,” the authors offer a scandalizing portrait of Chinese living in Hong Kong. The central lithograph titled “Celestial Ladies,” shows three women walking in one direction. Like a scientist, the artist highlights their skull size and shape following early basic anthropometric rules portraying their faces as cold and indifferent; they show no intimacy. The peculiar size of the skull, the oversized lips, the elongated neck and nose provide a perfect foil for the American reader to recognize evidence of racial Otherness. The practice of visual coding of racial Otherness follows racial typology in the overall discourse amongst the natural sciences, as seen especially in anthropology (Fig. 10.2). Similar to the depiction of the three women, the second lithograph, titled “Chinese Coolies,” reinforces the aforementioned anthropometric rules by exaggerating their skull sizes and shape and facial expressions. Adding to the visual depiction of racial and cultural Otherness, the authors depict the coolies as miserable, brutish, poorly clothed people, mostly addicted to opium. They characterize the poor reputation of coolies due to their dishonesty and lack of character. Text and images work together to convey intended meaning and to eliminate any other unwanted reading of the lithographs. The background of both images is white, nothing added to distract from the focus on the three female figures and both coolies. The correspondents and the artist setup visual markers for the consumer to identify, who, in turn, reads the physical

10

SIMILARITY IN APPEARANCE—“CHINAMAN” IN GERMAN …

209

Fig. 10.1 Celestial Ladies, from Harper’s Weekly, Vol. 2, no. 53 (January 2, 1858). Held by the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, held in the Lincoln Library, Allen County Public Library (Image courtesy of Internet Archive. https://www.archive.org/)

appearance with his/her familiarity of the racialized signs contained in the image. The artist made deliberate changes to the female and male figures to suit editorial or ideological needs, catering to the reader’s imagination

210

V. M. LANGBEHN

Fig. 10.2 Chinese Coolies, from Harper’s Weekly, Vol. 2, no. 53 (January 2, 1858). Held by the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, held in the Lincoln Library, Allen County Public Library (Image courtesy of Internet Archive. https://www.archive.org/)

and–in a dialectical fashion–affirming and expanding the construction of difference.

10

SIMILARITY IN APPEARANCE—“CHINAMAN” IN GERMAN …

211

The authors end their overview of Chinese in Hong Kong with a description of the ugliness of celestial ladies, illuminating their craniological and physical evidence as the distinguishing marker between races; “The taste for the Gaboon-like faces of Hong Kong women is, I fancy, like that for mangoes, an acquired one. I have learned to like mangoes, but my tailor’s wife still excites in me only unmitigated disgust.” The “Gaboon-like faces” argument, conflating Chinese immigrants with Africans, alludes to the hotly debated negro question in the United States to justify Chinese exclusion.21 The aforementioned Josiah Nott, for example, believed in the innate inferiority of blacks compared to white people. The sensationalist correspondent displays his prejudicial attitude by highlighting the skull’s various features and facial expressions because, following Nott, the “peculiarities of the Negro’s head and feet are too notorious to require specification.”22 Nott argues that Africans “possess certain unmistakable traits in common, marking them as negroes, and distinguishing them from all other species of man. Prognathous jaws, narrow elongated forms, receding foreheads, large posterior development, and small internal capacity, characterize the whole group craniologically.”23 Following the anthropological current dating back to the early writings on phrenology and craniology in America, as seen in Morton’s Crania Americana and Nott, the lithographs stand in a dialectical relationship of what Nott perceives as proven history: anatomy and physiology determine characters and destinies.

Saving Our Boys Similar to the (many) illustrations in Harper’s Weekly, San Franciscobased The Wasp goes to extremes to call for Chinese exclusion. We see one of the many racial cartoons depicting the Chinese titled “What Shall We Do With Our Boys?” Created by George F. Keller under the editorship of Ambrose Bierce, it was published on March 3, 1882. The cartoon appeared in response to the Workmen’s Party movement, whose anti-Chinese agitation began in 1877. The movement was led by Denis Kearney, a drayman, whose rallying call was “The Chinese must go!”24 Two months after the publication, the Chinese Exclusion Act was signed on May 6, 1882. President Chester A. Arthur signed the law to prohibit all immigration of Chinese laborers. The Chinese Exclusion Act built upon the 1875 Page Act, which had barred Chinese women from entering

212

V. M. LANGBEHN

the United States. The Page Act was the first restrictive federal immigration law in the United States preventing the immigration of all members of a particular ethnic or national group to the United States. In 1892 the US government implemented an extension of the exclusion act, the more draconian Geary Act. With the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in the case of Fong Yue Ting v. U.S. (1893), it granted the government the authority to regulate the entry of immigrants as it seemed necessary. Before this Chinese immigration had actually been encouraged. With the Burlingame-Seward Treaty in 1868, an expansion of the Treaty of Tianjin of 1858, China gained favorable trade status under the principle of a most-favored-nation concept supporting American commercial interests. The treaty advanced the right to free movement and travel within the United States25 (Fig. 10.3). Keller structured this image to appeal to white workingmen’s fears of a Chinese takeover of American society and enterprise.26 A reader notices the unemployed white workers loitering in search of work, while the Chinese immigrants enjoy work meant for white Americans and members

Fig. 10.3 “What Shall We Do With Our Boys?,” Oakland Museum of California (https://www.archive.org/)

10

SIMILARITY IN APPEARANCE—“CHINAMAN” IN GERMAN …

213

of the white trade unions. He depicts the Chinese laborer as a ruthless competitor with eleven arms and hands working multiple tasks, at the same time being involved in the sewing shirts, making shoes, rolling cigars, painting, and other trades. Using two frames, Keller placed the Chinese laborer in the oversized foreground capturing two-thirds of the frame. The left frame suggests the dominance of cheap labor at the expense of white and honest-looking Americans. The young men may end up committing a crime in order to survive economically symbolized by the San Quentin prison, Industrial School, or House of Correction in the background. The contemplative and clean-shaven men stand outside the building; they are literally shut out, excluded from work, divided by the oversized wall, and left to their own devices. While one young man leans against the lamppost with an American eagle on top, another man looks at the police officer, who takes away a loitering laborer, suggesting that this may be the future of the American labor force. Keller illustrates the dominance of cheap labor through the opposition between the oversized laborer and the rather small white Americans, alluding to their own powerlessness. The men standing alone suggests their lack of unity, the inability to act as a union, and, therefore, the caricature suggestively suggests that white men should join a labor union. The Wasp had published other pro-Workmen’s Party cartoons also and this caricature is just one of several in support of them. The inequality between cheap Chinese workers and white Americans laborers is further stressed by the cartoonist inserting a wooden board in the illustration with the description “Chinese Trade Monopoly.” The Chinese laborer keeps his foot on the sign, indicating that Chinese in California have total control or a monopoly in the displayed businesses. The title of the cartoon “What Shall We Do With Our Boys?” is equally suggestive, as the artist personalizes the message by aligning himself with the plight of the unemployed Americans against the Chinese trade monopoly. Using the pronoun “our” and “we” Keller appeals to the reader, suggesting that we as Americans have a duty to protect our labor force, especially younger white men as depicted in this cartoon, and stressed through the use of the noun “boys.” The message appears to be clear: we have to stand up against cheap immigrant labor and protect our national interests. If we do not act now, the future looks bleak because of the successful immigrant’s extraordinary ability to perform multiple tasks for an under the market income. Keller illustrates the motif of the unstoppable success of the Chinese immigrant in form of the filled moneybag

214

V. M. LANGBEHN

with the Dollar sign in one of his left hands. The filled bag suggests their success of working in America, but the money is designated to China, as symbolized by the rickshaw, and not reinvested in the American economy.27 The power of contrast is also evident in the physiognomical depiction of both the American and Chinese laborers. While the American men look properly dressed—like a civilized man—and physically in shape, albeit with a rather sad facial expression, Keller depicts the Chinese man as overweight and unkempt, suggesting an uncivilized man. The Chinese man appears to be sneering, alluding to the alleged greedy and conniving character of Chinese. His oversized body suggests that he has gained material success at the expense of young American workers. Interestingly, it only takes one Chinese coolie to outperform six American workers. Furthermore, the Chinese queue, curled like a whip, flies out from behind the head, hinting at the speed of Chinese productivity. By foregrounding undesirable aspects to capture attention, Keller has provided the reader a coordinate system of reading and feeling that appeals to a reciprocal mindset that has been socially and politically conditioned. This is further showcased in how Keller, by employing some of the customary strategies of a political cartoonist, grotesquely distorts the Chinese worker’s face and body. The man looks like an octopus, or like a weird creature with deeply slanted eyes and oversized nose and ears, suggesting that he cannot be trusted because he is simply dangerous. It appears Keller misconstrued the Buddhist statue of Bodhisattva Guanyin, who is often depicted with “1000” arms. Bodhisattvas are enlightened beings seeking to help others attain enlightenment. As the deity of compassion, Bodhisattvas are typically represented with exquisite jewelry, remarkable garments and elegant postures, a fact that Keller turns into the opposite.28 To highlight the monstrosity of the man, Keller juxtaposes him to the idealized young men. While the young white men overall look healthy, the Chinese man appears to be in bad health. His open mouth reveals poor oral hygiene, he is missing some teeth and some of his fingernails look like animal talons. It is noteworthy that explorers and travelers reported long fingernails on the Chinese since the thirteenth century. Later on, the nails became an inspiration for some European artists, such as the French painter François Boucher. Long fingernails as a symbol for Chinese culture, especially in the eighteenth century, remained very much a European view of Chinese.29

10

SIMILARITY IN APPEARANCE—“CHINAMAN” IN GERMAN …

215

It is noticeable that Keller follows the cartoonist tradition of the highly influential Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846), the French Charles Philipon (1800–1861), editor of the satire journals La Caricature and of Le Charivari, and Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), who viewed facial features as indices of character and temperament.30 However, it is Honoré Daumier who has shaped the political and social tradition of satire; his “physiognomy has served as a guide to decoding character” and “as a schema for encoding human interactions pictorially or in performance.”31 Keller’s highly sophisticated cartoons certainly succeeded in eliciting emotional responses as the popularity and influence of The Wasp confirms. However, Keller’s political cartoon, seen in the context of the late nineteenth-century sciences, displays the stereotypical artificial ethnic markers of racial difference under the guise of human taxonomies. Keller’s distorted depiction of Chinese reverberates back to the conceptual framing or social and cultural constructions of race during the nineteenth century. Western medical discourse, as historian Michael Keevak has aptly demonstrated, referred to East Asians as “Mongolians,” and during the nineteenth century used “the adjective ‘Mongolian’” to describe a number of conditions that were supposedly linked to–or endemic among– the people of the Far East.” What is today called Down syndrome was then the “Mongolian eye fold,” “Mongolian spots,” and “Mongolian idiocy,” or “Mongolism.”32 The fusing of the supposedly scientific medical findings with contemporary ideas of human evolution transformed these assumed endemic characteristics into purportedly racial characteristics. In 1866 the physician John Down wrote his “Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots,” seeking to offer a “classification of the feeble-minded by arranging them around various ethnic standards.”33 Down describes examples of regression, stating that the “great Mongolian family” has a flat face, the eyes are obliquely placed, the nose small and the skin has a yellowish tinge lacking elasticity, concluding that “these ethnic features are the result of degeneration.”34 According to Keevak, Mongolism was also linked with other stereotypical East Asian traits, such as a childlike language and a predisposition toward mimicry. The view that the Chinese language resembles that of children, or deaf and dumb people, was common and openly displayed in many anti-Chinese cartoons. With the link between Mongolism and racism being that of degeneracy, Keller thus exploits the stereotypical artificial ethnic markers of the evolutionary process. As “Mongol” became a stylish catchword,

216

V. M. LANGBEHN

interchangeable with “Oriental” and “Asiatic,” this process of artificial differentiation produced generalizations and stereotypes that generated social and cultural Otherness. Revisiting Keller’s cartoon, we now get the point; the Mongolian eyes, the distorted skull, and the bizarre facial features along with the oversized body are clear signs of degeneration of an inferior race. Keller’s anti-Chinese cartoon demonizes the coolie class Chinese, emphasizing their undesirable characteristics and, following the insights of Morton and Nott, relegating the Chinese to a less-developed race incompatible with the Anglo-Saxon race and civilization. The American sociologist Edward A. Ross, who was an advocate of melioristic sociology and a convinced eugenicist, notes with scientific certitude that the decline of the (white) American people led to the “deterioration of popular intelligence by the admission of great numbers of backward immigrants.”35 For Ross, Chinese men in particular “have a short mental circuit and respond promptly to stimulus,” and their cultural development “ceased at stages no more difficult to negotiate than the earlier stages.”36 Keller and Ross (and California’s) resentment of Chinese immigrants was common across the United States. Literary magazines, well-respected journals, professional journals, even liberal reform magazines expressed a hostile view to the Chinese. The massive influx of immigrants in big cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, Ross views as “the multiplying symptoms of social ill health” because of the uncontrolled growth of cities.37 For Ross, language barriers, lack of education, and the many religious orientations, coupled with corruption and criminality, pose a problem because immigrants “drag on the social progress of the nation that incorporates them.”38 Ross and many of his contemporaries provided the seeds of hostility toward emigrants, especially when issues like pauperism or juvenile criminality are labeled as a predominantly immigration problem.39 As an internationally well-recognized and popular sociologist in America, Ross stoked the process of racial differentiation, highlighting the implicit Anglo-Saxon superiority embedded in these observations. The American ethnologists and anthropologists, such as the aforementioned Morton, and his contemporaries, Josiah Nott, and the Egyptologist George Gliddon, argued for innate differences of races: “[f]rom remote ages the inhabitants of every extended locality have been marked by certain physical and moral peculiarities, common among themselves, and serving to distinguish them from other people.”40 Henry Patterson

10

SIMILARITY IN APPEARANCE—“CHINAMAN” IN GERMAN …

217

describes Morton’s comparison of crania and his distribution of races in Crania Americana as evidence of an “intrinsic race-character.”41 Morton collected skulls from people who lived in North and South America and his Crania Americana is a summary of observations and comments borrowed from travelers, explorers, missionaries, and skull collectors.42 Following in the footsteps of Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and other naturalists of his time, Morton’s study of racial differences aimed at highlighting the link between cranial capacity and intelligence. Their findings have rendered “the body as a highly visible, primary site of which the history of exclusion and violence is enacted.”43 The cartoonist’s obsession with the visible exterior of humans and their bodies, the skin and visible bodily features and their overall thematic repetitiveness of racial imagery or stereotyping provides a simple classificatory system. The viewer, through the process of internalization, acquires an emotional and mental disposition toward the feeble-minded, the moron, the handicapped, or the non-whites. Feeding into the American and European fiction of racial differences, Keller’s image stresses the irreconcilable antinomies. His caricature suggests the impossibility to civilize the Chinese laborer, or to bridge the gap between nature and civilization. Keller implicitly confirms the perceived antinomies as biologically grounded.44

The Uncurable German satire magazines acted in a like fashion. As historian Sebastian Conrad has shown, importing Chinese workers was a global phenomenon, since during the nineteenth century nearly 20 million Chinese people migrated all over the world.45 Similar to the United States, the vast Chinese market posed an incredible economic opportunity for German goods. In contrast to the United States, however, Chinese immigration to Germany hardly existed apart from some basic employment on German ships and in Germany’s new colonies.46 However, the transnational circulation of visual and verbal images assured that debates about China and the Chinese coolies, especially Germany’s involvement in Tsingtao and in the protectorate of Kiaochow, remained a topic in the popular press and satire magazines.47 Germany’s media often relied on diplomats, international newspapers, missionaries, geographers, anthropologists, and travel writers, as well as museums, archives, and

218

V. M. LANGBEHN

international press agencies for information.48 The media and communication scientist Jürgen Wilke describes this important aspect of using foreign sources as a tool to increase the media effect. The information becomes self-referential and becomes the facts they symbolize.49 The German Kaiser dramatically added to the popularity of anti-Chinese sentiments in Germany, providing enormous fodder for satire magazines, when offering the infamous Hun speech in 1900. Addressing the German troops assigned to leave for China to suppress the Boxer rebellion, Wilhelm II’s fiery and self-serving rhetoric highlighted the German Empire’s supremacy, remarking that “no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German.” Like the Huns under their King Attila, the Germans shall not take prisoners when encountering the enemy.50 In 1900, the artist Gustav Brandt produced a caricature addressing European colonialism and American imperialism in China that was published in the satirical magazine Kladderadatsch (onomatopoeic for “crash” or “kerboom”). Founded in March 1848, the Berlin-based Kladderadatsch reflected a middle-class outlook of German liberalism. Known for the disrespectfully grinning face of a Berlin street urchin, Kladderadatsch was one of the most popular satire magazines in the late nineteenth-century German media landscape. It displayed a characteristic Berlin sense of humor; dry, cynical, and laconic.51 Nationalistic, anti-clerical, and hugely successful in sales, the magazine became one of “the most effective popularizer of liberal ideas.”52 Special editions even appeared in Paris and New York53 (Fig. 10.4). Like all European and American satire magazines, Kladderadatsch responded to social and political events abroad and at home. The title “In the hospital of the Uncurable,” from 1900, describes the inability of Germany, France, America, Japan, and England, on the left side of the frame, to find a cure for the Chinese question. Below the frame we can read the Ottoman, with his Fez hat, state to the Chinese: “The old, sick man. Keep calm! They will not hurt you! I have laid here for some time and feel pretty good about it because the doctors will not come to an agreement.”54 The new imperialism, the dramatic increase of capitalist global trade and national interests, and the colonial conquest of China, have exposed China to dramatic internal social and political changes that culminated in the Boxer rebellion in March 1898. The renewed European scramble for Chinese territorial and economic concessions was triggered by the first Sino-Japanese war and the subsequent Japanese victory in 1895. Here the artist Gustav Brandt parallels the decline of Chinese

10

SIMILARITY IN APPEARANCE—“CHINAMAN” IN GERMAN …

219

Fig. 10.4 “Im Hospital der Unheilbaren,” Heidelberg University Library (https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kla1900/0324)

Empire with the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the “sick man of Europe.” Like the socio-economic scramble for China, European powers scrambled to assure that no power in Europe would gain an upper hand over the “sick man of Europe” at the expense of the others and thus upset the European political power balance. That the cartoonist places the Chinese Empire parallel to the Ottoman Empire in their respective sick beds suggests that both Empires are crumbling due to foreign economic, territorial, and political competition.55 The Turkish man, first, speaks of experience, since the term “sick man of Europe” term dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. His advice alludes to the competitive bargaining of the Europeans and Americans, who are more concerned about their economic and geopolitical advantages than finding a “cure” for the ailing China. A different way of responding to the cartoon suggests that China is too weak to withstand the challenges posed by Western powers.

220

V. M. LANGBEHN

The well-respected and internationally known German anthropologist Friedrich Ratzel posed the “Chinese Question” already in 1876. He wrote of the incompleteness of Chinese culture and the Chinese inability to develop as an independent race.56 As an astute observer of Chinese immigration in the United States, he had warned against Chinese immigration, describing it as the “Mongolian flood.” Like Ratzel, the cartoonist Brandt acts within pre-defined cognitive structures. His system of classification excludes, as Pierre Bourdieu suggests, “the genesis of mental structures and classifications;” people are literally stuck in their internalized social structures as anthropologists, social scientists, or as artists.57 Their network of descriptive adjectives, such as lazy, inferior, or superior, used in the classification of races, genders, and social groups, provided a structural grid to establish a common-sense world. The assumed corresponding mental dispositions enable a network of opposites, such as high and low culture or civilization. The network offers the matrix of commonly accepted linguistic and visual structures of the global racialized social order. Hence, the artist amplifies the changing health status of the Chinese and the Ottoman Empire through physical depiction. The Chinese man looks horrified at the foreign doctors entering his room. Scared they will hurt him, the Chinese seeks to hide. The artist offers a reason for the man’s concern because the entering doctors symbolize a real threat and the humiliation China had experienced since foreign encroachment began with the first Opium War of 1839–1842. Britain claimed territorial and economic rights in China, while the opium trade, and the ensuing “unequal treaties,” such as the Treaty of Nanking (1842), set the path for the once prosperous and wealthy country to be infected with the European disease of exploitation, greed, racism, and economic control.58 Thus, the entering doctors, here stereotyped through their national uniforms and facial expressions, only make things worse, not better. The patient dreads losing what is left of his health, that is, the vestiges of economic and national independence. The title “In the hospital of the Uncurable” thus implicates the doctors as well, suggesting they will continue their deadly exploits; hence they are uncurable or repeat offenders. The hospital becomes a prison cell, or mindset, from which there is no escape. European colonial powers, American economic imperialism, and China are all sick, the former stuck in their idea of racial and cultural superiority, the latter for enabling foreigners to take advantage of them.

10

SIMILARITY IN APPEARANCE—“CHINAMAN” IN GERMAN …

221

While the viewer laughs at the comic depiction, we notice a similarity to Keller, a striking resemblance on how to represent the “Other.” The strong emphasis on their physical appearance reveals all the hallmarks of physical anthropology, with a laugh. While the artist shows the Turkish patient with stereotypical features, such as big nose, oversized ears and deformed skull, the Chinese man appears similarly; nose, eyes, mouth, and skull echoes Keller’s characterization of Chinese immigrants in California. Across Europe, and the United States, the Boxer rebellion received strong responses in newspapers and satire magazines, reproducing or stressing the stark contrast between white Europeans and Americans on the one hand, and Asians on the other.59 The threat of the aforementioned “yellow peril” was the standard trope used to depict Chinese and China globally during the Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Russian-Japanese War.60 It validated Alfred Ploetz, who argued that the Germanic race is the most outstanding civilized race, and that it has to be protected and refined through racebased eugenics.61 Ploetz, who had spent time living in the United States starting in the mid-1880, pursued the question why the white race in the United States is superior to the black and why the black superior to the gorilla. He maintained that there is a significant difference in intelligence and social instincts between the blacks and whites but not as big as between blacks and gorillas.62 Accordingly social improvement starts with either manipulating human heredity by breeding and by producing superior people (positive eugenics) or by eliminating biologically inferior people (negative eugenics). When Ratzel, referencing Francis Galton, suggested that Chinese would be better off settling in Africa than in Europe, because of the inability of Africans in developing a successful and meaningful culture‚ he highlighted the insurmountable racial and cultural differences between white Europeans, Americans, and Asians.63 To protect western values, both the Africans and Chinese immigrants are undesirables for Western civilization. Chinese immigrants display desired physical and mental characteristics for labor, but they are a threat to the dignity of labor and white workers. Alexander Tille, a key figure in AngloGerman intercultural transfer and ardent social Darwinist, suggested also that the Chinese are morally unreliable and trail the Japanese and Arabs in their mental development.64 Likewise, the popular Theodor Kirchhoff, provided a devastating assessment of Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, depicting Chinatown as a dangerous slum to be avoided at all costs and as threatening to American values.65

222

V. M. LANGBEHN

Conclusion To close my observations of the interplay among social, political, economic, and global issues as seen in cartoons, we have to recognize that satire magazines and illustrated newspapers, along with picture postcards, provided a transnational visual empire of racism that confirmed and cemented the findings of scientific fields such as physical anthropology or medical sciences.66 The cartoonists, whether intended or not, have structured and shaped consciously and subconsciously our habitus, our patterns of thought, behavior, and taste. Irrespective of their diverse political agendas and national particularities, the racial imagery satire magazines employed to comment on colonial politics and imperialism reveal a rather universalizing master imagery. The majorities of caricatures in United States and European newspapers and satire magazines mirrored and asserted a racial hierarchy that occupied an important place in both the scientific and the popular imagination. The comic exaggeration and subtle forms of graphic coercion of caricature created a visual foil for the reader to engage in debates about the advantages of Germany’s imperial ambitions, or in the context of California, about allowing Chinese immigration. Like the emerging disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and ethnology, as well as the international eugenics movement, satire magazines, through visual images, collaborated, consciously or not, on the categorization and racialization of ethnic groups. As a reproduction of a social-cultural system, caricatures reflected political interests that were an integral part of a particular system of knowledge and permeated the metropolitan social imagination. Caricatures are always already rhetorical in their conception. We have to inquire to what extent do satire magazines exploit emotions, and excite or trigger explosive reactions as seen in the violent responses in the publication of the Mohammad cartoons in 2005 in Denmark, or the killing of members of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in 2015, known for its lampooning of the Prophet Mohammad.67 If we follow the sociologist Klaus Theweleit, we have to take seriously the fictions and fantasies visualized in popular newspapers or satire magazines, in children’s books, on postcards, photographs, and anthropological writings to demonstrate in detail how barbaric desire resides in us.68 Even if the creative artists Thomas Nast, Gustav Brandt, and George Keller would not be labeled racists, a viewer has to keep in mind that often the visuals or the text undermines the author’s intention. Caricatures will always reveal a high

10

SIMILARITY IN APPEARANCE—“CHINAMAN” IN GERMAN …

223

degree of ambivalence, as a more recent example in the New York Times illustrates, when a caricature about Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald J. Trump prompted outrage and was labeled anti-Semitic. Not everybody agreed. Does this ambivalence justify, for example, to end publishing or to start censor political cartoons as seen by The New York Times ? It is rather ironic to observe that in 2018 The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning and now has totally abandoned this art.69 The joke is on me as I am deprived as reader to draw my own conclusions.

