Acknowledgments
T H is book o W es its existence to the efforts of more individuals than just myself. This work is based on six years of research into thousands of pages of documents in seventy-seven files housed in seven archives in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Australia: the German Federal Archives in Lichterfelde and Koblenz (BArch), the Political Archives of the German Foreign Office in Berlin (PA AA), the Franckesche Stiftungen in Halle, the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Dahlem (GStAPK), the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, the National Archives of the United Kingdom, and the Pacific Manuscript Bureau holdings of the National Library of Austrialia in Sydney. In the archives, I focused my attention on letter networks, personal papers of key figures, government documents, memos, and briefs; transcripts of phone calls and meetings of German colonialist organizations and their members, of meetings of the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission members, of meetings of German government officials, and all correspondence and documents pertaining to the former German colonies, the mandates, the Treaty of Versailles, the Locarno Conference, the Naturalization Crisis, and the Manchurian Crisis. I also made use of hundreds of published primary sources—artwork, novels, memoirs, published speeches and debates, government documents, pamphlets— and forty-two periodicals—newspapers, missionary newsletters, interest group newsletters, advertisements, magazines, and journals—from Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Austria, Ireland, Switzerland, South Africa, Kenya, and the mandates of East Africa, the British and French Cameroons, and Southwest Africa. Such a monumental undertaking required input and assistance from numerous scholars, organizations, and family members, and I would like to extend acknowledgments of gratitude to them all.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the staff of all seven of the archives that house the material used in this book. An especial thanks to the staff at Lichterfelde, who made that archive feel like a second home, and to the staff at the National Library of Australia, who kindly shipped copies of materials I did not have time to access to me in the United States in the form of microfilm. I would also like to give a hearty thanks to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Blair Rogers Major and James Russell Major estate, and Emory University’s Laney Graduate School for the fellowships and funding which made the research for this project possible.
Aside from editors and readers at Oxford University Press, German History, and the International History Review, parts of or the entirety of this work have been viewed by many a scholar and I would like to thank as many of them as I can. I would like to thank professors Brian E. Vick, Astrid M. Eckert, and Tonio Andrade for their comments and advice in the various stages of this book’s production as well as their ongoing mentorship. Brian, our discussions about the Congress of Vienna and your theoretical approach to that international conference most certainly shaped how I attacked the material in the archives on not only Locarno, but also the PMC, the League, and even the various colonial German lobby groups. Astrid, your advice on the ever-shifting German archives, your encouragement to look at theoretical frameworks related to the other “orphans of Versailles,” and your meticulous editing and feedback were a godsend. Tonio, your global perspective gave the work a new dimension, making it more relevant for a twenty-first century audience. Additional thanks to Walter Adamson, Clifton Crais, and Gyanendra Pandey for your extra mentorship during my time at Emory. All of you left your mark on my scholarship, and I hope it shows in the present work. To all my friends from my graduate school days, who are too numerous to name, thank you all for your part in getting me through those years and beyond to the final project. To Lora Wildenthal at Rice University, thank you for your ongoing support of all young historians who tackle any aspect of Germany’s colonial past. Many a fruitful research discussion and many a panel at the German Studies Association has you to thank for it coming to pass, simply as a result of the connections you helped foster between us. Many thanks to Sebastian Conrad at Freie Universität, who not only served as my affiliation contact for my DAAD grant, but also built up a community of scholars in his Global History Colloquium in 2012–2013 that resulted in enduring contacts and friendships among many scholars, young and
old, including my favorite bunch from Berlin (Adam, Mahon, Julie: that means you). To my colleagues at Washington State University, my first teaching job outside of graduate school, all of you made my transformation from Emory doctoral graduate to professional historian smoother and many of you took special pains to give advice on this book or its proposal at various stages of its production. My thanks go out to the entire history department and our semimonthly reading groups, but I would like to especially thank Jesse Spohnholz—a mentor to us all in the Roots program, Matthew Sutton—the go-to academic for advice on publication, Steve Kale, Clif Stratton, Lawrence Hatter, Julian Dodson, Kaja Cook, Karen Phoenix, Theresa Jordan, Matt Unangst, Jared Secord, Will Hamlin, and Ray Sun. To my new colleagues at California State University—Bakersfield, thank you for the scholarly and financial support to see this book through the final stages of production.
