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 roundtables, 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 Germandominated 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 PanGerman 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 antiSemitic 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, PanGerman 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 PanGermans 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 PanGerman 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 biopolitical 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 PanGermans 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 broadranging 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 PanGerman 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 PanGermans 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
PAGE
PAGE 12
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 bioracism 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.