Notes 1. Stephen Hess and Sandy Northrop, American Political Cartoons: The Evolution of a National Identity, 1754–2010 (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2011), 52. 2. Ibid., 65–66. 3. See Richard S. West, The San Francisco WASP. An Illustrated History (Easthampton, MA: Periodyssey Press, 2004). 4. See also my “Satire Magazines and Racial Politics,” in Volker Langbehn, ed., German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory (New York: Routledge, 2010), 105–123. 5. W. A. Coupe, “The German Cartoon and the Revolution of 1848,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 9.2 (1967), 137–167. Here 137. 6. See Rotem Kowner and Christina Skott, “East Asians in the Linnaean Taxonomy: Sources and Implications of a Racial Image,” in Walter Demel and Rotem Kowner, eds., Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Interactions, Nationalism, Gender and Lineage (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 23–54. 7. Stanford Lyman, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ Mystique: Origins and Vicissitudes of a Racist Discourse,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 13.4 (June 2000), 683–747. Here 687. 8. See Samuel Morton, Crania Americana; or A Comparative view of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, Chestnut Street, 1839), Friedrich Ratzel, Die chinesische Auswanderung (Breslau: J.U. Kern’s Verlag, 1876) and later The History of Mankind, Vol. 1–3 (New York: Macmillan and Co. 1904), Josiah C. Nott, “Comparative Anatomy of Races,” in Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon, eds., Samuel Morton, Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co. 1854), 411–465. 9. See Volker Langbehn “The Visual Legacy of Friedrich Ratzel’s History of Mankind,” in Michael Eckhardt, ed., Mission Afrika: Geschichtsschreibung

224

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

V. M. LANGBEHN

über Grenzen hinweg. Festschrift für Ulrich van der Heyden (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2019), 241–255. Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., American Political Prints 1766–1876 (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall & Co., 1991), Xii. James A. Tyner, “The Geopolitics of Eugenics and the Exclusion of Philippine Immigrants from the United States,” Geographical Review 89.1 (1999), 54–73. Here 54. See also Christian Grimm, Netzwerke der Forschung. Die historische Eugenikbewegung und die moderne Humangenomik im Vergleich (Berlin: Logos Verlag GmbH, 2011), 211. Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary, To Die For. The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1999), 141, 147. Pascal Grosse, Kolonialismus, Eugenik und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland 1850–1918 (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2000). Ibid., 15–16. Matthew Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 97. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 9. See Philip Choy, Lorraine Dong, Marlon Hom, eds., Coming Man. 19th-Century American Perceptions of the Chinese (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing (H.K.) Co., Ltd, 1994), 19–20. See Matthew Schneiro, The Dream of a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America 1893–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). “Celestial Ladies,” Harper’s Weekly, 30. January 1858, 68. Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–82 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 60–61. Nott, “Comparative Anatomy of Races,” 415. Ibid., 430. West, The San Francisco WASP, 14. Robert McClellan, The Heathen Chinese: A Study of American Attitudes Toward China, 1890–1905 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1971); Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). See Nicholas Sean Hall, “The Wasp’s “Troublesome Children”: Culture, Satire, and the Anti-Chinese Movement in the American West,” California History 90.2 (2013), 42–63, 74–76. See also the blog post by Michelle Walfred on Chinese exclusion and her analysis of “WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR BOYS?,” February 14,

10

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

SIMILARITY IN APPEARANCE—“CHINAMAN” IN GERMAN …

225

2014 https://thomasnastcartoons.com/2014/02/14/what-shall-we-dowith-our-boys-3-march-1882/ (accessed October 11, 2019). My thanks here to my colleague Frederik H Green, who suggested this reference. He reminded me of what I do not know yet. Danke Fred! Anna Mouat and Melissa Mouat, “European Perceptions of Chinese Culture as Represented on the Eighteenth-Century Ballet Stage,” Music in Art 38.1–2 (Spring-Fall 2013), 49–61. Here 58. For an overview of this tradition see Judith Wechsler, A Human Comedy. Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century Paris (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1982) and Charles Press, The Political Cartoon (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981). Wechsler, A Human Comedy, 174. See Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 111. J. Langdon H. Down, “Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots,” London Hospital Reports 3 (1866), 259–262. Here 259. Ibid., 260. Edward A. Ross, The Old World in the New (New York: The Century Co., 1914), 256. Edward A. Ross, The Changing Chinese (New York: The Century Co., 1914), 51, 54. Ross, The Old World in the New, 239. Ibid., 230. Ibid., 241–245. Morton, Crania Americana, 1. Henry Patterson, “Memoir of the Life and Scientific Labors of Samuel Gordon Morton,” in Nott and Gliddon, eds., Samuel Morton, Types of Mankind, XVII-LVII. Here xxxiii. Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010), 80. Rüdiger Kunow, Material Bodies. Biology and Culture in the United States (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018), 32. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White On Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 98. Sebastian Conrad, The Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 208–209. See also Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), especially 154–166. Conrad, The Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany, 267. See Andreas Steen, “Germany and the Chinese Coolie. Labor Resistance, and the Struggle for Equality, 1884–1914,” in Nina Berman,

226

48.

49.

50.

51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

V. M. LANGBEHN

Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang, eds., German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences (Ann Arbor: UP Michigan, 2014), 147–160. See Ariane Knüsel, Framing China: Media Images and Political Debates in Britain, the USA and Switzerland, 1900–1950 (London: Routledge, 2016), 3–4 and Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, esp. 5– 25. Jürgen Wilke, Grundzüge der Medien- und Kommunikationsgeschichte. Von den Anfängen bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie, 2008), 287. Manfred Görtemaker, Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert. Entwicklungslinien (Opladen: Schriftenreihe der Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1996), 357. Ann T. Allen, Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany: Kladderadatsch and Simplicissimus, 1890—1914 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 16. Ibid., 29. For additional discussions of German satire magazines and colonialism, see Edward Graham Norris & Arnold Beuke, “Kolonialkrieg und Karikatur in Deutschland: Die Aufstände der Herero und der Nama und die Zeichnungen der deutschen satirischen Zeitschriften,” in Peter Heine and Ulrich van der Heyden, eds., Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus in Afrika (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995), 377–398; Markus Joch, “November 1884: Der Kladderadatsch sieht Culturfortschritte am Congo,” in Klaus Scherpe and Alexander Honold, eds., Mit Deutschland um die Welt: eine Kulturgeschichte des Fremden in der Kolonialzeit (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004), 66–76. Gustav Brandt, “Im Hospital der Unheilbaren,” Kladderadatsch June 15, 1900, No. 28, page 112. See Norman Rich, Great Power Diplomacy 1814–1914 (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1992). Ratzel, Die chinesische Auswanderung, 265. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 468. Ibid., 300. See the highly unique collection of images in satire magazines across Europe with focus on the Boxer rebellion by John Grand-Carteret, Chinois d’Europe et Chinois d’Asie (Paris: Hachette Livre BNF, 2013). See Heinz Gollwitzer, Die Gelbe Gefahr. Geschichte eines Schlagwortes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1962) and Ute Mehnert, Deutschland, Amerika, und die „Gelbe Gefahr“: Zur Karriere eines Schlagworts in der Großen Politik, 1905–1917 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1995).

10

SIMILARITY IN APPEARANCE—“CHINAMAN” IN GERMAN …

227

61. Alfred Ploetz, Grundlinien der Rassen-Hygiene (Berlin: Fischer, 1895), 3–5. 62. Ibid, 91. 63. Ratzel, Die chinesische Auswanderung, 265. 64. Alexander Tille, Der Wettbewerb weisser und gelber Arbeit in der industriellen Produktion (Berlin: Verlag von Otto Elsner, 1904), 9. 65. Theodor Kirchhoff, Kalifornische Kulturbilder (Kassel: Verlag von Theordor Fischer, 1886), 92–105. 66. See Otto May, Europa und die “Gelbe Gefahr.” Vom Boxer-Aufstand zum russisch-japanischen Krieg (Hildesheim: Verlag Franzbecker, 2016). 67. See Risto Kunelius, Elisabeth Eide, Oliver Hahn, and Roland Schroeder, eds., Reading the Mohammad Cartoons Controversy. An International Analysis of Press Discourses on Free Speech and Political Spin (Bochum and Freiburg: Projekt Verlag, 2007). 68. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987). 69. Steve Lohr, “New York Times’s Global Edition Is Ending Daily Political Cartoons June,” in The New York Times, June 11, 2019, Section B, Page 4.

CHAPTER 11

“I Almost Pulled Her to My Heart, but…” Competing Masculinities in Karl May’s Wild West Fictions and Their Modern Theatrical Adaptations A. Dana Weber

On a beautiful summer afternoon, on an outdoor theatre stage somewhere in Germany, a Mescalero Apache and a white frontiersman fall into each other’s arms exclaiming: “My brother!”—“My brother!” Winnetou, the Apache, and Old Shatterhand, the frontiersman, who speak these words, are blood brothers and one of the best-known pairs of male friends in German culture since the turn of the twentieth century. One can often see the two characters greet like this in the plays performed at over a dozen contemporary Karl May festivals in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland every summer. These popular events dramatize the nineteenth-century Wild West novels by Karl May (1842–1912), arguably the most successful adventure author in German literature. His biography

A. D. Weber (B) Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_11

229

230

A. D. WEBER

also makes him one of the most idiosyncratic. Born to an impoverished family of weavers from the Ore Mountains at the Saxon border of Bohemia that had lost its livelihood to industrialization, May was educated as a teacher. In his youth, he committed poverty-related crimes, lost his teaching license, lived as a vagrant for a time, and was imprisoned for more than seven years. After his release, he became a journal editor and writer and started a respectable middle-class lifestyle, eventually finding fame. His first marriage ended in divorce. Throughout his life, May suffered from psychological issues that included severe insecurities and pathological lying.1 In the German popular imagination, May’s fantasies still largely determine the American frontier as a masculine and heteronormative space of freedom and adventure. In the 1960s, the adaptation of May’s most popular novels to cinema renewed their cultural relevance in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, a cultural relevance that they have not lost since. Although May’s novels are read less and less today, most people living in Germany are familiar with both their film and stage adaptations at Karl May festivals.2 These festivals usually take place in specially constructed outdoor theatres, of which some are dedicated solely to the dramatization of May’s Wild West fictions, whereas others include a wider theatrical repertoire. The festivals’ organizational structures range from regional theatre institutions to commercial companies and local associations; some of them are expensively staged, others modest, even improvised. Professional and amateur actors (or a combination) perform at these events. Exhibitions, parades, contests, and dressing in Native American and western costumes alongside eating, drinking, and shopping typically complement the theatrical plays. Karl May film festivals, radio plays, comic books, enthusiasts’ conventions, fanzines, and a considerable community of literary, film, and festival aficionados are other modalities in which the German public continues to engage with the writer’s works and legacy. The ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted from 2007 to 2014 at six Karl May festivals yielded some of this essay’s insights about play and gender politics.3 In May’s novels, at Karl May festivals, and in German-speaking cultures generally, the American “Wild” West is regarded as a space of freedom, in which heteronormative masculinity proves itself by establishing law and order, heterosexual families, and civilized societies. Yet a closer scrutiny of some of May’s frontier characters reveals that this fictional space is

11

“I ALMOST PULLED HER TO MY HEART, BUT…” COMPETING …

231

gendered in more complicated ways. And yet, festival plays interpret May’s characters in a stricter heteronormative vein than they were originally written, but also include stronger female characters than May’s fictions and cross-dressing roles for women. This article analyzes a few relevant examples of the masculinities of the texts and the stages whose competition reshapes how the American West has been gendered in the German popular imagination throughout time.

Gender on the Page: May’s Literary Heroes Old Shatterhand, May’s fictional alter ego in his first-person frontier fictions, and the Apache Winnetou are the most recognizable pair of blood brothers in German popular culture.4 In May’s novels and on stage, they vanquish individual villains and criminal gangs together, bring peace between white settlers and Native Americans, and help families reunite. As May writes it, the two men’s friendship is charged with erotic energy. The author’s own struggle with his fluid masculinity is illustrated in the relationships between Old Shatterhand, Winnetou, and female characters. These struggles reveal the complex gendering of May’s Wild West that also includes gender-bending and homosexuality. May’s best-known novel, the three-volume Winnetou (1893), which tells the story of Winnetou’s and Old Shatterhand’s friendship, and Satan and Ischariot (Satan und Ischariot, 18975 ), also a three-volume work and one of his most idiosyncratic writings, offer revealing examples of the gendering of May’s fictional Wild West. Winnetou narrates Old Shatterhand’s transformation from an urban German immigrant to a famous frontiersman and the blood brotherhood of Winnetou until the Apache’s heroic death. The first encounter between the two men is illfated, however. The young German is working for a railroad company that plans a route through Apache territory without the tribe’s consent. In a bloody battle, Winnetou wounds Old Shatterhand severely. When the white man awakens from a coma weeks later, he meets Winnetou’s eighteen-year-old sister Nscho-tschi who has been tasked to nurse him back to health. The narrator describes her as “beautiful” with “the same velvet-black eyes, which lay hidden beneath long, heavy lashes” as her brother.6 Eventually, Old Shatterhand can convince the Apaches that he is their friend, becoming Winnetou’s blood brother. Nscho-tschi falls in love with him and, encouraged by her father Intschu-tschuna and Winnetou, decides to travel to St. Louis and be educated in the ways of white women

232

A. D. WEBER

in order to become a worthy wife for Old Shatterhand. On the way, she and her father are killed in a bandit attack while Old Shatterhand arrives just in time to rescue Winnetou. Both in May’s novel and in its dramatizations, the scene of Intschu-tschuna’s and Nscho-tschi’s deaths is one of the best-known and emotionally devastating ones. A curious moment of self-reflection ensues during the first encounter between Old Shatterhand and Nscho-tschi. When the young woman asks him whether he had always been so thin, he replies: “‘I have never been thin.’– ‘Look at yourself in the water here!’–I looked in the gourd and drew back in shock. Looking back at me was the head of a ghost, a skeleton.”7 The overlap between Old Shatterhand’s first laying eyes on Nscho-tschi and her prompting him to confront his own deathly face can be interpreted retrospectively, in view of her fate, as an ominous sign: the young woman eventually loses her life because of her love for this skeletal man. Within the economy of Old Shatterhand’s and Winnetou’s relationship, however, Nscho-tschi’s demise eliminates her as competition for the white man’s affections that can now focus solely on her brother. The shift from one sibling to the other is aided by their resemblance. For example, upon the group’s departure to St. Louis, the text depicts Nscho-tschi in a “man’s hunting outfit, not women’s clothing” which emphasizes “the great similarity between the siblings.”8 Nscho-tschi must have therefore looked quite like Winnetou when she died shortly thereafter. Significantly, the narrator recalls the movement of her eyes in her death moment, eyes (just like Winnetou’s) that “traveled over to me [as] a happy [but quickly dying] smile flickered across her pale lips….‘Old Shatter–hand!’ she breathed, ‘You–are–here! Now––I can die–[so–––].’”9 This scene repeats two important motifs: like Old Shatterhand had lied in his own blood after he was wounded by Winnetou, Nscho-tschi now lies in hers. Her dying face, especially her eyes, reflect themselves in the eyes of the observer, as he had reflected his deathly face in water when she had prompted him. Whereas Old Shatterhand survived the mirroring, however, Nscho-tschi survives it only symbolically by virtue of shifting into her brother. Winnetou’s sister dies for (heterosexual) love because the most important men in her life failed to protect her. Although Nscho-tschi had confessed her feelings for Old Shatterhand to Winnetou and Intschutschuna, neither stopped their love-struck daughter and sister from pursuing her hopeless romance although Old Shatterhand had admitted

11

“I ALMOST PULLED HER TO MY HEART, BUT…” COMPETING …

233

to them that he “had not come to the Wild West to take an Indian wife– nor a white one, for that matter. There was no room in my life’s plans for marriage.”10 Moreover, Winnetou told Nscho-tschi cryptically that “Old Shatterhand thinks and feels differently than you imagine,”11 yet nevertheless encouraged her that a white education could be the path to his blood-brother’s heart. This encouragement is puzzling considering that Old Shatterhand’s affections are the only point of disagreement between the siblings. Not only can one read the Apache’s assertion about Old Shatterhand’s feelings as a veiled acknowledgment that these feelings were directed at him; but as the brother must have known only too well, a white education would have cost his sister her culture, thus “killing” a fundamental part of her life. Although Nscho-tschi and Old Shatterhand never discussed their feelings with each other, the white man overheard Nscho-tschi confessing her love for him to Winnetou in a scene in which the siblings hid to test Old Shatterhand’s track reading skills. Winnetou carried his sister in his arms on the last portion of the way, so that their pursuer would suddenly see only one pair of footprints and have to solve this track reading riddle. Old Shatterhand recognized the ruse and approached the siblings unseen, overhearing Nscho-tschi. Yet even finding out about her emotions did not cause him to deter her, so that the men’s collusion to leave her in the dark encouraged Nscho-tschi to pursue her destruction wide-eyed. Literary scholar Johanna Bossinade interprets the scene in which Winnetou carries Nscho-tschi in his arms as the beginning of the siblings’ “androgynization” in which feminine and masculine aspects blend together, enriching Winnetou’s masculinity “with a second gender.”12 Literally and symbolically suspended by her brother, the young woman does leave a deep imprint on Old Shatterhand because her absorption into Winnetou starts in this moment, allowing her brother’s shift into the position of Old Shatterhand’s sole object of desire. Nscho-tschi’s death scene completes the transfer when the cross-dressing and thus masculinized woman and her (feminine) affection transform Winnetou into her now ambivalently gendered double. The joyful scanning of Old Shatterhand’s face by dying eyes just like Winnetou’s while Winnetou’s remain alive leaves the physical Nscho-tschi behind, whereas she remains symbolically present each time when the two blood brothers express their affection by looking at each other. Moreover, Nscho-tschi’s bloody death enriches the blood the two men have exchanged in fighting and a blood-brotherhood ceremony making them truly inseparable (Fig.11.1).

234

A. D. WEBER

Fig. 11.1 From left to right: Nscho-tschi (Radost Bokel), Old Shatterhand (Jochen Bludau, ✝ 2019), Intschu-tschuna (Wolfgang Kirchhoff), and Winnetou (Jean-Marc Birkholz), in blood-brotherhood scene, Elspe 2012 (Photograph by A. Dana Weber)

While Winnetou referenced May’s biography only loosely, in Satan and Ischariot the writer fictionalized himself more explicitly. At the time when Satan and Ischariot was published, May was claiming the factual truth of his adventures, giving lectures as Old Shatterhand and having his photograph taken in frontier garb.13 According to literary scholar Helmut Schmiedt, in Satan and Ischariot, May mixed the identity of the author, narrator, and his first-person character so much that “reality and fiction penetrate[d] each other indissolubly.”14 The novel’s manuscript contained a romantic love story that was removed despite the writer’s protestations because it interrupted the flow of the adventure plot and charged the impeccably manly first-person protagonist with personal guilt.15 This story was published posthumously with alterations in 1927 and finally republished in 1997 as “Old Shatterhand at Home” (“Old

11

“I ALMOST PULLED HER TO MY HEART, BUT…” COMPETING …

235

Shatterhand in der Heimat”16 ). Because of “At Home’s” treatment, Satan and Ischariot has both the most problematic publication history among May’s works and also the greatest “compositional fragility.”17 What makes this fragility so interesting within the context of my argument is how it illustrates the parallels between May’s auctorial and personal gender conceptions. In “At Home,” Old Shatterhand, a writer and editor by trade like his author, helps the musically gifted children of a poor working-class family from the Ore Mountains to obtain a top-notch musical education in Dresden. Martha, the (again) eighteen-year-old sister falls in love with Old Shatterhand. To be close to him, she cleans his small apartment and accepts a production job in the printing department of his publishing house. Martha also studies singing secretly. After her first solo recital becomes a resounding success, she practically makes Old Shatterhand a marriage proposal in which she claims that she would never sing on stage again but only “at home.” – “At home –-!” How much was implied in this word and in her decision! She stood in front of me, so beautiful, so dear, so bashful, her hand still in mine. I almost pulled her to my heart, but… “Old Shatterhand’s place is in the prairie, the Rocky Mountains, the bear’s den, but not at the side of a beautiful, delicate woman.” My eyes fell on the mirror. There I saw a serious, tan face, that of a man that life had never smiled upon with friendliness. And in front of me stood happiness in its most beautiful, most youthful form. Was it not a great sin to chain this beauty, this youth to this brown face, to a life that would possibly never give me peace? Yes, it certainly was.”18

And so Old Shatterhand thwarts Martha’s affections.19 Hurt by his rejection and pressured by her impoverished family, she marries a German nouveau riche who takes her to the United States. May narrates Old Shatterhand’s and Martha’s aborted love story in melodramatic terms yet with a sensitivity for the working-class social milieus of impoverished textile manufacturers and the print industry that he knew first-hand. In the first-person narrator’s intimate encounter with Martha cited above, he looks at himself, not at her, just as he had during his first encounter with Nscho-tschi. While the young woman is offering herself to him, Old Shatterhand reflects (about) himself, once again torn between the possibility of a heterosexual marriage and his commitment-free life in the Wild West. Although the novel’s publishers removed Martha’s affair

236

A. D. WEBER

with Old Shatterhand from the text, i.e., “killed” her romantic character, Martha lived on in the overall plot and Old Shatterhand met her again yet without renewing the romance. Accordingly, the face that Old Shatterhand sees in the mirror is not that of a skull, but of a seasoned frontiersman. The prospect of a heterosexual relationship is thus not a mortal threat for Old Shatterhand anymore as it was in Winnetou. Nevertheless, as the plot makes unequivocally clear through the perspectives of other characters, a marriage between the renowned author-editor and a working-class would-be-singer would have meant a disdained social mésalliance, offering Old Shatterhand an exculpatory way out of this relationship. In view of Nscho-tschi’s and Martha’s fates, one wonders what their author considered satisfying life options for women. May’s texts punish these attractive and romantically assertive female characters for their heterosexual infatuations with homosexual men, worse, across cultural and class divides. In contrast, the male protagonists’ mutual cross-cultural affection more than compensates for the (occasional) anguish over heterosexual love. Satan and Ischariot reflects this affection in a scene in which Winnetou suddenly shows up in Dresden. I jumped up from my seat… there he was at the door! Winnetou, the famous chief of the Apache in Dresden! And what did the mighty warrior look like! I rushed to him; he walked towards me just as fast; halfway through we fell into each other’s arms. We kissed each other again and again, looked at each other in between and, finally, broke out in a hearty laughter as the Apache had never laughed before. The shape in which he saw his Shatterhand before him was so very tame and the current figure of the bravest warriors of the Apache was so peaceful and droll…. I guessed why he did not take off his hat; under it, he had hidden the abundance of his rich, dark hair. I took the top hat off his head. His hair fell freely like a cape over his shoulders and low down his back.20

This scene is as unambiguous and emotionally satisfying as Old Shatterhand’s interactions with women are vacillating and tense. The two men rush toward each other and become one in numerous embraces; they laugh and look at each other directly and repeatedly and they are exchanging affectionate gestures. What is more, in an erotically charged gesture, Old Shatterhand exposes Winnetou by “letting” his long hair “down,” which alludes to an uninhibited, subliminally sexual interaction. In short, whereas Old Shatterhand’s erotic impulses withdraw behind his

11

“I ALMOST PULLED HER TO MY HEART, BUT…” COMPETING …

237

rational self-reflections in close interactions with erotically threatening women, they are unfettered when he reflects himself in Winnetou, his handsome and ambiguously gendered cultural Other. Scenes such as the above exemplify the underlying homosocial orientation of May’s Wild West narratives that they share with American frontier novels such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. To borrow literary scholar’s Leslie Fiedler’s pithy formulation, May’s heroes “in essence, and by definition, cannot get the girl.” Instead, they illustrate a “dream of primeval innocence and the companionship of red man and white” in which a white and a Native American man, like Old Shatterhand and Winnetou, “flee from civilization into each other’s arms.”21 Moreover, by their androgynous aesthetic–best represented by Winnetou’s and Nscho-tschi’s visual near-identity–May’s novels partake in the popular tastes of their time that were marked by Jugendstil (Art Nouveau). As Susan Sontag notes, in Jugendstil, what makes masculinity beautiful is its inherent femininity and vice versa.22 True to this style, desirable characters such as Winnetou, Nscho-tschi, and Martha, share idealized tan complexions, dark, languorous eyes, and long flowing hair. Moreover, the androgyny of Jugendstil figures is often combined with a culturally hybrid dimension which applies to May’s texts as well, for example in Nschotschi’s wish to become educated in white ways, her brother’s western outfit in Dresden, and Martha’s unhappy American marriage. Whereas May’s novels dispose of threateningly beautiful female figures, they nevertheless preserve their beauty in their texts and symbolism. Nscho-tschi is objectified and preserved in her beautiful brother in which Old Shatterhand mirrors himself unrestrainedly. Old Shatterhand gives Martha a flower encased in glass, a curious, beautiful memento that he created himself on one of his American journeys.23 In its mirror-like surface, this aesthetic-natural object reflects the narrator’s conception of attractive femininity as something that, at the peak of its vitality, must be killed in order to be preserved forever in a transparent, rigid encasing, almost like a display case in a museum.24 The fact that in May’s figures of desire the suspension (in androgyny) and arrest (in death and aestheticization) of the feminine coincide with culturally hybrid features is common for the colonial narratives of his era. As literary scholar Susanne Zantop has shown, in German literature and theatre, foreignness and exoticism had overlapped with sexual and gender fantasies at least since the second part of the eighteenth century.25

