When Germany annexed colonies in Africa and the Pacific beginning in the 1880s, many German women were enthusiastic. At the same time, however, they found themselves excluded from what they saw as a great nationalistic endeavor. In German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 Lora Wildenthal untangles the varied strands of racism, feminism, and nationalism that thread through German women’s efforts to participate in this episode of overseas colonization. In confrontation and sometimes cooperation with men over their place in the colonial project, German women launched nationalist and colonialist campaigns for increased settlement and new state policies. Wildenthal analyzes recently accessible Colonial Office archives as well as mission society records, periodicals, women’s memoirs, and fiction to show how these women created niches for themselves in the colonies. They emphasized their unique importance for white racial “purity” and the inculcation of German culture in the family. While pressing for career opportunities for themselves, these women also campaigned against interracial marriage and circulated an image of African and Pacific women as sexually promiscuous and inferior. As Wildenthal discusses, the German colonial imaginary persisted even after the German colonial empire was no longer a reality. The women’s colonial movement continued into the Nazi era, combining with other movements to help turn the racialist thought of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries into the hierarchical evaluation of German citizens as well as colonial subjects. Students and scholars of women’s history, modern German history, colonial politics and culture, postcolonial theory, race/ethnicity, and gender will welcome this groundbreaking study.

DIVAnalyses gender, sexuality, feminism, and class in the racial politics of formal German colonialism and postcolonial revanchism./div

The German Empire, its structure, its dynamic development between 1871 and 1918, and its legacy, have been the focus of lively international debate that is showing signs of further intensification as we approach the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. Based on recent work and scholarly arguments about continuities and discontinuities in modern German history from Bismarck to Hitler, well-known experts broadly explore four themes: the positioning of the Bismarckian Empire in the course of German history; the relationships between society, politics and culture in a period of momentous transformations; the escalation of military violence in Germany's colonies before 1914 and later in two world wars; and finally the situation of Germany within the international system as a major political and economic player. The perspectives presented in this volume have already stimulated further argument and will be of interest to anyone looking for orientation in this field of research.

"Revenants of a Fallen Empire reveals the various ways in which Colonial Germans attempted to cope with the loss of the German colonies after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. These Kolonialdeutsche (Colonial Germans) had invested substantial time and money in German imperialism. German men and women from the former African colonies exploited any opportunities they could to recover, renovate and market their understandings of German and European colonial aims in order to reestablish themselves as "experts" and "fellow civilizers" in European and American discourses on nationalism and imperialism. Colonial officials, settlers, and colonial lobbies made use of the League of Nations framework to influence diplomatic flashpoints including the Naturalization Controversy in South African-administered Southwest Africa, the Locarno Conference, and German participation in the Permanent Mandates Commission from 1927-1933. Sean Wempe revises standard historical portrayals of 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. In analyzing Colonial German investment and participation in interwar liberal internationalism, the project also challenges the idea of a direct continuity between Germany's colonial period and the Nazi era"--

German colonialism is a thriving field of study. From North America to Japan, within Germany, Austria and Switzerland, scholars are increasingly applying post-colonial questions and methods to the study of Germany and its culture. However, no introduction on this emerging field of study has combined political and cultural approaches, the study of literature and art, and the examination of both metropolitan and local discourses and memories. This book will fill that gap and offer a broad prelude, of interest to any scholar and student of German history and culture as well as of colonialism in general. It will be an indispensable tool for both undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. .

This book explores the wide-ranging consequences of Germany's short-lived colonial project for the nation, and European and global history.

On 16 July 1941, Adolf Hitler convened top Nazi leaders at his headquarters in East Prussia to dictate how they would rule the newly occupied eastern territories. Ukraine, the "jewel" in the Nazi empire, would become a German colony administered by Heinrich Himmler's SS and police, Hermann Goring's economic plunderers, and a host of other satraps. Focusing on the Zhytomyr region and weaving together official German wartime records, diaries, memoirs, and personal interviews, Wendy Lower provides the most complete assessment available of German colonization and the Holocaust in Ukraine. Midlevel "managers," Lower demonstrates, played major roles in mass murder, and locals willingly participated in violence and theft. Lower puts names and faces to local perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries, as well as resisters. She argues that Nazi actions in the region evolved from imperial arrogance and ambition; hatred of Jews, Slavs, and Communists; careerism and pragmatism; greed and fear. In her analysis of the murderous implementation of Nazi "race" and population policy in Zhytomyr, Lower shifts scholarly attention from Germany itself to the eastern outposts of the Reich, where the regime truly revealed its core beliefs, aims, and practices.