Last, but not least, I would like to thank former mentors and my family for their constant encouragement, love, and support, without which none of this would have been possible. To Mary Cherny, Rita Caver, Suzie Stuart: thank you for being excellent educators who instilled a passion for history in a young man. To Andy Lewis, Wayne Bartee, Eric Nelson, and Steve McIntyre at Missouri State: you four were there for the beginning of the journey and I cannot thank you enough for helping me get through not only my undergraduate career but giving me the courage and support needed to get into a prestigious doctoral program and pursue my research further. Andy, we lost you so suddenly in 2017. I miss you and I wish I could have handed you a copy of this book to show the fruits of all your amazing mentorship in those early days. To my parents, Joe and Kelly, thank you for always supporting my choice of an academic lifestyle, which in large part is the result of how you raised me, complete with trips to museums, thoughtful debates on current events at the dinner table, and discussions of Plato’s Republic in waiting rooms and on road trips when I was little more than a child. You may not have intended to get a historian as a result, but that is indeed what you created. To my grandfather, Mark, for our long discussions of history over coffee throughout the years which are sorely missed now that you are gone. For my siblings, Samantha and Brian, I have nothing but gratitude for our tense arguments and mutually beneficial discussions over the years as we’ve all wandered through various branches of academia. Though it may seem odd, I would like to thank my loveable Alsatian Collie, Charlie. Without him in my life insistently encouraging the occasional walk or run as a break from writing, I might have
gained thirty pounds while working on this project. Last, but most importantly, to my wife Ann. Without you, I never would have made it through this process. Your love and partnership through the highs and lows as you accompanied me across the planet for this vast endeavor were indispensable. This book is in many ways as much your baby as mine.
Abbreviations
AA Auswärtiges Amt, German Foreign Office
ACIQ Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions, Labour Party (UK)
BArch Bundesarchiv, German Federal Archives
BRD, FRG Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Federal Republic of Germany
DAG Deutsche Afrika Gesellschaft, German Africa Society
DDP Deutsche Demokratische Partei, German Democratic Party
DDR, GDR Deutsche Demokratische Republik, German Democratic Republic
DKG Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, German Colonial Society
DKP Deutschkonservative Partei, German Conservative Party
DNVP Deutschnationale Volkspartei, German National People’s Party
DVP Deutsche Volkspartei, German People’s Party
EU European Union
G20 Group of Twenty
GStAPK Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
KoRAG Koloniale Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft, Imperial Working Group on the Colonies
KPD Komunistisches Partei Deutschlands, Communist Party of Germany
NSDAP Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, Nazi Party
PA AA Auswärtiges Amt Politische Archiv, Political Archive of the German Foreign Office
PMC Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations
List of Abbreviations
SED Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, Socialist Unity Party of Germany
SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, Socialist Party of Germany
TNA National Archives of the United Kingdom
UK United Kingdom
UN United Nations
A World of Colonial Empires
i n April 1884, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck declared that the German Empire would join the European scramble for colonial possessions. After a year of debates in the Reichstag, Germany officially began a program of state-directed colonialism and a period of rapid imperial expansion.1 By 1913, just thirty-two years after unification of the German states under the Prussian Hohenzollern monarchy, Germany possessed the third largest colonial empire in the world, laying claim to small territorial holdings in China, island colonies in the Pacific, and huge swaths of the African continent. Although Germany was technically a latecomer to the table at which Europeans had carved up the globe, the birth and growth of the German colonial empire was the result of more than a century of German overseas scientific exploration, commercial ventures, missionary activities, emigration, scholastic Orientalism and exoticism, and concerted lobbying for the government to formulate a colonial policy by German colonial interest groups.2
The success these groups enjoyed at having attained their goal, however, was short-lived. Within eighteen months of the start of the First World War, all but one of Germany’s colonies was captured by foreign powers. By 1918, the only colony Germany had partially managed to keep from Allied occupation was German East Africa, thanks to the fierce defense staged by General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and his troops.3 By the time of the armistice on November 11, 1918, the German Empire—both overseas and in Europe itself—was nothing more than a memory.
