German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence by Susanne Kuss

Abstract

Reviewed by: German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence by Susanne Kuss Adam A. Blackler German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence. By Susanne Kuss. Translated by Andrew Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 1 + 386. Paper $45.00. ISBN 978-0674970632. Academic debates over alleged links between Germany's overseas empire and the Third Reich have dominated German colonial historiography since the early 2000s. Prominent historians such as Isabel Hull, Jürgen Zimmerer, and Benjamin Madley have drawn considerable interest to the field, suggesting in their respective studies that total warfare and systematic violence in the colonies acted as genocidal antecedents to the Nazis so-called "New Order" in Eastern Europe. While scholars have more recently started to turn their attention to other aspects of Germany's global empire, the "Windhoek to Auschwitz" thesis remains a powerful thematic undercurrent in the historical literature. Queries about German colonialism and its violent status relative to other contemporary colonial powers, in particular, continue to inspire curiosity, as well as direct much of the scholarly research on German imperialism. Susanne Kuss's German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence is an important example of this historiographical reality. In contrast to advocates of the "continuity thesis," Kuss argues that German imperial violence emerged in relation to the particular sociopolitical and geographic circumstances in each respective [End Page 147] Kriegsschauplatz or theater of war (8). She supports this thesis with a detailed analysis of Germany's three best-known colonial wars, specifically the Boxer War in China, the Maji Maji War in German East Africa, and the Herero and Namaqua War in German Southwest Africa. Kuss devotes a chapter to each imperial theater and assesses how the individual campaigns altered the mental and psychological disposition of soldiers toward local populations (5). In this manner, her study demonstrates that extreme violence in the colonial sphere did not follow a premeditated strategy contrived in the metropole, but was instead the result of shifting war aims, poor planning, economic concerns, and racist fantasies that failed to materialize once German settlers and soldiers arrived overseas en masse (107–108). Kuss organizes her study into three parts: "Three Wars," "The Colonial Theater of War," and "Evaluation and Memory." Part 1 offers concise overviews of the three military campaigns in question. In this section, Kuss pays careful attention to the unique regional dynamics, such as the specific intentions colonial leaders had for each colony, which she contends made it impossible for German leaders to conduct imperial policy monolithically. The quality of this study rests on Kuss's ability to combine primary source-based research of China, German East Africa, and German Southwest Africa into one analytical narrative. She writes, for instance, that German soldiers in China unquestionably participated in violent expeditions against Chinese militias, but given Germany's general "irrelevance to the outcome of the [Boxer] war" due to its late arrival in Asia, boredom motivated troops to commit selective episodes of brutality "for enrichment" and to "vary an otherwise dull routine" (36). In sharp contrast, the wars in German East Africa and German Southwest Africa were more systematic in their conduct and orientation. Part 2 sharpens the analytical comparison of the Kriegsschauplätze and how distinct conditions in each location fashioned disparate occupational strategies, as well as mixed attitudes toward the use of extreme violence against colonized populations. As an example, Kuss reminds readers that African soldiers (askari) comprised a significant number of colonial forces in German East Africa (105). She explains that the askaris' knowledge of the region and terrain allowed German authorities to deploy their forces methodically against enemy settlements, supply lines, and Maji Maji guerillas. By way of contrast, Kuss shows that this approach was not possible in China due to the Germans' lack of "reliable familiarity with the Chinese population" and the "ethnic homogeneity" of the Shandong Province (161). She argues that imperial officers in German Southwest Africa, meanwhile, decided not to classify ethnic peoples hierarchically because the military had already defeated the two most powerful groups (Herero and Namaqua) at the turn of the twentieth century (164). Kuss also rightly emphasizes the importance of biological racism in...