238

A. D. WEBER

While May’s prose undoubtedly contributed to the proliferation of exoticcum-gender colonial fantasies in the German popular imagination, in Old Shatterhand’s erotic triangles, these fantasies undermine the ostensibly heterosexual masculinity of his Wild West. This Wild West is moreover populated by other characters with more overt fluid or gay gender identities. One of them is Kolma puschi, a mysterious warrior from the novel Old Surehand (1894–1896),26 supposedly a man with “feminine and soft,” yet also “stern” characteristics. The blood brothers eventually reveal that the Native American Kolma puschi is the widow of a white man and had been estranged from her two infant sons in tragic circumstances. While they were brought up one Native, the other white, she adopted a male persona and roamed the Wild West looking for them. When Kolma puschi finally reunites her family, she not only harmonizes Native American-white race relations but also adopts the highest position in her patriarchal and multicultural family, re-balancing it in both cultural and gender terms. Her biography illustrates that, in May’s fictions, a successful woman replaces romantic feelings (those for her dead husband) with maternal ones and survives through biculturalism and cross-dressing. Also in Old Surehand, Dick Hammerdull and Pitt Holbers, an inseparable pair of frontiersmen who serve comic relief, make no secret of their mutual affections when Hammerdull declares that he would “marry him immediately” were Holbers a woman and openly flirts with the handsome Old Surehand.27 These are only a few examples for how heterosexual masculinity competes with homosocial, gay and cross-dressing (possibly transgender) ones in May’s fictional Wild West. As Rudi Schweikert has shown, crossdressers associated with the era’s gay culture inspired some of these characters.28 What is more, May had spent several years in prisons, which, at the time, were social environments of tremendous sexual frustrations and aberrant forms of alleviating them.29 After serving his sentences, one of his earliest works as an editor (for which he wrote a few parts) was The Book of Love (Das Buch der Liebe, 1876), an adult treaty about sexuality and venereal diseases published anonymously and banned in Prussia and Austro-Hungary. In the last years of his life, May entertained a close friendship with the gay Art Nouveau painter Sascha Schneider (1870– 1927). The writer’s interest in sexuality is not unusual for his era. The turn of the twentieth century saw, for instance, the founding of Stefan George’s influential literary circle with homosexual leanings, the start of Sigmund Freud’s career, and the medical doctor Magnus G. Hirschfeld’s

11

“I ALMOST PULLED HER TO MY HEART, BUT…” COMPETING …

239

movement to decriminalize homosexuality in Germany, where the first scientific journals on sexology were also published at this time. Yet the period when May wrote his most successful works was not only marked by intense debate over alternative sexualities and emerging feminism. It was also an era that Peter Marx has called the “theatrical age” in which class attributes and belonging were transforming under the onslaught of industrialization and modernization.30 These changes increased social mobility (as May’s biography demonstrates) and also encouraged social tricksters and frauds among whom May was no exception. At the same time, theatrical forms diversified and increased in numbers. New types of performances included exotic people’s shows known in German as “Völkerschauen,” among them Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West” (which visited Dresden, where May lived, in 1890), film, revues, boulevard theatre, and vaudeville, the latter including cross-dressing and blackfacing.31 The German culture was especially susceptible to these developments since it had traditionally been (and remains) a culture in which theatre enjoys high prestige and is considered an institution of education more than of entertainment. This context marked May’s life. Enthusiastic about theatre since his childhood, he frequented theatres throughout his life, was familiar with the current German and international repertoire, and even wrote his own theatre texts.32 It is not surprising, then, that May’s prose is theatrical in tone. As a commercial writer, he was paid by the page and dialogues extended the length of the texts, also making them easily dramatizable. To have his works adapted to the stage as they are today may have even been May’s intention.33 In his novels, May used melodrama, adventure, and a variety of thrills, stock characters, disguises, mystery, unmasking, and revelations which were popular not only in literature but also on stages on both sides of the Atlantic. For example, the “combinations” in which William Cody “Buffalo Bill” reenacted his own deeds in indoor theatres use the same effects and share several character clichés (including “Indians” and comical Germans34 ), plot elements, and adventurous actions with May’s prose.35 Parallels such as these illustrate that the cultures on both sides of the Atlantic shared a common repertoire of performances, cultural ideas, representations, and conceptions at the turn of the twentieth century. This repertoire ensured the enthusiastic reception of Cody’s “Wild West” in Germany. After the “Wild West” completed its last European tour, the renowned Hagenbeck and Sarassani companies in Hamburg and Dresden mounted their own Wild West shows in the 1910s. The Wild West performances and May’s books immediately caused popular imitations ranging from children’s play to carnival disguises and reenactment activities which

240

A. D. WEBER

aided the assimilation of the American frontier as a performative space in the German popular imagination.

Gender on the Stage: Theatrical Adaptations of May’s Literary Heroes May’s Wild West novels were transposed to the stage soon after the writer’s death. The first notable dramatization was Hermann Dimmler’s Winnetou staged in Munich in 1919, followed by productions in Vienna (1928) and Berlin (1929, 1938), all at renowned theatres. Ludwig Körner who directed the play in Vienna and in Berlin also played Old Shatterhand in the 1929 production. In 1941, he adapted a version of the play outdoors in the first Karl May festival in Rathen, a spa town in the touristic region of Saxon Switzerland on the river Elbe. The gendering of May’s characters changed when his fictions transitioned to the stage. For example, Dimmler’s play begins in medias res with a famous scene from Winnetou’s first volume in which the “greenhorn” Old Shatterhand kills a grizzly with a knife. On stage, however, Nscho-tschi shoots the bear, only wounding him. Old Shatterhand saves her and tells her later that she “acted like a brave man” whose “heart did not tremble.”36 Dimmler’s play eliminates the erotic tension between Old Shatterhand and Winnetou, instead having the white man offering himself to Nscho-tschi in marriage with the words: “the red dove may take what belongs to her.”37 This change has been maintained since then, and Old Shatterhand and Nscho-tschi are usually represented as mutually in love in contemporary Karl May festivals. Carl Zuckmayer’s review of Körner’s 1929 staging remarks that the reviewer “would have imagined [Winnetou] a little bit more masculine, harder, but he had the mysterious, dark quality that matters most.”38 Zuckmayer’s assessment suggests that, whereas the production reformulated Nscho-tschi’s and Old Shatterhand’s characters as emphatically heterosexual, it may have maintained Winnetou’s androgynous allure at least to a degree. Based solely on Dimmler’s text and reviews such as these, it is difficult to imagine how the play was staged. However, a photo of the 1929 production shows actress El’ Dura, a former revue dancer of alleged African origin, as Nscho-tschi.39 She wears a simple, carnival-type costume that combines African and Native American clichés (strings of multicolored beads, large hoop earrings, seam fringes, and two feathers in her hair). El’ Dura’s facial make-up and short hair recall Josephine Baker’s styling in

11

“I ALMOST PULLED HER TO MY HEART, BUT…” COMPETING …

241

her famous banana dance that had premiered three years earlier in Paris. The photograph illustrates that the Berlin production had no goals of accurate cultural representation, yet such a goal would have been anachronistic in the German theatre of the 1920s (Fig.11.2). Already before World War I, expectations of realism in performance had shifted to exotic people’s shows, film, and cultural and historical reenactments. German theatres (especially avantgarde ones such as the Theater an der Königgrätzer Straße where Körner staged Dimmler’s play) were invested in creating original, often whimsical performative worlds, not in historical or cultural accuracy. Co-authored with Roland Schmid, Körner’s post-war adaptation of Winnetou was shown at the first Karl May festival in Bad Segeberg, which, in 1952, picked up Rathen’s tradition of May dramatizations that had been interrupted in 1942 because of the war.40 Karl May festivals have

Fig. 11.2 From left to right: Nscho-tschi (El’ Dura), Winnetou (Hans Otto), and Old Shatterhand (Ludwig Körner), Berlin 1929 (Image available in the public domain)

242

A. D. WEBER

continued uninterrupted since then with more and more outdoor stages joining in throughout time. In 1952, Nscho-tschi is a far cry from her previous bear-hunting stage persona.41 She hesitates before her brother, yields to his decisions, and never asserts herself. In Old Shatterhand’s presence she is shy and “bows humbly.”42 Nscho-tschi falls in love with Old Shatterhand in this play too. Just as in May’s text, she does not heed her brother’s warning that Old Shatterhand “thinks and feels differently than [she] believe[s],”43 inevitably riding into her death. Less than a decade after the end of World War II and two years after the foundation of the two, ideologically competing, German states, Körner’s and Schmid’s adaptation stresses values such as peace, cross-cultural understanding, and German unification. These post-war values are emphasized at the cost of Nscho-tschi’s character that is depicted as meek and obedient toward men. At a time when West Germany aimed to restore the patriarchal gender balance, there was no room for outspoken women or cross-racial romance in a popular play. Three decades later, Helmut Baierl’s adaptation of May’s Winnetou was staged at the “Theatre of Friendship” in East Berlin under the title You Are a Greenhorn, Sir!. This production treated May’s text with a “considerable portion of irony”44 and updated May’s narrative in several ways, not least in gender terms. For example, Old Shatterhand was cast not as May’s robust hero but as a reserved, soft-spoken, and slim-built young man. The play included the invented character Gaby,45 a clichéd “vamp”46 that represented a capitalist opportunist (woman) who made advances to any men whom she regarded as powerful. Old Shatterhand and Nscho-tschi were reciprocally in love, and Nscho-tschi was shot.47 The play used distancing effects such as choirs of frontiersmen and groups of children that jabbed ironically at May’s idealized “America.” Olaf Hörbe’s recent adaptation of Old Surehand (2012) on the stage in Rathen illustrates how Karl May festivals adapt the gender profiles of May’s characters today. In this play, none of the central characters projected a mysterious or androgynous aura. Pitt Holbers and Dick Hammerdull did not suggest homosexuality. Played by Dörte Dräger, Kolma puschi was a mostly silent presence who appeared and disappeared, supporting the heroes with “his” actions. Her self-revelation as woman and mother gave Dräger the opportunity to deliver a dramatic and moving monologue in which Kolma puschi simply declared: “because I could be more unchallenged as a man, I decided to become Kolma puschi, the warrior without tribe.”48 The emphasis here was on the

11

“I ALMOST PULLED HER TO MY HEART, BUT…” COMPETING …

243

family melodrama, not on gender switching. Overall, in Karl May festivals May’s plots and characters are simplified, which impacts character representations. For example, the contemporary blood brothers share an affectionate friendship, but both are evidently cis-male. The unequivocal romance between Old Shatterhand and Nscho-tschi is often paralleled by other heterosexual and often cross-racial romances. Originally genderbending characters such as Kolma puschi and Aunt Droll (a cross-dressing male detective) that offer melodrama and comical relief are represented as unambiguously straight. While sexual ambiguities and tensions are thus lost in the transition from the novels’ pages to the stage, the theatrical productions that I have seen emphasize strong women characters more than May’s texts. For example, in May’s The Treasure of Silver Lake (1894), Winnetou and Old Shatterhand protect Ellen, a helpless teenager, in the chase for a treasure. However, on stage she is often represented as a mature and strong woman who confronts the perils of the Wild West as valiantly as the men around her. In Olaf Hörbe’s adaptation shown in Rathen from 2007 to 2009, Winnetou (Mark Schützenhofer) remarked that Ellen’s courage “is not a question of her gender.”49 Similarly, in Jochen Bludau’s dramatization Among Vultures (2008) at the Karl May festival in Elspe, the invented character Sara Helmer ran a business at the edge of the Llano Estacado. She valiantly demanded respect from men and defended her block cabin against a Comanche attack, aided only by Bloody Fox, the central hero of May’s text.50 (The Comanche and the settlers eventually made peace.) Characters such as Sara and Ellen are no exceptions in Karl May plays today. The festival in Bad Segeberg routinely invents strong female characters as counterparts to the masculine heroes, for example Kate Brody, a medical doctor in Winnetou III (2006), or Alexandra Patterson, an engineer’s daughter in The Treasure of Silver Lake (2016). Playing such roles can be an actor’s goal in Karl May festivals, as I learned in interviews. For example, Vera Telz who played Ellen Butler in Rathen’s The Treasure of Silver Lake (2008), used her personal kung fu skills in her stage fights against villains. Telz believed that her character needed such skills if she was to prevail in the masculine Wild West.51 As a child, Julia Vincze who played Nscho-tschi on the same stage in several productions, considered Winnetou’s sister an ideal because she could do “all these masculine things, [like] ride, and fight.” Vincze noticed that little girls admired characters such as Nscho-tschi because of “how they asserted themselves and rode [horses] and kept up.”52 Nevertheless, May

244

A. D. WEBER

adaptations maintain also anachronistic representations of women that are borrowed from film westerns and are absent from May’s plots, especially groups of female saloon dancers without individual identities who serve only to bring color and movement to the productions. Beyond this variety of female characters, women can appear in male roles in May dramatizations. Theatre historian Susanne de Ponte identifies three major types of such “breeches roles” (Hosenrollen): the “false” one in which a woman adopts male behaviors, for example bears arms and fights (such as Butler and Helmers); the “disguised” one, in which a woman changes between an assumed male and her actual female identity (such as Kolma puschi); and the “authentic” breeches role in which a woman is cast as a male (such as the school girls playing male roles in the plays with children and teenage casts at the Karl May festival of Bischofswerda).53 As de Ponte shows, these roles have established themselves in their current form in German theatre since the nineteenth century. This periodization is critical, because this is also the era when May wrote, indicating that his fictions were influenced by a theatre culture that included cross-dressing male and female parts. In Karl May festivals, the “false” breeches role of a female character bearing arms and fighting has been naturalized as the strong woman type. Yet these characters do not become threatening viragos but remain feminine in their appearance and conduct without disadvantages to their self-assertion. Additionally, “authentic” breeches roles appear on Karl May stages when women and girls are cast in male roles (many of them mounted) according to need, for example as bandits, soldiers or “Indians.” At the Karl May festival in Bischofswerda, even significant male roles are occasionally cast with girls. Similarly, at the Karl May festival in Twisteden, a usually biannual communal event staged for the local children, the bandit gang is routinely played by women. Casting of this type is customary at Karl May festivals and taken for granted. There is one caveat, however: the leading heroic roles, Winnetou and Old Shatterhand (or other male heroes) have not been cast with women at the festivals that I have researched. Two school girls in mounted male roles in Bischofswerda told me that they enjoyed their roles but were uncomfortable with the idea of playing Winnetou or Old Shatterhand.54 These female role types illustrate the contemporary gender repertoire of May dramatizations. Besides playing strong, conventional, and ornamental female characters, male or cross-dressing roles, women work

11

“I ALMOST PULLED HER TO MY HEART, BUT…” COMPETING …

245

backstage in the artistic, managerial, production, and many other positions (including leading ones) necessary for organizing and staging these events.

Gender from Page to Stage In May’s texts, Old Shatterhand’s self-understanding was complete and balanced only when he mirrored himself in Winnetou, an ambivalent character in both gender and cultural terms. The blood brotherhood between these two characters is undying and loyal, and recalls Immanuel Kant’s concept of a moral friendship, a union between two males that is cemented by respectful love and friendship and continuously pursued as a moral duty.55 Old Shatterhand’s and Winnetou’s adventures together can be considered the dutiful work they do for maintaining their moral friendship. And yet, according to Kant, such a relationship requires distance to be maintained and is undermined by attraction and love.56 From a Kantian perspective then, the erotic undertones of Old Shatterhand’s and Winnetou’s relationship and their narcissistic interest in one another, in fact undermine their friendship. Moreover, in a Kantian moral friendship, only “the modest woman is a brother for man.”57 According to this logic, Nscho-tschi endangers the men’s’ relationship by her efforts to insinuate herself as a love-interest and wife, so that her “immodest” gender-bending and self-assertiveness must be punished. Only in death, through her absorption in Winnetou, Nscho-tschi becomes “modest” enough to be considered a worthy “brother for [the gay] man” Old Shatterhand. In contrast, in May dramatizations, gender is always assumed as heterosexual and romance heteronormative and cross-cultural. The spectacular action, the melodramatic and exciting plots, and the cherished characters do not rise any controversial political or gender issues, guaranteeing the success of these festivals for spectators across the political spectrum. This does not mean that actors and audiences do not recognize the underlying eroticism of Old Shatterhand’s and Winnetou’s friendship. Actors cast in these roles occasionally perform themselves as a gay couple backstage58 and Bully Herbig’s successful western comedy Der Schuh des Manitu (Manitou’s Shoe, 2001), a spoof of May film westerns, includes Winnetou’s gay twin Winnetouch instead of Nscho-tschi. This covert acquiescence of the fluid gender of May’s iconic heroes illustrates that a gendered understanding of his texts exists also outside of academic

246

A. D. WEBER

interpretations. This understanding moreover confirms what culture and gender studies scholar Marjorie Garber observes in her pioneering study Vested Interests, namely that the story of cross-dressing (“transvestism”) in western culture is interwoven with that of “homosexuality and gay identity”59 —a fact that May’s texts illustrate, as we have seen earlier. In performance, a medium which “by its very nature can investigate and undo conventions of representation,”60 Herbig’s comical emphasis of the deep gendering of May’s Wild West and the actors’ seemingly innocuous jokes expose the fragility of this world’s supposedly monolithic masculinity. Likewise, despite the fact that Karl May festivals understand and market themselves as harmless family entertainments that avoid politicizing, by their matter-of-fact casting of women in breeches roles, they inadvertently engage in gender politics. Although the Wild West on stage is unquestionably patriarchal, current social expectations demand stronger, more relevant, and more numerous feminine characters than we find in May’s gender-fluid Wild West. Yet the numerous women who are involved in creating, managing, and enjoying Karl May festivals do not question the gender representations on stage. Noting this fact is relevant. As gender sociologist R. W. Connell reminds us, in our contemporary western societies, women partake in masculinity as a social practice and thus are “the bearers of masculinity as well as men.”61 By enjoying May’s writings and Karl May festivals, women partake in what Connell calls the “positive culture produced around hegemonic masculinity” that exists alongside an equally rich heritage of feminine culture.62 Ultimately, however, in western societies, masculinity remains the authoritative norm which still prevents women’s truly equal integration. Connell therefore proposes the pursuit of social justice in power relations by reciprocal “re-embodiment,” in which individuals can experience other genders’ bodily practices or engage in solidarity for other goals than gender itself.63 Karl May festivals offer spaces and opportunities for such practices. Here, women can experience or identify with physical situations that are coded “masculine,” such as riding, fighting, and asserting oneself. Even if Karl May festivals no doubt normalize a predominantly patriarchal cliché of the Wild West, these events invite participation from anyone, regardless of gender identity, thus enabling “solidarity” in the shared creation and enjoyment of these performance worlds. The matter-of-factness by which Karl May festivals include crossdressing in various roles illustrates the success of this “solidarity,” but also

11

“I ALMOST PULLED HER TO MY HEART, BUT…” COMPETING …

247

Fig. 11.3 Uschi Behm (right) and a friend as Old Shatterhand and Winnetou on the shooting location of Winnetou’s film adaptation in Croatia, 1982 (Used with permission)

keeps the stages’ gender conventions in flux and open to change. From female May readers dressing in self-made Winnetou and Old Shatterhand costumes at the turn of the twentieth century to today’s male characters cast with women and girls, these choices of performative (self-) representation, like the “transvestite” that Garber theorizes, mark a slippage, displacement or substitution. Apparently innocuous, such cross-dressing in fact signifies the “undecidability of signification” thus pointing toward itself “or, rather, toward the place where [these women] are not”64 (Fig. 11.3).

Conclusion The competing masculinities of May’s works and their adaptations and spin-offs have always accommodated characters with diverse gender and cultural coding. These characters point to the fragility of overt heteronormative representation without actively calling for its revision. Today, these

248

A. D. WEBER

representational types populate a distinct homegrown German theatrical world that one can find only in Karl May festivals and that is independent from Native American and frontier reenactments and other Wild West performances and leisure activities. Although the festivals’ solipsistic worlds have long lost their historical and cultural referents, they cannot exist without human beings and their bodies, which automatically inject gender into these worlds. The fluid genders in May’s texts and the May dramatizations’ cross-casting constitute implicit, yet continuous interferences in the masculine, heteronormative pretense of both. By maintaining this interference, both the page and the stage engage in implicit gender politics, thus fostering the inherent indeterminacy of their representations and keeping them open to change.

Notes 1. See Johannes Zeilinger, Autor in fabula (Husum: Hansa Verlag, 2000). 2. In German, many Karl May festivals are called “Festspiele,” “festive plays.” This term emphasizes their theatrical priorities. The English word “festival” does not distinguish between theatrically focused and other types of festivals. 3. For a more detailed discussion of these events, see A. Dana Weber, Blood Brothers and Peace Pipes: Performing the Wild West in German Festivals (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). 4. See Eckehard Koch and Gerd Hardacker, “‘Also eine Blutsbruderschaft, eine richtige wirkliche Blutsbrüderschaft, von der ich so oft gelesen hatte!’ Die Darstellung der Blutsbrüderschaft bei Karl May––eine Bestandaufnahme,” in Jahrbuch der Karl-May-Gesellschaft 2016 (Husum: Hansa Verlag, 2016), 79. Also see Weber, Blood Brothers and Peace Pipes, Chapter 2. 5. From 1893–1896, parts of the novel appeared under different titles as a weekly magazine serial. In 1896/1897, the text appeared in book form as Satan and Ischariot. 6. Karl May, Winnetou, trans. George A. Alexander (Media, PA: Preposterous Press, 2008), 232. 7. May, Winnetou, trans. Alexander, 235. 8. May, Winnetou, trans. Alexander, 358. 9. May, Winnetou, trans. Alexander, 381–382, additions mine. For clarity and narrative flow, George A. Alexander omits some elements from May’s text. I return them to the translation to better reflect May’s vivid aesthetic. 10. May, Winnetou, trans. Alexander, 348. 11. May, Winnetou, trans. Alexander, 335.

11

“I ALMOST PULLED HER TO MY HEART, BUT…” COMPETING …

249

12. Johanna Bossinade, “Das zweite Geschlecht des Roten,” in Jahrbuch der Karl-May-Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Karl-May-Gesellschaft e. V., 1986), 257. Unless noted otherwise, all translations from German are mine. 13. May also used an “Oriental” outfit to authenticate his identity as adventurer in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East where others of his novels are set. 14. Helmut Schmiedt, “Identitätsprobleme. Was ‘Satan und Ischariot’ im Innersten zusammenhält,” in Dieter Sudhoff and Hartmut Vollmer, eds., Karl Mays “Satan und Ischariot” 2nd ed. (Hamburg: IGEL Verlag, 2012), 60. 15. Dieter Sudhoff and Hartmut Vollmer, eds., “Introduction” to Karl Mays “Satan und Ischariot.” 16. Karl May, “Old Shatterhand in der Heimat,” in Old Shatterhand in der Heimat und andere Erzählungen aus der Werkstatt von Karl May (Bamberg: Karl-May-Verlag, 1997), 21–253. I will reference this text as “At Home” throughout. 17. Sudhoff and Vollmer, “Introduction,” 7. 18. May, “At Home,” 237. 19. Hartmut Kühne suggests that May fictionalized the experiences of his first, failed marriage in this text. See Kühne, “Satan und Ischariot I–III,” in Gerd Ueding, ed., Karl-May-Handbuch (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2001), 220. 20. Karl May, Satan und Ischariot: Reiseerzählung, 3 vols (Freiburg im Breisgau: Friedrich Ernst. Fehsenfeld, 1897), 248–249. 21. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962), 207, 191, x. 22. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Susan Sontag, A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2014), 108–109. 23. May, “At Home,” 187. 24. For a gendered reading of the feminine immobilization in glass, see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother,” in Maria Tatar, ed., The Classic Fairytales (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 296. 25. See Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 26. Karl May, Old Surehand, 3 vols, 2000, https://www.karl-may-gesellsch aft.de/kmg/primlit/reise/surehand/index.htm (accessed 16 April 2020). 27. May, Old Surehand 3, 535. 28. For example, Omar Kingsley aka Ella Zoyara or the French transgender writer Marguerite Eymery. See Rudi Schweikert, “Karl Mays Figuren des ‘Dritten Geschlechts,’” in Jahrbuch der Karl-May-Gesellschaft (Husum: Hansa Verlag, 2016), 339; for Kingsley, see also Laurence Senelick, “Boys and Girls Together: Subcultural Origins of Glamour Drag and Male

250

29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

A. D. WEBER

Impersonation on the Nineteenth-Century Stage,” in Lesley Ferris, ed., Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing (New York: Routledge, 1993), 84. Schweikert, “Karl Mays Figuren,” 359. See Peter W. Marx, Ein theatralisches Zeitalter: Bürgerliche Selbstinszenierungen um 1900 (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 2008). On blackface as performance that “often conveyed mixed messages about the multiply-dimensioned, artificial nature of race,” see Kathleen B. Casey, The Prettiest Girl on the Stage Is a Man (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2015), xxv. For May’s interest in theatre, see his recollections in Karl May, “Mein Leben und Streben,” in May, “Ich.” Karl Mays Leben und Werk (Bamberg: Karl-May-Verlag, 1995), 27–268; Ekkehart Bartsch, “Die liebenswürdigste aller Musen,” in Jahrbuch der Karl-May-Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Karl-May-Gesellschaft e. V., 1985), 93–122. Bartsch, “Die liebenswürdigste aller Musen,” 369. See Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 429–430, and Sandra K. Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). For a historical overview of Cody’s combinations, see Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage. For a more detailed comparison between them and May’s plots, see Weber, Blood Brothers, Chapter 4. For May’s and his second wife’s fictitious claims of having met Buffalo Bill, see Karl-Markus Kreis, “Buffalo Bill: Old Shatterhands Herausforderer, Rivale oder Vorbild?,” in Jahrbuch der Karl-May-Gesellschaft (Husum: Hansa Verlag, 2004), 121–138. Kreis also claims that May emulated Buffalo Bill’s stage persona. H. Dimmler, Winnetou: Reiseerzählung von Karl May (Radebeul: KarlMay-Verlag, 1928), 7–9, 13. Nscho-tschi is shot in the same scene, just as she and Old Shatterhand embrace. Dimmler, Winnetou, 71–72. Cit. in Hansotto Hatzig, “Dramatisierungen,” in Gert Ueding, ed., KarlMay-Handbuch (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2001), 523. See Hartmut Schmidt, “Winnetou auf der Bühne,” Karl May & Co 79 (2000), 45, and “El’ Dura,” https://karl-may-wiki.de/index.php/El% 27_Dura (accessed 16 April 2020). In Rathen (then in the GDR), May dramatizations were only staged again starting in 1984. I reconstruct this play from an edition published in 1959. Ludwig Körner and Roland Schmid, Winnetou, second edition (Bamberg: Ustad-Verlag, 1959), 26. Körner and Schmid, Winnetou, 38, additions mine. Hartmut Schmidt, “Wildwest in Berlin,” Karl May & Co 104 (2006), 41–42.

