Abstracts of papers: 

The Chimalpahin Conference 2008:

Colonial and Post-Colonial Remembering and Forgetfulness

Jason Weber

Department of History

University of Iowa

(Estados Unidos)

After World War II the colonial powers of Europe faced the problem of whether and how to maintain control of their overseas empires. These empires changed drastically as autonomy and ultimately independence were given or taken, and such changes affected both colonizing and colonized peoples. Even as African and Asian leaders struggled to build new nations, European nations struggled to redefine themselves. For the French, after the war in Algeria this meant a new, continental France: the hexagon. For the British it meant restructuring much of its empire into the Commonwealth. In both cases the flood of former colonial subjects into the metropole complicated this process of redefinition and further politicized the colonial past and the decolonizing present. The German experience was, of course, quite different.

Germany's colonial empire was short-lived. It began in Africa in 1884 and ended at Versailles after World War I, when Germany's colonies became League of Nations mandates and passed into the hands of Great Britain and France. Although the Third Reich rekindled the hopes of some colonialists these were extinguished once and for all by Germany's defeat in World War II. Yet Germany's colonial empire would live on in memory, even without significant numbers of former colonial subjects in the metropole or a few remaining tiny overseas territories to remind Germans of it.

In the 1950s and 1960s West German memories and misrememberings of the colonial past served two purposes. Within the Federal Republic recollections of friendship and cooperation with colonized peoples provided a welcome counterpoint to the racism of the Nazi regime and made it easier to dismiss the Nazi dictatorship as an aberration. With newly independent states, however, the Federal Republic downplayed that history; only in dealings with former colonies did West German leaders and diplomats readily admit Germany's colonial past, and even then they cast it in a positive light.

Only in the mid- to late 1960s did other, critical memories of the German colonial past begin to become widespread, and even then these were as much a product of contemporary politics as the memories they challenged. Students and Leftists pointed to the misdeeds of Germans in the colonies and sought to link colonial atrocities to those committed by the Nazis. They also painted the Federal Republic as neocolonialist and imperialist, echoing the Cold War rhetoric of the German Democratic Republic in the Federal Republic's national political discourse.

The German colonial past never commanded the attention the more recent Nazi past and continuing Cold War did. More often than not talk of the German colonial past served as a proxy for some other debate. Still, the enduring ability of that past to--however briefly--capture German imaginations time and time again despite everything suggests its importance in understanding not just German but European perceptions of themselves in relation to the rest of the world.

About Jason Weber