The Racial Economy of Weltpolitik: Imperialist Expansion ...



The Racial Economy of Weltpolitik: Imperialist Expansion, Domestic Reform,

and War in Pan-German Ideology, 1894-1918

Dennis Sweeney

University of Alberta

It is hard not to be impressed by the new interest in “transnational” or global perspectives among German historians. Long immune to the developments in world history, globalization studies, postcolonial criticism, and cultural-historical debates over colonialism and empire, which have made much more headway in several other national fields, German historians are increasingly advocating critical engagement with these highly diverse theoretical-analytical approaches in a growing number of monographs, essays, special journal issues, conference panels and round-tables, and online forums. Their intentions are varied: they aim to trace the historical genealogy of the present global “reality,” the proliferation and intensification of transnational movements, flows, and networks of commodities, money, cultural products, ideologies, and migrants, in relation to the German transnational past; to further deconstruct the “founding mythology” of the nation state and the overly bounded, structuralist framework of most existing social and “societal history;” to identify the sources of metropolitan cultural-political identities in the contexts of empire and colonial domination; and, more generally, to prompt new questions about, and generate new perspectives on, the major themes and debates in the history of late nineteenth and twentieth-century Germany.

This paper is an attempt to respond favorably, but also critically, to this call to think about what a sensitivity to transnational developments might mean for our histories of Wilhelmine Germany. I am interested in considering the ways in which processes of global interaction since the late nineteenth century might help me think about my own research on the Pan-German League from 1894 to 1918, especially what I believe to be the core of Pan-German ideology: its articulation of an imperialist “racial economy” centered on the inter-related demands for capitalist expansion and the biopolitical imperatives of the German Volkskörper. Without developing the arguments in full here, I maintain that most scholarship on the Pan-German League, for very good reasons, has emphasized its primary commitments to nationalism and “migrationist colonialism,” an ideology founded on a backward-looking agrarianism and visions of Lebensraum, in contradistinction to a more modern and “industrial” Weltpoltik, led by export interests, favoring global trade and the search for “markets and sources of raw materials, thus jobs and profits.” But I would argue that the Pan-Germans from the start embraced a strategy of capitalist expansion, different from other strategies of Weltpolitik to be sure, involving the promotion of German trading relations, markets, industrial production, and the acquisition of agricultural land and raw materials. Initially focused on overseas expansion and colonial conquest, this strategy turned increasingly toward an emphasis on the creation of a German-dominated economic Mitteleuropa during the two decades before the First World War. In addition, I argue that these economic imperatives were closely articulated to the Pan-German advocacy of a new biopolitical racist project: the cultivation of the health and conditions of the German “race” or body of the nation “Volkskörper.” This project, which departed from the primarily cultural and demographic nationalism of the early Pan-Germans, developed over the course of the prewar decade and evolved into an imperialism that demanded new “living space” for Germans and entailed a range of colonial activities promoting German “settlement” (Besiedelung). Moreover, it established bio-racial definitions of “Germandom,” called for “planned racial breeding” of Germans, and the ethnic-demographic reorganization of central Europe. In 1912, Pan-German Chairman leader Heinrich Class even called for the “ethnic cleansing” (völkische Flurbereinigung) of “racially foreign” populations from Germany’s contested border regions—a demand that radically intensified during the First World War, when the imperatives of what Pan-Germans labeled a “race war,” a “war of annihilation,” and a “struggle for existence” demanded ethnic cleansing and population “transfers.”