11

“I ALMOST PULLED HER TO MY HEART, BUT…” COMPETING …

251

45. Another invented character was an African-American lawyer, an ally of the heroes. 46. Schmidt, “Wildwest,” 44. 47. Helmut Baierl, Ihr seid ein Greenhorn, Sir! Nach Motiven des Romans “Winnetou” von Karl May (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, n.d.), 77–79. 48. Olaf Hörbe, Old Surehand: Abenteuerstück von Olaf Hörbe frei nach Karl May (Rathen, 2010), manuscript, n.p. 49. Olaf Hörbe, Der Schatz im Silbersee: Abenteuerstück von Olaf Hörbe frei nach Karl May (Rathen, 2007), manuscript, 19. 50. In Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West,” block cabins such as Sara’s were often under attack from hostile Natives, from where the trope entered the western. See Paul Reddin, Wild West Shows (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 78. 51. Interview with Vera Telz, Rathen, 7 May 2008. 52. Interview with Julia Vincze, Dresden, 14 June 2012. 53. See Susanne de Ponte, Ein Bild von einem Mann–gespielt von einer Frau (München: Edition text und kritik, 2013), 15–16. 54. Field notes, Bischofswerda, summer 2007. 55. Immanuel Kant, Die Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 608–609. 56. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London:Verso, 2005), 255. 57. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 274. 58. For example, in the bonus features of the television trilogy Winnetou (2016) and backstage in Rathen (field notes, Rathen, summer 2008). 59. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1997), 4. 60. Alisa Solomon, “It’s Never Too Late to Switch. Crossing Toward Power,” in Lesley Ferris, ed., Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing (New York: Routledge, 1993), 146. 61. R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 230. 62. Connell, Masculinities, 233. 63. Connell, Masculinities, 237. 64. Garber, Vested Interests, 37, addition mine.

CHAPTER 12

In Service of Empires: Apaches and Askaris as Colonial Soldiers Janne Lahti and Michelle R. Moyd

Colonial expansion needs armies, and armies need soldiers. In the second half of the nineteenth century, European and North American empires built new armies or reshaped old ones to implement their priorities of seizing land, subjugating peoples, and installing new forms of governance. These armies recruited colonized peoples worldwide to secure control over the lands facing colonialism.1 These recruitment efforts often created unintended opportunities for the colonized to pursue their own goals and empowerment, although those opportunities always came with limitations. Recruitment for imperial armies pulled from populations that were already enmeshed in various kinds of uneven relationships with colonizing powers. Men seeking financial reward, upward mobility, respectability, and

J. Lahti Department of Philosophy, History and Art, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] M. R. Moyd (B) Indiana University, Bloomington, Bloomington, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_12

253

254

J. LAHTI AND M. R. MOYD

particular forms of masculinity found a home in colonial armies, some only temporarily, some for longer terms. Coercion certainly featured in how men came to join the ranks of some of these armies.2 But many of them also joined of their own volition, even if labeling them “volunteers” misses the mark.3 As relentless imperial pressures recast men’s ability to carve out paths to masculine adulthood, some found army life to be a source of new possibilities for charting the future, family formation, and acquiring relative wealth and status. In this chapter we look at United States and German colonial violence and armies through a comparative lens, discussing some of their shared and divergent characteristics by using Apache soldiers (“scouts”) in the US West (Arizona and New Mexico) and African soldiers (askari) in the colonial army of German East Africa as examples.4 We frame this work as a gendered analysis that accounts for Apache and askari complicity in US and German colonial projects, the violence work they did as they went to war against Native American and African peoples, as well as the costs of their quests for manhood within the domestic spheres and kinship networks that shaped their aspirations.5 The effects of their roles as aspiring householders, or the attempt to protect their households from the vagaries of empire, were typically borne by women, children, and youth whose relationships to the soldiers often were at the intersection of affective ties, opportunity, and dependency. It is important to account for this not as a side note to colonial conquest, but rather as a central factor in understanding how armies built their ranks, and the particular kinds of harm that came from these recruitment processes. By bringing together two lesser studied imperial cases—the US Army and the German East African colonial army (Schutzruppe)—we show that there is still much to learn about relationships between masculinity, households and kinship ties, and the violence of imperial conquest.6 Most importantly, we posit that the history of soldiering for empire must account for these familial, domestic, and affective dimensions of masculinity in the making of colonial troops. The violence they committed in the name of empire cannot be fully understood without taking this into consideration.7 While the Apaches and the askaris occupied shared ground as “martial races” in service of colonial powers, their experiences, of course, were not identical.8 Studying their enlistment processes, army experiences, and the tensions of racialization, exposes how colonialism produced certain forms of violence in the American West and German East Africa. It also shows

12

IN SERVICE OF EMPIRES …

255

that this violence was coproduced by Apaches and askaris whose interests were intricately connected to the success or failure of colonial projects.

Colonial Enlistment: Masculinity, Voluntarism, and Preparation for Violence Recalling his initiation into the US Army in 1873, Joshy, a Western Apache, evoked a gruesome aspect of Apache scouts’ work: they were “sent to kill and cut off heads of those chiefs who did not want to bring their people at San Carlos.” Following an aggressive military campaign in central Arizona, the US Army wanted to send a message to Apaches who asserted their independence by refusing their forced removal to a new reservation at San Carlos, Arizona. By having the Apache scouts kill noncooperative leaders, and displaying their heads at the reservation agency, the US Army sought to instill terror and compliance among Apaches. Another Western Apache enlistee, Walter Hooke, noted how the Apache enlistees at this time “killed their own relatives because they were mean.”9 Both of these men subsequently reenlisted several times, serving short spells, usually of six months, at a time. The army used Apaches against other Apaches, mostly in offensive operations, including pursuit and skirmishing. Some engaged their own relatives, while others clashed against Apaches with whom they felt no bond. In all, hundreds of Apache men served in the army in the wars that lasted until the 1886 removal of Chiricahua Apaches to Florida. The army needed the Apaches’ military skills in desert warfare to suppress Apache independence, and to force them off their lands so that settlers could occupy them. Many Apaches found the idea of army enlistment appealing, because it suited their notions of manliness, compensated for their lost independence, helped their families survive dire times, and enhanced their personal status. Yet equally obviously their options were severely limited by colonial conquest. Made to choose between reservation life and war against the US, the army offered a third way. A few years later, on another continent, the aspiring German empire also required a small army to realize its expansive ambitions in what would become German East Africa.10 Beginning in 1889, German officers assembled this army (the Wissmanntruppe, named after its founder, Hermann von Wissmann) by recruiting men from disparate locations, including Egypt and Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique).11 Recruits were also drawn from soldiers employed by the German East Africa

256

J. LAHTI AND M. R. MOYD

Company (GEAC), which had laid the groundwork for Germany’s colonial interests in the region. Collectively, these recruits became known as askaris, a Kiswahili, Arabic, and Turkish word meaning soldier, police, or guard, which was widely used by colonial armies across eastern and northeastern Africa. The immediate impetus for these soldiers’ rapid recruitment emerged from Germany’s decision to intervene militarily in a worsening conflict between local African coastal elites resisting persistent GEAC encroachments on their interests—economic, religious, and sociocultural.12 Like their Apache counterparts in the United States, these men joined the German colonial army because it afforded them opportunities to earn steady income, secure their status vis-à-vis other colonized populations, and affirm their masculinity through martiality and violence. As the former askari Ali Kalikilima explained to a British colonial official in the late 1940s, “When the Germans called for volunteers to become soldiers I felt I was already used to such a life and enlisted for two reasons— firstly, I was ready for a change and secondly, I believed greater freedoms would come of this new position.”13 While he did not specify what these freedoms were, his subsequent narrative about his time in the Schutzruppe affirms that his desire for higher status and the ability to continue demonstrating his manhood through violence motivated him to fight for the Germans. Over the roughly twenty-five years of the Schutztruppe’s existence, askaris created a corporate identity based on their shared training and recognition that the organization and perhaps more importantly, their officers, would protect their socio-economic interests and status. As noted above, like the Apaches, askaris were motivated to fight for the German colonizers for family reasons.14 Unlike the Apaches though, their sense of family or kinship was less connected to a specific place. Instead, the askari families were often as mobile as the soldiers themselves, accompanying them on campaigns and doing much of the logistical work that made it possible for their columns to stay in the field.15 Kin mattered to the askaris, though perhaps not in exactly the same ways as they did to many Apache soldiers in the US Army. In both the US West and German East Africa, armies sought to bring diverse populations and the expansive geographies they inhabited under their control. The Apache homeland in the US Southwest (southern Arizona and New Mexico) was a land of deserts and jagged mountain ranges, claimed from Mexico by the United States in the mid-1800s in a short, one-sided war. The region had never been under Mexico’s full

12

IN SERVICE OF EMPIRES …

257

control, though, and was characterized by intricate networks of amity and enmity between vibrant Hispanic and Native American communities, foremost among them the many groups—Chiricahuas, Western Apaches, Mescaleros, and Jicarillas—the outsiders dubbed “Apaches.” Engaging in a prolonged conflict against the independent Apaches, the US Army sought a monopoly of violence through diplomatic overtures and campaigns of extermination. Then, during the reservation era (1870s–1880s), they conducted military operations designed to hunt down and subjugate free Apache cells, forcing these mountain peoples to abandon their home ranges and become reservation dwellers.16 Similarly, the lands Germany claimed in East Africa encompassed numerous peoples who spoke different languages, practiced different religions, and made their livings in different ways. The Germans came to occupy and settle lands that ranged from the fertile mountainous terrain of the Kilimanjaro region, to the arid central steppe regions, to lakeside settlements around Victoria Nyanza and Lake Tanganyika, to forests, riverine areas, and highlands. Its long coastline linked many peoples to wider oceanic and global networks of intellectual, religious, and economic exchange. Long established caravan routes connected extensive trading interests from the Great Lakes region to the coast. Throughout the 1890s, askari units were stationed at military outposts across the territory, and their numerous campaigns and expeditions meant that some askaris traversed a variety of these different landscapes, encountering many different Tanzanians. The more experience they gained through soldiering, the more their commanders valued them. The label “askari” functioned almost like an ethnic identifier, although askaris came from different ethnolinguistic backgrounds. The question of whether or not soldiers “volunteered” for service cries out for more nuance than that term connotes. Askaris were generally not conscripted into the Schutztruppe. This was because the Germans paid them relatively high salaries that placed them at the top of the hierarchy of colonial employees. The Schutztruppe also granted them significant socioeconomic status, ensuring that they had authority over other Africans they encountered in everyday situations. They wore uniforms, carried firearms, and led expeditions on their own. Schutztruppe officers rarely had to worry about keeping up their ranks’ numbers.17 Men signed up to become askari because it reinforced their claims to respectable manhood, assured them upward mobility, and connected them to colonial authority in powerful ways. It is important to note though that their

258

J. LAHTI AND M. R. MOYD

perceived voluntarism was also tempered by the ways that colonialism closed off other paths to respectability that men of previous generations might have pursued. No one forced them to do this work, but few other options yielded the same benefits within a nascent capitalist colonial socioeconomic structure. They exercised agency, but it was “agency in tight corners,” as historian John Lonsdale put it.18 Apaches also became soldiers voluntarily, though the conditions of their voluntarism differed from those of the askaris. Their continuing relationships to Apache kin, US Army needs, and their martial traditions made their experiences as “volunteers” more immediate and contingent than the askaris’ paths to service. Apaches did not have a political apparatus or social organization tying them all together as a single polity. Instead, the Apaches consisted of several independent cells, of flexible and dynamic groupings of families, local groups, bands, and groups. A minority of them were affiliated through clan membership. There was thus no Apache army per se, and no unified Apache resistance against the US. In addition, joining the US Army was a tempting option, which young men approached as a practical way to fight poverty and fulfill gender roles. They did not typically view it as treachery against family or kin. But it was sometimes seen as such when close relatives fought each other. Often enlistment was a reaction to restrictions caused by the US regime as it imposed reservation life on the Apaches. In the mid-1870s, the US federal government thought it could better control Chiricahua and Western Apaches by moving all of them to one reservation at San Carlos. This US policy proved disastrous. Apaches traumatized by years of US aggression felt caged at San Carlos. They faced arbitrary punishments, violent quarrels, hunger, and diseases. Hopelessness became chronic as white reservation administrators misappropriated rations and funds meant for the Apaches. Government also sought to recast Apache men as yeoman farmers. Reservation life, obviously, came with severe limitations on hunting and a total ban on free movement. This created a situation where it was impossible for Apache men to live up to their gender roles unless they joined the army. Jason Betzinez, a Chiricahua, was certain that if the Apaches on the reservation “had been set at some activity in which they were interested or experienced they would have been happy and would have exhibited great exertion. This is shown by the zeal in which some of our Apaches enlisted…they were as happy as bird dogs turned loose in a field full of quail.” Apache men were hunters

12

IN SERVICE OF EMPIRES …

259

and fighters, whose sense of status and manhood relied on independent movement and martial skills.19 Apache military culture included strong traditions of war and raiding, which generated economic prosperity, masculine honor, and a sense of supremacy over competitors. Trained from an early age, there were few or no other options for Apaches wanting to gain standing as men in their communities. Under the direction of veterans, they underwent a systematic training program in their own bands designed to produce skilled individuals able to provide for and protect their communities against outside threats, whether from other Indians (like the O’dham), Mexicans, or US settlers and army. The regimen involved endurance training like running and climbing as well as wrestling and practice fights to improve muscle strength and coordination. Riding, weapons crafting and use, as well as training on simulated combat scenarios and lessons on natural bounty and terrain were also part of the curriculum. Training also grew steadily more challenging, culminating in the dikohe trials during which a youngster, by excelling in four raids, proved he had what it took to become a man. Furthermore, proficient warriors continuously honed their skills, learning special martial qualities. In turn, they also trained youngsters in military skills, preparing the next generation of soldiers.20 For young Apache men, army work represented an avenue to continue their training to respectable manhood. Using his first enlistment as a substitute for the dikohe trials, the Western Apache John Rope acted as an “apprentice” in the mid-1870s. In the army he was watched over and trained by his older cousin, who later extolled Rope’s abilities: he worked hard in camp, assisted the older fighters, and never slowed down the group. In other words, he behaved as a successful dikohe should. For older men, the army provided an opening to build their status in the highly egalitarian Apache society, where individual initiative and behavior, not any hereditary position, brought or took away a man’s standing. Men could even use army service to claim leadership roles in their own communities. One Chiricahua summed it aptly: “being chosen as scouts was a recognition of a warrior’s ability to fight…Scouts were admired and envied by other men.”21 Part of the army’s allure came from the income it offered Apache men and their families as their communities struggled with dire poverty on the reservations. The income, in turn, had a direct impact on a man’s community standing. The army gave Apache recruits the same pay as white and black enlisted cavalrymen, at least $13 per month. Yet, they usually also

260

J. LAHTI AND M. R. MOYD

received food, clothing, guns, ammunition, and other equipment such as blankets and canteens. Some Apaches got extra compensation if using their own horses while in service. Most spent their earnings immediately on necessities like food, clothing, utensils, and stock for their families. Taking care of their families was the first priority of the enlistees. Furthermore, Apache soldiers often had the opportunity to confiscate enemy property in the field, thus increasing their earnings. Horses especially were valuable and useful commodities. Apache men with means were expected to be generous to those in need in their community. Army service provided the means for Apaches to demonstrate their largesse, and to gain status accordingly. To secure their status, some Apache recruits even sent for sheep and horses all the way from California, which allowed them to raise livestock, providing them with long-term wealth and standing.22 The askaris’ reasons for becoming soldiers resembled those of the Apaches, though their paths into the German colonial army followed a different model. Recruited from different locations with vastly different military backgrounds and traditions, the askaris’ identity was not primarily rooted in ethnolinguistic groups or characteristics. Rather, they forged a new corporate military identity as they carried out the violent conquest of Tanzania. Sudanese, Shangaan, Swahili, Nyamwezi and others brought with them different skills, aptitudes, strengths, and readiness to comply with colonial military structures, practices, and training regimens. In the end, those who succeeded were the ones who the Germans felt they could consistently rely on. In other words, they became askari through colonial military training and the numerous violent military campaigns in which they participated. Officers gave commands in German, but everyday conversation among soldiers was in Kiswahili, the regional lingua franca which German administrators promoted for the purposes of governance. It is true that in German officers’ eyes, their supposed ethnic attributes were never fully subsumed under a holistic askari identity. But in the historical sources it becomes difficult to discern any real differences between different askari after the mid-1890s. The only exception was that of the “Sudanese” or “Nubi” troops who had been recruited in Egypt, and who came into the Schutztruppe with extensive military experience due to their prior service in the Anglo-Egyptian army during the Mahdi wars.23 They were older, combatexperienced, and perhaps importantly for the early phase of German military operations, they were outsiders to German East Africa. They spoke Arabic and perhaps other northeastern African languages. They were

12

IN SERVICE OF EMPIRES …

261

Muslims who some described as fanatical. They were often described as stoic, perhaps a feature of their relative age and experience, but attributed to their Sudaneseness by their officers. Throughout the period of German rule in East Africa, Schutztruppe officers held up the Sudanese troops as paragons of military discipline and effectiveness. The Schutztruppe’s corporate identity included a finely honed sense that Sudanese troops were natural leaders, calm under pressure, whereas the rank-and-file were dependable, knowledgeable, and skilled troops who could be counted on for stamina and battlefield effectiveness. They were good troops, but not without flaws, despite German insistence on their military superiority. For the askari, aspirations to respectable manhood influenced recruits to join the colonial army because it allowed them to maintain and expand their households—a key marker of having achieved masculine adulthood and community standing. They went to war for the colonizers because doing so allowed them to provide for their existing families. Warfare also gave them opportunities to expand their households through incorporation or seizure of women and children. For Schutztruppe askari, the decision to become a colonial soldier enabled the pursuit of respectability, as manifested in large households, relative wealth and status, and a measure of authority within colonial society. It was not the only available path to respectability for African men under colonial rule. But in German East Africa, it was the most lucrative. And it provided them with a degree of prestige among the colonizers, as well as for some East Africans who came to view them as representatives of the way forward under colonialism. The authority they exercised in the name of the colonizers also secured their status into their old age. In theory, it also laid the groundwork for intergenerational wealth and status. The German empire’s demise at the end of World War I interrupted that process for most askari and ex-askari. But in 1914, at the war’s outset, the askari occupied a distinct elite status within colonial socio-economic hierarchies.

A Sharp Military Instrument: Recruitment and the Labor of Soldiering In both the western United States and in German East Africa, colonizing armies enlisted Indigenous or African men, respectively, for similar purposes. In both cases, colonial officers built armies tasked with defeating resistance to colonial expansion, and to securing and administering these territories in the aftermath of military conquest. But whereas

262

J. LAHTI AND M. R. MOYD

the US Army employed Apache soldiers primarily against other Apaches, in German East Africa, the askaris’ socio-cultural or ethnolinguistic backgrounds played little role in how colonial officers deployed them in warfare against East Africans. Nevertheless, Apaches and askaris came into colonial military service from backgrounds that elevated certain martial qualities to the forefront of masculine identity. Their martial identities also shaped both how their officers perceived them, and how they saw themselves as men. In 1871, General George Crook, who was commanding Arizona troops at the time, started hiring Apaches systematically. Thinking white soldiers could not defeat the Apaches in desert and mountain warfare, Crook was a firm believer in the effectiveness of using Apaches against other Apaches. He hired Apaches to hunt, wear down, and strike at the free Apaches, to apply constant pressure, thinking that only Apaches could succeed in this task. Furthermore, the more intimately those he hired knew those they pursued, the better it was for Crook. He thought this would fragment the Apache communities, disintegrate the resistance, thus reducing the numbers of men willing to fight against the US. He also counted on the profound psychological effects the Apaches would experience if their own kinsmen pursued them, making them more likely to surrender due to fear and sustained stress levels.24 The recruitment logics employed by the founders of the German colonial army were first and foremost the result of practical exigencies of imperial expansion. The Wissmanntruppe’s recruitment strategy in its initial phase came from the need to rapidly assemble a force to confront armed resistance to German encroachment on East African coastal elites’ authority and wealth.25 Wissmann and other German officers recruited the first contingent of troops from sites where they expected to find large numbers of militarily experienced men. One contingent, the “Sudanese” or “Nubi” troops described above, had extensive training and experience in the Anglo-Egyptian military, but had been released from service and were living in dire circumstances in Cairo when Wissmann came looking for recruits. Another officer traveled to Portuguese East Africa to recruit men they referred to as “Zulus,” referencing another potent version of military masculinity that was distinctly different from the Sudanese version.26 The fact that these men were not Zulus, but Shangaan, mattered little to the German officers’ main objective, which was to recruit men who could mobilize quickly to German East Africa to fight against coastal leader Abushiri.27

12

IN SERVICE OF EMPIRES …

263

The early Shangaan recruits never quite measured up to German expectations of soldierliness. Perhaps more importantly, the Germans never measured up to Shangaan ideals of leadership. After their initial stints in the Schutztruppe, they returned to Portuguese East Africa, and the Germans no longer recruited from that region. The new rank-and-file that began to develop in German East Africa in the mid-1890s came from the Nyamwezi, Sukuma, and Manyema, who came from societies and cultures that elevated particular masculine qualities to the forefront. They emerged from traditions of long-distance porterage, elephant hunting, and regional armies that translated well to Schutztruppe military needs and ideals. Another contingent of troops came from the German East Africa Company’s small retinues, referred to generally as “Swahili”, but which incorporated men from different backgrounds. They too had experience of working within European-led formations, but were likely not as well-trained or organized as the Sudanese troops. Later, as it became clear that recruiting from such distant sites as Egypt and Mozambique was both impractical and increasingly impossible, the Schutztruppe turned to recruitment from within, or in close proximity to, German East Africa. In this way, African soldiers began to construct a sense of themselves as askaris, with specific patronage ties to German officers. They carefully cultivated these ties, ensuring that the troops were well-paid, uniformed, and invested with considerable authority in day-to-day interactions with other Africans living with colonial rule. Askaris’ and Apaches’ work resembled that of other soldiers engaged in wars of imperial conquest in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Called “scouts” in army discourses and official records, Apaches performed much the same labor tasks as regular troops, meaning white or African-American soldiers. Some were attached as individuals to regular units, while others served in their own racially segregated companies. Always commanded by white regular army officers, the composition of Apache companies varied from those where the workers came from one particular Apache community to mixed outfits. Usually anywhere from 100 to 200 Apaches were employed at any given time, but during crisis the numbers peaked at four hundred men. On average, the Apaches comprised an approximate 5–10% of the army’s strength in the Southwest. Askaris were also organized into companies, which were led by German officers and NCOs. Senior askaris assumed significant leadership over rank-and-file askaris, especially when on campaign, but at no time could

264

J. LAHTI AND M. R. MOYD

an askari command white officers or NCOs. Until 1914, when recruitment for WWI swelled the ranks of the Schutztruppe, the organization never had more than about 2000 men. Depending on the state of conflict in German East Africa as the Schutztruppe sought to secure its claims to the territory, auxiliary troops recruited from allied (or at least not hostile) polities supplemented the askaris. Army officers such as Crook ranked Apaches high in individual military skills, considering them a “martial race” far superior to the other indigenous peoples in the Southwest, such as Navajos and the O’odham. And this preference showed in their hiring practices, with Apaches preferred whenever possible over Indians of other tribes, who they did not believe possessed the skill and endurance necessary to combat the Apaches.28 Seeking to exploit their individual skills, officers did not ask Apaches to perform drill, to wear uniforms (although they could wear army uniforms if they wanted), or to do manual labor, which white and African-American soldiers were expected to do. As for military training, there was a chronic shortage of it in the army spread throughout the trans-Mississippi West in general and the Apache recruits proved no exception. In short, they had very little or any training while enlisted. The army had its reasons, though. In the field Apache recruits were actually encouraged to behave much like an Apache raiding party would. Many officers, most significantly Crook, who commanded the US troops in Arizona from 1871 to 1875 and again from 1882 to 1886, felt convinced that the Apaches’ sense of independence was their greatest asset. Junior officers commanding Apaches units were expected to give only general instructions and let the Apaches do their work in their own way. They walked, ran, or rode horses as they saw fit, advancing at their own pace and using their own formations. When hiring Apaches the army looked for short-term gains, a sharp instrument to assert its authority, not institutional incorporation or long-term association. On the other hand, many Apaches did not even want permanent employment. Enlisting numerous times between 1877 and 1885, John Rope did not want to work for the army all the time, but opted to stay at home, fulfilling his domestic duties, for months between enlistments.29 By contrast, many askaris stayed with the Schutztruppe for extended periods, turning their enlistments into careers. This characteristic gave the Schutztruppe some stability in training, which in turn gave the small army some measure of consistency. And because it was a relatively small army, recruitment was not difficult for the Schutztruppe until World War I, when

12

IN SERVICE OF EMPIRES …

265

the German situation changed drastically, leading to desertions. They then used conscription to fill the ranks. Had the Schutztruppe continued to exist after World War I, it is likely that the askaris would have further developed in this direction, with their sons or other male dependents taking their places.

