German entanglements in transatlantic slavery: An introduction

ABSTRACT

This essay aims at bringing together research on Germany’s colonial past and imperialist endeavors with current trends in scholarship in Atlantic history and slavery studies. While scholars of German history have begun to challenge what Jürgen Zimmerer has called the “colonial amnesia of Germans,” the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery have rarely been included in discussions about national commemorative cultural debates because Germany, it is claimed, has never directly and profitably participated in the economies of slavery. For the longest time, Germany has entertained the notion that the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery involved only other European players such as England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, or Denmark, and indeed, it seems plausible that for its own history, Germany is able to claim non-participation. Yet, the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery were part of the earliest economic enterprises that embodied and inherently relied on global networks of trade that uprooted and relocated people in unprecedented numbers. Building on the pioneering work of scholars like Klaus Weber, Eve Rosenhaft, Felix Brahms, and Mischa Honeck, this essay re-charts the various routes of German participation in, profiteering from, as well as showing resistance to transatlantic slavery and its cultural, political, and intellectual reverberations. The essay thereby seeks to interrogate historical processes (or fantasies) of empire-building, colonialism, and slavery which, according to public memory, seem to have taken place in isolation from each other; yet, we claim that they should be regarded as part and parcel of a narrative that ingrained colonialism and slavery in German cultural memory and identity to a larger extent than has been illustrated and admitted so far in general discourses in contemporary Germany.

KEYWORDS:

• German colonialism
• transatlantic slavery
• African slavery
• abolition
• German cultural memory
• racism

With the emergence of “the cultural turn in memory studies” in recent decades, scholars have begun to draw academic as well as general public attention to the workings of cultural memory that has been circulated and mediated within local communities and across nations via text, image, media, embodied practices, performances, and public monuments.¹ In Germany, debates about memory cultures and their public sites have focused primarily on the Holocaust. While, for obvious reasons, the Holocaust has been the most important historical event for Germany’s national memory, recent years have also seen growing public demands to add other historical events to Germany’s national narrative and its memory culture; one specific call for a new accounting concerns Germany’s colonial past and its overseas empire that officially lasted from 1884 to 1918.² In cities like Munich, Hamburg, or Berlin, for example, citizens’ initiatives and public campaigns have begun to demand the renaming of streets which, at present, still commemorate highly problematic colonial figures like Carl Peters, Adolf Lüderitz, or Hermann Wissmann. In a similar manner, public monuments are currently either replaced or re-contextualized by adding explanatory panels to the site.³ Various groups and projects, such as afrika-hamburg.de, Arbeitskreis hamburg-postkolonial, Berlin Postkolonial e.V., AK Potsdam Postkolonial, or Decolonize Bremen have actively promoted postcolonial memorial practices by drawing attention to the legacy of their cities’ national as well as transnational colonial history. In a different scenario, but one that insists also that Germany confronts its colonial past, members of the Ovaherero and Nama peoples in Namibia have taken Germany to court for reparation payments because of the genocide committed to their ancestors by German colonial troops from 1904 to 1908. Depending on the outcome of this court case, the decision could pave the way for other reparation claims connected to crimes committed by German colonial authorities; it could also further help catalyze Germany’s changing attitude towards its colonial past and the past’s place in the nation’s cultural memory.

These different initiatives aim at opposing what German historian Jürgen Zimmerer has called the “colonial amnesia of Germans,” which stands for a still widespread ignorance about the history of German colonialism in German public memory and for a continued denial of any colonial legacy in political discourse.⁴ If one considers that Germany’s era as colonial power in a variety of African and Asian regions has been well researched during the last decades, this public and political ignorance seems even more astounding. Solid academic scholarship has documented the German Empire’s economic desires and its philosophical justifications, the role of its first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, in the so-called Scramble for Africa, and the Empire’s various colonial administrative rules and politics in Africa as well as Asia. One is able to find excellent publications by scholars who have focused on providing information in order to clarify revisionist and nostalgic public perceptions of German colonies and protectorates in Africa and the Pacific.⁵

While this research focuses primarily on Germany’s colonial past and imperialist endeavors and inquires how this colonial past has contributed to a still persistent racism in German society to which people of African descent are exposed to on a daily basis, the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery have rarely been included in discussions about national commemorative cultural debates because Germany, it is claimed, has never directly and profitably participated in the economies of slavery. For the longest time, Germany has entertained the notion that the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery involved only other European players such as England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, or Denmark, and indeed, it seems plausible that for its own history, Germany is able to claim non-participation. Yet, the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery were part of the earliest economic enterprises that embodied and inherently relied on global networks of trade that uprooted and relocated people in unprecedented numbers. The publication of David Eltis and David Richardson’s Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which is the result of decades-long international research initiatives to document the largest forced migration in world history, visualizes the extent to which the slave trade profoundly involved the entire Atlantic region.⁶

