Nobody\u27s people: Colonial subjects, race power and the German state, 1884–1945

Although Germany\u27s colonial project lasted only 30 years, the impact of colonialism on metropolitan institutions continued long after. Germany entered overseas imperialism in 1884 with race-thinking hardly discernible in official policy or public debate. By the time Germany lost its colonies in 1919, however, race-thinking had permeated most of the political parties and had come to define a host of state health initiatives. How do we account for such a dramatic shift in such a short period of time? Studies of the sciences and medicine have begun to answer this question, but a focus on scientific inquiry cannot fully explain how race entered the political and public spheres. This dissertation examines the unintended long-term impact of colonialism on German political culture by looking at the political experiences of African colonial subjects in Germany from 1884 to 1945. When African colonial subjects raveled to the metropole, they raised questions about their legal status that became occasions for public commentary on colonialism, state power, violence, and race. Because they continued to raise the question of the nature of their belonging even after Germany lost its colonies in the First World War, their stories offer us one of the most direct ways of measuring the development of race-thinking in metropolitan state practice before 1933. This study shows that race-thinking became an operative principle in German political culture as a consequence of colonial domination. The Bismarkian state set the stage for the entrée of race-thinking into official policy by failing to define colonial subjects as anything but the pure objects of state will, as “nobody\u27s people.” Colonial administrators on the ground could therefore treat them with great violence, while colonial reformers at home were at pains to explain this violence according to German traditions. A particular “race power” complex emerged from this dynamic of atrocity, scandal and reform, which did not remain neatly in the colonies, but came to influence the programmatic ideas of radical racists when they imagined German expansion eastwards