After four years of war with no end in sight and the loss of nearly two million German soldiers, Germany had had enough.4 A revolution, sparked on October 29 by sailors in Kiel who chose to mutiny rather than to perish in a foolhardy “last stand” envisioned by the German admiralty, had prompted calls in Germany for the end of the war, the abdication of the Kaiser, and the establishment of a democratic government.5 The Kaiser’s abdication was announced on November 9 by Chancellor Max von Baden, who himself resigned the same day. On November 11, the same day the armistice was signed, a provisional democratic republican government was established under Friedrich Ebert, head of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).6
Yet as Detlev Peukert argued, “the Weimar Republic did not come into being as the result of an heroic act or of an act which national mythology could represent as heroic . . . Rather it was the product of complex and painful compromise, of defeats and mutual concessions.”7 In its fifteenyear history, Weimar Germany faced many challenges, particularly in its early years. The new state struggled to legitimize itself domestically and encountered malcontents and critics reacting to, and sometimes prompting, many changes of government amid the shift from monarchy-empire to republic. Pamela Swett and Dirk Schumann have demonstrated the processes by which the polarizing party politics resulted in a sometimes violent or extreme political culture in the form of paramilitary groups, assassinations, and even street brawls between parties.8 Although it would attain a brief period of stability from 1925 to 1929, the Weimar Republic experienced at least two bouts of detrimental inflation, fluctuating economic conditions, and agricultural and industrial production, and numerous groups placing demands on its welfare system.9 Weimar Germans also engaged with global shifts in political culture and communication throughout the “roaring Twenties,” as well as media and cultural production more generally, creating new debates on morals, art, religion, gender roles, demographics, reproduction, and population control.10
Thus, the birth pains of Germany’s new Weimar Republic, which was not formally established under a constitution with Ebert as its first president until August 1919, went hand in hand with the negotiations to end the First World War and the new global society that emerged in their aftermath.11 The Treaty of Versailles, negotiated between delegates from the victorious Allied powers between January and June 1919, redrew the map of Europe and imposed what many Germans considered to be harsh terms on the new Republic. In Article 231, the infamous “war guilt” clause, Germany
was forced to accept responsibility for initiating the war.12 Germany was ordered to demobilize large sections of its army, reducing its standing forces to no more than 100,000 troops. The Rhineland, Germany’s shared western border with France and Belgium that was now occupied by forces from those countries, the United States, and Britain, was to be completely demilitarized: all German military personnel and their equipment would leave the region, all German fortifications in the area were to be razed, and no new military installations were to be constructed there.13 Germany was ordered to pay reparations for damages and occupation costs to the Allied powers, the amount of which—roughly five billion dollars—was not determined until 1921.14 Last but not least, Germany was forced to cede approximately 25,000 square miles of territory in Europe and turn over sovereignty of its overseas colonies to the League of Nations Mandates System. Estimates vary, but nearly seven million Germans living in AlsaceLoraine, Moresnet, Eupen-Malmedy, Upper Silesia, Posen, sections of East Prussia, Pomerania, Memel, and the city of Danzig found themselves under the sovereignty of France, Belgium, the League of Nations, or the newly self-determined states of Poland and Czechoslovakia.15 The result was a protracted debate over the citizenship and nationality of these “minority” Germans: the so-called orphans of Versailles.16
In Africa, China, and the Pacific, the thousands of Germans living in the colonies received word that their “colonial homelands” were now reclassified as mandates of the League of Nations, to be administered by France, Belgium, Japan, Britain, and the British dominions of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.17 What immediately followed in each of the reclassified German colonies, with the exception of German Southwest Africa,18 was the direct expulsion and repatriation of all Germans and a liquidation of “confiscated enemy property.” Colonial Germans became yet another of the many groups of refugees and malcontents within Germany angered by the Treaty of Versailles and placing a cacophony of demands for restitution and accommodation on the Weimar state and the League of Nations.
