Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History

Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide

Richard H. King, Dan Stone, Richard H. King, Dan Stone

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780857455444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) first argued that there were continuities between the age of European imperialism and the age of fascism in Europe in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). She claimed that theories of race, notions of racial and cultural superiority, and the right of 'superior races' to expand territorially were themes that connected the white settler colonies, the other imperial possessions, and the fascist ideologies of post-Great War Europe. These claims have rarely been taken up by historians. Only in recent years has the work of scholars such as Jürgen Zimmerer and A. Dirk Moses begun to show in some detail that Arendt was correct.

This collection does not seek merely to expound Arendt's opinions on these subjects; rather, it seeks to use her insights as the jumping-off point for further investigations – including ones critical of Arendt – into the ways in which race, imperialism, slavery and genocide are linked, and the ways in which these terms have affected the United States, Europe, and the colonised world.

Part I

IMPERIALISM AND COLONIALISM

Chapter 1

RACE POWER, FREEDOM, AND
THE DEMOCRACY OF TERROR
IN GERMAN RACIALIST THOUGHT

Elisa von Joeden-Forgey

When Chancellor Bismarck suddenly undertook a policy of overseas expansion in 1884, Germany was almost wholly unprepared for the legal and ideological stresses of colonial domination. Since it was determined from the outset that overseas polities would not be brought into the German federation as member states, the German constitution provided no model for the incorporation of colonial territories and German citizenship law was equally useless for defining the status of Germany's new subjects. Dominant thinking among officials and the public was very much influenced by the traditions of the old Prussian territorial state, where expansion was generally coupled with inclusion, irrespective of national or ethnic affiliations. So, for example, Prussia counted Danish and Polish speakers as its citizens and defined belonging in terms of loyalty and obedience to the monarchy. This tradition of legal assimilation informed the approach of many officials and members of the public towards Germany's colonies and especially towards the people living there, leading to confusion and contradiction among legal scholars, state offices, colonial bureaucrats, the press, and ordinary Germans.

When one examines official documents relating to the early years of colonial rule, the absence of any clear language of race difference is striking. Officials and the public tended to define difference according to assumed cultural distances and what Gerrit Gong has called the “standard of civilization.”¹ Although these modes of demarcating difference drew from the often racialized stereotypes and bigotries about the world beyond the borders of Europe that had gained currency in the nineteenth century, they still allowed for border crossings, for cultural and civilizational naturalization.² So, for example, we find early metropolitan officials referring to new subjects as Schutzgenosse (fellow protected persons), a term drawn from consular law that had historically referred only to other Europeans.³ The state initially gave high status Africans from the colonies an audience with the Crown Prince and quite positively supported the naturalization of an African in Hamburg who planned to marry the daughter of a local police official.⁴ The German press had the maddening habit, at least from the point of view of the state, of referring to colonial subjects as Reichsangehörige (citizens) and Landesleute (fellow countrymen).⁵

Despite the pronounced cosmopolitanism of the Germany that undertook its overseas project, racism emerged within two decades as the dominant language of colonial governance. The state passed travel bans in the late 1890s and early 1900s to limit the flow of people and information between colony and metropole precisely because such border crossing was undermining an emerging racialist argument in favor of colonial domination. Citizenship applications from colonial subjects show that naturalizations were becoming more fraught with racist anxiety. Mixed marriages became the almost unanimous subject of scorn within the middle classes. In public discussions, colonial subjects were frequently described as radically alterior—as existing in a separate dimension and, increasingly as time went on, outside of the boundaries of humanity. Among colonial scholars, colonial racism became so taken-for-granted that in 1909 a professor of National Economy at Hamburg's Colonial Institute could elevate race to a psychological explanation for colonization itself: “Is the presence of a racially foreign underclass not also one of the psychological bases for colonization? What attracts the colonizer and satisfies him? Certainly the freedom to be a master [Herr] and to belong to the upper caste. Who of us, who has lived with peoples of a foreign race, does not know this feeling? Or the feeling of discomfort when one sees a white man working together with colored peoples to produce an ordinary handicraft?”⁶ In this lecture, given upon his assumption of the position of the chairman of the Institute's Professors Council, Karl Rathgen promoted the creation overseas of an aristocratic form of racialized governance, where whites would form an eternal ruling strata over “colored peoples.” Given that Rathgen's racialized view of the colonial project was rather routine by this time, the question becomes how we can begin to account for this radical shift in perspective between the 1880s and World War I, and what, if any, long-term consequences such a shift might have had.

