The Discourse Strategies of Imperialist Writing

The German Colonial Idea and Africa, 1848-1945

Felicity Rash

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317600961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this monograph, Felicity Rash examines German colonialist texts through the lens of linguistics, using multiple analytic approaches in order to contribute to the study of ideological discourse. Focusing on texts from Germany's colonial period during the Second Reich, the book describes the discourse strategies employed in a wide variety of colonialist discourses, from propagandistic and journalistic writing to autobiographical and fictional accounts of life in Germany's African colonies. The methodologies Rash employs include the Discourse Historical Approach and Cognitive Metaphor Theory, and the book aims to develop a new model for the analysis of expansionist nationalist writing. Little detailed analysis exists of the types of texts taken as primary sources, and Rash provides English translations of German quotations, in addition to drawing upon her research in former German colonies in Africa. Rash's research will be of interest to linguists, historians, Germanists, and social and political scientists, and lays the groundwork for future interdisciplinary analyses of German colonialism.

1
The Background to German Colonialism

This book is concerned with the discourse of German imperialism in Sub-Saharan Africa from the beginning of Germany’s aspirations to own colonies until the Second World War. It examines German colonialist propaganda, travel literature, colonial memoirs and autobiographies and fictional literature set in the African colonies. German-language colonial and colonialist texts will be analysed within their historical and philosophical context and against their ideological background.¹ They will be scrutinized from the point of view of thematic content and of the discursive-linguistic strategies used to purvey a broadly nationalist and specifically colonialist ideology. The analysis makes particular use of two modern methods of discourse analysis: the Discourse Historical Approach, developed in the late 1990s by Ruth Wodak et al., and Critical Metaphor Theory, used to good effect by Jonathan Charteris-Black (2004 and 2014) and Andreas Musolff (2010) for the analysis of political discourse. This methodology is fully explained in Chapter 2.

While Germany’s interest in territorial expansion within Europe stretches back into the early Middle Ages, its desire to possess overseas colonies started to develop during the seventeenth century, gathering momentum from the mid-nineteenth century. Friedrich Ratzel was the first to define the former type of colonization as “internal” (‘innere Kolonisation’) and overseas colonization as “external” (‘äußere Kolonisation’), the latter frequently involving forceful conquest (‘das kriegerische Vordringen, die Eroberung’) (Ratzel 1897, 115). German external expansionist dreams were initially directed at South America, and only from the mid-nineteenth century were they directed towards Africa. As late at 1879, Friedrich Fabri advocated expansion into South America over settlements in Africa (Zantop 1997, 215), but most German colonialists recognized that the Americas were already occupied by other European powers.

The main era of German overseas colonialist activity followed the foundation of the Second Empire in 1871 and included expansion into Africa and the Pacific islands. German colonialist ambitions are widely regarded as a major cause of the First World War, and in 1919 the Treaty of Versailles dealt a fatal blow to the German dream of becoming a colonial power of world stature. It appeared to the outside world that German colonial ambitions were no longer viable, but these lived on, albeit in diminished form, throughout the Weimar Republic and into the Third Reich. Germany’s hopes of possessing colonies finally expired at the end of the Second World War.

Colonialism and Imperialism Defined

The term “colonialism” refers to a particular aspect of international power politics which developed at a point in history when certain nations discovered foreign geographical regions which they deemed suitable for exploitation and domination. The dominant nations were European and the object of their ambitions was, in effect, the rest of the world. The term “imperialism” refers to the formation of an empire under the control of colonizers, often as an extension to an existing empire. “Imperialism” is thus a specific type of colonialism and the term can readily be applied to the German colonial idea, at least from the formation of the Second Empire onwards.

Post-colonial theorists see racism and opportunism as the basis for colonialism. They analyse the political and cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism.² Eleni Kefala defines colonialism as a ‘particular historical manifestation of coloniality, where “coloniality” is seen as founded upon the racial classification of the world’s population and as forming part of the basis of the world-system of capitalism’ (Kefala 2011, 1). Coloniality is thus a ‘thorough and far-reaching global pattern of power’ that still persists today, creating vertical relations that lead to domination, conflict and exploitation; “colonialism” is, more specifically, a form of political and administrative domination (Kefala 2011, 1). The latter, in particular, involves the unjust and unequal application of power. Colonialism is today recognized as belonging to a defunct and unjust type of hegemony, and has recently been described as the inescapable “darker side” or the “underside” of modernity (Kefala 7; see also Mignolo 1996, 76).