My attempt to explore the “transnational” dimensions of Pan-German ideology will also offer a (less than direct) critique of what I see as some of the potential shortcomings and methodological problems associated with this turn to transnationalism or globalization as well as, to a lesser extent, recent studies of German colonialism/empire. These include the ways in which much, though certainly not all, recent work does the following: 1) attempts to move beyond the confines of nationalism or the nation-state but often inadvertently leaves in place the figure of the unitary nation or nation-state (as the “metropole” or “Germany”), which implicitly acts with a singular, coherent agency in relation to external forces; 2) emphasizes the local in relation to the global in a way that ignores questions about the relative explanatory weight of local-national social struggles versus transnational developments in the dynamics of domestic and international politics; 3) favors a methodological approach to the analysis of German culture and politics that tends to slight questions of historical causality, and matters of local and conjunctural determination, in favor of presumed semantic continuities, textual linkages, and discursive unities that seem to link extra-European colonial to metropolitan cultural practices across vast stretches of time and space; and 4) embraces spatio-temporal metaphors that privilege transitive and transitory phenomena—flows, movements, networks, dialogues—that appear to render previous forms of social-historical interpretation and theories of globalization, developed for the analysis of questions of class, capitalism, geopolitics, “the blunt arguments of war and profit making,” and imperialism, irrelevant to present-day modes of transnational historical inquiry.

Nevertheless, my response to the new interest in transnationalism, globalization, and “empire”—this emergent transnational, global, or imperial “turn”—is generally favorable, especially as it relates to several key themes of this new moment: imperial ideologies and representations of empire, the dynamics of national-racial identity formation in the metropole in relation to projects of colonial domination, and the connections between the local and the global (i.e., domestic politics and imperialism). In the first section of this paper, I will explore the ideological transition toward an economic Mitteleuropa and a biopolitical racism in relation to transnational developments associated with global capitalism and colonial rivalries. In the second section, I will briefly examine some of the domestic factors behind this evolution of Pan-German imperialist ideology in social struggles over the capitalist social order and political conflicts over the very terms and legitimacy of Weltpolitik within Germany. The final section will discuss, very schematically, the evolving domestic coalition and ideological convergence among leaders of the Pan-German League, German heavy and other industrial interests, and the imperial government. In these ways, I am trying to identify the specific connections between transnational and domestic conditions and conflicts that shaped Pan-German ideology and the causal dynamics of German imperial expansion and war.

I

The evolving configuration of Pan-German imperialism—its combination of economic expansionism and biopolitical racism—was constitutively shaped in relation to the transnational developments and the forces of global capitalism. In an obvious sense, Pan-German imperialism was conceived as a response to the imperial designs of other powerful nation-states, which sought to secure markets, raw materials, land, labor, and investments across the globe as vital preconditions for capitalist stability/growth and national strength. Its economic strategies were explicitly understood as part of an imperial response to the “world empires” of Britain, Russia, and the United States. Similarly, Pan-German concerns about an expanding population and its existential need for new colonial territories are only intelligible in the context of an ideological schema that emphasized the centrality of population growth to the strength and even existence of national communities in an era of competitive struggles between nation-states. The initial thrust of Pan-German ideology, after all, centered on the need to prevent the “loss” of Germans to other nation-states (especially the US, and to a lesser extent Canada and countries in south America) as a result of migration and thus to support and retain “Germandom” throughout the world.

Moreover, the Pan-German vision of Mitteleuropa, the economic and demographic-racial reorganization of central Europe under German hegemony, was conceived as a means of limiting the allegedly deleterious consequences of an improperly regulated ( or “Manchester-like”) transnational capitalism: the immigration of foreign (mostly Polish) workers to Germany, the general shortage of workers in agriculture, the “overpopulation” and lack of sufficient housing in the large cities, the rise of large masses of geographically concentrated unemployed in response to “every oscillation in the economy,” the physical dangers to “public health” (Volksgesundheit) entailed by the unregulated rhythms of “urban and industrial life,” the amassing of “foreign money” by large banks and the associated influence of wealthy (and by definition foreign) Jews, and the rise of internationalist Social Democracy. Pan-Germans instead called for controlled economic growth, a proper “balance” between industrial and agrarian sectors of the economy, and border and other controls designed to eliminate the foreign and to mitigate international and sub-national movements of goods, capital, and humans.