The book before you supplements literature on imperialism, postcolonialism, internationalism, and Modern Germany. My work revises customary historical interpretations of European imperial and postcolonial identities, the League of Nations’ form of international governance, German participation in the League, the role of interest groups in international organizations and diplomacy, and liberal imperialism. I challenge these literatures by outlining the complex and fragmented nature of the
“postimperial” experience for various communities of Colonial Germans, by seriously considering the role of the League of Nations as a form of international governance perceived by contemporaries as an opportunity for redress on the world stage, and by asserting that Colonial Germans served not as a hindrance to the imperial internationalism of the Mandates System but as active supporters of and contributors to liberal interwar internationalism as the strongest option for the maintenance of empire in the twentieth century. In outlining Colonial Germans’ substantial interwar-era investment in the League and its mechanisms as a means to preserve their individual imperial interests alongside those of other Europeans, I also complicate the recently popular narrative of a direct continuity between Germany’s colonial period and the Nazi era.
In this book, I place particular emphasis on how colonial officials, settlers, and colonial lobbies made use of the League of Nations’ framework. The German colonial advocates who are the focus of this monograph comprised not only those individuals who had been allowed to remain in the mandates as new subjects of the Allies, but also former colonial officials, settlers, and missionaries who were forcibly repatriated by the mandatory powers after the First World War. These Kolonialdeutsche (Colonial Germans) had invested substantial time and money in German imperialism. I highlight how German men and women from the former African colonies exploited transnational opportunities to recover, renovate, and market their understandings of European colonial aims in order to re-establish themselves as “experts” and “fellow civilizers” in European and American discourses on nationalism and imperialism, and thereby transformed the global perception and structures of imperial governance as they situated themselves between colonizers and colonial subjects in a world of evolving colonial empires that were not their own. Starting in 1919, I investigate the involvement of former settlers and colonial officials in such diplomatic flashpoints as the Naturalization Controversy in South African-administered Southwest Africa, and German participation in the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) from 1927 to 1933. I end my analysis in 1933 with an investigation of the involvement of one of Germany’s former colonial governors in the League of Nations’ commission sent to assess the Manchurian Crisis between China and Japan.
The caesura of 1918–1919, though creating the postcolonial environment in which Germany’s new variants of imperial and national identity would emerge, represents an interruption of the running narrative of colonialism, but not a complete break with precolonial and colonial identities.
For Germans, as for other European nationalities, to be European meant standing at the “pinnacle of civilization.” Being civilized in turn implied a need, duty, or right to expand that civilization to other parts of the world deemed “uncivilized” and “savage.” The final piece of this identity construction was a sentiment that Empire made a national group truly European among their colonizing peers, since the concept of having “civilizational superiority” or being “respectable” was gained or reinforced through displays of dominance over “Others.”19 This conception of Europeanness, as well as notions of race and gender from the colonial period, did not simply disappear with the loss of empire. International encounters with a plethora of understandings of the concepts of Nation, Empire, and European remained crucial in efforts to locate and define “Germanness” in the interwar period.
Despite a German history of renegotiating colonial selves, Germany is often overlooked in studies of imperial decline and of the impact of that postcolonial experience on European identities. Germany’s disappearance from the colonial stage long before the events of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s that challenged British and French imperialism has contributed to its omission from the historiography of decolonization. Although the loss of the colonies far predated the assumed period of decolonization, postwar Germans, just like Frenchmen after Algerian independence or Britons after the loss of India, modified colonial rhetoric and crafted a narrative of colonial loss in order to maintain the dimensions of their imperially constituted German national and European identities. Germany’s experience as one of the first powers in the twentieth century to lose its entire overseas empire, albeit under special circumstances, helped set the tone for how Europeans coped with the end of their colonial rule in Africa and Asia. Colonial Germans, having been so vocal and so public in their own renegotiations of identity without empire, seeded some of the thoughts, arguments, and policy decisions that later influenced other “Colonial European” populations as they struggled to come to terms with the contradictions inherent in the “civilizing mission,” and as they experienced imperial decline. Colonial Germans’ efforts to adapt and adjust to the loss of colonies in order to maintain a presence in European imperial endeavors, both within the League of Nations and in broader public discourses, may also have had an effect on metropolitan France and Britain. Both of these states, which engaged in similar discourses as Germany over the nature of “good colonial government” in the international political environment after the Great War, are said to have “invented” decolonization or “abdicated
responsibility” for their colonies in the second half of the twentieth century.20 They refashioned their policies and self-understandings formed in the context of imperialism to secure global influence in new ways as their empires officially crumbled away. Investigating the German case will enable scholars to chart the trajectory of what Europeans perceived as imperial decline and colonial loss as well as the impacts these experiences had on European societies and cultures over a much longer period of time, beginning earlier in the twentieth century.
