The Colonial Pedagogy of Imperial Germany: Self-Denial in the Interest of the Nation

Abstract

In this volume of essays on differing models of imperialism, different scholars engage in comparative studies of empires and imperial ideologies across various nations with British imperialism—and, to a limited extent, French imperialism—as the central point of reference. The main issue is the variety of dominance. To what extent is it true that imperialisms compete with each other? We all examine varieties of imperialism based on individual components in each case. The editors and authors of this volume argue that imperialisms fashion themselves in relation to their forms of nationhood, in relation to other imperialisms from which they discriminate themselves, and in relation to territories for which they compete. While it can be argued that the subvariety of British imperialism was distinguished by its prolonged and complex involvement with India, German imperialist discourse emerged in the Romantic era as a philosophical and scholarly discourse that is also sufficiently distinctive and cohesive to be taken into account. Susanne Zantop argued in a pioneering study of German precolonial fantasies that precolonial German letters from 1770 to 1870 saw the emergence of stories of sexual conquest and surrender, love and blissful domestic relations between colonizer and colonized, set in colonial territory, stories that made the strange familiar, and the familiar ‘familial.’