Inside Out, Outside In: Soldiers, Violence, and Belonging Soldiering requires the willingness to use violence against combatants and non-combatants on short notice, and without equivocation. African men became askari expecting violence to be a defining factor in their everyday lives as they carried out the colonizers’ military objectives of defeating African peoples who defended their societies against the German invasion. Colonial stations (bomas), where askaris were housed, and where local colonial administrations carried out their work, were attractive sites to people from surrounding areas. People came to the stations for work, to attend judicial proceedings, to request assistance from colonial officials, to attend celebratory events, and more. The bomas thus became “islands of rule,” where people participated to varying degrees in the making of everyday colonialism.30 The askaris were in many ways the key practitioners of colonial rule, since their military performances in the bomas—field exercises, parades, drill, and target practice—were spectacles of authority.31 These performances of power simultaneously underscored the Schutzruppe’s military might in different ways, all of which conveyed to observers the potential costs of challenging the Germans, but also the potential benefits of aligning with them. Unlike the askaris, who depended on continual warfare as a way of enriching themselves and growing their households, many Apaches thought that they could use army service to bring chronic warfare to an end, thereby protecting their loved ones from further violence. Apaches saw the futility of armed conflict, and used the service to enable their relatives fighting the Americans to surrender. They also hoped that the end of fighting would ease federal control, giving them more autonomy inside the reservation.32 Yet, army service also created much animosity within the Apache communities. There were Chiricahuas who considered those Chiricahuas who worked in the army as traitors and cowards who in a time of crisis abandoned their own kinsmen. They even identified the red headband Apache soldiers wore as a symbol of servitude. Others held

266

J. LAHTI AND M. R. MOYD

that men like Geronimo, who continued fighting against the Americans, only brought further destruction and misery to Apache lives.33 In German East Africa, askaris caused havoc during their frequent military campaigns, as well as in their everyday coercive roles in colonial administration around the bomas. The often deadly violence they perpetrated against East African peoples gave them deserved reputations as destructive strangers, or outsiders, to be avoided at all costs. Their reputation for seizing goods, livestock, and people while on expeditions or campaigns preceded them, causing people to hide or flee in order to avoid them. Regarded as outsiders, African communities understood the askari as practitioners of arbitrary violence and expropriation. It was thus best to stay out of their way.34 This perception of the askaris as dangerous existed alongside others that encouraged people to join their households for protection in a precarious socio-economic and socio-political period.35 Being in proximity to askari as household members offered vulnerable people ways to survive difficult circumstances, and perhaps to improve their socioeconomic standing by virtue of their connection to the colonial centers.36 These possibilities too were fraught with dangers, since askari households could be difficult spaces within which to live and work. Soldiers brought violence into their homes. But in societies that prioritized kinship and connection, it was often better to be part of a household than not. Continuities in askari military service could also mean a certain kind of stability for household members, who in turn played an important part in projecting askaris’ status as “big men.”37 By contrast, the US Army’s lack of interest in fully incorporating the Apaches, coupled with the short-term employment periods created a confusing situation where, as one officer accurately noted, “the scouts of one year would be turning the Territory topsy-turvy the next, & the officer commanding a company of scouts would be pursuing a party of ex-scouts with an assortment of ex-hostiles.”38 Thus, there was room for the Apaches to move between the army and the Apache groups fighting against it, and back again.39 The betrayal of army service became devastatingly clear in September 1886 when the federal government opted to remove all Chiricahuas to Florida as prisoners of war. Unable to destroy or capture the free Chiricahuas under Geronimo, this plan ensured the Chiricahuas would never again pose a military threat to the US regime. In the reservation white soldiers disarmed the Chiricahuas and put them on a train toward Florida.

12

IN SERVICE OF EMPIRES …

267

Most of these Chiricahua men had recently worked in the army. Indeed, some were still employed by the army, even as they were being removed to Florida. Chiricahua lives fell apart: “We didn’t know where we were to be taken…Some thought we were going to be taken to the ocean and thrown in. Some thought we were going to be killed in some other way,” one Chiricahua later acknowledged.40 Chiricahuas would remain prisoners of war for twenty-seven years. This precariousness shows the army’s fraught attitude concerning its Apache recruits. Some forms of social comradery certainly existed within these military communities. Apache and white troops sometimes gambled or drank together. Yet white troops also treated Apache recruits with racist disdain. For example, white officers and enlisted men sometimes renamed Apache soldiers. Unlike in boarding schools, alteration of names was not yet permanent, and did not mark any upward mobility in terms of status. Names also did not resemble proper Christian names, but were rather loosely devised structures. Nicknames whites gave to indigenous soldiers included Nosey, Washington, Charlie, Indian Chicken, Slim Jim, Rowdy, Yuma Bill, Jacko, Popcorn, Whiskey, Dutchy, Peaches, and Deadshot.41 In renaming Apache soldiers whites sought to create and retain racial hierarchies and assert their own superiority. One soldier wrote that when giving names whites “made pets” of the Apache troopers, thus effectively reducing Apaches in the colonial hierarchies and also questioning the Apaches’ manliness.42 The askari experience was quite different. Especially among Nyamwezi and Sukuma recruits, longstanding nicknaming practices gave askaris ways to simultaneously tout certain martial masculine characteristics, while also potentially masking other names.43 Nicknaming practices among Nyamwezi laborers who worked on sisal plantations allowed them to evade the colonizers’ attempts to manage their movements for work. If porters or laborers wanted to retain autonomy over their movements, using a nickname in colonial work registers was a way to protect themselves and their mobility.44 Rank-and-file Nyamwezi and Sukuma askaris may have continued such practices. And in a reversal of Apache nicknaming practices, the askaris often took part in the naming of German officers. These names simultaneously conveyed comradeship between the askari and German officers’ and ridiculed them. In some ways, the askaris could use these naming practices subversively to create spaces for doing what soldiers across time and space enjoy—making fun of their superiors while also maintaining decorum and rank hierarchy.45

268

J. LAHTI AND M. R. MOYD

Also unlike the Apache, the Schutztruppe organization remained quite stable in terms of recruitment needs through the beginning of the East African campaign of World War I in 1914. Schutztruppe officers took care of their troops, ensuring that they remained at the top of colonial society in terms of status, wealth, and authority. But starting in late 1916, the Schutztruppe began experiencing military setbacks that radically changed the army’s ability to keep soldiers alive and healthy, undermining loyalty among the ranks. Desertions increased, with some soldiers throwing in their lot with the British instead, reckoning that they would fare better as part of the King’s African Rifles instead of the Schutztruppe. By the end of the war in November 1918, the remaining askaris had lost everything. And with Germany’s loss of its colonies in the Versailles settlement, the askaris were left without the officer-patrons who had previously ensured their status in colonial society. The corporate identity they had forged over two decades continued among groups of veterans living in Tanganyika, the British successor colony to German East Africa, but their status disappeared, except among themselves and their former German officers back in Germany.46 While subjecting the Apaches to betrayal and racialization, some army officers considered the Apaches essential to army success. But others considered them useless, a racial insult to white pride. Their loudest spokesman, Crook, was not afraid to say that “in operating against them [Apaches] the only hope of success lies in using their own methods, and their own people.”47 Downplaying the abilities of regular—meaning white and African-American—troops did not sit well with many white officers and soldiers, most of whom saw Apaches as a single race, and thus could not comprehend why any of them had enlisted. In their view, Apache recruits had betrayed their own race, and thus had no place among “civilized” soldiers. Alternatively, they had remained true to their people all along and would thus never fight against their own. Either way, hiring Apaches had been a terrible mistake. After Crook was dismissed from the Arizona command in Spring 1886, in part because of trusting his Apache scouts, his replacement General Nelson Miles expressed no confidence in the Apache recruits, questioning their loyalties. It was hardly surprising then that Miles, ordered by Washington to use white troops, did not hire many Apaches to the army.48 Schutztruppe officers and colonial government officials revered the askaris, but European settlers who found the askaris’ levels of authority disconcerting did not. Askaris typically did not have authority over white

12

IN SERVICE OF EMPIRES …

269

settlers, but the soldiers’ relative mobility, status, and fearlessness made settlers nervous. Although the historical record for tracing such encounters is thin, enough examples exist to demonstrate that the askaris and settlers were often at odds with each other, mainly because white settlers viewed them as an affront to German masculine authority in colonial society. Interestingly, the colonial government sometimes indicated their preference for bolstering askari authority over the complaints of settlers who found the askaris’ power unacceptable. In confrontations between askari and Germans, the government sought to protect the askaris on one hand, while also trying to assuage white settlers’ anxieties about the African troops. Colonial officials understood that maintaining colonial rule over this vast territory required a dedicated army of askaris, and they were unwilling to risk losing their loyalty to settler vagaries.49

Conclusion Soldiering for US and German empires brought with it a range of benefits for the men who agreed to fight, but there were also significant costs. The Apaches occupied a more precarious position in certain ways, since their ties to Apache kin also tied them to the vulnerabilities of reservation life and forced removal. The Apaches’ standing as colonial subjects in the US Empire was if anything affirmed by their military service. The askaris, by virtue of having created a corporate identity that superseded ethnolinguistic roots as meaningful markers, counted on their officers to support them and their households. Yet while empowered during the German reign, they were also colonial subjects, as World War I made the askari vulnerable in new ways. But in the two preceding decades, once they had committed to fighting for the Germans, they usually did not have to worry about the safety of their households in the same ways the Apaches did. Their families often accompanied them on campaigns. Moreover, the askaris benefited from extensive military campaigns, since they provided opportunities to capture women and children who they then incorporated into their households, thereby increasing their wealth and status. The costs of the askaris’ ever-expanding households came at the expense of the East Africans who the askaris violated during the Schutztruppe’s numerous campaigns. For the Apaches, enlisting in the colonial army also meant taking charge of their own destiny. But unlike the askari, the Apaches enlisted

270

J. LAHTI AND M. R. MOYD

in a time when an invading colonial power sought to destroy their independence. Reservation life meant white control, forced assimilation, and hunger and poverty, whereas freedom meant fighting against the colonial regime and resulted in death and suffering. The askari did not face these kind of choices. But for Apaches working for the US Army offered a third way, a possibility to end war, save relatives, confirm ideas of manhood, achieve status, and ease poverty and starvation. In other words, soldiering in the army allowed Apaches to survive amidst the intrusions brought in their lives by colonialism. Still, their freedom was partial, restricted, and potentially dangerous. Working for the colonizers did not give the Apaches any rights—such as citizenship—in colonial society, nor did it save enlistees from forced removal or reservation life. In many ways, the Apaches were at the bottom of hierarchies in the US Army as a shortterm expandable workforce. While families could gain more nutrition and better security through it, military service could also break families apart, cause divisions with kin and clan, and result in bitter feuds. The army tried to control the Apache workforce by giving Apaches certain privileges, but retaining others for the white and black soldiers. The army made the rules, but Apaches not only used the work for their own aims, but created space for movement unintended by colonizers when moving back and forth between the army, reservation, and free Apaches. For African men who became askaris, joining the Schutztruppe helped them salvage or reclaim a form of military masculinity, securing at the same time a relatively lucrative path through colonialism. They used the wealth they accumulated through war spoils and salaries to build respectable lives for themselves and their household members. They were still colonial subjects, but they wielded considerable authority within the colonial socio-economic landscape. They could never transcend the hierarchies of race and rank that ordered colonial society and politics, but they could use their association with the colonial state to continue using coercion and violence to their benefit, even into their retirement. Their rapid demise as a social group after Germany’s defeat in World War I illustrates that the askaris’ success was tied to their officer-patrons’ abilities to serve as their advocates. After World War I, this became increasingly difficult. Many ex-Schutztruppe askari lived out their post-World War I lives in a state of destitution and dependence indicative of their weaker status within British Mandate Tanganyika. With few exceptions, they were no longer “big men.”

12

IN SERVICE OF EMPIRES …

271

What does the Apache and askari experience reveal about US and German colonialism? In the US West and in German East Africa colonial power was secured and maintained through the use of colonized men as soldiers. Military service both affirmed and blurred the lines between the colonized and the colonizers in both places. It led to complicated relations with restricted opportunities and limited freedoms, to the interplay of empowerment and impediment. For the Apaches and askaris, masculinities made precarious by colonialism provide a common thread for thinking about what colonial military service meant to them. On one level, we can make a rather simple argument that these men demonstrated agency by taking up colonial military service in order to earn money, prove their manhood, and to protect or build kinship ties. But how are we to value agency of this sort? What does it mean to recognize the precarity of men whose value came from their supposed martial attributes while at the same time recognizing the harm they caused as part of colonial armies? The differences in Apache and askari soldiers’ histories point to the value of viewing them not simply within the contexts of their army units, but as actors in the transimperial histories of colonial violence that unfolded in the second half of the nineteenth century. By analyzing them as soldiers with complicated relationships to their officers and kin, we can see them striving to be worthy men. At the same time, by analyzing them as violent actors in histories of colonial conquest, the terrible costs of their decisions to serve as soldiers of empire became all too clear.

Notes 1. For colonial armies and indigenous soldiers, see David Killingray and David Omissi, eds., Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers c. 1700–1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig, eds., Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia (New York: Routledge, 2006). 2. See life histories of Sudanese men who had been captured or given as tribute in their youth. After passing through a number of other martial roles, they ended up in the Anglo-Egyptian army, where they had long careers. See for example Ali Effendi Gifoon, “Memoirs of a Soudanese Soldier (Ali Effendi Gifoon),” trans. Percy Machell, Cornhill Magazine n.s. 1 (1896), 30–40, 175–187, 326–338, 484–492. 3. Michelle Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014), 64–68.

272

J. LAHTI AND M. R. MOYD

4. Askari is a Kiswahili, Arabic, and Turkish word for soldier, police, or guard. Askari came from many different ethnolinguistic backgrounds, and although they were widely referred to by this name, it does not denote an ethnic or other social identity. Rather, it referenced their corporate identity as colonial soldiers in the Schutztruppe. We do not capitalize it here, since in English, nouns are not capitalized unless they are proper nouns. 5. Micol Seigel, Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 9–13. See also Madiha Tahir, “Violence Work and the Police Order,” Public Culture 31.3 (September 2019), 409–418. 6. The full name of the German colonial army in German East Africa was Die Kaiserliche Schutztruppe für Deutsch-Ostafrika. We have abbreviated it to Schutztruppe here. 7. This essay partially draws from our previous works. See Moyd, Violent Intermediaries; Janne Lahti, Cultural Construction of Empire: The U.S. Army in Arizona and New Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), chap. 7; Janne Lahti, “Colonized Labor: Apaches and Pawnees as Army Workers,” Western Historical Quarterly 39 (Autumn 2008), 283– 302. 8. On the idea of martial races in African colonial armies, see Myles Osborne, Ethnicity and Empire in Kenya: Loyalty and Martial Race among the Kamba, c.1800 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See also Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 9. Quotes from Joshu interview, 247, and Walter Hooke interview, 48, both folder 34, box 3, Grenville Goodwin Papers, Arizona State Museum, Tucson (hereafter GP, ASM). 10. At its fullest extent, German East Africa comprised what is now mainland Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi. 11. The Wissmanntruppe became the Kaiserliche Schutztruppe für DeutschOstafrika in 1891. 12. For background on the Coastal Rebellion of 1888–1890, see Steven Fabian, Making Identity on the Swahili Coast: Urban Life, Community, and Belonging in Bagamoyo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 175–210. 13. Bror Urme MacDonell, Mzee Ali: The Biography of an African SlaveRaider Turned Askari and Scout (Johannesburg: 30 Degrees South Publishers, 2006), 85. Ali Kalikilima was the son of an elite Nyamwezi slave raider, who followed in his father’s footsteps, undertaking the same career, until the German invasion of his region disrupted slave trading patterns and processes. Ali Kalikilima’s life history is further analyzed in

12

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

IN SERVICE OF EMPIRES …

273

Michelle Moyd, “‘We Don’t Want to Die for Nothing: Askari at War in German Easte Africa, 1914–1918,” in Santanu Das, ed., Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 90–107. Michelle Moyd, “Making the Household, Making the State: Colonial Military Communities and Labor in German East Africa,” International Labor and Working-Class History 80.1 (2011), 53–76. As an example of women’s roles in the Schutztruppe columns, see Ludwig Deppe, Mit Lettow-Vorbeck durch Afrika (Berlin: August Scherl Verlag, 1919), 122–130. On the US-Apache wars, see Janne Lahti, Wars for Empire: Apaches, the United States, and the Southwest Borderlands (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017); Edwin R. Sweeney, From Cochise to Geronimo: The Chiricahua Apaches, 1874–1886 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010). This changed in the second half of World War I, when the Germans had difficulty filling their ranks. See Moyd, “We don’t want to die for nothing.”. John Lonsdale, “Agency in Tight Corners: Narrative and Initiative in African History,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 13.1 (2000), 5–16. Quote from Jason Betzinez, with Wilbur Sturtevant Nye, I Fought with Geronimo (1959; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 54–55. For Apache views on San Carlos, see also Alchisay et al., “The Apache Story of the Cibicue,” in Peter Cozzens ed., Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865–1890: The Struggle for Apacheria (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2001), 303–310; Eve Ball, In the Days of Victorio: Recollections of a Warm Springs Apache (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970). John Rope interview, folder 33, box 3; Harvey Nash-kin interview, folder 32, box 2 and folder 33, box 3, GP, ASM. Ball, In the Days, 80. On Rope, see Keith H. Basso, ed., from the notes of Grenville Goodwin, Western Apache Raiding and Warfare (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1971), 108. For how the army drew Apache men of various ages, see enlistment papers for “Indian scouts” in Rolls 70–71, M233, Registers of Enlistments in the U.S. Army, Record Group 94, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. For pay, allowances, booty, and status, see Eve Ball, with Nora Henn and Lynda Sanchez, Indeh: An Apache Odyssey (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1980), 47; Basso, Western Apache Raiding, 104–109, 185, 199, 307; John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 221–222.

274

J. LAHTI AND M. R. MOYD

23. Gifoon, “Memoirs of a Soudanese Soldier.” See also Ronald Lamothe, Slaves of Fortune: Sudanese Soldiers & the River War 1896–1898 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2011). 24. On Crook’s views, see George Crook, Resume of Operations against Apache Indians (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887). 25. Fabian, Making Identity on the Swahili Coast, 175–210. 26. Elizabeth Timbs, “The Regiments: Cultural Histories of Zulu Masculinities and Gender Formation in South Africa, 1816–2018,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 2019). 27. Georg Maercker, Unsere Schutztruppe in Ostafrika (Berlin: Karl Siegismund, 1893); G. Richelmann, Meine Erlebnisse in der Wissmann-Truppe (Magdeburg: Creutz’sche Verlangsbuchhandlung, 1892); Hans-Joachim Rafalski, “Die Unteroffiziere in den Kolonialtruppen,” unpublished manuscript, MSg 2/984, p. 164, Bundesarchiv, Germany. See also Moyd, Violent Intermediaries, 60–64. 28. For army views of Navajos and the O’odham as soldiers, see William Shipp, “Captain Crawford’s Last Scout,” in Cozzens, Eyewitnesses, 518; Anonymous, “Early Days in Arizona with the Fifth U.S. Cavalry,” in Cozzens, Eyewitnesses, 144–146; Charles B. Gatewood, “Campaigning against Victorio,” in Cozzens, Eyewitnesses, 214. 29. Janne Lahti, “John Rope,” in Janne Lahti ed., Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands, 1846–1886 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), 197–218. 30. Michael Pesek, Koloniale Herrschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika. Expeditionen, Militär, und Verwaltung seit 1880 (Frankfurt a m: Campus Verlag, 2005), 244–259; Moyd, Violent Intermediaries, 163–166. 31. “Lokales,” Anzeigen für Tanga (Stadt und Bezirk), 24 October 1903; “Was Prinz Adalbert in Tanga gesehen hat. Bilder vom Prinzenbesuch am 13. Februar,” Usambara Post, suppl., 18 February 1905; “Eröffnung der Usambara Eisenbahn in Neu-Moschi am 7. Februar 1912,” Evangelisches Lutherisches Missions Blatt 67.9 (1912), 208–209. 32. Morris E. Opler, Apache Odyssey, A Journey between Two Worlds (1969; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 49; Basso, Western Apache Raiding, 154; Betzinez, I Fought with Geronimo, 50, 121. 33. Ball, In the Days, 80, 154–167, 175–180; Ball, Indeh, 47, 251–252. Samuel L. Kenoi, “A Chiricahua Apache’s Account of the Geronimo Campaign of 1886,” in C.L. Sonnichsen, ed., Geronimo and the End of the Apache Wars (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 72. 34. “Nachrichten aus Myambani: Quartalbericht von Miss. Augustus (4 Quartal 1904),” Evangelisches Lutherisches Missionsblatt 60.7 (1905), 165–166; “The Maji Maji Rising in Majimahuu,” Maji Maji Research Project, no. 6/68/1/1.

12

IN SERVICE OF EMPIRES …

275

35. Marcia Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life Stories from East/Central Africa (New York: Lilian Barber Press, 1993), 185–188. 36. Michelle Moyd, “Bomani: African Soldiers as Colonial Intermediaries in German East Africa, 1890–1914,” in Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang, eds., German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Perspectives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 101–113; Michael Pesek, “The Boma and the Peripatetic Ruler: Mapping Colonial Rule in German East Africa, 1889–1903,” Western Folklore 66.3/4 (2007), 233–258. 37. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries, 4. 38. “Gatewood on Experiences among the Apaches” manuscript (no page numbers), Charles B. Gatewood Collection, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson. 39. For examples, see Betzinez, I Fought with Geronimo, 143–145; Sherry Robinson, Apache Voices: Their Stories of Survival as Told to Eve Ball (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 54, 87–100, 112, 154–157; Ball, Indeh, 47–51, 98–100. 40. Kenoi, “Chiricahua Apache’s Account,” 83–84. 41. Harry Wright, “In the Days of Geronimo,” in Cozzens, Eyewitnesses, 500; Charles King, “On Campaign,” in Cozzens, Eyewitnesses, 165; Leonard Wood, Chasing Geronimo: The Journal of Leonard Wood, May–September 1886, Jack Lane, ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1970), 72; C. B. Benton, ed., “Sgt. Neil Erickson and the Apaches,” Westerners Brand Book (Los Angeles Corral, 1948), 124–125. 42. Charles Elliott, “An Indian Reservation Under General George Crook,” in Cozzens, Eyewitnesses, 413. 43. Gustav Adolf Graf von Götzen, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Aufstand 1905/06 (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1909), 7. 44. Paul Reichard, “Die Wanjamwuesi,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin 24 (1889), 246–260, 304–331; Thaddeus Sunseri, Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), 144. 45. Jane L. Parpart and Marianne Rostgaard, eds., The Practical Imperialist: Letters from a Danish Planter in German East Africa 1888–1906 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 160. 46. Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst, Treu bis in den Tod: Von Deutsch-Ostafrika nach Sachsenhausen: Eine Lebensgeschichte (Berlin: Links, 2007); Michelle Moyd, “Radical Potentials, Conservative Realities: African Veterans of the German Colonial Army in Post-World War I Tanganyika,” First World War Studies 10.1 (2019). 47. Annual Report, Secretary of War, 1883, House Ex. Doc. No. 1, 48th Cong., 1st sess. Serial 2182, 166; Crook, Resume of Operations, 20–22.

276

J. LAHTI AND M. R. MOYD

48. Peter DeMontravel, A Hero to His Fighting Men: Nelson A. Miles, 1839– 1925 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1998), 192–193. 49. For an example, see “Protokolle in der Untersuchungss. gegen Lieutenant Werther,” Basler Afrika Bibliographien transcription, Basel 1995, analyzed in Michelle Moyd, “‘From a Hurt Sense of Honor’: Race, Violence Work, and the Limits of Soldierly Obedience on a Scientific Expedition inGermanEastAfrica, 1896–1897,” Slavery and Abolition 39.3 (August 2018), 579–601. See also G21/592, Strafsache Miersen, Tanzania National Archives, which is further analyzed in Moyd, Violent Intermediaries, 156–160.