Indeed, such challenges to territorial and cultural sovereignty posed by transnational flows of (foreign) commodities, students, ideas, fashion, and even words, names, and phrases—the threat of cultural “hybridity”—were fundamental to the formation of Pan-German national identities after 1900. Pan-Germans began sponsoring a series of lectures at their national conferences and numerous pamphlets concerned with “national education” that increasingly pointed to the dangers of all manner of “foreign” imports at home. In his pamphlet from 1904, Julius Ziehen called for a broad-ranging “pedagogical” project in the schools, in the military, and in the public, family, and occupational lives of all Germans in order both to educate them in their “native nationality” (Volkstum), “their own culture, their own national soul,” and the national duties that arise from the latter; and to protect them from the “contamination” of foreign ideas, the “poison” of foreign reading materials and trashy literature, and the “obscene goods” imported from outside Germany. This desire to arrest the flow of “foreign bodies into the life of our people” authorized Pan-German efforts to hygienicize public life and “public opinion” more generally. These included calls for a “völkische press law” that would regulate and suppress the “international cultural spirit,” the poisonous “importation from abroad,” manifested in German newspapers and the work of foreign editors in April 1909; a formal League resolution taking up the battle against the “obsession with foreign words” in economic life—namely, the proliferation of foreign names for businesses, on stores signs, and in store windows—in September 1912; and other initiatives focused on matters ranging from reducing the number of foreign students at German universities to eliminating the presence of foreign clothing and fashions, especially for women, in German stores. This assault on the urban modern and cultural hybridity was taken up in 1912 by Heinrich Class in his pseudonomously published tract entitled Wenn ich der Kaiser wär, which amounted to a broad-ranging call to “cleanse” German-national public and everyday life by means of constitutional revisions, national education, controls over the press and public culture (theater, etc.), and even the home, which women were called on to police and cleanse in ways that were both political-national and moral: a woman’s duty was “ihr Hause heilig und rein zu halten von allen Einflüssen der Zersetzung, und zwischen sich und allem Unreinen eine schärfste Grenze zu ziehen; kein Buch, keine Zeitung komme ins Haus, die Ansteckung bringen können, kein Gast werde geduldet, der nicht unantastbar ist, keine Gesellschaft werde anerkannt, wo nicht der Geist der sittlichen Reinlichkeit herrscht.” In a similar way, Constantin von Gebsattel, called for broad restrictions on the unwanted foreign influences in the press, in publishing, in artistic-cultural life, and the formal domains of party politics in his notorious anti-Semitic pamphlet of 1913.

In these ways, transnational and sub-national developments contributed to the formation of Pan-German racial ideology. Indeed, the League leaders embraced racism as a marker of difference in much the way other racists defined human communities in the era of expanding European colonial empires. In this very broad sense perhaps, imperial or colonial contexts provided a backdrop to the evolution of Pan-German racial taxonomies and “race thinking;” they provided material for a number of Pan-German disquisitions on the attributes of “native” peoples and thus, in a general way, the defining features of German Eigenart.

II

Nevertheless, transnational conditions and processes of global interaction on their own do not explain the critical transformations of Pan-German ideology in the late Wilhelmine era. First, Pan-German economic prescriptions were never aimed simply at the global economic struggle between nations, empires, and races. Indeed, in my view, the urgency and frequency with which the Pan-Germans embraced economic issues and advocated strategies of social reform after 1900, can be best be explained in relation to an evolving dialectical relationship between transnational and international conditions and policies, on the one hand, and domestic social and political struggles—including struggles over the legitimacy of Weltpolitik—within Germany, on the other. Second, Pan-German elaborations of biopolitical racism evolved not in any direct or recognizable way from colonial rule in places like Southwest or East Africa but rather in response to a perceived crisis from within and at the borders of Germany. Thus, the new bio-racialist language centering on the needs and conditions of the Volkskörper emerged more directly from a sustained engagement with alleged domestic threats, which were often understood has having international origins, and a striking turn to a preoccupation with the “inner” political reform of Germany and its biopolitical consolidation in the years from 1903 to 1918.

