Changing Frames Identity and Citizenship of New Guineans of German Heritage during the Interwar Years, 2012 (original) (raw)

This paper investigates Melanesian-German history across national and regional boundaries, highlighting conflicting pressures on Pacific Islander-Germans during the interwar years; it brings to the fore a Kafkaesque web of contradictory transnational policy developments, legislation and radicalised government practices that impacted on the lives of German-New Guineans who lived in the Mandated Territory of New Guinea and as (transient) diasporas in Australia and National Socialist Germany. The assertions and challenges of Melanesian-Germans to externally ascribed racialised identities by German and Australian agencies are explored within the wider context of German-Pacific Islander experiences and linked to present-day remembering and representations. Whether the descendants of German fathers and New Guinean mothers were fellow citizens or enemy aliens, Germans, New Guineans, Europeans, natives, mixed-bloods or half-castes depended on the political circumstances and on who defined and framed their being and their rights. IT IS AN EASY TRAP, WHEN ANALYSING THE PAST RACIALISATION OF INDIVIDUALS, to treat the categories of 'race' developed in the past as if they were stable entities and practices based on them as if they were coherent. That there is no logic or system in the framing of individuals according to race, and that the resulting entitlements or opportunities granted or denied are arbitrary and forever changing has to be said before embarking on the history of New Guineans of German heritage during the interwar years. Most of them born to New Guinean mothers and German fathers during the short period of German colonial rule of New Guinea, these children lived through dramatic political changes that impacted on their lives. Who they were, fellow citizens or enemy aliens,