Interdisciplinary conference
War, Genocide and Memory.
German Colonialism and National Identity
(Sheffield: 11-13 September 2006)
Convenors: Jürgen Zimmerer/Michael Perraudin
Workshop of the Arbeitskreis Militärgeschichte e.V.
in cooperation with the Department of Germanic Studies, Department of
History and Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, University of Sheffield,
the Nordic Africa Insti-tute, Uppsala, and the European Network of Genocide
Scholars (ENOGS)
For almost sixty years, since the end of World War II, the German public
had forgotten about its colonial empire. Whereas other European powers
experienced the traumatic violence of decolonisation, Germans believed that
they had nothing to do with the colonial exploitation of large parts of
Africa, Asia or South America. They were innocent - so many believed - of
the devastations brought about by European colonialism and could therefore
engage with the new postcolonial world without the dark shadow of a
colonial past. Some observers have termed this ‘colonial amnesia’.
Such suppression was severely shaken in 2004, when the centenary of the
genocide of the Her-ero and Nama peoples confronted a wide German audience
with German atrocities of a hun-dred years before. The first German
genocide, as it was called, attracted media coverage, and in August 2004
the German government officially apologised for the atrocities. After
Germany’s attempts to come to terms with its Nazi past, this step was seen
by many international observ-ers as a major break-through in global
attempts to right historic wrongs, especially those com-mitted in a
colonial context. In Germany, the official apology, far from marking
closure on a dark chapter in German history, sparked a variety of agitated
responses. Instead of acknowl-edging the act as a much-needed step in the
process of coming to terms with the colonial past, conservative circles
denounced the German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Develop-ment,
Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, who had delivered the apology, as a ‘traitor’.
Others wor-ried about claims for reparations by the Herero, and the German
tabloid ‘BILD’ asked on its front page, ‘What will be the cost of the
minister’s tears?’, deriding her carefully crafted state-ment as being the
result of female sentiment. Wieczorek-Zeul’s courageous act had obviously
touched a nerve. Whereas some felt encouraged to bring other German
colonial atrocities into the limelight, for example the Maji-Maji war in
German East Africa, the centenary of which fell in 2005, others have
attempted to rewrite Germany’s colonial past by emphasizing the ex-otic
aspects of Germany’s colonial undertaking, and by disconnecting the
imperial past from the positive strands of German history. A dubious
documentary on prime-time German televi-sion, which made repeated use of
colonial stereotypes, marked - for the time being - the ex-treme point of
this endeavour.
Nevertheless, the debate shows that Germany has finally arrived at a
postcolonial European normality, where its own historical relationship with
the world is part of a lively debate not only about the past, but also
about the future. Migration, multiculturalism and xenophobia are only some
of the topics which are substantially shaped by Germany’s memory of the
past. Co-lonialism was central to Wilhelminian discourse on national
identity, to the country’s under-standing of itself as a world power; and
now discussion about the German empire seems to be resurfacing as part of a
German discourse of self-understanding and self-reassurance in the
aftermath of Unification.
The proposed workshop will address Germany’s biased and troubled
relationship with its colo-nial past over the course of two centuries. As
postcolonial studies have shown, colonial en-gagement neither started nor
ended with formal colonial rule. Thus we invite papers dealing with all
aspects of the encounters of Germany and Germans with imagined or real
colonial em-pires, from the Enlightenment to the present day. Papers
addressing the problems from a trans-national or comparative perspective,
papers dealing with the landscapes of memory in the for-mer German
colonies, and papers offering literary and other cultural-historical
perspectives are all especially welcome. Contributions from practitioners
in any relevant discipline are encour-aged.
Possible topics include:
• Local Histories, Local Memories
• Heroic Discourses in the Imperial Centre
• Colonialism, Literature and Culture
• Uses and Abuses of History for Postcolonial Nation-Building
• Guilt, Responsibility and National Identity
• Shared History, Shared Memory
• Coming to Terms with a Colonial Past
• Colonialism before the Empire; colonialism after the end of Empire
Papers will be 20-25 minutes long, and will be presented and discussed in
English. To apply to deliver a paper at the conference, please send by
email an abstract of a few lines plus a brief c.v. simultaneously to BOTH
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Deadline for submission: March 1st 2006.
Limited funds may be available to subsidise non-salaried participants.
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