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Material Memories of Empire: Coming to Terms with German Colonialism

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Material Memories of Empire: Coming to Terms with German Colonialism BrittaSchilling Material Memories of Empire: Coming to Terms with German Colonialism The memory of colonialism in Germanyhas been long-lived and relatively dy- namic. This is because Germany’spostcolonial period has been shaped by pro- found ruptures including the Second World War, the Holocaust and the Cold War. This article sketches out the multifaceted collective memoryofGerman col- onialism stretching from the loss of the colonies to the present day. In 1959, The- odor Adorno famouslyadmonishedGermans for not “comingtoterms” with their National Socialist past in the postwar period, astatement which manyin- tellectuals and “ordinary Germans” have taken to heart since then.¹ But has there been acomparable “comingtoterms” with acolonial past? The Germancase is importantfor scholars’ understanding of wider Europe- an colonialisms and postcolonialisms because it is at once an example and an aberration. Although some academics have revivedHannah Arendt’swork on the origins of totalitarianism and sought the origins of Nazism in colonial wars at the begin- ning of the twentieth century, this is aproblematic thesis which has come up against anumber of well-founded counter-arguments.² Extreme violence and TheodorAdorno, “What does coming to terms with the past mean?,” in G. Hartman, Bitburgin Moraland PoliticalPerspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 114–129. JürgenZimmerer has been the most prolific recent proponent of this argument; see for exam- ple “Krieg,KZund VölkermordinSüdwestafrika. Der erste deutsche Genozid,ˮ in JürgenZim- mererand Joachim Zeller, Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Berlin: Ch. Links,2003), 45 – 63;see also Mark Mazower, DarkContinent (New York: Random House, 1998), 71– 72;Marcia Klotz, “Global Visions:From the Colonial to the National Socialist World,ˮ European Studies Journal 16,2 (Fall 1999): 37–68;David Furber and WendyLower, “Colonialism and Genocide in Nazi-Occupied Polandand Ukraine,ˮ in A. Dirk Moses, Empire, Colony,Genocide (New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2008): 372–400.Convincingarguments against this “continuity thesis” have been presentedinIsabel Hull, Absolute Destruction (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2005); Birthe Kundrus, “Kontinuitäten, Parallelen, Rezeptionen,” Werkstatt Geschichte 43 (2006): 45 – 62;Pascal Grosse, “What does German colonialism have to do with National So- cialism?Aconceptual framework,” in Eric Ames,Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal, Germany’s Colonial Pasts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,2005), 115–134;Sebastian Conrad, Deut- sche Kolonialgeschichte (Munich:C.H. Beck, 2008), 96–106;Stephan Malinowski and Robert Gerwarth, “Hannah Arendt”sGhosts,” Central European History 42 (2009), 279–300.For further discussionofthe debate, see Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama, German Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). DOI 10.1515/9783110525625-002 Brought to you by | Utrecht University Library Authenticated Download Date | 2/16/18 1:31 PM 24 BrittaSchilling racism were not uniquetothe German colonies,and, as with other European powers,the shape of colonial rule varied across the different areas of empire. As much as it mayhaveinfluenced German racialist thinking,colonial violence in itself does not explain whyother colonial powers did not develop into total- itarian societies. Moreover,not all former colonialists integrated themselves into the NSDAP seamlessly.Certainly, bothNazism and colonialism made use of concepts of “race,”“empire,” and to some extent also “colonialism,” but in very different contexts.³ Finally, in numerous aspects, the colonial period itself was similar to and indeedentangled with other European colonial powers’ pat- terns of governance, as Ulrike Lindner,for example, has shown with respect to British and Germancolonial powers in Africa.⁴ Part of what makes the German case uniqueisnot onlythat the colonial pe- riod wassoshort,but rather that it was cut short. On the one hand, this meant that Germanynever had the experience of postcolonial migration, of hundreds of thousands of ex-colonial migrants moving to live and workinthe metropole, as has been the case in France and Britain. On the other hand, some scholars have argued that the colonial past still influences Germany’smulticultural present to varyingdegrees.