Following on from last week’s post on Dutch material, this post will present some material on Germany’s colonial history and race relations.
While Germany’s colonial period was relatively brief the legacy was nevertheless devastating. Reassessment of Germany’ colonial history has been a focus of research in Germany during the last 20 years.
As currently only relatively few German titles are available as ebooks to students and staff in Cambridge, English titles containing contributions from German scholars and translations of German titles are included in this list.
The following 2 contributed volumes provide an overview of the history of Black experience in Germany:
- Aitken, Robbie, and Rosenhaft, Eve, eds. Black Germany : the making and unmaking of a diaspora community, 1884–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013.
- Honeck, Mischa, Klimke, Martin, and Kuhlmann-Smirnov, Anne, eds. Germany and the Black Diaspora : points of contact, 1250-1914. 2013. Studies in German History ; v. 15.
Research and debates:
- Pape, Elise. “Postcolonial Debates in Germany – An Overview.” (African Sociological Review / Revue Africaine De Sociologie 21, no. 2 (2017): 2-14). Accessed June 10, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/90018694
- Lennox, Sara, ed. Remapping Black Germany : new perspectives on Afro-German history, politics, and culture. 2016.
German colonialism:
- Conrad, Sebastian. German colonialism : a short history. 2012.
- Sebastian Conrad is Professor for Global History at Leipzig University and uses a global and postcolonial approach in this concise history.
- Mühlhahn, Klaus, ed. The cultural legacy of German colonial rule. 2017.
- Perraudin, Michael & Zimmerer, Jürgen, eds. German colonialism and national identity. 2010.
- Jürgen Zimmerer, Professor for African History at Hamburg University, is one of the leading scholars on German colonial history and is author and editor of several books on German colonial history.
- Bürger, Christiane. Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte(n) : der Genozid in Namibia und die Geschichtsschreibung der DDR und BRD. 2017.
- The genocide in Namibia is a particularly dark chapter of Germany’s colonial history. This study compares the historiography of the genocide in West and East Germany.
A particular topic of debate is how to deal with colonial artefacts in museums, especially in ethnographic museums. This has recently been become a pertinent discussion in relationship to planned opening of the Humboldt-Forum in Berlin. The following 2 titles discuss various aspects of postcolonial museum work in a German context:
- Greve, Anna. Koloniales Erbe in Museen : Kritische Weißseinsforschung in der praktischen Museumsarbeit. 2019.
- Di Blasi, Johanna. Das Humboldt Lab : Museumsexperimente zwischen postkolonialer Revision und szenografischer Wende. 2019.
Christian Staufenbiel
europeancollections.wordpress.com 