Since the European Renaissance, colonialism has entailed a view of Europe or “the West” as justified in the acquisition of overseas territories and as occupying a central, i.e. most important and powerful, position in the world. This “Eurocentrism” or “Occidentalism” categorized colonized peoples according to European criteria of hierarchy and normality, and in terms of Christianity and the philosophies of Ancient Greece and Rome. It involved the appropriation and retention of lands, possessions and resources from a powerless, “primitive” national or ethnic group for exploitation by a more powerful and “advanced” nation or similar social group. The latter have tended to justify their activities by claiming cultural, economic, intellectual or ethnic superiority over the less powerful. They have commonly assumed that the colonized regions and their inhabitants would benefit from their cultural and economic influence. As Stuart Hall points out in his discussion of the early colonization of the Americas, the autochthonous populations of colonized regions adhered to social systems which differed from those deemed normal in Europe, and it was readily assumed that they therefore had no systems at all. The fact that no such lack existed was not understood by colonizers who, by modern-day standards, were unable to recognize and respect difference (Hall 1995a, 212 and 215).

In his post-colonial critique, first published in 1950, Aimé Césaire likened the application of colonialist force to the Nazi regime (Césaire 2000, 36). Césaire was a black francophone West Indian who reassessed the view that colonization stemmed from a desire to spread civilization. He used the proclaimed aims of colonization to present an account of what it is not:

(…) neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law.

(Césaire 2000, 32)

Césaire’s essay argues for a new way of regarding colonialism, and this is what lies at the heart of modern post-colonial theory and anticolonial thinking. He explains that the colonizers of the past legitimized their despotic acts by maintaining that they were bringing civilization and economic benefit to “savages” according to the equation: ‘Christianity = civilization, paganism = savagery’ (Césaire 2000, 33). Colonization, according to Césaire, awakens colonizers’ buried instincts, covetousness, violence, race hatred and moral relativism (Césaire 2000, 33). Acts of enslavement and theft turn colonizers into the beings without civilization and the colonized people into objects (Césaire 2000, 35). Césaire therefore proposes a new equation: ‘colonization = thingification’ (Césaire 2000, 42). Whereas contact can benefit cultures which are different from one another, since ‘it is an excellent thing to blend different worlds’, association between colonizers and colonized did not in the past result in a blend; instead, it resulted in:

forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses. No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.

(Césaire 2000, 42)

This picture of force and abasement is reflected in much German writing of the period under investigation, in fictional and autobiographical narrative especially, but also in other text types.

The discourse of colonialism is defined by the post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha as an ‘apparatus of power (…) that turns on the recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences’ (Bhabha 1994, 70). It creates cultural difference in the service of discrimination and authoritarianism while purporting to reflect reality; it enunciates culture as ‘knowledge able, authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification’ (Bhabha 1994, 34). Colonial discourse has one chief objective, according to Bhabha, and this is to create an image of colonized populations as inferior and degenerate in order to justify conquest and domination. The purpose of the discourse is to produce the colonized people ‘as a social reality which is at once “other” and yet entirely visible and knowable’ (Bhabha 1994, 70f.). A “negative difference” is constructed which stereotypes race as “fixed” and the colonized as simultaneously inferior and threatening to the Self.

Modern discourse analysts recognize that both the colonizing Self and the colonized Other are constructed within this type of discourse; the imagining of the Other by the Self is seen as an act of self-identity. This act of “othering” is, of course, common in all persuasive discourse. Michael Schubert explains that since the Other has more to do with how one sees oneself, the Self can be described as “divided”. The ability to compare and contrast oneself with an alien Other can help one rediscover the Self. This is the type of “alterity” which is seen by post-colonialist theorists as fundamental to the specific way in which racist discourse produces and interprets its subjects; it is also the reason for the Self being both drawn towards and repulsed by the Other (Schubert 2011, 401).³

A final point to consider in this context is that made by Hannah Arendt in 1951 about the significance of colonialist ideology for totalitarianism. She showed how imperialism made racism necessary and made a connection between late nineteenth-century German imperialism and National Socialist racism, claiming that the racist mentalities of the Nazis originated in the colonies:

The full impact of the African experience was first realized by leaders of the mob, like Carl Peters, who decided that they too had to belong to a master race. African colonial possessions became the most fertile soil for the flowering of what later was to become the Nazi elite. Here they had seen with their own eyes how peoples could be converted into races and how, simply by taking the initiative in this process, one might push one’s own people into the position of the master race.

(Arendt 2004, 268)

The Nazi regime, like former German colonialists, created a superior place for a social group which, within a capitalist system, were classed as under-privileged (a “mob”); they did so by constructing a class of people who were still less privileged, an inferior Other. According to a similar principle, many less privileged Germans had found an elevated position for themselves in the colonies, where they were considered to be racially superior to the native populations and therefore possessing the right to dominate them. The role of the underprivileged German colonizer was often occupied by women who, in turn, were able to exercise power over an autochthonous Other who was even less privileged.