⁵ Germany’soriginal period of decolonization began earlier than that of manyotherEuropean nations, giving it considerable time and impetus to develop acollective memoryofcolonialism after the fact,amemory which is UtaPoigerthus makes avalidplea for viewingGerman history as “imperial” history,but this is not contingent upon classifyingthe German–Hererowar as “genocide.” U. Poiger, “Imperial- ism and EmpireinTwentieth-Century Germany,” Historyand Memory 17,1– 2(Spring–Summer 2005): 117–143. This is echoed by Pascal Grosse in “From Colonialism to National Socialism to Postcolonialism,” Postcolonial Studies 9,1(2006): 48 and Shelley Baranowski in Nazi Empire (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,2011), 3. UlrikeLindner, Koloniale Begegnungen (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus,2011). See, e.g., MonikaAlbrecht, “Postcolonialism and Migration into Germany’sColonial Past,” German Life and Letters 65,3 (July2012): 363–377;PatriceNganang, “Autobiographies of Black- ness in Germany,” in Ames,Klotz, and Wildenthal, Germany’sColonial Pasts,227–240; Kien Nghi Ha, Nicola Lauré al-Samarai and Sheila Mysorekar, “Einleitung,” in Ha, al-Samarai and My- sorekar, re/visionen (Münster: Unrast,2007), 9–21;HitoSteyerl, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodrí- guez and Kien Nghi Ha, Spricht die Subalterne deutsch?,2nd edition (Münster: Unrast,2012); María do Mar CastroVarela and Nikita Dhawan, “Mission Impossible,” in Julia Reuterand Paula-Irene Villa, Postkoloniale Soziologie (Bielefeld:Transcript,2010), 303–330; Cyber-No- mads/Öffentlichkeit gegenGewalt, TheBlack Book (Frankfurt am Main/London: IKO, 2004); MaureenMaisha Eggers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Piesche and Susan Arndt, Mythen, Masken und Subjekte (Münster: Unrast,2006); Sara Lennox, “Postcolonial WritinginGermany,” in Ato Quayson, CambridgeHistoryofPostcolonial Literature (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2012), 620 – 648. Foradiscussionofdifferent German “postcolonialisms,” see Britta Schil- ling, “German Postcolonialism in Four Dimensions,” Postcolonial Studies 18,4(2015): 427– 439. Brought to you by | Utrecht University Library Authenticated Download Date | 2/16/18 1:31 PM Material Memories of Empire: Coming to Terms with German Colonialism 25 now one or even twogenerations ahead of that of other major European powers, but perhaps more hidden from public space. Although the scope of German col- onialism discussed, for example, at international conferences has expanded, most historians still see 1945asastoppingpoint,claiming that afterwards there existed onlyaperiod of colonial ‘amnesia’.⁶ This article proposes adiffer- ent periodization, one which transcends the conventional breaks marked by the Nazi takeover and the end of the Second World War. 1. MemoryinGermany: a(material) re-periodization Lookingatboth historical and theoretical aspects, it addresses aproblem in tra- ditional historiographybyexploring how long,following the end of formal claims to overseas territories,a‘collective memory’ of Germancolonialism con- tinued to exist,what formsitassumed, and how and whythese forms changed over time.This paper summarizes the most important nodes in this memory nar- rative,which are explained more fullyinthe book, Postcolonial Germany.⁷ But, unlike other lieux-de-mémoire-like compilations,⁸ the research alsoopens up val- uable new opportunities for consideringthe relationship between human mem- ory and material culture, how things make us think about the past.Inour own rapidlyevolvingdigital age, which replacesmaterial objects with ephemeral ren- ditions(one has onlytothink of the evolution of the book), the relationship be- tween the physical and the psychological mayitself soon be afigment of the past,making its investigation all the more valuable. It is the latter goal on which this article focuses. Recent attemptstodefine the relationship between people and artefacts have shown how memory objectsare aunique means of re-experiencing the past in the present.Inhis work on memory and material culture, Andrew Jones, for example, argues that “we can no longer simplytreat objectspurely The term “Amnesie” has been used by Reinhart Kößler and others to describe the current state of awareness of colonialism in Germany. Kößler, “Kolonialherrschaft—auch eine deutsche Ver- gangenheit”,inLutz and Gawarecki, Kolonialismus und Erinnerungskultur (Munster: Waxmann, 2005), 33.Lora Wildenthal also referstoa“repudiation or amnesia” of imperial ambitionsafter 1945inher essay, “Notes on aHistory of ‘Imperial Turns’ in Modern Germany,” in Antoinette Burton, After the ImperialTurn (Durham/London: DukeUniversity Press, 2003), 145 – 156. Britta Schilling, Postcolonial Germany (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2014). Forexample, most recently, JürgenZimmerer, Kein Platz an der Sonne (Frankfurt am Main: Campus,2013). Brought to you by | Utrecht University Library Authenticated Download Date | 2/16/18 1:31 PM 26 BrittaSchilling as symbolic media; rather the materiality of objectsisbest seen as impingingon people sensuallyand physicallyatafundamental level.”⁹ This primacy of the material in social and culturalhistory has also been evoked in different contexts by sociologist Arjun Appadurai, historical anthropologist Nicholas Thomas,his- torian Carolyn Steedman, archaeologist Chris
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