German Studies Review

The past three decades have seen a very impressive research effort to expand our understanding of German colonialism and imperialism. This interdisciplinary enterprise has brought historians together with political and social scientists as well as scholars of literature, film, gender, memory, and emotions. The divergent approaches have stimulated discussions on the applicability of some key concepts, and they have moved research in a comparatiste direction.

This essay attempts to take stock of what has been achieved. Thematically organized within a broad chronological framework from 1871 to 1945, it endeavors to trace the evolution of our empirical as well as conceptual knowledge in the “new colonial history.” It begins with a brief discussion of the paradigm shift that historical and cultural studies have undergone during the past decades. A large part of the analysis then examines the major themes that have been covered by research on colonialism and imperialism. A third section looks at work interested in the interactions between movements at the grassroots level and the peripheries with strategies and policies developed by decision-making elites at the center. It returns to the question of continuity in modern German history from “Bismarck to Hitler,” as John C.G. Röhl termed it, and hence the “peculiarities” of the country’s road to 1941 and 1945. In other words, the issue is not merely the country’s modernity or backwardness but also the connections between imperialism and genocide.

Research on colonialism and imperialism has followed the larger international trends in historiography and cultural studies. In the 1960s, these disciplines shifted away from the “top-down” methodologies of the early postwar years that had focused on political and military history, with statesmen and generals at the center, toward the analysis of societies “from the bottom up.” This sea change is generally assumed to have occurred first in British labor history when, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the field began to move to the study of “ordinary men” whose lives scholarship had hitherto largely ignored.²

For reasons that were also related to the societal upheavals during the late 1960s and 1970s, research on other social groups was soon added to that of unorganized industrial workers and agricultural laborers. Among those who were now made visible as historical actors were first of all women, followed by the study of ethnic minorities and later also other marginalized groups, such as homosexuals and the disabled. Soon these research topics began to spread in continental Europe and the United States. They were accompanied by a renewed interest in the diverse regions of modern nation states and their interactions with their metropolitan centers. In the German [End Page 147] case, historians discovered a second (southern) Germany and even a third (Saxon) Germany, critiquing the previously dominant Prussocentric view of modern Germany.

From the 1970s onward, a similar transformation also took place with respect to overseas colonies and imperialism. The traditional metropolitan perspective was complemented and even overshadowed by approaches that started from the periphery and examined colonialism “from the bottom up.” With respect to British historiography, it is hardly a coincidence that some of the main protagonists of what became known as subaltern studies received their graduate training at Cambridge and at other universities where the debate about the relationship between the center and peripheries of empires had been gathering momentum.³ These shifts in research agendas were linked to the larger contemporary processes of anticolonial movements and decolonization.

Top-down approaches proved more durable in West Germany, partly because of the influence of the Hamburg School around Fritz Fischer that was interested in decision-making processes as well as key decision-makers.⁴ Similarly, scholars around Hans-Ulrich Wehler at Bielefeld University, who studied socioeconomic forces and strategic elites, remained quite critical of the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte) and the “new cultural history” more generally.⁵ The reception of foreign research on colonialism and imperialism from a peripheral perspective was similarly delayed. Fischer and his students had been primarily concerned with German war aims during World War I—not only in Europe but also in Africa and as designed by politicians, generals...