If Pan-German economic concerns were defined in terms of overseas expansion, the acquisition of colonies, and territorial resettlement in Europe, they were always linked to the domestic conditions of capitalist profitability, especially after 1903. This was not simply a matter of carefully crafted political rhetorics, emanating from nationalist pressure groups like the Pan-German League, the Colonial Society, or the Navy League or from the political parties (left liberals, National Liberals, and Free Conservatives) about the economic benefits and “welfare” for German workers associated with imperialist expansion. The demands for empire emerged from the same capitalist imperatives—“free” labor and commodity markets, uninhibited employer prerogative, limited state interference in the industrial workplace and the “free economy”—that motivated newly emergent and broad-ranging domestic political alliances. The first efforts at alliances of this kind were spearheaded by the Imperial League Against Social Democracy. Led by General Eduard von Liebert, a prominent Pan-German and former governor of German East Africa, and conceived as a response to the dramatic victory of the SPD in the Reichstag elections of 1903, the Imperial League sought to combat Social Democracy by means of propaganda and Öffentlichkeitsarbeit and the construction of a new politics of Sammlung, which would include the anti-socialist labor organizations, employer associations, and the main bourgeois parties (left liberals, National Liberals, Free Conservatives, and Conservatives in a new Blockpolitik). It relied on explicitly imperialist and colonial arguments and motifs in its propaganda activities, especially during the “Hottentot elections” of 1907, in its attacks on the “red international,” which was deemed a “foreign body” within Germany that preached “class hatred,” insubordination in the factory, and revolution and threatened the economic and military strength of the nation. In the wake of the even more dramatic victory of the SPD in 1912, the Pan-Germans helped to build a new kind of alliance among the nationalist right, domestic heavy industry, the anti-socialist unions, the Agrarian League, Mittelstand and peasant associations, and key elements within the right wing of the National Liberal Party, the Free Conservative Party, and the Conservative Party. The Cartel of Productive Estates, which met officially in August 1913, and subsequently won numerous allies in the ranks of export and light industrial sectors, was forged around the similar domestic economic and imperial imperatives: efforts to combat the trade unions and Social Democracy; “excessive” state Sozialpolitik, with its alleged financial burdens and deleterious racial consequences; and the political harvest of universal male suffrage and the power of the Reichstag—all of which were deemed responsible for inhibiting the necessary conditions for capital accumulation and the expansion of the German economy (Volkswirtschaft) in an era of globalizing capitalism.

Similar kinds of specific connections and chronologies, which point to the importance of domestic political factors, characterized the development of Pan-German racism. Certainly, Pan-German conceptions of race, understood as a marker of difference, evolved in relation to colonial projects overseas but they applied earlier and more consistently to colonial projects carried out in relation to less “racially foreign” Europeans, especially eastern Europeans (Poles, etc.)—ethnic groups and “border” populations that figured centrally in the racist obsessions of the Pan-Germans but took on much greater importance as plans for colonization and settlement turned eastward after 1905. Moreover, “race” (Rasse) in Pan-German ideology developed not only as a signifier distinguishing self from other but also according to a “norm/deviance model of diversity and inequality,” which articulated other, often class definitions, of Germandom. Like many other discussions and publication, including Ziehen’s aforementioned lecture on national pedagogy, Ludwig Kuhlenbeck spent most of his time outlining the internal qualities of and dangers to the Germans as a “race of people” in a major lecture from 1905. The “racial value” (Rassenwert) of the German people, according to Kuhlenbeck, was located in a broadly defined “middle class” of Handwerker, independent farmers, merchants, small-scale factory owners, and professionals (jurists, doctors, teacher, technical employees, etc.); it was now threatened by “race mixing,” the social consequences associated with “Manchester-style” capitalism and their impact on the mechanisms of natural selection, and especially internal political threats (Catholic universalism but mostly Social Democracy), which disrupted Pan-German efforts at imperial expansion. Indeed, to date I have found very few references or debates within the League that would suggest that the new biopolitical racism evolved solely, or even primarily, in relation to overseas or non-European sites of colonial domination, or that the German colonies provided “laboratories”—at least for the Pan-Germans—for the incubation of this specific form of biopolitical racism and its subsequent re-importation into the metropole. It appears instead that Pan-German racism evolved out of the interpenetration of foreign policy and domestic concerns and developments but directly in relation to the latter.

