Abstract
The swastika flag and the black-white-red flag of the Kaiserreich fly together in front of a palm tree. On the globe below, Togo, Cameroon, South-West and East Africa radiate in red, as does Germany on the northern horizon. ‘Auch hier liegt unser Lebensraum!’ (‘Here too lies our Living Space’) exclaims the text (Figure 7.1). As part of its new poster campaign in 1933, the Reichskolonialbund (RKB; Reich Colonial Bund) introduced this placard as an expression of Germany’s claim to its former colonies.1 The globe spatially linked Germany to the African Lebensraum. The two flags temporally linked the past of colonial possession with the present and implicitly with a future repossession of these territories. By visually refuting a historical narrative of German colonial loss in this poster, the members of the Reichskolonialbund asserted their movement’s relevance by emphasizing the importance of colonial space in Nazi Germany.
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Notes
For a discussion of the relationship between spatial practices and nationalist states, see Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley, CA, 1996)
Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley, CA, 1997).
Several of the NSDAP’s 25 points from 1920 fell into disuse. Before 1935–1936, Hitler still hoped for an alliance with England, which advocacy for the return of the colonies (either as an economic resource or for settlement) could derail. Germany’s two largest former colonies (South-West and East Africa) were British mandates. Klaus Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich. Hitler, NSDAP u. koloniale Frage 1919–1945 (Munich, 1969), 298.
Georg Fritz, Kolonien? Das koloniale Schicksal des deutschen Volkes—Gesichtlich als Lehre—Politisch als Aufgabe (Berlin, 1934), 71.
Fritz Zumpt, Kolonialfrage und Nationalsozialistischer Rassenstandpunkt, ed. Dr O. Hartleb und Dr J. Petersen im Auftrag des NS.-Lehrerbundes Gau Hamburg, ‘Deutsches Ringen um kolonialen Raum, Lese- und Vortragsstoffe’ (Hamburg/Paul Hartung, Verlag, 1938), 22f.
Erich Duems, ‘Kolonialpolitik oder Raumpolitik?’, Mitteilungen der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft, No. 2 (15 March 1932), 17.
Erich Duems, ‘Kolonialraum und Ostraum’, Mittelungen der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft, No. 7 (15 July 1931), 49f.
Historically, the German colonies had never been a site of ‘mass’ settlement. In 1914, only about 20,000 Germans lived in the German colonies (5300 in German East Africa and 14,800 in German South-West Africa, the two most populated colonies). Dorothea Siegle, „Trägerinnen echten Deutschtums“: die Koloniale Frauenschule, Rendsburg (Rendsburg, 2004), 43.
Afrika Siedlungsland’, Nationalsozialistische Landpost (22 November 1940). BAB NS 22/672. See also Prof. Dr Fr Tobler, ‘Siedlungs und Rohstoff, alte und neue Grundlagen der Kolonialfrage’, Deutscher Lebensraum, 4 (2) (1936), 47–50.
Ilse Steinhoff travelled to southern Africa in 1937 and published her photographs from this trip in book form as well as photo essays and as illustrations for numerous articles in colonialist journals. Ilse Steinhoff (ed.), Deutsche Heimat in Afrika: Ein Bildbuch aus unseren Kolonien, Reichskolonialbund (Berlin, 1939).
Kolonie und Heimat, 2 (1) (January 1938), 3; ‘August in Kolonie… und Heimat’, Kolonie und Heimat, 2 (8) (August 1938), 3. See also Jens Jaeger, ‘Colony as Heimat? The Formation of Colonial Identity in Germany around 1900’, German History 27 (4) (2009), 467–489.
Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten: Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Cologne, 2003).
Karl Mohri, ‘Farmernachwuchs, hart und trotzig wie die Väter’, Kolonie und Heimat, 3 (5) (28 February 1939), 136f.
See Daniel Walther, Creating Germans Abroad: Cultural Policies and National Identity in Namibia (Athens/Ohio, 2002).
My thanks to Rainer Schmidt for bringing this to my attention. Quoted in Rainer F. Schmidt, Die Aussenpolitik des Dritten Reiches 1933–1939 (Stuttgart, 2002), 111f.
