Sixteenth-Century German Participation in New World Colonization: A Historiography (original) (raw)
Abstract This article explores the mostly-forgotten history of the sixteenth-century colonization of Venezuela by the Welser Company, a German merchant family company from Augsburg, and its reinterpretation in Germany’s cultural memory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When Imperial Germany began to colonize parts of Africa and the South Pacific, the Welser episode resurfaced in its popular culture. The Venezuela Welser colony became a hopeful symbol for Imperial Germany’s colonial desires, and supported imperialists’ idea that Germany had a legitimate right to colonization. Later, after the loss of its colonies at the end of WWI, Germany continued to try and make sense of its colonial past while transitioning between the short-lived German Empire, the democratic Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich. Through an analysis of works of history and historical fiction from the Imperial era through the Third Reich, this paper analyzes how and why the fantasy of the Venezuelan colony fueled the desire for imperial expansion and why it matters to discuss it amidst Germany’s belated imperialism and its ultimate turn to Fascism. The article concludes with an an examination of how Germans have recently decided to decolonize their public spaces. This time Germans’ de-colonial turn aims to connect early colonial history to ongoing struggles against racism and anti-Semitism in the German public sphere.
Culture & History Digital Journal, 2014
In 1507, the excitement over the publication of the Mundus Novus led to the naming of a new continent on the map, a globe and a learned treatise as an appendix to an edition of a work by Ptolemy published in Saint-Dié, Lorraine. Network analysis of the cities where the broadsheet Mundus Novus, attributed to Amerigo Vespucci, appeared shows that the text was mainly published in German mercantile cities, especially Augsburg and Nuremberg between 1504 and 1506. There is strong evidence that this text about the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci was primarily issued to raise money in order to finance German mercantile investments in the Portuguese fleet to Asia in 1505-1506. In 1507, the map and the globe with the new name for the New World demonstrated the riches that the members of the Diet of Konstanz might obtain if they supported Maximilian in his expedition to Italy and his quest for the imperial crown. Thus, the struggle between Maximilian I and Louis XII for the title of Holy Roman Emperor and the need for investment in German trade with Asia determined the invention of America.
Germany: 1. Colonialism, Early Modern period
Encyclopedia of Empire, 2016
Although no German state maintained a continuous colonial presence outside Europe before the 1800s, early modern Germany formed at least temporarily an important part of European expansion on several levels, which had repercussions for German society and economy as well as for other colonial empires and extra-European regions. Characteristic is the pattern of “mediated” German encounters, whereby merchants, sailors, missionaries, and scholars took part in colonial ventures under non-German flags.
2011
The direct German contribution to the exploration of the New World in the sixteenth century was slight compared to that of the Spanish and Portuguese, but the peoples of Germany shaped the overall European conception of the Americas. The German attempt to make sense of the momentous and unexpected discovery of the New World, assimilating the “Other” of the New World into Old World categories of knowledge, also helped to engender a nascent idea of a distinct German identity. Sixteenth century soldiers of fortune Ulrich Schmidel of Bavaria and Hans Staden of Hesse published popular accounts of their respective American travels. As with all travel literature, these works describe not only the observed, but also the observers themselves. Schmidel and Staden, like German scholars and authors of their day, attempted to explain the exotic western hemisphere in the familiar European terms they knew, but their accounts also demonstrate that encounters between German-speakers and a medley of Amerindian and other European peoples fostered the construction of a German “national” identity.