Wastelands of empire, sites of ‘salvation’: landscapes of ‘reform’ in late nineteenth-century Germany

Abstract

This essay traces a rural network of modern carceral and internal colonial land enclosures developed in late nineteenth-century Germany. It considers the extent to which long-running debates over the value of penal colonialism and deportation for the management of societal ‘threats’ influenced shifts in carceral policy of the time, long thought to have been largely determined by the welfare reform movement of the Wilhelmine period and the notion of ‘protective supervision’ that prevailed in its wake. It is argued that certain aspects of convict colonialism, publicly interrogated by German legal theorists, were quietly adapted by carceral reform practices beginning in the 1880s. This essay speculates on the spatial and territorial implications of those adaptations, examining the little-known prison labour camps located in the sewage farms of Berlin after 1890, the model establishment of the rural labour colony founded by the pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, and the Prussian Settlement Commission’s anti-Slavic, anti-migrant program of internal colonisation, established by the German Ministry of Agriculture in 1886. It is argued that links between them were crystallised in a racialised topos of waste, framed by an emergent environmental discourse that served to sediment difference. Together, these institutions of correction, the architectures of enclosure that attended them, and the segregated geographies that resulted from them transformed the meaning and administration of Germany’s rural landscape and demarcate modern imperial planning practices that mobilised space, territory, and environment as mediums of ‘progressive’ reform and ‘protective supervision’ tied to increasingly regimented and policed forms of settlement.