Racializing Expansion

The dramatic shift in the official and intellectual conception of colonial subjects in the metropole can be linked to the trauma of colonial realities. Between the early 1890s and 1906 Germany was beset by constant colonial scandals, thoroughly exploited by the anti-colonial Progressive and Social Democratic Parties and avidly presented to the public by the press. Such scandals raised the glaring contradiction between the values and norms of metropolitan German society and the day-to-day brutalities of colonial rule, which were in direct opposition to the traditions of Kultur and the Rechtsstaat. It may seem natural, then, that Germans would turn to race theory to smooth out the rough edges of empire. Historical studies of racism have shown the usefulness of racist ideology to democratic or liberal systems, which are engaged in violent exploitation, since racism posits unbridgeable and inalterable differences between human groups and purports to ground these differences within natural hierarchies. Thus racism served to legitimate the Atlantic slave trade, New World slavery, the massive land expropriation, and the near total annihilation of indigenous polities within settler colonies like the United States and the British Dominions—all based on the premise that certain groups had certain natural fates based on their racial essence. Two recent comparative treatments of the history of racism, by the historian George Fredrickson and the political scientist Anthony Marx, have both argued strongly for the state-based nature of the production of racism in the modern world.⁷ In Marx's words, “states made race.”⁸

But the German story of the history of racism shows a much less cynical and predictable development of race language in political thought and praxis. This statist interpretation of the origin of public race consciousness is apt in the German case only after a certain point in time. The German state turned to the language and logic of race-thinking after a decade and a half of colonial experience. Initially the state only generated the legal categories, and thus the political realities, that were to offer formal race-thinking an entrée into respectable political culture. Once race-thinking was given entrée, once, that is, the political system offered it a potential role, race-thinking took on a “powerful negative force of its own,” to quote from Kwame Anthony Appiah.⁹ The direction of this negative force was unpredictable, and its unleashing quite unintentional. What the German state experience with overseas imperialism shows us is that the production of racialist systems is too complex to be reduced to conscious actions on the part of state officials, and as a consequence, racialist systems are profoundly insidious and can be established incrementally through the uncoordinated synergy of individual actions and historical events.

In Germany, the history of official and pragmatic race-thinking began with a category. When the German state set out to establish a legal apparatus for colonial domination, its key concern was to give the Kaiser a free hand.¹⁰ Officials had to find a way, then, to include colonial subjects within the boundaries of German state power (sovereignty) while excluding them from any institutions that would limit that power. Furthermore, wary of state involvement in overseas rule, Bismarck was also set upon the private funding of colonization and hence had to ensure the ability of private companies to pursue their economic objectives. Officials and parliament both assumed that African and other colonized polities were too culturally different to warrant inclusion in the federation of states that made up the German empire. Given these realities, the state chose to leave for some later date the positive definition of the legal status of colonial subjects vis-à-vis the power of the state. Since their main aim was simple exclusion from limiting institutions, they defined this status negatively instead: colonial subjects, referred to in law as Eingeborene (“native”), while subsumed beneath the sovereign power of the state, did not fall under the jurisdiction of regular civil or criminal law. The “law” that was to apply to them was left up to the praxis of the men sent to rule over them. The law for Eingeborenen, then, was little more than caprice, and Eingeborene became a category for the limitless expansion of state power.