CHAPTER 13

Words and Wars of Conquest: The Rhetoric of Annihilation in the American West and the Nazi East Edward B. Westermann

In a recent work examining the influence of US racial legislation on National Socialist Germany’s development of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, James Whitman argued, “the Nazis took a sustained, significant, and sometimes even eager interest in the American example in race law.” He subsequently added, “Nazi lawyers regarded America, not without reason, as the innovative world leader in the creation of racist law; and while they saw much to deplore, they also saw much to emulate.”1 If Nazi judicial bureaucrats looked to the United States in the quest to create a racial state, the impulse of using the United States as an exemplar for policies of race and space reached all the way to Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler. For

I would like to thank my colleague, Billy Kiser, for his insightful comments in the preparation of this chapter. E. B. Westermann (B) Texas A&M University-San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_13

277

278

E. B. WESTERMANN

Hitler and his paladins within the Nazi Party, the experience of the United States served as a benchmark for their own ambitions as they planned for a campaign of conquest and annihilation in Eastern Europe. The broader attraction of the United States for eighteenth and nineteenthcentury German liberals, and, the later Nazi focus, reflected a fascination with “American exceptionalism” based in part on the perceived modernity and technological development of an emerging great power, a goal that characterized Germany’s own ambitions from the Kaiserreich of Imperial Germany into the Third Reich.2 In this sense, generations of German politicians and academics entangled their understanding of Germany’s historical mission with the history of US expansionism.3 By the late 1920s, Hitler, in both his writings and his speeches, repeatedly referenced the United States as a model and a measuring stick of economic power, a fact that he attributed to the conquest of the West with its attendant acquisition of vast land and mineral resources and the subjugation of Native peoples.4 Later, as he prepared for and waged his war of annihilation on the Eastern Front, the Führer repeatedly drew parallels between the Nazi quest for Lebensraum (living space) in the East and the concept of Manifest Destiny and the treatment of Native Americans during the United States expansion into the West. Drawing this comparison in a conversation in October of 1941, Hitler offered his vision of a “German East” populated by former soldiers settled on millions of homesteads and remarked, “Our Mississippi must be the Volga, not the Niger.”5 In his view, a Nazi colonial empire was not to be found in distant colonies, but rather in Eastern Europe and Russia in a “Drang nach Osten” or push to the East. Furthermore, Hitler and other Nazi leaders linked the process of colonization with the concept of “extermination,” a discourse borrowed from their own understanding of the fate of Indians in the United States.6 Using the term “redskins” to describe the peoples of Eastern Europe, Hitler asserted that the American West had been won after the settlers had “shot down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.”7 In Hitler’s imagination, the conquest of the American West provided a precedent for the murderous activities of Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police Heinrich Himmler and his SS and police legions as they swept forward behind the Wehrmacht deep into the Soviet Union, literally murdering millions one bullet at a time.8 The public and military discourse that drove the westward march of the American empire and the displacement of Native Americans provides

13

WORDS AND WARS OF CONQUEST …

279

intriguing parallels with the use of language during the Nazi conquest of the East and the conduct of a racial war of extermination against the region’s Slavic and Jewish populations. This chapter compares this colonial rhetoric in the development and implementation of military strategy in the US West between 1850 and 1890 and in the Nazi East between 1939 and 1945. It evaluates the ways in which the orders and statements of military leaders influenced the attitudes and actions of armed forces charged with the conquest of these two regions. Furthermore, it explores the effects of pejorative and euphemistic language on the conduct of acts of massacre and atrocity in both regions.

Language and Annihilation Acts of conquest, mass violence, and genocide rely on linguistic justifications of the perpetrators in which language provides a rationale for dealing with a “problem” that demands a “solution.” Likewise, the rhetoric that is employed to describe the nature of the alleged problem often contains an inherent justification for the proposed solution. In Mein Kampf , Hitler’s description of Jews as “parasites” seeking the “pestilential adulteration” of German blood framed European Jews as an existential threat to the survival of the German race. Likewise, he identified the Soviet Union, under the “poisonous grip” of “Jewish Bolshevization” as the “mortal enemy” of Germany.9 Obviously, the use of language to generate enemies and conjure existential threats was not unique to Nazi Germany. In a more recent example, Hutu extremists used the term Inyenzi or cockroaches in radio broadcasts for inciting violence against Rwanda’s Tutsi minority prior to and during the genocide in 1994.10 In the early nineteenth century, US policymakers did not frame Native populations in terms of a biological or mortal threat to white settlers, but rather as an impediment to progress in which the racialized language of inferiority provided the justification for dispossession of tribal lands. The pronouncements of Andrew Jackson during his presidency epitomized the use of language as a tool for vindicating acts of force against Native populations in the Southeast. In his First Annual Message to Congress in December 1829, Jackson remarked, “By persuasion and force they [the Native tribes] have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for a while their once terrible names.”11 First, Jackson proposed the “voluntary” emigration of

280

E. B. WESTERMANN

tribes to areas West of the Mississippi River.12 But four years later, the rhetoric of conciliation, humanity, and national honor had been replaced with a call for the forced removal of Indian tribes from the Southeast. Jackson claimed, “They [the tribes] have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.”13 Ultimately, the arguments of racial superiority, “states’ rights,” and economic advantage provided the rationale for removal and resettlement of the “Five Civilized Tribes”—Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles— with the associated consequences of demographic decline and cultural loss that led a contemporary Cherokee tribal elder, Wilma Mankiller, to describe the removal, the “Trail of Tears,” as “our holocaust.”14 In the late nineteenth century, military leaders in the trans-Mississippi West continued to refer to extermination and extinction in their discourses concerning Native populations. However, the rhetoric among political leaders in the East witnessed a fundamental transformation. For example, while still the Commanding General of the Army in 1868, Ulysses S. Grant vowed to protect emigrant routes in the West “even if the extermination of every Indian tribe was necessary to secure such a result.”15 A year later, in his inaugural presidential address to Congress, Grant remarked, “A system which looks towards the extinction of a race is too horrible for a nation to adopt without entailing upon itself the wrath of all Christendom, and without engendering in the citizen a disregard for human life.” Grant continued, “I see no substitute for such a system except in placing all the Indians on large reservations, as rapidly as it can be done, and giving them absolute protections there.”16 In truth, it was Grant’s decision to pursue a “Peace Policy” as part of a renewed effort to promote and expand the existing reservation system that explained his volte face. However, the change of his rhetoric offers one example of the way in which apocalyptic discourse was discarded and refashioned with respect to changing political circumstances.

Language and the Limits of Assimilation In both the East and the West, the use of language created cultural and racial separation between the objects of conquest and those seeking to

13

WORDS AND WARS OF CONQUEST …

281

supplant them. From the Spanish Colonial era through American Westward expansion, the description of Indians as “bárbaros” and “savages” served as an explicit rationale for a multitude of aims including dispossession, “civilization,” assimilation, and extermination.17 In the case of colonial America, the description of the Iroquois and other tribes as “barbarians” provided a potential rationale for atrocity and mass killing and “profoundly shaped” the nature of the conflict between colonists and the Indians. Yet, even in this case, early Americans were “prepared to absorb them if they [the Indians] changed their ways.”18 In short, white and Indian relations in the West were predicated on the belief that the tribes could in fact join the “American project” if they were willing to abandon their cultural and spiritual traditions and agree to become farmers in the Jeffersonian yeoman tradition. In contrast, the Nazi description of Jews and Slavs as “subhumans” created a dynamic in which these groups were specifically excluded from assimilation and incorporation into the socially constructed Aryan Volk. The Nazi linguistic assault against the Jews took over German mass media in the 1930s and involved the “racialization of the category ‘Jew’ and its separation from [the concept of] Germanness.”19 The process of “othering,” or dehumanizing, putative enemies has been and remains a hallmark of warfare and conflict. In both the American West and the Nazi East, this process resulted in the use of apocalyptic imagery and language in dealing with policymakers’ multiple pronouncements on both the “solution of the Indian problem” and “the final solution of the Jewish question.”20 In the United States the use of exterminatory language repeatedly appeared in the writings and utterances of politicians, soldiers, frontiersmen, and journalists. One western reporter writing in 1875 argued against federal policy: “[T]he present Indian policy calls out for ‘Peace! Peace—Christianize the poor unfortunates, treat them with kindness,’ and all that sort of bosh. Bah! I say, turn the dogs of war loose, and drive them off the face of the earth, if they do not behave themselves.”21 Still, such rhetoric was often invoked not as a desired end state, but rather as a situation that had to (or could) be prevented. Several years prior to Grant’s inauguration and the proclamation of his Peace Policy, a New York Times editorial declared, “Many of the western settlers are very anxious for a war of extermination against the Indians, and assert that outrages and atrocities will never cease until this is adopted and ended. But this in itself would be an atrocity of the most gigantic and inexcusable character.”22 In addition to the moral arguments

282

E. B. WESTERMANN

against such a policy, the editorial noted the cost and bloodshed associated with such an undertaking, arguments made all the more powerful in the wake of the death and destruction of the American Civil War. In the case of the East, Hitler and an army of demographic and racial administrators viewed Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union through the lens of colonial fantasy; a potential German “Garden of Eden” in which a new breed of soldier-farmers would extend not only German territory but “precious” German blood into the bountiful Eurasian steppe.23 In Nazi ideology, the German came East as a “holy warrior” with the dual objective of eliminating the Slavic “subhumans” and propagating the Nordic race in a grandiose colonization program devoted to Blut und Boden (blood and soil).24 The American West also was an imagined area in which “intrepid” farmers characterized by Thomas Jefferson “as the chosen people of God” would remake the land and refashion American virtue.25 The West also existed in the minds of US Eastern reformers as a wild and untamed area peopled by “noble savages” or “ignoble savages” both requiring the powers of civilization and Christianity in order to be “raised up.” For American missionaries, “American expansionism and Indian salvation thus began to become synonymous.”26 In this critical respect, the process of westward expansion embraced the same messianic elements of Nazi colonization and the effacement of ethnic and racial identity even if the implications for the Native Americans did not involve the corresponding dynamic of physical extermination.

Rhetoric, Punishment, and Atrocity in the US West The conquest of the American West was a process that occurred over several decades and involved a number of military and paramilitary groups, including the US Army, territorial and volunteer militias, and frontier vigilante groups. As a result, exterminatory rhetoric emerged at different times and places in response to national and local events. The American Civil War witnessed apocalyptic rhetoric combined with acts of egregious violence aimed at specific Native communities in the West. While Union and Confederate forces waged a “hard war” leaving hundreds of thousands dead and wounded on Eastern battlefields, US Army regulars, state militias, and territorial volunteers threatened Indian communities with annihilation in the Southwest and on the southern Plains.27

13

WORDS AND WARS OF CONQUEST …

283

In 1861, Colonel Edward R. S. Canby outlined a military strategy for protecting New Mexico from a Confederate invasion and for breaking the power of the Navajos (Diné). He wrote, “there is now no choice between their absolute extermination or their removal and colonization at points so remote from the settlements as to isolate them entirely from the inhabitants of the Territory.”28 Canby’s missive provides a prototypical example of US Army official discourse in the period between 1850 and 1890. These communications adopted a binary solution involving annihilation or complete submission and movement to reservations under federal control. Canby’s subsequent transfer to the Eastern theater did not result in the abandonment of his proposed strategy. Rather its implementation was left to his successor, Brigadier General James H. Carleton whose arrival in September 1862 coincided with “a program of total warfare against all southwestern tribes.”29 Determined to “balance the inherently antithetical strategies of assimilation and extermination,” Carleton, an experienced “Indian fighter,” brought his own brand of hard war to New Mexico by “first killing large numbers of tribe members, butchering their animals, and destroying all means of subsistence.”30 In his message to the Navajo, Carleton employed the rhetoric of submission or annihilation by providing the following ultimatum: “Go to the Bosque Redondo [a reservation site in eastern New Mexico], or we will pursue and destroy you. We will not make peace with you on any other terms…. This war shall be pursued against you if it takes years, now that we have begun, until you cease to exist or move.”31 Carleton’s demands resulted in the “Long Walk,” a southwestern counterpart to the Trail of Tears, in which hunger, disease, and severe weather conditions decimated groups of Navajos as they trekked away from their homelands and sacred sites toward internment at the Bosque Redondo.32 Without doubt, Carleton’s hard war strategy was embraced by many citizens of New Mexico, and, after 1863, Arizona territories who envisioned their own solution to the “Apache problem.” Sylvester Mowry, a former army officer, mining speculator, and Arizona resident, described the Apaches as “human wolves” and complained, “The utter neglect by the [US] Government of this Territory is a crime which has brought its own punishment, but we have had it to bear. General Carleton … has a large force at his disposal, and he promises to ‘clean out’ the Apaches root and branch.” For his part Mowry proposed the following strategy: “There is only one way to wage war against the Apaches. A steady, persistent

284

E. B. WESTERMANN

campaign must be made, following them to their haunts—hunting them to the “fastnesses of the mountains.” He also insisted that the Apaches “must be surrounded, starved into coming in, surprised or inveigled— by white flags, or any other method, human or divine—and then put to death. If these ideas shock any weak-minded individual who thinks himself a philanthropist, I can only say that I pity without respecting his mistaken sympathy. A man might as well have sympathy for a rattle-snake or a tiger.”33 Despite this clear antipathy for the Apaches and dehumanization of the tribe, settlers like Mowry accepted the stark alternative to either “subdue or exterminate the hostile Apaches.” Likewise, he did not view them as a “serious obstacle to the working of mines in Arizona” but rather as general threat to individuals who failed to take “precautions dictated by common sense.”34 Perhaps the most infamous intersection between the rhetoric of annihilation and mass murder in the American West can be found in the Sand Creek Massacre in November 1864. In Colorado Territory, Governor John Evans had appointed Colonel John M. Chivington to lead a group of Colorado Volunteers against the Cheyennes. In fact, Evans had requested approval from Washington, DC to raise a regiment of 100-day volunteers for action against the Indians and felt pressured to make use of the men or to accept the political embarrassment associated with raising the unit and never employing it in the field.35 Evans asserted, “They have been raised to kill Indians, and they must kill Indians.”36 Many of these short-term volunteers included “rowdies and toughs recruited from the mining camps and Denver saloons;” the perfect choice for men ordered to “burn villages and kill Cheyennes wherever and whenever found.”37 For his part, Chivington was no stranger to acts of atrocity, as evidenced by his earlier decision to execute six Confederate prisoners despite being denied permission by higher authority.38 He was eager for action as he discussed “taking scalps” and “wading in gore.” When one of the regular army officers at Fort Lyon, Lieutenant James Connor, questioned the morality of the planned attack on Black Kettle’s peaceful Cheyenne encampment and labeled the plan as “murder in every sense of the word,” Chivington responded in a rage. He exclaimed, “I have come to kill Indians, and believe that it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.”39 Other regular officers at the fort were “stunned” by Chivington’s plan, but they received no support in their protests from the fort’s commander, Major Scott Anthony, who

13

WORDS AND WARS OF CONQUEST …

285

supported Chivington’s plan to “punish” the Cheyennes.40 In fact, subsequent testimony about Anthony stated that “he [Anthony] was in favor of killing all the Indians he came to.”41 At daybreak on November 29, Chivington’s volunteers attacked the Cheyenne village, butchering an estimated 105 women and children and 28 men. The massacre included an orgy of sexual mutilations, scalpings, and the extensive taking of body parts as trophies.42 Lieutenant Connor later testified on the “horrible manner” of the mutilation “in which men had cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over the saddle-bows and wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks.”43 Some soldiers refused to participate in the carnage. Captain Silas Soule declined to give the order to fire and he and his men simply watched as the massacre unfolded.44 In Denver, Chivington and the aptly-named “Blood Thirdsters” paraded through the streets to the cheers of the assembled crowd and displayed “trophies” of the body parts of the Cheyenne at a local theater.45 With the end of their enlistment, many of these volunteers found their way back to their “old haunts” where they openly admitted that “the big battle of Sand Creek was a cold-blooded massacre.”46 A subsequent Congressional inquiry found: “As to Colonel Chivington…Wearing the uniform of the United States, which should be the emblem of justice and humanity; holding the important position of commander of a military district, and therefore having the honor of the government to that extent in his keeping, he deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the verist [sic] savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty. Having full knowledge of their friendly character, having himself been instrumental to some extent in placing them in their position of fancied security, he took advantage of their in-apprehension and defenceless [sic] condition to gratify the worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man.”47 Still, Chivington escaped official punishment since he had resigned his officer’s commission prior to the release of the Congressional report in 1865. Although he later ran for political office in Colorado and Ohio, his political ambitions were crushed by the “ghosts of Sand Creek.”48 The massacre at Sand Creek offers several insights into the rhetoric and acts of violence in the West. First, the withdrawal of federal authority during the Civil War, specifically the regular army presence in the West,

286

E. B. WESTERMANN

put exactly those settler groups most closely associated with an “exterminationist” philosophy in control. One participant in the massacre discussed the unit’s belief “that a war of extermination should be waged; that neither sex nor age should be spared.”49 In contrast, the protests of regular army officers such as Connor and Soule’s refusal to participate provide a counterpoint to the actions and words of Chivington and his volunteers. A second insight involves the brutality and savagery of the massacre itself. The gratuitous violence and the sexual mutilations reflected the deep-seated antipathy of these “westerners,” just as the shock and revulsion shown by Congressmen and friends of the Indians in the East highlighted the cultural and experiential chasm between the political power center of the nation and its frontier periphery. Finally, the massacre at Sand Creek reflected an act of cold-blooded atrocity with clear premeditation and the successful dehumanization of the victim group. A public speech that Chivington delivered in Denver prior to the massacre is revealing. He advocated the scalping of infants with the remark that “little and big…. Nits make lice!”50 If the Civil War had escalated the rhetoric of annihilation as well as acts of atrocity in the territories, the end of the war witnessed a return to the more traditional military strategy centered on pursuing and punishing individual tribes or bands of Indians for actual or alleged depredations. As one historian correctly noted, “Traumatized by the carnage of the Civil War, most Americans had no stomach for the wholesale slaughter of Natives, which forced the government to negotiate with the Indians.”51 Despite the shift toward diplomacy, military leaders continued to invoke exterminationist rhetoric even if their actions in the field proved otherwise. The annihilation of an eighty-man force under Captain William Fetterman by northern Plains Indians led by the Lakota Red Cloud near Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming, along the Bozeman Trail in December 1866 provides one of the starkest illustrations of the disconnect between martial rhetoric and action. For his part, William T. Sherman, commanding general of the Military Division of the Missouri, responded to the loss of Fetterman’s force by declaring, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”52 He called for a campaign of “vindictive earnestness” aimed at killing ten Indians from Red Cloud’s followers for “each white life lost.”53 Ultimately, federal authorities rejected the rhetoric of extermination in favor of a renewed effort at negotiation with the tribes of the northern Plains. In 1868, a Peace Commission made a treaty favorable to

13

WORDS AND WARS OF CONQUEST …

287

the Lakota at Fort Laramie, including the withdrawal of troops from the Bozeman Trail. Some historians have pointed to the words and statements of senior military leaders, including Grant, Sherman, and Phil Sheridan that advocated acts of extermination or annihilation against specific Indian tribes or the Indians as an ethnic group.54 To be sure, these officers and others used the rhetoric of annihilation on numerous occasions in their personal and official correspondence. However, it is equally clear that the physical extermination of the Indians as an ethnic group never became the official goal of the US government. For the army command, the first rule of Indian warfare was that punishment was the only effective method for dealing with Indian depredations. Sheridan remarked, “The trouble heretofore with Indians has been caused by the absence of all punishment for crimes committed against the settlements. No people, especially those in a wild state, can be expected to behave themselves where there are no laws providing punishment for crime.”55 Thus, the objective of the US Army strategy focused on operations to “pursue and punish” Indians who had abandoned the reservation. The purpose of these operations centered on the capture or killing of Indians accused of raiding and “depredations” and represented a continuation of the existing policy of punishment and coercion in contrast to complete annihilation. General Alexander McCook in 1865 aptly expressed the army mindset on the available options. The first involved the creation of a permanent Indian territory from Kansas to California restricted to the Indian tribes alone, a solution that would require the withdrawal of military forces and federal government control from the region. The second and third alternatives postulated the use of direct military force, but in vastly different ways. He called for the creation of Indian reservations in the West with the army serving as both the guardians and wardens of the tribes placed within them. In contrast, McCook’s final alternative involved the extermination of the Indian tribes. For his part, McCook discounted the first alternative based on the economic realities and resources present in the western territories. He likewise rejected the third option of annihilation as “so cruel and inhumane that the idea of it cannot be entertained.”56 It was the second alternative that emerged as the US Army’s primary strategy. Annihilation would not be the overall objective, but as a rhetorical means for threatening individual tribes, bands, and clans who refused to submit to the imposition of federal power.

288

E. B. WESTERMANN

Rhetoric, Punishment, and Atrocity in the Nazi East During the Third Reich, the dominant thrust of National Socialist ideology revolved around the ideas of race and space in which “Racial vitality and spatial expansion were directly related.”57 Hitler’s conflation of the Jews with Bolshevism provided the foundation upon which the genocide of the Jews would be built. In the case of space, Hitler repeatedly advocated “the adjustment of space to population by the conquest of additional land areas whose native population would be expelled or exterminated, not assimilated.”58 On May 23, 1939, Hitler informed senior military leaders that he intended to attack Poland “at the first suitable opportunity.” German expansion, he asserted, was necessary to solve “economic problems.” He exclaimed, “Living space proportionate to the greatness of the State is fundamental to every Power….The alternatives are rise or decline.”59 Although emphasizing the economic rationale for conquest, Hitler’s words concerning “rise or decline” reflected his own racial beliefs in the inevitability of conflict between “Aryans” and Slavs as well as the principles of Social Darwinism that framed his policies for the East. On August 22, Hitler again met with his senior military commanders to share final instructions for the impending invasion. He told them that the time for dealing with Poland had come and that Germany was faced with a decision of “striking or of certain annihilation sooner or later.” Later that day he exhorted the assembled Wehrmacht leaders to “Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. Eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure. The stronger man is right. The greatest harshness [is demanded].”60 During the meeting, chief of the German General Staff General Franz Halder recorded Hitler’s demand to “have no pity” and for German forces to act with “the greatest brutality and without mercy.” Halder also documented Hitler’s statement that the campaign involved “the physical annihilation of the Polish population.”61 The de facto collaboration between German Army and SS forces resulted in the murder of 50,000 Poles, including 7,000 Polish Jews in the first three months of the campaign.62 Likewise, Hitler’s orders and the complicity of the senior military leaders lowered the “moral threshold” within the Wehrmacht and created a precedent for a war of annihilation against the Soviet Union.63

13

WORDS AND WARS OF CONQUEST …

289

By the end of 1940, Hitler, as he had advocated in Mein Kampf fifteen years earlier, began to “direct our [Germany’s] gaze towards the lands in the east.”64 On December 18, he signed an order for military preparation designed to “crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign.”65 This offered the opportunity for realizing Hitler’s longest held colonial fantasy in Europe, the acquisition of living space in the East that would support German power “for the next one hundred years.”66 In January 1941, he once again gathered his generals and told them of the “immeasurable riches” to be gained by German control of Russia.67 Once again, despite Hitler’s emphasis on economic advantages, his comments demonstrated that racial objectives and mass murder played the dominant role in Nazi plans for occupied Russia. Indeed, the attack on the Soviet Union offered both the promise of economic autarchy as well as the chance for Germany to grasp “the grail of a new society built upon racial purity and racial domination.”68 During a meeting in early March with Wehrmacht commanders, Hitler highlighted the ideological objectives for the coming campaign. He declared, “The impending campaign is more than a clash of arms; it also entails a struggle between two ideologies…. The Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia, as the oppressor in the past, must be liquidated.”69 The task of extermination became the primary responsibility of Himmler’s SS and police forces, the regime’s political soldiers, who had proven their commitment to the regime’s racial policies in Poland. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel issued “Guidelines in Special Fields Concerning Directive Number 21.” “Directive 21” informed Wehrmacht field commanders that, “On behalf of the Führer, the Reich Leader of the SS [Himmler] assumes special tasks in preparation for the political administration within the army’s field of operations that arise from the final, decisive battle between two opposing political systems.”70 In a subsequent meeting with his senior commanders on March 30, Hitler explicitly commented on the nature of these “special tasks” as “the extermination of the Bolshevist Commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia.”71 In conjunction with efforts to prepare the armed forces for special tasks in the East, Hitler also limited military jurisdiction by restricting the authority of military courts to examine incidents of criminal offenses involving Soviet citizens. This move deprived civilians of due process and placed their fates in the hands of military and SS units. On May 13, Keitel

290

E. B. WESTERMANN

issued a decree suspending jurisdiction from the courts for “enemy civilians” committing crimes, thus creating a situation in which Wehrmacht, SS, and police forces literally became judge, jury, and executioner.72 As Wehrmacht commanders finalized their operational plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police and Security Service (SD), developed the blueprint for the activities of SS and police forces. In a meeting on March 26 with the commander of the German Air Force and head of the Four-Year Plan, Reich Marshall Hermann Göring, Heydrich reported on plans for the “solution to the Jewish question” in conjunction with the coming campaign. Göring expressed his concern that German forces be made aware of the danger posed by Soviet intelligence personnel, political commissars, and Jews that they might know “who they had to stand against the wall.”73 In a final example, the infamous Commissar Order (Kommissarbefehl ) issued on June 6, 1941 directed the summary execution of Communist functionaries and political commissars serving with the Red Army, including Jews in party and state positions. In sum, these orders and agreements set the stage for Hitler’s self-proclaimed war of annihilation. Even as military and SS leaders came together to discuss operational strategy and responsibilities, a group of civilian bureaucrats held their own consultations in the months preceding the invasion in order to establish economic policy for the eastern territories to support military operations. During a meeting on May 2, 1941, these bureaucrats summarized several key points resulting from their discussions. First, it was apparent to them that the only method for supporting the Wehrmacht in a war involved the exploitation of food resources in Russia. They clearly recognized the horrendous consequences of such a policy for the local populace with the laconic remark: “As a result, x million people will doubtlessly starve, if that which is necessary for us is extracted from the land.”74 The essential outlines of this “Hunger Plan” were finalized by May 23 and envisioned the destruction of cities, the extinction of industry, and the deaths of some thirty million people in the winter of 1941–1942 alone.75 In this respect, the siege of Leningrad, a campaign aimed at the complete extinction of the city’s entire population provides perhaps the most “outstanding example of the ruthless lengths to which the German Army was prepared to go in the service to the Nazi state.”76 Overall, the framers of the Hunger Plan calculated that “Many tens of millions of people in this territory will become superfluous and will die or must emigrate to Siberia.

