Germans Abroad Respatializing Historical Narrative (original) (raw)
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Postcolonial Germany: Memories of Empire in a Decolonized Nation
Reviews in History, 2014
The title of Britta Schilling's fine monograph, Postcolonial Germany, refers to a phenomenon that has given rise to a relatively new but vital field of study. While historians have, in one way or another, always been working on the roughly 30 years of German colonialism (1884-1914/19), a 'boom' (1) of scholarship in this field only occurred following the emergence of postcolonial German studies, which gained momentum in the late 1990s. Schilling's study thus builds on lively recent discussion and research on German colonialism and postcoloniality both in the Anglophone and German context. Simultaneously, the author leaves the beaten path many times. Unlike earlier works in the field of German postcolonial studies she proposes, for instance, a periodization 'which transcends the conventional breaks marked by the Nazi takeover and the end of the Second World War' (p. 9). She also joins the very few scholars who do not reiterate the catch-phrase of a 'colonial' or 'postcolonial amnesia' (2) that allegedly 'affected the cultural memory' in Germany-an amnesia that for some 'began after World War II and lasted well into the 1960s' (3) while for others it continues roughly to the centenary in 2004 of the colonial wars against the Herero and Nama peoples.(4) Schilling thus not only covers the entire 'post-colonial' time (in a chronological sense) 'from the loss of the colonies to the present day' (p. 2), she also maintains that there was never such a period of forgetting in Germany (p. 10).
Making Germany's Hidden Yet Omnipresent Colonial Past Visible
Displacing Theory Through the Global South, 2024
For thirty years, Berlin was the metropole of the German colonial empire. For most German citizens, however, this statement is relatively unknown. Even though there is an increased interest in decolonial praxis within Berlin-based cultural and educational settings, the persistence of such efforts and their implications within larger society is hard to assess in advance. In response, this text proposes a walking tour through Berlin, highlighting places related to this part of German history. In doing so, it demonstrates the presence of many references to colonialism spread through the city and, more significantly, many initiatives and projects seeking to make this past more visible. By offering an overview of four specific locations within the city, this chapter hopes to critically reflect on the extensive trajectory of the ongoing struggles for historical reparations. Keywords: German colonialism; Berlin; collective memory; reparation; decolonization
The history of Germany and the history of imperialism have long served as stark reminders that modernity is not always a process of growing enlightenment and emancipation. Once, both modern German history and overseas colonialism could be dismissed as the result of feudal holdovers, for example, in the work of Ralph Dahrendorf on Germany and Joseph Schumpeter on imperialism. 1 Today modern German history and the history of imperialism have become exemplars of modernity, but a modernity of a decidedly authoritarian and dystopian type. Paul Rabinow, for example, has termed colonies "laboratories of modernity," while Detlev Peukert has found the "spirit of science" at work even in the Holocaust. 2 German and colonial history no longer trouble the concept of modernity but rather constitute exemplars of a modernity that is itself troubling. Given the separate significance of the histories of imperialism and of Germany for our understanding of modernity, it should perhaps come as no surprise that the German colonial empire itself played a central, and contradictory, role in the construction of a modernity that we today recognize as liberal internationalism. Before the First World War, European colonial thinkers, the greatest liberal internationalists of their day, looked to Germany with envy and admiration for its modernizing (or kulturbestrebend), colonial policy. 3 After the war, these same European colonial powers cast Germany 6