Indeed, Pan-German references to the health and future of the racial Volkskörper, which appeared only after 1903 with increasing frequency, were forged in fears about the biological endownment of Germans and the perceived internal threats to national unity. This was the case with Pan-German lectures, pamphlets, discussions within the Hauptleitung, and the most public statements from members of the League. It appeared in early texts about “national education” and the German race, and it was the central feature of Class’s If I were the Kaiser from 1912, which was the most widely read Pan-German text before the war. The latter appeared in response to a major domestic political event—the SPD Reichstag victory of 1912—and offered a plan for “imperial reform” focused most insistently not on foreign policy but on the internal threats to the German Volkskörper, especially ethnic-national minorities, left liberalism, Social Democracy, feminism, parliamentarism, “Americanization,” and (now) Jews. It called for a vast project of socio-political reform that combined numerous references to physical heath of the German Volkskörper, national-cultural education, and antidemocratic constitutional changes. This preoccupation shaped the discussions of Pan-German priorities more generally in the prewar years. In 1912, when von Liebert called on the leadership to turn its attentions to a more active “innere Politik,” for example, he referenced not colonies abroad (his longstanding concern) but the problems of settlement in Germany’s border areas and most centrally three main issues: the “race question,” the “Jewish question,” and the “question about the struggle against Social Democracy.” These concerns only intensified during the war years, when the Pan-German League began urgently to identify its principal aims in terms of defending and promoting the “health, strength, and growth” of the German Volkskörper, which was “not an artificial image of a random joining together of all kinds of persons” but a “real, organically evolved creation” with its own “solid inner unity”—and the essential foundation of German Eigenart. The League’s first postwar “declaration” and its new statutes from 1919 confirmed this focus in relation to military defeat at the hand of the allies, the defeat of the annexationist forces within Germany itself, and the appalling spectacle—for the Pan Germans—of the socialist-inspired Revolution.

In this context, the main enemies could be found within Germany itself: left liberals, socialist, and especially Jews. The Pan-German turn to biopolitical racism, and the excessive preoccupation with the health of the Volkskörper, was directly linked to the racialization and demonization of Jews as the principal internal racial threat to Germany. Initially, Jews were allowed to be members of the Pan-German League. But as the Pan-Germans embraced a bio-political racism, Jews were understood increasingly as agents of cultural hybridity, political opposition, and racial pollution within Germany. This was visible in the discussions of the “Judenfrage” but most tellingly in relation to discussions of the “Rassenfrage,” which was considered to be distinct from but related to the “Judenfrage.” This racial definition was animated by the continued political opposition, especially from liberal newspapers and Social Democracy, to Pan-German plans for colonial expansion and Machtpolitik. These connections deepened during the two years before the war, when the Hauptleitung took up the issue at several of its meetings, Class published his “Kaiserbuch,” and Gebsattel launched his own assault on the “poisonous” influence of Jews on German public life. The war only brought the issue to a head: anti-annexationist initiatives, popular protest, military defeat, and socialism were all connected to the political and racial influence of Jews. For this reason, the League officially proscribed Jewish membership in its revised statutes of 1919 and identified Jews as one of the central threats to the health and well-being of the German Volkskörper.

III

I would like to conclude with some general thoughts on the connections and tensions between the capitalist and bio-racial components of Pan-German imperialism and their relation to war. First, it is important to recognize the contradiction between Pan-German demands for capitalist expansion, which focused on the acquisition of agricultural land and raw materials, trade, and investments and fostered a “molecular” set of economic exchanges and practices that “operates in continuous” and uneven spaces on the one hand; and the territorial and spatial boundedness required by the collective protection of the racial Volkskörper, on the other. Indeed, their general economic prescriptions for industrial growth—a central imperative of German national strength—helped to sustain the very movements of commodities and people and the proliferation of social interests that challenged the “hygiene” of the German Volkskörper from without and within. Second, and conversely, the goal of a racially pure Volkskörper demanded an empire with fortified boundaries, immune to the diverse cultural influences and “racial” elements of other peoples—a disruption of the spatial openness and volatile logic of processes of capital accumulation. It was this dialectic, I maintain, that propelled Pan-German efforts increasingly to insist on the qualities of German Eigenart and to demand that the imperial government police the borders, unity, and purity of the German “race” or Volkskörper by 1914 and, with a heightened intensity, during the war itself, when open military confrontation and total mobilization turned their biopolitical project into a armed “race struggle” and “Daseinskampf.”

