The role of German actors in European colonialisms, especially before the foundation of the German nation state in 1871 and Germany’s entry into imperialism proper with the so-called protectorates of 1884/1885, is a contested one. Different academic camps have interpreted the peculiar German case very differently. Opposing positions were flagged in the late 1990s and still hold. Notably, the literary scholar Susanne Zantop compellingly argued that longer standing German ‘colonial fantasies’ were not only instrumental in paving the way for later German imperialism but analogous to Hannah Arendt’s earlier argument that they were also constitutive for Germany’s fascist futures in the twentieth century. Although the continuity argument about the links between the Holocaust and antecedent genocidal practices during the Herero uprising in South West Africa (from Waterberg to Auschwitz, so to speak), and the implications of making the link have been debated, subsequent historians, including George Steinmetz have shown how colonial fantasies were indeed operative, although they met with other determining factors, such as local conditions and the habitus of German colonial actors, when they were put into practice in the German colonies. By contrast, critics like Russell Berman, partly drawing on Edward Said and Mary Louise Pratt, but also deliberately distancing himself from universalising arguments about the European colonial project, proposed that early German investment in other states’ colonialism could be, and very often was, a disinterested affair driven by a passion for science and the extension of knowledge rather than conquest.' (Lindsay Barrett, Lars Eckstein, Andrew Wright Hurley & Anja Schwarz : Introduction)
'This article continues the focus on German-Australian militarised modernities through the Second World War to the present day. It draws on the author’s own family history, beginning with the memories evoked by her grandparents’ house in northern Sydney, built between 1950 and 1953. Named ‘Gorgobad’, Persian for ‘place of the wolves’, it resonates with a family history that involves German colonial investments in post-First World War Iran, the global geopolitical upheavals of the Second World War, which drew her family into separate histories of refuge, British imprisonment and deportation and, finally, building a new home in Australia. The essay asks pertinent questions about the entanglement of hegemonic racialised orders in Europe with the very racialised orders of the grounds on which Gorgobad was built.' (Publication abstract)
'The beginnings of a racialised order in Oceania, and of German involvement in such, reach back a long way. In this article, the author traces elements of this racialisation back to the years before the first formal European settlement on the Australian continent. She examines important aspects of the German journalistic reception of James Cook’s voyages to the Pacific by focusing on one particularly highly networked and very widely distributed newspaper and its reporting in the period 1768–1787. She uses this to show how the editors, and especially London-based German-speaking correspondents, consciously leveraged an Anglophilia that was typical of the Hanseatic city of Hamburg in a way that encouraged their German-speaking readers, wherever they might be, to closely identify with British exploration and even claim ownership of these events themselves. Anglophilia and the German-language reporting of the Cook voyages, therefore, supplied raw materials for an entangled sense of imperial identity.' (Publication abstract)
'The focus in this article, through a reading of the German-Australian newspaper Der Kosmopolit, is on the legacies of entangled imperial identities in the period of the nineteenth-century German Enlightenment. Attention is drawn to members of the liberal nationalist generation of 1848 who emigrated to the Australian colonies and became involved in intellectual activities there. The idea of entanglement is applied to the philosophical orientation of the German-language newspaper that this group formed, Der Kosmopolit, which was published between 1856 and 1957. Against simplistic notions that would view cosmopolitanism as the opposite of nationalism, it is argued that individuals like Gustav Droege and Carl Muecke deployed an entangled ‘cosmo-nationalism’ in ways that both advanced German nationalism and facilitated their own engagement with and investment in Australian colonial society.' (Publication abstract)
'Formerly used primarily for propagandist aims, missionary writings have, over the last decades, increasingly been analysed by secular scholars to gain new social, political, anthropological and cultural insights. Missionaries were some of the first Europeans to travel through Indigenous lands. They were often the first to settle for any length of time among Indigenous peoples, hoping to convert them to Christianity. As in various other British colonial spaces, many of the Protestant missionaries engaged in such work in Australia were German, and they wrote copiously about their work, keeping private diaries and journals as well as informing both local supporters and home committees about their activities. Yet missionary texts also circulated beyond religious circles, informing and influencing broader secular and scientific debates. This chapter examines a selection of German language texts produced by two different religious groups, the Moravians (known in German as Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine) and Lutherans, in the 1860s, at a time when both groups planned, established and then disbanded missions to the Diyari (also Dieri) people, in the interior of Australia. It will show how German-language missionary texts were also mediated into broader religious, as well as secular and scientific settings, so as to further several agendas, including the legitimisation of colonial expansion into the interior of Australia. In the process, German writers engaged with ideas about German identity, as well as drawing on British imperialist thought, and ideas of scientific advancement.' (Publication abstract)
'This essay uses the 2003 symphonic Cantata Journey to Horseshoe Bend to examine some of the different entangled memories of German missionisation in Central Australia, including those held by the settler-European librettist Gordon Kalton Williams and members of the Indigenous Ntaria community choir, among others. Rather than simply reading this as a pernicious settler-Australian appropriation of Aboriginal culture, or as a simple story of harmonious intercultural collaboration, the author seeks to open up the multiplicity of meanings – the consonances, as well as the ambiguities and the disconcerting moments of (Publication abstract)uncanniness and clash that lie beneath the surface of a musical act of memory.'