While not offering a specifically post-colonialist critique, the present volume examines as objectively as possible some of the literature contemporary with the German colonial enterprise in order to reveal some of the discourse features that still anger post-colonialist scholars. It will reveal the traces of brutalization and hypocrisy in the literature of the German colonial era of the Second Reich and of the Third Reich, with its enduring colonial dream.

The Philosophical Background to Colonialism

Bernard McGrane claims that anthropology was created as a discipline by Europeans as a means of describing and analysing the racially Other (McGrane 1989, 7). He holds that the European Renaissance was the age when the Other became ‘a subject for imagination and thought and an object of practical action’ (McGrane 1989, 7). At this time, Europeans saw the cultural and geographical centre of the world as Christian; the Other was non-Christian. Practical action thus included missionary activity, an activity which often laid the ground for economic exploitation. It is interesting to read in an essay by Walter Mignolo of another culturally “advanced” or “civilized” society, that of the Chinese empire, which also saw itself as inhabiting the centre of the known world at the time of the European Renaissance. Mignolo recounts the experience of a Jesuit priest who in the late sixteenth century was faced with the disapproval of Chinese Mandarins when they saw a European map depicting Europe at the centre of the world and China on the extreme right-hand periphery. The Mandarin map of the world placed China at the centre (Mignolo 2003, 219f.).

Within the post-Renaissance discourse of colonialism, the European Self continued to inhabit the metaphorical space at the “centre” of the civilized world. The Other occupied peripheral spaces and had two possible roles: the friend and the foe, e.g., the “noble” and the “ignoble” savage (Hall 1995a, 216). Colonialist discourse almost invariably portrays the Self as superior to the Other in matters of physical and intellectual racial characteristics, innate morality, and cultural, technical and scientific achievements; the attributes of the Other are judged against the norms of the colonizing and “civilizing” power. One early German traveller, Peter Kolb, criticized the tendency of extant travel literature to portray the “Hottentott” as stupid and dirty, with disgusting eating practices, stating ‘daß sie bey weiten so dumm nicht sind, als man sie bißhero ausgeschrien hat’ [that they are far less stupid than has so far been proclaimed] (quoted from Fiedler 2005, 31). Writing in 1719, Kolb adjudged the native Africans work-shy according to European norms of useful activity, but believed that they had the capacity for development, albeit within the frame of his own Eurocentric and Christian worldview (Fiedler 2005, 41). In particular, he was not convinced that the dichotomy created by Europeans between themselves and the “pagan” Other was unbridgeable, since the Hottentotts he had observed obviously believed in and worshipped a single powerful deity, even if they did not call this entity “God” (Fiedler 2005, 45).

During the Age of Enlightenment, the non-European Other was considered incapable of participating in the process of civilization open to Europeans, and, because non-Christian, lacking reason and access to the truth of biblical revelation (McGrane, 59–72). More importantly in this so-called “Age of Reason”, the uncivilized being or “savage” had no access to knowledge in the non-religious sense, and was seen as Other in relation to the “enlightened” Self—as living in darkness. References to “darkness” and the “savage” were not necessarily interpreted in a negative manner by enlightenment philosophers, however, and notions developed of the “noble savage” or “child of nature” who was untainted by the ills of civilization. Such ideas had to be reinterpreted by the German colonialists of the nineteenth century if they were to justify their exploitation of such noble innocents. As German colonialist plans evolved, the term “savage”, meaning “wild” or “untamed”, increasingly took on connotations of danger and brutality.

Some of the most influential Enlightenment conceptions of the African negro appeared in the French philosophical treatises of Abbé Guillaume Raynal and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Both compared the African and American “noble savage” with the “civilized” European. The knowledge of both Raynal and Rousseau of non-European people was based entirely upon travel literature. Raynal’s descriptions of natural societies in contrast to civilized ones relied chiefly upon second-hand accounts of native Americans, notably Brazilian “Indians”; he also wrote about “Hottentotts”, by which he meant black Africans, as a homogeneous group. Raynal portrayed the objects of future colonization as existing in a state of nature and freedom which colonizers would ruin. He was especially critical of contemporaries who wrote of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Background to German Colonialism
• 2 The Discourse Historical Approach to Textual Analysis Described and Illustrated
• 3 Finding Colonies: Travel Writing 1878–1913
• 4 Controlling Colonies: Political Discourse 1879–1914
• 5 Living in the Colonies: Memoir and Autobiography 1896–1914
• 6 The German Colonial Dream after 1919
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Extract from an 1848 Speech by Ernst Dieffenbach
• Appendix 2: ‘Ein gemüthliches Negervölkchen’
• Appendix 3: ‘Das lebendige Ebenholz’
• Appendix 4: ‘Abschied Von Zentralafrika’
• Appendix 5: ‘Deutschlands Recht auf Kolonien’
• Appendix 6: ‘Wie Mongolla zu seiner Frau kam’
• Bibliography
• Index of Vocabulary with Dates of First Attestation