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An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa by Adam A. Blackler (review)

2023; German Studies Association; Volume: 46; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/gsr.2023.a910202

2164-8646

Sean Andrew Wempe,

German Colonialism and Identity Studies

Reviewed by: An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa by Adam A. Blackler Sean Andrew Wempe An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa. By Adam A. Blackler. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022. Pp. xv + 282. Hardback $114.95. ISBN 9780271092980. Adam A. Blackler's An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa is a distillation into a single volume of the now fairly extensive literature on the history of Germany's Southwest African colony and the genocide that occurred there against the Herero and Nama populations between 1904 and 1907. The central focus of Blackler's work is on how colonial projects impacted impressions of national identity. He argues that the "forging" of German identity was as much impacted by the settlers, merchants, and settlers in the colony as the indigenous African populations. While the notion that "racial thinking surfaced as the most consequential legacy of Germany's colonial project" (6) is not a novel one in the now expansive literature on German Southwest Africa and the Herero Genocide, in a variant of Arendtian argument, Blackler additionally contends that colonial encounters between these groups "shattered the illusion of German cultural superiority" (6) and fostered the extreme racism and brutality in the colony. The book will be a useful addition to the classroom for educating undergraduates and graduates, with the weakest portion being Chapter Two and the strongest being Chapter Six. The book is divided into three chronological parts of two chapters each. The first part, "National Aspirations, 1842–1884," examines the emergence of German identity during the precolonial, preunification era. Chapter One condenses works by scholars such as Susanne Zantop and Matthew Fitzpatrick, charting the rise of colonial fantasies and the establishment of German liberalism's interest in territorial expansion from the decade of the Frankfurt Assembly to the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, which is often referred to as the kick-off in the "scramble for Africa." Chapter Two looks at the Rhenish Mission Society and its early involvement in what would later become German Southwest Africa. In this particular chapter, the author has a number of contradictory theses, such as on the one hand arguing that the literature had "traditionally diminished the religion as a critical factor in the evolution of a German colonial project" and that "cultural racism" informed many of the conclusions drawn about Africans by the missionaries (54) while then on the next page arguing that the literature has been wrong to "simply cast Rhenish missionaries as nothing more than German imperial agents in an inevitable settler-colonial story." The attempt at nuance, which is admittedly needed with the topic, rings a bit more like trying to satisfy all the divides and arguments in the literature on missionary activity in imperial settings instead of the author staking his own strong claim. The second part, "Colonial Encounters, 1884–1904," examines the evolution of German engagement with the colony. Chapter Three is a concentration of arguments similar to those of Jeff Bowersox, John Short, H. Glenn Penny, David Ciarlo, and Nina [End Page 493] Berman on the consumption of colonial artifacts, products, media representations, and advertising by Germans in the metropole in ways that reinforced myths of cultural and racial superiority. Chapter Four is a useful foil for the preceding chapter. By emphasizing African agency, it attempts to explore the ways in which German encounters with African leaders such as Hendrik Witbooi and Samuel Maherero fractured German myths of superiority. These acts of resistance to German rule, which challenged colonial fantasy, Blackler argues, led to an increased reliance by German authorities on civil and annihilatory acts of aggression to maintain the façade of power and diffuse African demands for greater autonomy and sovereignty. Part three, "An Imperial Homeland, 1905–1914," is centered on the segregation, brutality, and ultimately genocidal campaigns that became part of the racist fabric of the colony. Chapter Five is comparable to arguments made by Lora Wildenthal, Birthe Kundrus, and George Steinmetz on how race thinking contributed to exclusionary definitions of citizenship throughout the empire, laying the groundwork for a color line in the colony that ultimately contributed to the targeted, genocidal annihilation of local...