Moreover, the Pan-Germans sought to integrate these two logics in a way that transformed them into a dynamic ideological amalgam in the vision of a German-dominated Mitteleuropa as the basis for the continued expansion, rather than the static, autarkic contentment, of the German Volkskörper. The Pan-Germans imagined a Mitteleuropa that would secure the German economy both in its structural coherence and in its trade relations with other nations; it would provide both an economic base and the framework for German economic expansion. This plan called for military conquest and dispossession, especially within the key industrial regions of northern France and the border strip in the Polish east, and a set of economic and financial instruments that would control the other European states, especially France, and subordinate them to German economic priorities. This framework for continued capitalist expansion in turn would provide the foundation for the “propagation” (Fortpflanzung) or continued “development” (Entfaltung) of the German Volkskörper into the future. For the Pan-Germans redefined the territorial assumptions behind previous nationalisms by insisting that national state borders could only ever be provisional because, as the former Pan-German Chairman Enrst Hasse had argued, the “borders of peoples,” as opposed to states, “are constantly subject to changes.” The “force of expansion” (Ausdehnungskraft) was self-propelling, an expression of the internal dynamics and biological imperatives of the German racial Volkskörper. Indeed, it was the facilitation of the latter that led Pan-Germans to celebrate war for another reason: that is, for the way it allegedly fostered “natural laws” by eliminating all that was “rotten, brittle, life threatening” to the German race: “Der Krieg ist uns Alldeutschen,” according to Franz Sontag, “nun einmal nicht der grosse und blindwütige Zerstörer, sondern der sorgsame Erneuerer und Erhalter, der grosse Arzt und Gärtner, der die Menschheit auf ihrem Wege zur Höherentwicklung begleitet.” In this context, war served three main purposes in Pan-German ideology: it would secure the expanding economic foundations of Germandom, revise state-territorial boundaries in accordance with the ongoing biological expansion of German race; and cultivate the internal qualities—national unity, masculine pitilessness, and sacrifice—and “human material” of the German Volkskörper.

In my view, the Pan-German imperialist project is important because many of its central concerns and demands were taken up by the economic interest organizations, political parties, and the imperial government and the Army High Command during the First World War—a thesis subject to much debate that I can only briefly advance in this paper—in ways that point to the transnational conditions but especially domestic political processes. In this regard, I would argue that the Pan-Germans developed their economic ideology and conception of Mitteleuropa in relation to the interests of domestic industry, especially heavy industry, over the course of the prewar decade. This took place through the agency of key Pan-German leaders with direct ties to heavy industry—Hugenberg, Reismann-Grone, and ultimately Kirdorf—but also, crucially, in processes of political coalition-building, discussed above, in response to domestic opponents of capitalism, national chauvinism, and imperial expansion abroad. These activities brought Pan-Germans to the center of imperialist public opinion, described by Fritz Fischer, during the prewar decade: the diverse journalistic and party-political networks and circles engaged in the broad-ranging public relations work on behalf of German Weltpolitik. In the process, many German economic elites and organizations, politicians (especially National Liberals, Free Conservatives, and Conservatives), imperialists, and government officials embraced the racial elements of Pan-German imperialism: these included leaders of the CVDI, who were closest to the Pan-German League, numerous leaders of the export-oriented Bund der Industriellen, and imperialists like the seemingly ubiquitous Arthur Dix, a National Liberal and exponent of capitalist expansion, whose understanding of German imperial interests was decisively shaped by völkisch understandings of race struggle and “racial” approaches to foreign policy.