13

WORDS AND WARS OF CONQUEST …

291

Attempts to rescue the population there from death through starvation by obtaining surpluses from the black earth zone [i.e., Ukraine] can only come at the expense of the provisioning of Europe.”77 In the words of historian Timothy Snyder, “German intentions were to fight a war of destruction that would transform eastern Europe into an exterminatory agrarian colony.”78 The support by field commanders for the regime’s racial and ideological objectives found repeated expression in the Fall of 1941 as German forces began their assault on Moscow. On October 10, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, commander of the Sixth Army, ordered: “The main aim of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevist system is the complete destruction of its forces and the extermination of the Asiatic influence in the sphere of European culture. As a result, the troops have to take on tasks which go beyond the conventional purely military ones.” He continued, “In the eastern sphere the soldier is not simply a fighter according to the rules of war, but the supporter of a ruthless racial ideology … For this reason soldiers must show full understanding for the necessity for the severe but just atonement being required of the Jewish subhumans.”79 Upon receiving a copy of Reichenau’s order, the commander of Army Group South, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, decided to pass it along to the other armies under his command and a copy even reached Hitler who “declared it to be outstanding, and ordered that it be sent to every unit on the eastern front.”80 For his part, General Erich von Manstein echoed Reichenau’s views in his order proclaiming: “The Jewish-Bolshevik system must be eradicated once and for all. Never again may it intrude upon our European living space.”81 The widespread dissemination of these orders combined with the criminal directives that preceded the attack into Russia served to radicalize the conduct of the war and not only promoted, but justified, widespread acts of premeditated murder and cold-blooded atrocity across the Eastern Front. With respect to military and SS and police forces, cold-blooded murder found expression in the German prosecution of “anti-partisan” war or the war against “bandits” throughout the Soviet Union. The campaign against the partisans was a no-holds barred affair in which Hitler’s demands for the utmost brutality found expression an order from the German Armed Forces High Command on December 16, 1942: The enemy employs in partisan warfare communist-trained fanatics who do not hesitate to commit any atrocity. It is more than ever a question

292

E. B. WESTERMANN

of life and death. This fight has nothing to do with soldierly gallantry or principles of the Geneva Convention. If the fight against the partisans in the East as well as in the Balkans, is not waged with the most brutal means, we will shortly reach the point when the available forces are insufficient to control this area. It is therefore not only justified, but is the duty of the troops to use all means. without restriction-even against women and children-as long as it ensures success.82

The exterminationist discourse taking place at every level of political and military leadership ultimately found its manifestation in multifold acts of atrocity that took the lives of between 35 and 43 million Soviet men, women, and children.83 Over one million of those died at the hands of SS and policemen with a bullet to the head at the edge of a ditch in hundreds of killing sites scattered across Eastern Europe. However, it was not only SS and policemen who imbibed the poisonous rhetoric of their senior commanders. This toxic brew seeped down to the ranks of the common soldier into individual acts of atrocity. In a journal entry from 1943, Willy Peter Reese, a German infantryman in Russia, revealed, “Our humor was born out of sadism, gallows humor, satire, obscenity, spite, rage, and pranks with corpses, squirted brains, lice, pus, and shit, the spiritual zero… The fact that we were soldiers was sufficient basis for criminality and degradation, for an existence in hell.”84 Another soldier described his Russian adversaries, “They are not humans, but rather wild hordes and beasts, so bred by Bolshevism over the last 20 years. By no means can one allow compassion with these people to surface.”85 The transformation of exterminatory language into acts of annihilation provided the ultimate measure for assessing the impact of rhetoric on the conduct of military strategy in the East.

Comparing the Rhetoric and the Reality of Warfare the American West and the Nazi East The preceding discussion of US Army strategy in the American West and German military strategy in the East reveals some points of similarity with respect to the use of rhetoric and in tactical operations. Army generals such as Sherman and Sheridan in the West, and Reichenau and Manstein in the East, made extensive use of annihilationist rhetoric. However, it is

13

WORDS AND WARS OF CONQUEST …

293

equally apparent that the implementation of such orders proved fundamentally different in terms of execution. Without doubt, Sheridan and Sherman, like many of their contemporaries, viewed and described Indians as “savages” and felt them capable of treachery and cruelty. In some cases, individual generals, like John Pope, alternated between the rhetoric of extermination in 1862 and calls for a “defensive arrangement” against the tribes in 1865.86 Other military officers, such as George Crook and Nelson Miles, used force to punish or coerce the Indians, but still displayed respect and admiration for their adversaries and their culture. During the Great Sioux War in 1876–1877, Crook ordered his men, “We don’t want to kill the Indians…. We want to find the village and make the Indians give up their ponies & guns, so that in the future they will have to behave themselves.”87 Miles, despite the limits imposed by his own racial views, rejected calls for “destroying the whole race” and attempted “to act with justice and compassion toward his former enemies,” including his contention that surrendering Sioux should be dealt with “fairly and justly” and prepared for “a pastoral life [that] would suit them well.”88 The ultimate goal of military and political policy in the West involved the assimilation of tribes under the guise of civilizing and christianizing “savages,” even if this policy entailed the “cultural asphyxiation” of the Indians implied by confinement to the reservations.89 In general, military force was used to enforce specific behaviors or to control the actions of the tribes by “pursuing and punishing” Indians who left the reservation or became involved in hostilities with white settlers. The Wehrmacht had no such obligation to the native peoples of the East. In fact, the racial and ideological imperatives that drove the war in the East explicitly freed soldiers and SS and police forces from any legal responsibilities or restraints with respect to Slavs and Jews seen as “subhuman.” In the East, assimilation only applied to a select few who displayed supposed Aryan characteristics. The remaining Slavs, the vast majority of the population, were to be expelled, exploited through slave labor, starved, and exterminated when deemed appropriate. For the Jews, exploitation and annihilation were the only solutions, with the former often used as the means to achieve the latter. If US political officials could and did choose on occasion to moderate military responses to the Indian tribes, such was clearly not the case for Nazi occupiers in Poland and the Soviet Union. Hitler’s boasts on creating a new frontier in the East to rival that of America in the previous century not only demonstrated the Führer’s limited understanding of the

294

E. B. WESTERMANN

history of the American West, but also exposed the genocidal impulse that underpinned his conception of conquest and exploitation in Eastern Europe. These apocalyptic colonial fantasies could only be realized by men willing to pursue the racial objectives of the regime through an unprecedented military campaign of mass murder and atrocity. The first step in the creation of a German Garden of Eden did not involve the fashioning of a rib, but literally the creation of mountains of bones as the basis for a new race of “farmer-soldiers” and their progeny.

Notes 1. James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 4–5. 2. Brendan Simms, Hitler: A Global Biography (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 77–78, 92. 3. Jens-Uwe Guettel, German Expansionism: Imperial Liberalism, and the United States, 1776–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 12, 190. 4. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936 Hubris (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 290–292. 5. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936–1945 Nemesis (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 434. Hitler’s comment was intended to indicate that Nazi Germany’s colonial empire would begin in Europe. 6. David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 305. 7. David Stahel, Operation Typhoon: Hitler’s March on Moscow, October 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 230 and Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940–1941 (New York: Penguin, 2007), 387. 8. Shelley Baranowski, German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 140–141. 9. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf , trans. James Murphy (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939), 310, 365. 10. Roméo Dallare, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2005), 142. 11. Andrew Jackson, First Annual Message to Congress (8 December 1829), The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucs b.edu (accessed November 27, 2019). 12. Ibid.

13

WORDS AND WARS OF CONQUEST …

295

13. Andrew Jackson, Fifth Annual Message to Congress (3 December 1833), The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucs b.edu (accessed November 27, 2019). 14. Wilma Mankiller, “Reflections on Removal,” in The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents, ed. Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005), 186. 15. Russell Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 159. 16. Ulysses S. Grant Papers, reel 4, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Wording denotes changes made by Grant to the original draft of the text. 17. David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 18. Wayne Lee, Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500– 1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 241. 19. Thomas Pegelow, “‘German Jews,’ ‘National Jews,’ ‘Jewish Volk’ or ‘Racial Jews’?: The Constitution and the Contestation of ‘Jewishness’ in Newspapers of Nazi Germany, 1933–1938,” Central European History 35 (June 2002), 197. 20. Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 225. 21. Quoted in Hugh J. Reilly, Bound to Have Blood: Frontier Newspapers and the Plains Indian Wars (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 42. 22. Quoted in Robert G. Hays, A Race at Bay: New York Times Editorials on the “Indian Problem.” 1860–1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1997), 1. 23. Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 20–24. 24. Jost Hermand, Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkish Utopias and National Socialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 240. 25. As quoted in Allan G. Bogue, “An Agricultural Empire” in The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde Milner II, Carol O’Connor, and Martha Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 289. 26. Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 72. 27. Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 28. Quoted in Jerry D. Thompson, A Civil War History of the New Mexico Volunteers and Militia (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 299.

296

E. B. WESTERMANN

29. William S. Kiser, Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), 168. 30. Ibid. 31. Quoted in Thompson, Civil War History, 320. 32. Gerald Thompson, The Army and the Navajo: The Bosque Redondo Reservation Experiment, 1863–1868 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976). 33. Sylvester Mowry, Geography and Resources of Arizona and Sonora: An Address Before the American Geographical and Statistical Society (San Francisco: A. Roman and Company, 1863), 113–114. 34. Mowry, Resources of Arizona and Sonora, 2, 114. 35. US Congress, Senate, Sand Creek Massacre, 39th Cong., 2d sess., 1867, Ex. Doc. 26. 36. Quoted in Bobby Bridger, Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull: Inventing the Wild West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 109. 37. Robert Utley and Wilcomb Washburn, Indian Wars (Boston: Mariner Books, 2002), 206. 38. Reilly, Bound to Have Blood, 18. 39. Quoted in David Crowe, War Crimes, Genocide, and Justice: A Global History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 48. 40. Reilly, Bound to Have Blood, 20. 41. US Congress, Senate, Sand Creek Massacre, 39th Cong., 2d sess., 1867, Ex. Doc. 26. 42. Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 45. 43. Evan Connell, Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 177. 44. Alex Alvarez, Native America and the Question of Genocide (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 95. For a detailed examination of the massacre see Stan Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961) and for a discussion of the memory and historical legacy of the event see Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 45. Hoig, Sand Creek, 160 and Kelman, Misplaced Massacre, 39–40. 46. Reilly, Bound to Have Blood, 23. 47. Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of War at the Second Session of the Thirty-eighth Congress, https://quod.lib.umich.edu (accessed November 27, 2019). 48. Reilly, Bound to Have Blood, 29. 49. Quoted in Alvarez, Native America, 99–100.

13

WORDS AND WARS OF CONQUEST …

297

50. Quoted in James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 27. 51. Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 272. 52. Weigley, American Way of War, 158. 53. Robert W. Larson, Gall: Lakota War Chief (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009) 62. 54. For examples see Larson, Gall, 62, Weigley, American Way of War, 153, and Paul N. Beck, Columns of Vengeance: Soldiers, Sioux, and the Punitive Expeditions, 1863–1864 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 43, 50. 55. Sherry L. Smith, The View from Officer’s Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 99–100. 56. Smith, View from Officers’ Row, 92. 57. Gerhard Weinberg, Germany, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), 32. 58. Weinberg, Germany, Hitler and World War II , 35. 59. Quoted in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, ed., Nazism, 1919– 1945, vol. 3, Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1988), 737. 60. Quoted in Noakes and Pridham, ed., Nazism, Vol. 3, 739, 741, 743. 61. Alexander Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 9–10. 62. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland, 234. 63. Ben Shepherd, Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 59. 64. Hitler, Mein Kampf , 950. 65. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 159. 66. Gerhard Weinberg, ed., Hitler’s Second Book (New York: Enigma Books, 2003), 158. 67. Kershaw, Nemesis, 336. 68. Ibid., 343. 69. Jürgen Förster, “Operation Barbarossa as a War of Conquest and Annihilation,” in The Attack on the Soviet Union, ed. Research Institute for Military History, trans. Dean S. McMurry, Ewald Osers, and Louise Wilmot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 482. 70. Helmut Krausnick, Hitlers Einsatzgruppen: Die Truppen des Weltanschauungskrieges, 1939–1942 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1981), 100–101. 71. Reinhard Rürup, Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion, 1941–1945 (Berlin: Argon, 1991), 42.

298

E. B. WESTERMANN

72. Förster, “Operation Barbarossa”, 496–507. 73. Peter Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion, 1941/42 (Berlin: Druckhaus Hentrich, 1997), 367–368. 74. Alex J. Kay, “Germany’s Staatssekretäre, Mass Starvation and the Meeting of 2 May 1941,” Journal of Contemporary History 41 (October 2006), 685. 75. Snyder, Bloodlands, 162–163. 76. David Stahel, Kiev, 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 280 and Jeff Rutherford, Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front: The German Infantry’s War, 1941–1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 172. 77. Quoted in Snyder, Bloodlands, 163. 78. Snyder, Bloodlands, 163. 79. Quoted in Noakes and Pridham, ed., Nazism, Vol. 3, 1096. 80. Geoffrey Megargee, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 125. 81. Ibid. 82. “The Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces, Armed Forces Operations Staff/Chief Operation Office, Subject: Combattings of Partisans,” 16 December 1942, https://phdn.org/archives/www.ess.uwe.ac. uk/genocide/partisans1.htm (Accessed November 30, 2019). 83. Stephen G. Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Annihilation in the East (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 471. 84. Willy Peter Reese, A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War, Russia 1941–1944, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 98. 85. Quoted in Sven Oliver Müller, Deutsche Soldaten und ihre Feinde: Nationalismus an Front und Heimatfront im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2007), 146. 86. Larson, Gall, 58 and Beck, Columns of Vengeance, 43. 87. Quoted in Sherry L. Smith, Sagebrush Soldier: Private William Earl Smith’s View of the Sioux War of 1876 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 55. 88. Robert Wooster, Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 72, 74, 85, 161–162. 89. Jerome Greene, Yellowstone Command: Colonel Nelson A. Miles and the Great Sioux War, 1876–1877 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 4.

PART IV

Afterwords

CHAPTER 14

Empires of Comparison Andrew Zimmerman

Comparison has long been central to imperial projects.1 This volume highlights not only the many ways these imperial comparisons took place, but also, crucially, the signal role that the United States played as a comparative case for German imperialist thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the authors of the Federalist Papers employed the Holy Roman Empire as one model for their emerging polity, German imperial intellectuals drew on the United States for their own later discussions of empire, both on the European continent and overseas. As Gregor Thum shows in this volume, one of the most important thinkers to return the US model to the German states was Friedrich List, who took the Whig political economy of the early US Republic for the German Zollverein. Later, in 1848, the Frankfurt Parliament called on the South Carolina secessionist and slaveholder John C. Calhoun for his advice on the German federal polity its members hoped to renew.2 White settlers of North America have, from the beginning, presented their polity as a “light unto the nations” (Isaiah 49:6), an example for other nations to emulate. For Puritan John Winthrop, the Massachusetts

A. Zimmerman (B) George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_14

301

302

A. ZIMMERMAN

Bay Colony would be a “city upon a hill” with “the eyes of all people…upon us.” Two and a half centuries later Abraham Lincoln called the United States the “last best hope of earth.” A hundred years after that another white settler of Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, delivered his own “city upon a hill” speech, updating the imperial exemplar for its period of anti-Communist counterinsurgency. The United States has been, arguably, the most successful white supremacist society in human history, a slaveholding settler colony that generated enormous power and prosperity and moral self-validation for a white ruling class. No wonder so many imperial and colonial thinkers have looked to the country as a model state and empire. The US served both as a pattern from which policy makers could borrow and as an image that could legitimize various other imperial enterprises. Robert Nelson shows how Max Sering used the white homesteaders of North America as a promising model for German colonization of the Polish East. Tracey Reimann-Dawe reveals how the example of US railroads served Gerhard Rohlfs’s plans for railroads through Africa. Jeannette Eileen Jones explains how German colonial experts borrowed techniques of white settler agriculture from the United States for their own projects in Southwest Africa. One important consequence of this, as Dörte Lerp suggests, was that the fundamentally racial construction of class by European settlers in the Americas also shaped German understandings of class in the European East. Class was race was class was race. This point resonates with the arguments of Cedric Robinson—although he traces what he calls racial capitalism to Europe’s encounter with the Muslim world—and Aníbal Quijano, who sees class, race, and capitalism co-constituted in the Americas under European dominion.3 Comparison not only allowed imperialist writers to draw practical lessons for their own schemes of expropriation and domination. Comparison also served a legitimizing function, cloaking the bloodiest acts of piracy in a mantel of progressive nationhood and beneficent whiteness. Nearly every act of imperialism has presented itself as a correction of some earlier act of imperialism, a step in the right direction. This we could call a comparison of distinction, one that draws attention not, say, to the ways all imperialisms, perhaps all forms of white supremacy, are, at a fundamental level, the same, but rather to the ways in which they are each different, such that some can be called “better” and others “worse.” Thus, in the eighteenth-century, the British Empire in the Americas presented itself as a preferable alternative to the Spanish Empire in the

14

EMPIRES OF COMPARISON

303

Americas. In the nineteenth-century United States, Ulysses S. Grant’s “Peace Policy” seemed, at least to those not impacted by it, as a more humane version of the slaughter and dispossession of Indigenous Americans, as Edward Westermann indicates. In the period before the First World War, German imperialism in Africa appeared as a preferable alternative to Belgian imperialism, allowing E. D. Morel, journalist and Congo activist, to save the broader European conquest of Africa from the stain of the abuses that he had helped publicize. In the twentieth century, US anti-Communist developmentalism could present itself as a preferable alternative to earlier forms of European imperialism. Consequently, Raymond Aron was quite typically imperialist when he denounced Nazism and other older forms of European imperialism while supporting the US war on Vietnam, as is indicated in the essay by George Steinmetz, although this is not the argument of that essay. The very idea that there is such a thing as better or worse imperialism is one of the central ideological justifications of imperialism. Here comparison also serves empire by providing this set of betters and worses. Germany is, in a different but no less intense way, as exceptional as the United States. Where the United States was the “city on the hill” whose example seemed to offer both practical tools and ideological legitimacy to any imperial project, Germany served as a kind of counterexample. The continental Kaiserreich has long served as a negative model that lends an appearance of democracy to the set of imperial nations that take their name from the compass direction “West”—France, Britain, the United States, and the like.4 The allegedly unique atrocities of German colonialism legitimized the interwar imperialism of the League of Nations mandate system, as well as its extension to all colonialism in the work of the British colonial administrator and theorist of colonial government Frederick Lugard.5 It made no difference that many of these same colonial reformers had admired German imperialism as a model in the years before the First World War, nor that the greatest proponents of this new order of nations embraced global white supremacy as fully as their allegedly more brutal predecessors had.6 Since the Second World War, Nazi Germany has provided the ultimate legitimating counterexample to the varieties of imperialism. Nazism was, of course, also unique. As Jens-Uwe Guettel shows, Nazism pursued large-scale racialized settlement schemes inside of Europe that had previously enjoyed wide legitimacy only when applied outside of Europe. This confirms the insight of Aimé Césaire that the crime for which “the very

304

A. ZIMMERMAN

distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century… cannot forgive Hitler…is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘n*****s’ of America.”7 Césaire does his own kind of comparative work here by refusing to allow distinctions between, say‚ US imperialism in Vietnam and Nazi imperialism in Eastern Europe to validate imperialism as such. This ceaseless process of imperial comparison also authorizes careers, intellectual pursuits, even life projects for some people, mostly white, mostly male. Those people write a lot: books, articles, reports, letters, diaries, and meticulous plans for governments and private enterprises. They sometimes also sailed, as Eriks Bredovskis reminds us, taking notes, photographing artifacts, abducting bear cubs. The wits in their bunch make jokes of racism, as Volker M. Langbehn discusses, circulating caricatures to extract a few laughs and perhaps magazine subscriptions from forms of knowledge originally created for more earnest purposes of murder and dispossession. Some of those whose nations have been subjugated, like the Apaches in North America and Sudanese and others in East Africa, also work through empire. As Janne Lahti and Michelle Moyd reveal, they seek to recover from the gendered catastrophe of conquest by serving, paradoxically, further conquest. This gendered work of empire resonates in the metropole too, as A. Dana Weber shows, through novels and plays and performances that stage, in a less murderous, more edifying setting, the terrible destabilizations of imperialism. It is mostly through these writings that scholars come to know these imperialists and their careers. Yet these writings are also lies. Their untruth consists not merely in the necessarily perspectival distortions of every document, the stuff basic academic historical method teaches us to deal with. The lie of imperialist writing is, in a way, the fundamental lie of European humanism: that the human is a normative concept and that not every member of the species Homo sapiens is, properly speaking, human. It is perhaps the one lie that all the talk of perspective in historical knowledge trains historians not to challenge. How can we deal with those lies? Edward Said has offered one method, a close reading of the texts of European imperialism to show how they reflect, not the world, but the imperialist distortions of the world.8 Many

14

EMPIRES OF COMPARISON

305

of the essays in this volume take this approach and illustrate its continuing relevance and vitality. Sylvia Wynter has given depth to Said’s basic assertion in her discussions of “the overrepresentation of Man as if it were the human.” She describes how the normative person of Eurocentric selfregard became a figure for all of humanity, so that “the subordination of the world and well-being” of the peoples of the world for the comfort of this European person could count as progress for all peoples of the world.9 Wynter’s “human” is “the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century” inside of whom Aimé Césaire detected “a Hitler” who “inhabits him,” who “is his demon.” Against the lie of this Eurocentric humanism, Césaire called for “a true humanism – a humanism made to the measure of the world.”10 Perhaps this also suggests how scholars might begin thinking about Empire not through, but rather from outside, its lies, to include all the actors in a particular imperial moment, the European minority as well as the non-European majority. The essay in this volume by Lahti and Moyd reveals how very fruitful this approach is. This is a kind of comparative work that Césaire might have advocated, the comparison that created the anti-imperialist internationals of Négritude, the non-aligned movement, and Communism.11

Notes 1. The literature on imperial comparison is vast. Two especially important texts are Micol Seigel, “Beyond Compare: Comparative Method After the Transnational Turn,” Radical History Review 91 (2005), 62–90, and Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties : The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001), 829–865. 2. Merle E. Curti, “John C. Calhoun and the Unification of Germany,” American Historical Review 40, no. 3 (1935), 476–478. 3. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America,” International Sociology 15, no. 2 (2000), 215–232. 4. The classic statement of this argument is David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 5. Frederick D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1922).