The consequence of this negative definition was rampant atrocity. Bismarck himself complained of a furor regiminalis that appeared to beset Prussian bureaucrats sent to the tropics, many of whom treated Eingeborenen in ways antithetical to established traditions of Prussian state-subject relations.¹¹ By the 1890s, newspapers were laced with lurid stories of official misconduct, including rapes, massacres, summary executions, trophy beheading, and the rampant use of flogging. Flogging was so widespread in fact that the colony of Kamerun in West Central Africa was popularly known as “the twenty-five country,” referring to the number of lashes regularly given.¹² By including Eingeborenen within the reach of the sovereign state and its monopoly of violence while simultaneously excluding them from any protective institutions or traditions, the German state had effectively, but unintentionally, created a potentially genocidal category of person—someone who existed wholly outside the community of moral obligation, without moral boundaries, whose very murder technically would not be illegal.

Because of its radical potential, the moral emptiness of the category of Eingeborene could support even a rational state policy of genocide. Franz Giesebrecht, editor of the reformist collection of essays entitled The Treatment of Natives in the German Colonies (1898), commented that:

Admittedly, life is often more brutal than the man, and when in the struggle of the races [Rassenkampf] the extermination of the population of an entire continent is postulated, that is certainly a standpoint of monstrous cruelty, a standpoint that we hold to be false and therefore that must be fought with all our energy, but that we must recognize as an historically and philosophically legitimate [one]. In contrast, we refuse all brutality that is committed by one colonizer against individual Eingeborene.¹³

For Giesebrecht and other reformers, it was not a conscious policy of annihilation that had to be refused categorically as illegitimate, but rather the arbitrary action of the individual bureaucrat against individual Eingeborenen. He was willing to grant a conceptual legitimacy to genocide as a state policy, both in the past (historically) and more generally (philosophically), thereby allowing genocide into the space of reasonable policy discourse.¹⁴ A conscious policy of annihilation happened, of course, between 1904 and 1907, when up to eighty percent of the Herero peoples in South West Africa were murdered as a consequence of the war pursued by the general sent there to put down the Herero insurrection.¹⁵

The emerging racialist definition of colonial subjects only began to crop up in legal explanations of the term Eingeborene after the turn of the century. This coincided with the shift in the political language of colonialism away from Germany's cosmopolitan traditions and towards the racialized reformism typified by many of the contributions to Giesebrecht's volume. The law student Emil Peters, for example, concluded in his 1906 dissertation that “under the category Eingeborene we should understand the colored persons of a colony, so long as they have not naturalized as German citizens or as members of a state recognized by international law, or so long as they are not granted an exemption by the Governor empowered by the Chancellor.”¹⁶ A few years later the Governor of South West Africa, Theodor Seitz, wrote to the State Secretary of the Colonial Office that he believed that legal status in the colonies should be based not on formal citizenship status (that is, naturalizations), but “alone on belonging to the ‘Eingeborenen.’” Referring to Germany's cosmopolitan traditions, he remarked, “it may be that in Germany no difference is made between black and white, but not, however, in the colonies.”¹⁷ When explicitly racialized, Eingeborene lost its political and legal meaning and came to identify a biological essence.

The radical alterity of the term Eingeborene was eventually worked into images of and prescriptions for colonial domination. In fact, the package of ideas that finally came to dominate political language about colonial questions was based in the juridical-anthropological notion of a separate sphere of governance called Eingeborenenrecht. Eingeborenenrecht was a concept that denoted the “customary law” of the Eingeborenen. Colonial reformers, many of them from the National Liberal Party, fleshed out the concept in the 1890s in response to the numerous colonial scandals that were attracting unwanted international attention and domestic outcry. Eingeborenenrecht, though it provided the fiction of governance according to local forms, never was meant to prevail over the decrees of colonial bureaucrats, colonial governors, or the Colonial Department in Berlin. Nor was it intended to limit the discretion of Germany's men on the spot, or to curtail the often lethal use of flogging and imprisonment in chains. In fact, m...