This influence extended to government ministers and officials not only by means of personal connections—for example, between Class and Kiderlen-Wächter, Johann Neumann and Alfred Tirpirz, or Theodor Schiemann and Kaiser Wilhelm himself—but more generally by means of Pan-German influence or pressure on “public opinion.” I would argue that the Pan-Germans shaped government foreign policy in decisive ways during the three years leading up to the outbreak of war in 1914 and in the debates over official war aims during the war itself, especially after the ascendancy of Hindenburg and Ludendorff in 1916. Pan-German ideological influence, its combination of capitalist and biopolitical demands, surfaced repeatedly in the war aims discussion—e.g., in the “Address of the Six Trade Associations” to the Chancellor in May 1915, in the “Intellectuals’ Address” from the summer of the same year, etc.—and most tellingly in the plans of Ludendorff and the Army High Command for German conquest of, and control over, Europe. The latter included the economic and infrastructural re-organization of conquered and subordinated regions, the ethnic-racial (re)mapping of Europe, proposed “ethnic cleansing” and population “exchanges” or “transfers,” especially in the Polish “border areas” where non-German populations were to be replaced by “returning” German migrants (Rückwanderer) from the “east”—all of which were variously based on the strategic economic and biopolitical visions of the Pan-Germans.

Endnotes

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Osterhammel, “Transnationale Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Erweiterung oder Alternative,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27 (2001): 464-79. In my view the best sustained discussion of the possibilities of a global approach among historians is Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 1034-60. I have taken “founding mythology” from Young Sun Hong’s excellent online contribution: “The Challenge of Transnational History,” H-Net.

Though I can’t address definitions in any depth, “racial economy” here refers to both the connections between bio-racism and capitalist economic structures and processes and the specific organization of Pan-German racism as an ideological formation.

This, of course, is the schema provided by the very intelligent analysis in Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imeprialism (Oxford, 1986), esp. 91-94; and his recent essay in Conrad/Osterhammel. For an essay on the “primacy of the national,” which offers intriguing arguments about the connections between domestic and foreign policy, see Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, “Nationale Verbände zwischen Weltpolitik und Kontinentalpolitik,” in Herbert Schottelius and Wilhelm Deist (eds.), Marine und Marinepolitik im kaiserlichen Deutschland 1871-1914 (Düsseldorf, 1972), 296-317.

I don’t mean to suggest that all of the studies carried out in the name of transnationalism or globalization are the same or share the same qualities; certainly, I see important differences between recent work on German colonialism and the efforts to develop transnational approaches. Rather, by identifying common problems, I am trying to clarify what I think are the potentially useful aspects of these newer approaches in general and to situate myself in relation to them.

In other words, many recent essays on transnationalism and globalization seem to pay much less attention to the structured or more fixed and institutionalized patterns of social life as well as the entrenched—and therefore difficult to overthrow—social relations of domination and subordination. This quote and the general line of critique come partly from the fierce analysis in Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York, 2006), 130. I would argue that these criticisms apply to most of the essays in the two main recent volumes on transnationalism and German empire: Sebastian Conrad und Jürgen Osterhammel (eds.), Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1871-1914 (Göttingen, 2004); and Birthe Kundrus (ed.), Phantasiereiche. Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus (Frankfurt and New York, 2003). I would add one further skeptical comment about some recent work. I am struck by the exaggerations of some recent statements, especially that of Conrad and Osterhammel, which seem to suggest that all historians (until the arrival of transnationalists) have been wedded to uncritical historical narratives unwittingly trapped in “conventional modes of thought,” namely the false organizing categories associated with the nation state. This kind of overstatement, it seems to me, ignores not only the existing scholarship, however limited, on transnational movements, localities, and regions of different kinds; it also overlooks the more than two decades of scholarship deconstructing the essentialisms of modern nationalisms. This exaggeration is particularly manifest in their efforts to put paid to all previous historical work on imperial Germany, and the bankruptcy of the national narrative, in the space of three pages (11-14).

