Bismarck, Europe and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference 1884–1885 and the Onset of Partition. It includes excellent illustrations and maps as well as an annotated critical bibliography.įorster, Stig, Wolfgang Mommsen, and Ronald Robinson, eds. Offers an up-to-date synthesis of Germany’s colonial ventures in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific and places them in a cultural and transnational frame. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012. The interdisciplinary volume includes essays in the fields of musicology, religious studies, film, and tourism studies as well as literary analysis and history.Ĭonrad, Sebastian. Some essays focus on the period of Germany’s formal colonial empire in Africa and the Pacific, while others examine Germany’s postcolonial era, which includes the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany and its colonial revanchism.

Offers a wide range of studies on German colonialism and its legacies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 2005 offers a collection of essays on all aspects of German colonialism.Īmes, Eric, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal, eds. Steinmetz 2007 presents a comparative study of three German colonies, and Ames, et al. Gann and Duignan 1977 deals with the German personnel in Germany’s African colonies. 1988 concentrates on the early years of colonial partition, and van Laak 2005 is a short general study of two hundred years of German imperialism. Stoecker 1987 represents the former GDR school of studying German imperialism. Speitkamp 2005 is a condensed, easily readable general introduction, whereas Conrad 2012 is based on an up-to-date transnational history approach. There are a number of excellent overviews that focus on different aspects of German colonialism. Recent literature speaks of “imaginary colonies” in the context of revisionism of the post-Versailles years. Only when the Nazis’ Russian campaign of World War II began taking its heavy toll did colonial ambitions finally end.

Following the official end of German colonialism, a revanchist movement in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany began to try and claim the former territories, and colonial literature, films, and science blossomed. The German colonial empire ended after its defeat in the war and the Treaty of Versailles on 10 January 1920. Only in German East Africa did General Lettow-Vorbeck and a small number of African mercenaries persevere until the end of the war. Most of Germany’s African and Pacific colonies were occupied by other European colonial powers in the early stages of World War I. The German-Herero war led to the first genocide of the 20th century.

The Herero-Nama war of 1904 in German Southwest Africa and the Maji-Maji war in German East Africa were the most devastating ones for the local population. From the beginning, African men and women resisted the wrongful annexation of their territories, which led to several violent colonial wars. In addition, Germany obtained territories in the Pacific, such as German New Guinea and Samoa, as well as some smaller islands, and with the status of a concession territory, Kiautschou (Jiaozhou) in China. As a latecomer in the struggle for colonies, Germany had to settle for four territories, called “protectorates,” in Africa: Togo and Cameroon in the west, German Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia), and German East Africa (today’s Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi) in the east. With the exception of Brandenburg-Prussia’s short-lived attempt to gain a foothold on the West African coast and to participate in the 17th-century transatlantic slave trade, German colonialism began only in the 1880s.

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