In recent years, “postcolonial Germans” have garnered increased attention from scholars. Marcia Klotz and Jared Poley point to works of fiction as a way to indicate the broad influence of “decolonization” and postcolonial narratives of German identity. Their research is insightful. Looking for currents of decolonization thought and rhetoric throughout Weimar society is an important first step in probing the particulars of continuity between Germany’s colonial, Weimar, and Nazi periods. These works, however, seem too quick to overlook the writings and activities of political figures engaging directly with the loss of empire, particularly former colonial administrators and long-term settlers.21 Conversely, Uta Poiger has argued that representations of empire need to be understood in the context of “decision makers in business and politics.”22 I would suggest that Poiger’s argument holds just as true for representations of empire after the moment of imperialism had passed. Often these individuals had dedicated their entire adult lives to overseas imperialism. Some served for decades in the same colonies, others traveled from protectorate to protectorate, while still others commuted over the years between metropolitan and colonial offices. Just like Jared Poley’s fiction writers and pamphleteers, the former colonial administrators tried to renegotiate what it meant to be German during an interruption of imperially constituted German identity.
The most comprehensive work to date on how Germans came to terms with the loss of empire through memory is Britta Schilling’s Postcolonial Germany. Schilling explores the connections between public and private memories of Germany’s colonial past. She charts the changes in Germany’s “collective memory” of its overseas imperial endeavors from the Weimar era, to the Nazi regime, and on into post-Second World War Germany and the later, reunified Federal Republic of Germany. The focus in her work is the shifting relationship between memory and material culture in these various epochs.23
Schilling’s work is integral to our understanding of Germany’s colonial past as an ongoing process of memory construction that evolves and
changes constantly long after the formal end of Germany’s overseas imperialism.24 Yet in ambitiously trying to cover nearly a century of transformations in Germany’s collective memory of colonialism, Schilling simplifies the Weimar era in order to move on to the later periods. She contends that the Weimar years are the time in which private and public memories of Germany’s colonial past were most unified and that the material culture created by Colonial Germans in this period afforded them a “dream state” in which they could indulge in nostalgia for the former colonies “without political repercussions.”25 For Schilling, Colonial Germans in the interwar period are passive actors, not directly engaging in domestic or international politics, but instead marketing the colonial experience to Germans as a shared memory and cultural heritage.
I counter that it was in the Weimar era that the memory of Germany’s colonial past is most fragmented and contested, especially among Colonial Germans themselves. Colonial officials largely sought to whitewash German atrocities in the colonial era in the hopes of colonial restitution and doggedly defended Germany’s colonial record. Some German missionary societies on the contrary acknowledged the atrocities and distanced themselves from the colonial administration in hopes of retaining the ability to proselytize in the new, Allied-controlled mandates, bringing themselves into conflict with the German colonial lobbies that were dominated by former colonial officials. Finally, settlers were more concerned with remembering a “better Germany” in Africa. They distinguished their colonial Heimat from the European Germany and, rather than sharing it with other Germans, coveted their personal contributions to the colonial endeavor that had made their colonial homeland superior to a decadent and decaying metropole. Repatriated settlers desired to return to this “truer” Germany in the colonies, not only in dreams or memory, but in reality—even at the expense of their German citizenship and regardless of whether their former African homes were restored to German administration. Furthermore, none of these groups of Colonial Germans shied away from political engagement. In domestic politics, Colonial Germans’ cultural representations of the colonial past were just part of an ongoing effort to receive some sort of government assistance to alleviate their various postimperial plights. The Colonial Ball, the Africa Book, and the Colonial Week were festivities, publications, and public exhibitions full of dioramas of colonial life, parades, musical performances, and lectures from “experts” on the former colonies, and memorial celebrations for fallen German colonial soldiers intended to evoke nostalgia for the colonies among German
citizens and politicians. Though not always sharing a common goal of colonial irredentism, these works and events often went hand-in-hand with direct political action by former colonial governors like Theodor Seitz and Heinrich Schnee, who rallied the colonial lobbies for routine demonstrations and letter-writing campaigns to encourage or shame the German government into pursuing colonial restitution.