My thoughts, therefore, are very exploratory at this stage of my research.

“Eine Alldeutsche Wirtschaftspolitik,” 62-7; Class, Denkschrift, 13-18; Frymann, Wenn ich der Kaiser wär, 20-4.

Ziehen, Über Volkserziehung im nationalem Sinn. Vortrage, gehalten auf dem Verbandstage des Alldeutschen Verbandes zu Lübeck am 28. Mai 1904 (Munich, 1904).

Stauff, “Ein völkisches Pressegesetz,” 431-3.

“Entschliessung,” in BArch R8048/86, 12.

Fryman, Wenn ich der Kaiser wär, 121.

Dieter Fricke, “Der Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie von seiner Gründung bis zu den Reichstagswahlen von 1907,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft VII (1959): 237-280.

Stegmann, Die Erben; Fischer, Germany’s Aims.

There is even evidence suggesting that the organization of Germany’s eastern border and the treatment of the Poles was invoked as a model for the colonization of Southwest Africa. See the “Kolonialpolitische Forderungen” from 1904, in BArch R 8048/188, 61-2.

Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York, 1995), 180.

“The Race Question,” according to Kuhlenbeck, was also a “Class Question.” Kuhlenbeck, “Rasse und Volkstum.”

I am not contesting the specific findings of excellent work by Lora Wildenthal, Pascal Grosse, Birthe Kundrus, and others, especially Ann Stoler. It is their claims about the causal determinations of biopolitical racism or its principal animating discourses within Germany or the metropole, and the specific explanatory weight assigned to colonial discourse in Africa, that I am questioning here.

Liebert’s motion entitled “Der Alldetusche Verband und die innere Politik,” in BArch R 8048/95, 18-20.

Vietinghoff-Scheel, “Grundlinien künftiger innerer Arbeit,” Der Panther 3, no. 10 (1915), 1209.

David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, 2003).

See in particular Leopold von Vietinghoff-Scheel’s essay, which represents this intensifying inward focus in the context of total war in 1915: “Grundlinien künftiger innerer Arbeit,” Der Panther 3, no. 10 (1915).

Carl Klingemann, “Deutsche Zukunft,” Der Panther 3, no. 10 (1915): 260-1.

Hasse, Deutsche Grenzpolitik (Munich, 1906), 5.

Sontag, “Wir Alldeutschen und der Weltkrieg,” 1156.

See ibid., 1157, which points to these three aims.

Fischer, War of Illusions, 235, 236, 239. My thanks to Geoff Eley for pointing out the importance of Dix.

Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann and Imanuel Geiss, Die Erforderlichkeit des Unmöglichen. Deutschland am Vorabend des ersten Weltkrieges (Frankfurt am Main, 1965).

Imanuel Geiss, Die polnischen Grenzstreifen 1914-1918. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kriegszielpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Lübeck and Hamburg, 1960), esp. 176; and for Ludendorff’s own words, see Egmont Zechlin, Krieg und Kriegsrisiko. Zur deutschen Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg. Aufsätze (Düsseldorf, 1979), 211, 214-15, 225. See also Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, 2000), 94ff.; and the evidence in Wolfgang Mommsen, “Der ‘polnische Grenzstreifen.’ Anfänge der ‘völkische Flurbereinigung’ und der Umsiedlungspolitik,” in Mommsen, Der Erste Weltkrieg. Anfang vom Ende des bürgerlichen Zeitalters (Frankfurt am Main, 2004), 118-136. Of course, I’m not suggesting that government ministers and officials or all economic and political elites simply adopted Pan-German imperialist prescriptions. Indeed, there were numerous other competing imperialist visions, including those of Bethmann Hollweg, during the prewar and wartime eras; this was one of the reasons why the Pan-Germans so aggressively sought to shape public opinion and the war aims debates. It is precisely the extent to which one particular organization and group of right-wing activists in Wihelmine Germany were able to push government policy in specific imperialist directions that interests me here.

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