German Colonialism and National Identity

Perraudin, Michael; Zimmerer, Jürgen; Heady, Katy

doi:10.4324/9780203852590

Cited by 42 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…In the scholarly field, several collective volumes have subsequently documented efforts to promote (self-)critical reflections on how to come to terms with an also German colonial past (see e.g. Hobuß & Lölke, 2007, Perraudin & Zimmerer, 2011, Bechhaus-Gerst & Zeller, 2018, Zimmermann & Geißler, 2020.…”

Section: Postcolonial Initiatives Making Headwaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Selective commemoration: coming to terms with German colonialism

Kößler¹,

Melber²

2021

Dealing With the Past

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German colonialism lasted for three decades between 1884 and World War I. With the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the German empire was officially declared unfit to colonise and its colonial territories were transferred by the League of Nations as trusteeships to mandatory powers. But while this was the official end of a German colonial empire, it survived in German mindsets and ambitions, further reinforced under the Nazi regime. Notwithstanding its end, the ideological impact of the colonial project on the expansionist warfare especially into Eastern Europe and the treatment of people, escalating in the Holocaust and other forms of systematic mass extermination, remained to a large extent ignored ever since. The quest for coming to terms with the violent German past focused mainly on the Third Reich.While in West Germany, Nazi crimes were largely repressed from public discourse during the 1950s and Nazi perpetrators continued in the ranks of the state and public services, this began to change around 1960, largely due to single-handed action of persons such as state attorney Fritz Bauer who initiated the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, and increasingly also through insistence by a younger generation who turned towards a painful and soul-searching engagement with the dire past. Such quests for recognition of state-sponsored crimes met dogged resistance and could prevail only in a long process, in which successive groups of victims besides Jews, such as Sinti and Roma and gay people came to the fore. Claims raised in 2020 against the German railways (Möller, 2020), which had been instrumental in ferrying millions to annihilation camps, underscore that this process has by no means come to a conclusion. Still, in the eyes of the world, these efforts have received a lot of recognition, respect and earned Germany international credibility.In keeping with this, speaking at the 75th commemoration of Victory in Europe Day (VE) in May 2020, German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier called this a day of liberation imposed by Allied military forces, including the Soviets. But as he stated, "internal liberation", the coming to terms with the heritage of dictatorship and above all the horrific mass crimes, re-

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Section: Postcolonial Initiatives Making Headwaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Selective commemoration: coming to terms with German colonialism

Kößler¹,

Melber²

2021

Dealing With the Past

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“…For the late imperial period proper, colonies were an important discursive platform to negotiate issues such as global leadership, cultural hierarchies or the bourgeois value system. Means of popularisation within the wider German public included travel literature, popular magazines and extensive visual representation (Kundrus 2003;Naranch 2005;Perraudin and Zimmerer 2011;Zantop 1997). The discourse about 'Germans abroad' followed similar patterns.…”

Section: Diaspora Support and (Trans)national Identitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Protestantism, nation and diaspora inImperialGermany

Manz

2012

Nations and Nationalism

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This article examines the close connection between Protestantism and nationalism in Imperial Germany within a transnational context. In the years before 1914, the Prussian State Church in particular strengthened the legal and organisational framework for an increasing number of diaspora congregations to become attached. These acted as an important vehicle to embed the nationalist rhetoric produced within the Reich into emigrants' notions of belonging. Whilst previous scholarship has noted this connection in general, the article sheds more detailed light on the mechanics and structure, but also on the limits, of this process. Feedback processes from periphery to centre, in turn, had an impact on German national identity construction as that of a nation that was not confined to state borders. Applying a constructionist theoretical framework, the contested question of whether the heterogeneity of Germans abroad allows for the application of the diaspora concept is answered affirmatively.

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Black Is Not Beautiful: The German Myth of Race

Samples

2018

Relating Worlds of Racism

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German Colonialism and National Identity

Cited by 42 publications

References 0 publications

Selective commemoration: coming to terms with German colonialism

Selective commemoration: coming to terms with German colonialism

Protestantism, nation and diaspora inImperialGermany

Black Is Not Beautiful: The German Myth of Race

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