Colonial German political activity, however, was not limited to the domestic stage. The most frequent omission from recent works on postcolonial Germans concerns Colonial German engagement with internationalism and the League of Nations. To develop a fuller picture of both the Colonial Germans and international relations in the period of the League and the Mandates System, it is important to incorporate Germany’s moment of colonial loss into the larger narrative of how Europeans confronted what they thought was the end of empire. The clearest evidence of Colonial German contributions to the European narrative of fears of imperial decline can be seen in the ways in which Germans participated in transnational discussions of imperialism, ethnicity, and nationalism at the League of Nations. Until the 1990s, most of the scholarship on the League of Nations operated on the hindsight fallacy and was preoccupied with the League’s failure to maintain general peace and to prevent the outbreak of the Second World War. This changed with the fall of the Soviet Union. New questions emerged about how international governance bodies like the United Nations could operate in a world politics environment with a single superpower and how best to handle minorities within the former Soviet Republics. In this context, historians began interrogating something other than the League’s teleological trajectory to 1939, and instead investigated the League’s intended roles, structures, and functionality.26 This study makes interventions into scholarship on the inner workings of the League of Nations by seriously considering its perceived capacity for international oversight and governance through close examination of the ways in which Colonial Germans adapted to and participated in the political language and structure of the League as part of their efforts to use the international body and its principles to forward their individual and collective goals.
Scholars like Zara Steiner have fleshed out the inner workings of the League and have come to the conclusion that it was never a form of international government, but was intended and used as an extension of diplomacy between the Great Powers. Steiner insists the League “was only a mechanism for conducting multinational diplomacy whose success or
failure depended upon the willingness of the states, particularly the most powerful states, to use it.”27 Building on these notions, studies like those of Gérard Unger and Jonathan Wright focus on the chief diplomats of the Great powers, investigating the back-room deals and relationships between prominent plenipotentiaries.28 In this light, the League is seen as nothing more than the occasionally effective plaything of diplomats and powerful states instead of a body that engaged with a global community of peoples and groups. True as this may in part be, the League of Nations was seen by contemporaries as an earnest attempt at international governance and oversight.29 By keeping contemporary views of the League and its role in international mediation in mind, it is possible to understand how not only Great powers, but also minority groups and lobbying interests, believed they would have a hearing on the world stage through the mechanism of the League of Nations.
Some of the most recent work has addressed how the League of Nations handled the protection of minorities in newly formed nations and mandates.30 Despite differences of opinion on the effectiveness of the League and its numerous committees in defending minority rights and overseeing governments, continental and colonial, these works share a tendency to center their narratives on the League or mandate-holding great powers. The more positive assessments of the League highlight the encouragement that minority communities may have received in the period by analyzing partially effective supervisory commissions, but still neglect aspects of the story that could only be told from the perspective of the minorities themselves as these groups navigated the complexities of the League’s bureaucracy.31
Unlike the current literature, which places more emphasis on the League and mandate-holding powers, this work operates from the point of view of a self-proclaimed minority group: Colonial Germans. The League’s international public presence, though viewed as a weakness by Cohrs and Raitz von Frentz, added to its legitimacy in the eyes of minority groups who yearned for a larger audience to tell of their plight and from which to seek sympathy and support. Hence the present study investigates how Colonial Germans understood their opportunities for international redress and how they pursued and employed these options. Although Susan Pedersen’s thorough work on the League Mandates System includes a section where she addresses Colonial German participation in the League, she, like much of the existing literature, labels Colonial German activism within the League as revisionism intended to hinder British and French
imperial interests.32 My book acknowledges that much of the activism was revisionist in nature, but contends that there was also genuine investment on the part of some Colonial Germans in the League’s new imperial framework and vision. Furthermore, my work argues that whether revisionist or supportive in the nature of their participation, Colonial Germans served not as barriers to imperial interests in the League, but rather as conarrators of the new discourse of imperial internationalism created by the Mandates System. In the first chapters, I focus on the various strategies used by Colonial Germans between 1919 and 1926 to further their cause, their appeals to the League, their petitions to the mandatory powers of Britain and South Africa, and their reactions to British, South African, and League responses to their pleas. For the years following Locarno, Germany’s entry to the League, and the admission of a German to the PMC, my focus shifts from how Colonial Germans sought redress to how Germans maintained a foothold in international discourses on imperialism, mandates, and nationalism in events that involved the League, such as the Manchurian Crisis. By inserting themselves into larger, transnational discussions on the definitions of empire, civilization, “good colonial governance,” and Europeanness, Colonial Germans hoped to create a new niche for themselves in other Europeans’ colonial projects. Analyzing this minority group’s engagement with transnational events and networks has the added benefit of exploring how a distinct fragment of German national identity not only emerged and interacted with competing notions of German identity domestically, but also managed to interface with and market itself to a dynamic international community.
