Abstract
Beginning in April 1920, various German citizens’ organizations, encouraged by their government, launched a campaign against France’s stationing of colonial African soldiers in its zone of the German Rhineland. Far from limiting themselves to the nations directly involved in the situation, groups such as the Volksbund Rettet die Ehre (People’s Federation to Save the Honor) and the Rheinische Frauenliga (Rhineland Women’s League) deliberately spread their propaganda overseas in an effort to create an international furor over France’s alleged transgressions. While on the face of it, the goal of the drive—known as the “Rhineland Horror” or “Black Horror” campaign—appeared to be to rid the area of African soldiers, the crusaders clearly wanted bolder outcomes. Still reeling from the cease-fire and more recently a humiliating peace settlement, the propagandists desired nothing less than the international discredit of the French, a halt to France’s efforts to separate the Rhineland from the rest of Germany (see Chapter 1), an end to the entire occupation, and the restoration of German honor in the eyes of its own inhabitants and of other nations.1 To reach these goals, the propagandists sent tentacles across the Atlantic, the North Sea, and the Baltic Sea to insure international support for their cause.
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Notes
Keith L. Nelson, “The ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’: Race as a Factor in Post–World War I Diplomacy,” Journal of Modern History, 42 (December 1970): 606–27. Sally Marks, “Black Watch on the Rhine: A Study in Propaganda, Prejudice and Prurience,” European Studies Review 13 (1983): 297–333, Robert C. Reinders, “Racialism on the Left: E. D. Morel and the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine,” International Review of History 13 (1968): 1–28, and Keith L. Nelson have viewed the campaign in its diplomatic and political context; Gisela Lebzelter, “Die ‘Schwarze Schmach’: Vorurteile—Propaganda—Mythos,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11 (1985): 37–68, and Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse, and Yara-Colette Lemke-Muniz de Fario, “Blacks, Germans, and the Politics of Imperial Imagination, 1920–60,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1998), 205–29, view the campaign as an attempt to compensate for national anxieties produced by the defeat and occupation; Anja Schüler, “The ‘Horror on the Rhine’: Rape, Racism and the International Women’s Movement,” John F. Kennedy-Institut Für Nordamerikastudien, Abteilung für Geschichte, Working Paper No. 86 (1996), 1–19, explores the international women’s movement’s response to the campaign; and Christian Koller, “Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt”: Die Diskussion um die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa Zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial-und Militärpolitik, 1914–1930 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001), places the campaign in its European perspective.
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© 2008 Erika Kuhlman
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Kuhlman, E. (2008). Imperialism and Postwar Reconciliation The International and Transnational “Rhineland Horror” Campaign . In: Reconstructing Patriarchy after the Great War. The Palgrave Macmillan Series in Transnational History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612761_3
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