Sixteenth-Century German Participation in New World Colonization: A Historiography (original) (raw)
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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.
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.