Transnational encounters in Algeria: para-colonial writing in the travelogues of German soldiers in colonial Algiers, 1830–1890

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay analyses travel writing by German-speaking soldiers serving in the French military in nineteenth-century colonial Algiers. It suggests that their position – that of Europeans associated with and employed by the French colonial powers without necessarily being culturally or politically aligned with the colonial project – can be described as “para-colonial”. That perspective allowed soldiers writing in German both to participate in and endorse, though also to critique, the process of colonisation, albeit in ambivalent terms. The texts do not describe binary, German–Algerian relationships, but rather “triangular” intercultural encounters, whereby the soldiers’ shifting attitudes to the French influence their feelings and writing about local people and culture, and vice versa. Examining the representations of the “first encounter” each soldier has with the new continent, the triangular intercultural relationship, and the written treatment of urban and rural spaces, the discussion contrasts two travelogues produced in 1840 and 1881, respectively, considering how the absence and, later, the advent of a German colonial Empire left its mark on German writing about the colonisation of Algiers.