Alexandre Kum’a N’dumbe, Was wollte Hitler in Afrika? NS-Planungen für eine faschistische Neugestaltung Afrikas (Frankfurt/Main, 1993), Appendix, 250–255. This sentiment echoes an older statement by the Kaiser: ‘Wherever a German soldier falls in the loyal fulfilment of duty, that land is German and will remain German.’ Quoted in Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten, 56.
W. Oetting, ‘Über den ideelen Wert kolonialer Betätigung’, Die Frau und die Kolonien, 5 (May 1935), 66f.
Leo Waibel, ‘Südwestafrika’, Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, 3 (3) (March 1926), 187–200, here 198.
Freiburg address ‘The National State and Economic Policy’, in Max Weber (ed.), Essays in Economic Sociology (Princeton, NJ, 1999), 120–137.
Adolf Friedrich von Oertzen, Nationalsozialismus und Kolonialfrage (Saarbrücken, 1935), 50.
Karin Francke, ‘Südwester und Heimatdeutsche Jugend’, Die Frau und die Kolonien, 7–9 (1942), 62–64.
Hans Gerd Esser], ‘Gegen die Verwässerung kolonialer Begriffe’, Afrika-Nachrichten, 18 (2) (1 February 1937), 38f.
Karsten Linne, ‘Deutsche Afrikafirmen im „Osteinsatz“’, 1999. Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21, Jahrhunderts, 16 (1) (2001), 49–90
Karsten Linne, Deutschland jenseits des Äquators? Die NS-Kolonialplanungen für Afrika (Berlin, 2008).
Agnes von Boemcken, ‘Kriegseinsatz der Kolonialfrauen’, Die Frau und die Kolonien 10–12 (1942), 78–80.
Quoted in David Furber, ‘Near as Far in the Colonies: The Nazi Occupation of Poland’, International History Review, 26 (3) (2004), 541–579, here 571.
This National Socialist reworking is best seen in the 1941 film Carl Peters. See Sandra Maß, Weiße Helden, Schwarze Krieger: Zur Geschichte Kolonialer Männlichkeit in Deutschland, 1918–1964 (Cologne, 2006), 243–247.
For example, Steinhoff, Deutsche Heimat; Helmut Blenck and Erna Blenck, Afrika in Farben: Das Farbbild-Buch der deutschen Kolonien, Deutsch-Ost- und Südwestafrika, ed. Reichskolonialbund (Munich, 1941)
Joachim Fernau, Afrika Wartet. Ein Kolonial-Politisches Bildbuch (Potsdam, 1942)
Hermann Schreiber, Deutsche Tat in Afrika. Pionierarbeit in unseren Kolonien (Berlin, 1942)
Paul Pietzner-Clausen, Deutscher Weg nach Afrika (Berlin, 1943).
Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich; Wolfe W. Schmokel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism, 1919–1945 (London, 1964).
This comparison does not extend to the issue of race, which was not the same in Africa and in Eastern Europe. Nazi attitudes towards Jews had a different history and followed different lines than German attitudes towards Africans in the former colonies (and in colonialist propaganda in Nazi Germany). This difference is important to any debate on continuity. See for example, Birthe Kundrus, ‘Von Windhoek nach Nürnberg? Koloniale „Mischehenverbote“und die Nationalsozialistische Rassengesetzgebung’, in Birthe Kundrus (ed.), Phantasiereiche: Der deutsche Kolonialismus aus kulturgeschichtlicher Perspektive (Frankfurt/Main, 2003), 110–131; Matthew Fitzpatrick, ‘The Pre-History of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past’, Central European History, 41 (2008), 477–503.
See also Elizabeth Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (New Haven, CT, 2003).
Vejas G. Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, 2000).
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Sandler, W. (2012). ‘Here Too Lies Our Lebensraum’: Colonial Space as German Space. In: Szejnmann, CC.W., Umbach, M. (eds) Heimat, Region, and Empire. The Holocaust and Its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-39111-6_8
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