306

A. ZIMMERMAN

6. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 7. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (1955; New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 37. 8. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 9. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003), 257–337, 267. 10. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 37, 73. 11. See the excellent Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

CHAPTER 15

Settler Colonialism and Financial Imperialism: The German and United States Empires in a Global Age Sebastian Conrad

Entangled Empires is a timely intervention. Over the course of the past two decades, research on both the German and United States empire has developed into fully fledged fields. After many years of relative scholarly neglect, German colonialism has seen a resurgence of interest since the early 2000s, and a host of detailed studies have been generated across a wide variety of themes, approaches, and geographies. Almost synchronously, interpretations of the history of the United States as a history of empire have emerged in the wake of September 11, 2001. As a result, and against the backdrop of a general wave of scholarship on empires in global history that has emerged since, there is now a solid body of works in both fields.1 Much more recent is the interest in the interactions between empires. Empires did not evolve in national isolation, but in close interaction

S. Conrad (B) Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_15

307

308

S. CONRAD

with other empires. Many historical actors—administrators, bureaucrats, scholars, experts, settlers, colonial subjects—operated across imperial boundaries. International conferences, study tours, exchange of personnel, and the circulation of institutional models and blueprints attest to the close-knit exchange between different imperial ventures. Similarly, anti-colonial activists conversed and acted in spaces that were trans-imperial.2 In this context, a focus on Germany and the United States is very productive, for a variety of reasons. At the end of the nineteenth century, both countries—together with Italy and Japan—joined the race for colonies as imperial late-comers. While formally acquiring overseas territories, they also played a role as models for each other. It was particularly the experience of the United States that served as reference point and inspiration for German colonial enthusiasts. The chapters in this book collectively make an important contribution to a better understanding of the close collaboration of scholars, administrators, journalists, and intellectuals between the two countries. The focus here is primarily on German experts looking across the Atlantic, much less the other way around. This perspective could usefully be complemented by attention to the hundreds of North American scholars who during this time flocked to German universities to study. They all operated in a world in which knowledge circulated, not simply in a comparative context in which influences could be gauged. Some of the “American lessons” were thus easily legible for German delegations, as they incorporated “German lessons” picked up by North American specialists earlier—even if they now came in a different shape, and were molded by the experiences and specific challenges of the United States. In the imperial world before the great war, the United States occupied a crucial position, standing in simultaneously for two competing if overlapping strategies of expansion: internal vs. overseas, settlement vs. investment, population vs. capital. For German observers, this resonated with the paradigms of “Lebensraum” and “Weltpolitik,” and thus with different guiding principles of colonial globalization.3 Where Max Sering saw space, land, and settlement opportunities, Max Weber, when touring the United States in 1904, found the spirit of capitalism. To start with the first paradigm: As the chapters of this book make clear, the main interest of the scores of German scholars and bureaucrats flocking to North America was in US westward expansion. They were fascinated by the seemingly empty space and the massive settlement

15

SETTLER COLONIALISM AND FINANCIAL IMPERIALISM …

309

projects engineered to people it. These lands, of course, were not really empty; and to the extent that they were, they had been emptied through warfare, forced relocation, and extermination campaigns. While German youth were brought up on the novels of Karl May and a widespread if condescending compassion with the native population, the technocrats looked to the United States as a model of settlement. It is interesting to note that the takeover of the Philippines in 1898, when the United States joined the ranks of colonial powers ruling over a formal empire, was much less on the agenda of German admirers, if at all. As a consequence, only two of the articles in this book even make reference to the Philippines, and then only in passing. America’s territorial empire in Southeast Asia may have been of interest to Dutch and Japanese administrators, but their German colleagues seemed much less curious. What the fascination with US settlement politics also underlines is that the typological difference between contiguous and overseas (“saltwater”) empires is artificial, and reveals more about the conventions of latter-day historians than about the concerns of contemporaries. There may have been proponents for either course of action, and ideological differences between both camps. But the very fact that these discussions took place demonstrates the degree to which internal colonialism was understood as on the same plane as other colonial ventures.4 There were, indeed, links and overlap between Germany’s internal (Eastern European) and African settlements, specifically in Namibia.5 The major German migration movements, however, were directed not to the formal colonies, but elsewhere. Apart from the United States, the largest diaspora communities emerged in Latin America where many Germans settled. By 1930, more than 200,000 Germans had migrated to Brazil alone—more than ten times as many as ever lived in all of Germany’s African colonies combined.6 While our image of imperial migration is dominated by the British in their white dominions and by French settlers in Algeria, transborder migration beyond the confines of the formal empires was no anomaly. In fact, the German empire was not an exception, but rather a typical example—think of Japanese migrants to Manchuria and Peru, or Italians in Argentina and Uruguay—of the way in which states supported, or at least tolerated, outward migration to select destinations in the hope of creating spheres of influence, and overseas markets. Politics of settlement, then, were able to bridge the gap between formal and informal empires. The diversity of usages of the term “colony” in

310

S. CONRAD

late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century discourse further underlines the family resemblance between them. The term referred not only to colonial settlers, but to a wide variety of projects that shared specific elements of control: workers’ colonies, penal colonies, settlement initiatives in the countryside, as well as in the Americas or elsewhere. The various overlaps among these projects have been erased by a historiography that treats empires as circumscribed geographical spaces rather than as political strategies. All of this is to suggest that a narrow Schutzgebiete (protectorates) reading of German colonialism is too narrow a frame, and needs to be complemented by a broad vision of Germany’s colonial entanglements.7 The overlap between formal and informal imperialism brings us to the second paradigm to be discussed here: the gradual shift from formal rule to capitalist penetration, and thus from territorial to financial imperialism. This was, to be sure, not a clear-cut transition between two opposing principles; these are ideal types and abstractions, and in historical practice, both strategies typically overlapped. Imperial history since the 1880s had been dominated by scrambles (first for Africa, then for China) and land grabs. Yet, the Boxer War, that exceptional concerted effort of eight powers to preserve the imperial order, symbolically sanctioned a politics of open doors, of comprador capitalists, and of foreign direct investments. Instead of carving up the Qing territory into spheres of influence, the powers agreed to treat the immense “China market” as a space for investment by all. The main champion of the “Open Door,” a policy that would last until 1931, was the United States.8 According to this logic, colonialism was not primarily about the color of the map, but about the money in state and private coffers. This model was not at all new. Influence via the infiltration with capital, and control of financial institutions, was common practice in the formally independent states of the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Qing China. The Administration de la Dette Publique Ottomane, the Imperial Bank of Persia, and the Imperial Maritime Customs Service in China were only the most conspicuous and symbolic institutions documenting the financial erosion of these formerly great powers. In the early years of the twentieth century, proponents of financial imperialism became increasingly vociferious, and influential, also in Wihelmine Germany. Liberal economists of the Younger German Historical School played a large part in directing attention away from the settlement colonies in Tanzania and Namibia, and from a concern with

15

SETTLER COLONIALISM AND FINANCIAL IMPERIALISM …

311

“Germandom,” and toward investment opportunities in places ranging from Venezuela to China. In the decade before 1914, the Berlin-Baghdad railway project became the most important site of German imperial engagement in the public imagination.9 The flipside of capital mobility in an increasingly integrated world economy was the mobility of labor. After the official end of slavery, and triggered by the growth of the plantation complex, new forms of servitude and indenture emerged. In the highly hierarchical world of empires, these labor regimes shared many characteristics with the system of slavery, but formally—seemingly voluntary recruitment, contracts with expiry dates—were consistent with the ideology of “free labor.” Demand was high particularly in the agricultural spheres of production, in the tropics and elsewhere, that catered to the expanding global markets, but also in mines and infrastructural construction. As a result, colonies and spheres of influence were treated as recruitment grounds for a seemingly insatiable quest for dependent labor.10 The expropriation of colonial labor hinged on the category of race. Race and racism, indeed, were the crucial and indispensable elements of the colonial regimes. Race was a defining feature common to both colonialist paradigms, the settler and the investment models. Racialization was key for the divide et impera-strategies of territorial rule, and it was an essential ingredient of all definitions of Germanness, Frenchness, Japaneseness. At the same time, racialization was the precondition of the expropriation of colonial labor, beyond the exploitation of (white) wage labor in Europe and the United States.11 It is within this imperial world, impregnated by the pervasive logic (and practice) of race, and bound together by the integration of the world market, that any discussion of the German-US relationship needs to be situated, as many chapters in this book also demonstrate. This becomes particularly evident when we shift our attention from the German and North American protagonists—the chief concern of this book—to historical actors who looked at German colonialism and US imperialism from the outside. For both proponents of empire and for their enemies, for the statesmen of imperial powers as well as for anti-imperial activists hailing from the colonies, Germany and the United States occupied crucial positions, and were mobilized as points of reference to modify the global system of empires. In the British debates about imperial reform from the 1890s onwards, to give but one example, both Germany and the United States served

312

S. CONRAD

as inspirations. At the core were plans to give the empire a larger role in Britain’s national economy and to introduce “imperial preference” in order to create an empire-wide free trade zone with clear external boundaries. This proposal to amend the dominant free trade politics, prominently championed by Joseph Chamberlain, amounted to an introduction of elements of protectionism as practiced at the time both in Germany and the United States. Similarly, the British debate about national efficiency in the early twentieth century saw proponents of reform look to Germany, but also to the United States and Japan, as models of a modernized state and economy that was seen as superior to the traditional outlook that the British Empire now seemed to represent.12 Also on the part of anti-colonial activists, the United States and Germany offered a positionality that promised to challenge the existing imperial order. While the United States was unquestionably seen as an imperialist power in its own right, particularly in Latin America, its insistance on the “Open Door” could also be apprehended by colonial nationalists as a stance against territorial conquest and foreign rule. The liberal imperialism championed by President Woodrow Wilson, for example, also provided the rhetoric of “self-determination” that fueled anti-imperialist projects around the world. Similarly, post-World-War I Germany emerged as a point of reference, and even a base of operation, for small groups of nationalists from the colonial world. Berlin, in particular, became home to anti-colonial activists hoping to benefit from the popular German criticisms of British and French imperialism typical of the Weimar period. They included intellectuals such as the Indian nationalist M. N. Roy, who was active in communist circles and was in close contact with individuals like August Thalheimer, the chairman of the Communist Party of Germany in 1923/24; and Mohammad Nafi Tschelebi, who campaigned for Islamic-Arab nationalism. The Congress held by the League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression in Brussels in 1927 was organized from the German capital. Alongside other imperial centers—Paris, London, Geneva, Shanghai, New York—Berlin emerged as a hub for anti-colonial activism in the interwar period.13 There was not much in the history of German colonialism that predisposed it for such a role. To be sure, occasional anti-imperialist sentiments had been voiced in the Kaiserreich, as was the case in other European countries, and a strong Communist movement in the interwar period proved fertile soil for critiques of imperialism. But not many activists

15

SETTLER COLONIALISM AND FINANCIAL IMPERIALISM …

313

and intellectuals in the colonial world would have considered Germany as the congenial base for anti-colonial coalitions before 1918, and thus before the dissolution of Germany’s empire. It was the changing geopolitical situation, and Germany’s shifting position within it, that helped turn the German capital into a site where new alliances were forged, and a post-imperial world envisioned. Similarly, the appeal that the United States held for many German colonial actors only becomes fully legible once we place it in the broader context of the times. What may appear as a bilateral exchange between Wilhelmine Germany and the United States in the Progressive Era, an “elective affinity” of sorts, was part and parcel of a global conjuncture. References to other imperial projects were multi-directional, and spanned a diverse geography. But all these models—including German lessons from the United States, and vice versa—derived parts of their purchasing power from the way in which they were placed in a world deeply structured—albeit unevenly—by imperialism and capitalism.

Notes 1. On German colonialism, see Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For a good summary of recent scholarship, see Minu Haschemi Yekani and Ulrike Schaper, “Pictures, Postcards, Points of Contact: New Approaches to Cultural Histories of German Colonialism,” German History 35.4 (2017), 602–623; Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, “Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Decolonization,” Central European History 51.1 (2018), 83–89. For the United States, see Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116.5 (2011), 1348–1391; Anthony Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Daniel Immerwahr, How To Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 2019). 2. E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects Between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Jonas Kreienbaum and Christoph Kamissek, eds., “An Imperial Cloud,” special issue of Journal of Modern European History, 14.2 (2016); Daniel Hedinger and Nadin Heé, “Transimperial History: Connectivity, Cooperation and Competition,” Journal of Modern European History, 16.4 (2018), 429–452. 3. This typology builds on Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

314

S. CONRAD

4. Ann Laura Stoler and Carole McGranahan, “Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Terrains,” in Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan & Peter Perdue, eds., Imperial Formations (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2007), 3–42. 5. Dörte Lerp, Imperiale Grenzräume: Bevölkerungspolitiken in DeutschSüdwestafrika und den östlichen Provinzen Preußens 1884–1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2016). 6. Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 7. Sebastian Conrad, “Rethinking German Colonialism in a Global Age,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41.4 (2013), 543–566. 8. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688–2015, 3rd. ed. (London: Routledge, 2016); Marc-William Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle Over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Michael Patrick Cullinane and Alex Goodall, The Open Door Era: United States Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). 9. Erik Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 10. David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834– 1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Adam McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846–1940,” Journal of World History 15.2 (2004), 155–190. 11. Minu Haschemi Yekani, Koloniale Arbeit: Rassismus, Migration und Herrschaft in Tansania (1885–1914) (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2018). See also Nancy Fraser, “Legitimation Crisis? On the Political Contradictions of Financialized Capitalism,” Critical Historical Studies 2.2 (2015), 157–189; Michael C. Dawson, “Hidden in Plain Sight: A Note on Legitimation Crises and the Racial Order,” Critical Historical Studies 3.1 (2016), 143–161. 12. Edmund Rogers, “The United States and the Fiscal Debate in Britain, 1873–1913,” The Historical Journal 50.3 (2007), 593–622; Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860– 1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Chika Tonooka, “Reverse Emulation and the Cult of Japanes Efficiency in Edwardian Britain,” The Historical Journal 60.1 (2017), 95–119. 13. Nathanael Kuck, “Anticolonialism in a Post-imperial Environment: The Case of Berlin, 1914–1933,” Journal of Contemporary History 49.1 (2014), 134–59; Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

Index

A Africans, 2, 9, 64–66, 70–79, 93, 110, 118, 129, 131, 133–135, 137– 141, 143–145, 151, 155–158, 160–162, 167, 170–173, 211, 221, 240, 251, 254, 256, 257, 260–266, 268–270, 272, 273, 275, 309 Afrikareisende, 65–67, 70, 76, 79, 81 age of empires, 95, 172 agrarian romanticism, 43, 53 agriculture, 20, 26, 45, 130, 132, 140, 156, 162, 163, 302 American West, 2, 5, 7–10, 43, 50, 52, 58, 111, 116, 117, 119, 121, 122, 155–157, 164, 170, 172, 224, 231, 254, 256, 278, 281, 282, 284, 292, 294 androgyny, 237 anti-immigrant, 208 Apaches, 10, 231, 233, 254–260, 262–271, 273, 283, 284, 304 Aron, Raymond, 8, 83–105, 303

askaris, 10, 254–258, 260, 262–271 atrocity, 279, 281, 284, 286, 291, 292, 294, 303

B Barth, Heinrich, 65, 67, 78, 79 Behncke, Paul, 179–195, 197–200 Berlin, 27, 32, 35–38, 44, 56, 59–61, 78, 79, 84, 110, 117, 127, 135, 137, 143, 147–151, 158, 173–176, 189, 196, 197, 218, 224, 227, 240–242, 251, 273–275, 297, 298, 311, 312, 314 breeches role, 244, 246

C Campbell system, 9, 156, 164, 165, 167, 172 Canada, 6, 43, 46, 48, 60, 110, 136, 160, 179, 194

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2

315

316

INDEX

caricatures, 205–207, 213, 217, 218, 222, 223, 304 Césaire, Aimé, 303–306 China, 97, 134, 161, 205, 212, 214, 217–221, 310, 311 Chinaman, 9, 205, 207 Cody, Buffalo Bill, 1, 2, 239, 250, 251 colonialism, 2–5, 8, 10, 12, 13, 37, 84, 85, 88, 90–92, 97, 98, 110, 114–116, 118, 119, 121–124, 158, 178, 207, 218, 226, 253, 254, 258, 261, 265, 270, 271, 303, 307, 309–313 colonial soldiers, 72, 86, 91, 94, 123, 135, 137, 138, 161, 253–266, 268–273, 285, 290, 311 Connell, R.W., 246, 251 conquest empires, 88 craniology, 211 Crook, George, 262, 264, 268, 274, 275, 293 cross-dressing, 231, 233, 238, 239, 243, 244, 246, 247

expansionism, 8, 116, 117, 123, 124, 130, 278, 282 expansion, United States, 2, 4, 8, 64, 112, 117, 155, 156, 189, 194, 278, 308 expedition, 64–68, 70–72, 76, 77, 81, 91, 163, 257, 266 exploration, 45, 64–66, 77, 79, 91 expropriation, 56, 138, 140, 141, 266, 302, 311

D Darré, Walther, 57 decline of European empires, 85, 95 decolonization, 90, 313 de Lagarde, Paul, 114, 116, 121, 126 Drang nach Osten, 8, 110, 125, 278

G Garber, Marjorie, 246, 247, 251 gender, 9, 197, 220, 230, 231, 233, 235, 237, 238, 242–248, 258 genocide, 14, 57, 58, 119, 125, 140, 161, 279, 288 George F. Keller, 211–217, 221, 222 German Colonial Division, 137 German Customs Union (Zollverein), 26, 32, 37 German East Africa, 10, 77, 110, 117, 134, 158, 162, 174, 254–256, 260–264, 266, 268, 271–273, 275, 276, 310 German Empire, 42–44, 49, 53, 109, 110, 116, 117, 119, 120, 131, 133, 144, 154, 159, 171, 218

E Eastern Europe, 2, 7, 12, 43, 59, 110–112, 114, 116, 119–122, 124, 125, 278, 282, 292, 294, 304 eugenics, 9, 205–207, 221, 222 euphemism, 279 Evangelisch Sociale Kongress , 133, 138 exceptionalism, 1, 5, 278

F Fabri, Friedrich, 80, 114, 115, 159 Falke, SMS, 9, 178–182, 184–189, 191–195, 198 farming, 9, 44, 46–48, 134, 136, 138, 153, 155, 159–162, 164, 165, 167, 170. See also agriculture financial imperialism, 310 French colonialism, 83, 85, 98 French sociology, 84 Friedrich List, 7, 17, 19, 34–39, 145, 301

INDEX

German Farm Workers’ Office, 143, 144 German National Assembly, Frankfurt 1848, 30, 32, 111, 112, 301 German Navy, 32, 197 German Southwest Africa (GSWA), 4, 6, 8, 9, 14, 117, 119, 122, 131, 134, 137–140, 143, 144, 147, 149, 151, 154, 155, 158–165, 167–174, 302, 309, 310 Grant, U.S., 140, 176, 280, 281, 287, 295, 303 Great Plains, 7–9, 41, 45–47, 52, 59, 73, 136, 164 H Hagenbeck, Carl, 2, 11, 239 Herero, 14, 134, 137–140, 149, 154, 159–162, 164, 168, 173, 226 Hintze, Otto, 129–131, 145 Hitler, Adolf, 4, 12, 34, 43, 56, 61, 86–88, 90, 120–122, 124, 125, 127, 277–279, 282, 288–291, 293, 294, 297, 304, 305 Homestead Act, 50, 136, 163, 168 households, 10, 254, 261, 265, 266, 269, 270 I identity, 1, 48, 71, 234, 237, 238, 244, 246, 249, 256, 260–262, 268, 269, 272, 282 immigration laws, 206, 212 imperial wars, 95 Indigenous people, German perceptions of, 2, 10, 46, 50, 55, 58, 73, 135, 138, 140, 144, 145, 155, 161, 172, 177, 179, 180, 186–188, 190, 230, 231, 237, 238, 240, 248, 254, 257, 264, 278, 282

317

inner colonialism, 8, 12, 42, 43, 47, 51–56, 58, 59, 113, 136, 147 irrigation, 9, 46, 119, 154–156, 162, 164, 168–172

J Jackson, Andrew (US president), 21, 279, 294, 295 Junker, 44, 47, 50, 52, 54, 56, 57, 136

K Karl May festivals, 10, 229, 230, 240–244, 246, 248 kinship, 95, 254, 256, 266, 271 Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee (Komitee), 9, 155, 156, 164, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171

L Labor labor policies, 130, 131 labor question, 131, 133–135, 164 labor regimes, 131, 311 wage labor, 132, 134, 139–141, 311 Lafayette, 20, 36 Langhans, Paul, 114, 115, 126 Latvia, 41, 42, 54, 55 Lebensraum, 37, 56, 116, 278 Leutwein, Theodor, 137, 143, 148, 150, 161 liberalism, 22, 130, 133, 218, 312 linguistics, 72, 220, 279, 281 Lowenberg, Carl, 181, 187, 191

M Manifest Destiny, 278

318

INDEX

masculinity, 10, 230, 231, 233, 237, 238, 246, 247, 254, 256, 262, 270, 271 May, Karl (German fiction writer), 5, 9, 72, 116, 229, 243, 244, 248–250, 309 Mexico, 6, 13, 27, 28, 167, 250, 256, 275, 283, 295 migration, 4, 5, 12, 13, 27–34, 51, 72, 94, 111, 114, 125, 130, 131, 133, 136–138, 142–144, 157–160, 164, 167, 178, 208, 211, 212, 216, 217, 220, 222, 279, 309 military strategy, 279, 283, 286, 292 Mitteleuropa, 18, 30, 35, 38 N Nama, 135, 139, 141, 154, 155, 159–162, 164, 168, 173, 226 narrative, 7, 66, 67, 70–72, 76, 77, 79, 117, 118, 132, 162, 179, 182, 188, 191, 237, 242, 248, 256 nationality, 25, 31, 131, 141–143, 159 navalism, 22–28 Nazi East, Nazi imperialism, 10, 87–89, 98, 99, 279, 281, 304 Nazi Germany, 8, 12, 37, 85, 88, 99, 121, 279, 294, 295, 303 networking, German-American middle-class, 6, 7 O Ober Ost, 120 “Open Door” policy, 310, 312 Orient, 30, 33, 205 P Pacific Ocean, 170, 178, 194, 199

Personal photographs, 182, 184, 185, 195 Peters, Carl, 2, 11, 80, 109, 110, 114, 117, 122, 124, 158, 159 phrenology, 211 physical anthropology, 221, 222 Poles, 9, 30, 42, 50–52, 54–58, 113–115, 131, 133–135, 138, 139, 141, 145, 190, 288 Prussia, 27, 31, 32, 34, 44, 50, 51, 54, 58, 76, 110, 111, 113–115, 117, 126, 130, 131, 135–137, 142, 144, 150, 171, 238 Prussian East, 4, 8, 31, 34, 41, 43, 44, 52, 56, 110, 111, 113–115, 117, 118, 126, 130, 131, 133–138, 141–143 Prussian Settlement Commission, 51, 113, 116, 121, 124, 135, 137, 148 R race, 3, 4, 9, 10, 23, 30–32, 57, 58, 70, 88, 90, 94, 97, 114, 119, 120, 122, 130, 131, 133, 135, 140–143, 145, 155, 158, 161, 205–208, 211, 215–217, 220–222, 238, 242, 243, 250, 264, 267, 268, 270, 272, 277, 279, 280, 282, 288, 289, 291, 293, 294, 302, 304, 308, 311 railroad, 5, 8, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 32, 34, 45–47, 64, 68, 70, 72–75, 77, 78, 80, 81, 167, 169, 207, 231, 302 Ratzel, Friedrich, 2, 11, 116, 117, 121, 122, 127, 205, 220, 221, 223, 226, 227 Rehbock, Theodore, 161–164, 174–176 Reichskolonialamt , 9, 155, 156, 161, 164, 167–173, 176

INDEX

Rhenish Missionary Society, 140 rhetoric, 10, 51, 91, 204, 207, 218, 279–287, 292, 293, 312 Rohlfs, Gerhard, 8, 63–68, 70–78, 80, 81, 302 Rohrbach, Paul, 138, 148 S satire magazines, 203–207, 217, 218, 221, 222, 226 Schmitt, Carl, 89, 96, 99, 102, 105 Schmoller, Gustav, 44, 45, 51, 133, 136, 147 Schutzruppe, 254, 256, 265 Sering, Max, 2, 7, 8, 11, 12, 41–61, 113, 121, 122, 124, 126, 136, 147, 302, 308 settlement program, 136–138 settler colonialism, 2, 6, 7, 43, 48, 49, 51, 53–55, 57–59, 145, 156, 157, 159 Sheridan, Phil, 287, 292, 293 Sherman, William T., 286, 287, 292, 293 Southeastern Europe (Mitteleuropa), 18, 29–31, 33, 57 SS, 34, 278, 288–293 Sudanese, 260–263, 271, 304 T Texas Society (Mainzer Adelsverein), 28, 38 theatre, 229, 230, 237, 239–241, 244, 250 transnational, 6, 77, 203–205, 207, 217, 222 travel, 8, 50, 66–69, 71, 74, 79, 116, 160, 162, 185, 187, 188, 192, 195, 207, 212, 217, 231 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 1, 2, 11, 53

319

U US Army, 254–258, 262, 266, 270, 282, 283, 287, 292 US empire, hegemony, 8, 95, 98 V Verein für Socialpolitik, 133 Vietnam War (French, American), 97 violence, 10, 58, 87, 161, 217, 254–257, 265, 266, 270, 271, 279, 282, 285, 286 von Bismarck, Otto, 47, 50, 51, 135, 157, 158 von Gagern, Hans Christoph, 111, 112 von Hartmann, Eduard, 135, 147 von Trotha, Lothar, 154, 161, 174 W warfare, 68, 88, 154, 255, 262, 265, 281, 283, 287, 291, 309 Weber, Max, 52, 84, 85, 95, 122, 133, 146, 308 Weimar sociology, 83, 84 Weltpolitik, 4, 37, 118 Wild West, 1, 2, 5, 9, 229–231, 233, 235, 237–240, 243, 246, 248, 251 Winnetou, Mescalero Apache (fictional character), 229, 231–233, 236, 237, 240, 241, 243–245, 247, 250 World War I (WWI), 5, 30, 172, 178, 197, 241, 261, 264, 265, 268–270, 273, 275 World War II (WWII), 17, 34, 85, 93, 95, 96, 242 Wynter, Sylvia, 305, 306 Y Yakima, 9, 156, 169, 170, 172, 176 yellow peril, 205, 221