Imperialism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Germany

Abstract

“Imperialism” has had an uneven career in German historiography. In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars scrutinized the development of a German overseas empire during the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine periods. Responding to the Fischer controversy about German culpability for the outbreak of World War I, several historians contributed analyses that linked domestic politics to German expansionism before and during the war.1 While the rise of National Socialism was always the implicit or explicit backdrop for this scholarship, others pursued suggestions made by Hannah Arendt and Aime Cesaire, namely that imperialism was a laboratory for the later policies of the Nazis.2 After something of a lull in studies of imperialism in the 1980s, we have recently seen a revived interest in the history of German colonialism and what some scholars have termed “colonialist discourse” and “imperialist imagination.”3 Some of this scholarship has asked questions about longer continuities from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and thus has considered periods of formal German empire during the Kaiserreich and World War II together with periods when Germany did not formally rule over territories outside of Europe. However, this has not led to a new consensus on the significance of imperialism beyond the fairly short history of a formal German overseas empire from 1884 to 1919. Thus imperialism receives scant attention in German history surveys.4 In this article I ask whether empire and imperialism are useful categories for thinking about twentieth-century German history. Whereas scholars use expansionism and imperialism, linked to authoritarianism,