Colonial German involvement in the League, however, necessitated a shift in the vocabulary, political language, and rhetorical strategies of those Germans who chose to actively participate in the internationalism of the new world order. The Allied powers justified the seizure of Germany’s colonial holdings with accusations that Germany had militarized its colonies and had committed colonial atrocities such as the German campaign against the Herero. As one German commentator recognized, “Germany’s failure in the field of colonial civilization . . . ha[d] become all too apparent to leave thirteen to fourteen million natives again to the fate from which the war had liberated them.”33
Germany’s history in the colonies had, indeed, been blotted with a considerable amount of blood. There was for instance the highly publicized Peters Scandal of 1892–1896 in German East Africa. Carl Peters, the German colonial explorer who had laid the groundwork for the foundation
of German East Africa as a colony, was made Reichskommisar of the Kilimanjaro region in 1891. In 1892, Peters discovered that one of the local African women he used as a concubine was having a sexual affair with his manservant. Peters had both of them hanged and ordered their villages destroyed. Peters was recalled to Berlin in 1893, but his crimes were not made public until 1896, when August Bebel, chairman of the SPD, read a self-incriminating letter of Peters before a session of the Reichstag and demanded a series of investigations that led to Peters being deprived of his commission. Ultimately, Peters evaded criminal prosecution by moving to the United Kingdom to serve as a colonial expert for the British Empire in Rhodesia. Nonetheless, Peters’s wrathful vengeance had resulted not only in the destruction of two African communities, but also led to a series of small rebellions by the Chaga of East Africa that were brutally put down by German forces in the colony.34 Yet another example of Germany’s colonial violence was the Maji Maji Rebellion of 1905–1907, in which several indigenous communities in the East African colony violently resisted head taxes, hut taxes, and a scheme that coerced the indigenous population to grow cotton for export.35 This African resistance was viciously suppressed by German colonial troops, resulting in the deaths of thousands of African subjects in German East Africa.36
While there are several other instances of violent repression of indigenous groups under the rule of the German Empire, the suppression of the Herero and Nama resistance movements in Southwest Africa from 1904–1907 is the most notorious instance of bloodshed in the German colonies. In response to ever more restrictive land policies imposed upon them by the German colonial state, ongoing railway construction through tribal lands, and decades of violent encounters with German settlers and German colonial troops, the indigenous Ovaherero (Herero) and the Nama (Khwoisen, Khoikhoi) communities rose up in open rebellion in 1904. The German general sent to put down the rebellion, Lothar von Trotha, enacted martial law in the colony and, on October 2, 1904, issued his infamous “annihilation order,” stating that every Herero man, woman, and child must either leave Southwest Africa or be killed. Though appraisals of the final death toll vary, the war was nonetheless devastating to the Herero and Nama. Between 1904 and 1907, large percentages of both populations were killed in the fighting, in the concentration camps the Germans used for African prisoners of war, and in a desperate flight by several Herero into the Omaheke (Kalahari) Desert in an attempt to escape Trotha’s war machine.37