As part of this awareness of the transnational character of the economies of slavery, several researchers have also begun to look more closely into different forms of potential German involvement in New World slavery and its transatlantic trade system. So far, research on German contributions to the abolition movement still figure prominently in this specific academic field,⁷ whereas research on German economic participation in slavery is still in its early stages. Apart from individual approaches to specific aspects of German involvements with slavery, such as the pioneering work of the German historian Klaus Weber on German regional textile production, an encompassing and systematic study on the multiple forms of German entanglements with slavery remains to be published.⁸ Felix Brahm and Eve Rosenhaft’s 2016 essay collection Slavery Hinterland: Transatlantic Slavery and Continental Europe, 1680–1850 provides a first, crucial step in this direction. Brahm and Rosenhaft illustrate the necessity to expand the study of transatlantic slavery and abolition beyond what is generally outlined as the triangular trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Brahm and Rosenhaft employ the term “hinterland” to conceptualize the involvement of continental European states such as Italy, Denmark, and German-speaking countries. The hinterland although at first sight geographically detached from the enslavement and displacement of Africans, must nevertheless be considered inextricably entwined with the economies produced by the system of slavery.⁹ With the essays compiled in their collection, Brahm and Rosenhaft draw attention to slavery’s hinterlands, that is, in addition to the most obvious European profiteers and practitioners of slavery (for example, the British, the French, and the Portuguese) as well as the most prominent opponents of transatlantic slavery (the British and the French), they bring European countries on the radar of discourses of slavery and abolition that have thus far been thought of as detached, non-complicit, and thus irrelevant.¹⁰ They argue that

if these flows of people, goods, capital and indeed ideas were to be traced on a map, the resulting network would reveal itself to be something less recognizable and far more complex than the transoceanic triangle that has hitherto been an icon for the slave trade.¹¹

Re-charting these various routes of German participation in, profiteering from, as well as showing resistance to transatlantic slavery and its cultural, political, and intellectual reverberations will be the subject of this collection of essays. Our focus will be twofold: First, our collection traces the encounters of Germany with slavery in the USA, the Caribbean, and South America. The first three contributions will explore how German financiers, missionaries, and immigrant writers made profit from, morally responded to, and fictionalized their encounters with New World slavery. They will demonstrate that these various German entanglements with New World slavery deem it necessary to revise preconceived ideas that erase German involvement from the history of slavery and the Black Atlantic. Second, we aim at bringing together these German perspectives on slavery with an investigation of German colonial endeavors in Africa. We see the necessity because observing that contemporary Germany still harbors strong forms of latent racism at all levels of civic society, we suggest that this demands a closer examination of its possible origins not only in the legacy of Germany’s colonial past but also in Germany’s much earlier economic and intellectual historical involvement with transatlantic slavery. The three remaining essays in the collection will thus look at how religious practices, political rhetoric, and East German socialist writers’ fiction connected discourses of transatlantic slavery with attitudes towards colonialism in Africa in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taken together, our collection thereby seeks to interrogate historical processes (or fantasies) of empire-building, colonialism, and earlier slavery which, according to public memory, seem to have taken place in isolation from each other; yet, we claim that they should be regarded as part and parcel of a narrative that ingrained colonialism and slavery in German cultural memory and identity to a larger extent than has been illustrated and admitted so far in general discourses in contemporary Germany.

German involvements: A historical potpourri

The claim that Germany was not part of the history of New World slavery and its transatlantic trade is founded on the fact that Germany as a sovereign country did not exist during this time period; the German national union, the German Empire, was founded in 1871. In addition, if one turns to slave traders, financiers, shipping company proprietors, or overseas plantation owners, one indeed finds only a small group of people who were of German descent. While these traditional participatory factors are missing, one has to turn to other, at first sight more implicit forms of encounters that have served as major historical, economic, as well as intellectual influences on contemporary German society.

Any questions about German financial gains, for example, have to turn from a micro- to a macro-economic level: it is a well-established fact today that several manufacturing trades as well as trading companies, even if they were owned by single people or families, helped larger geographical areas to profit economically and to develop vital branches of domestic manufacturing. The above-mentioned work of Weber explores these forms of macro-economic participation which resulted in the industrial development of several manufacturing branches, such as textile processing and manufacturing, and in the economic strengthening of entire geographical regions such as Westphalia, Swabia, Saxony, and Silesia. Furthermore, products such as copper mined in the region of the Harz Mountains, guns from Thuringia, or glassware from Bohemia were part of a stable transatlantic trading market that allowed middle and lower class members to develop a purchasing power for goods from overseas markets. The manufacturing of and trade in these products might not have implied an immediate involvement in slavery’s economy, but, as Weber argues, should be seen in the larger, macro-economic context of a steady financial improvement of entire regions and their populations.¹²

If one searches for any economic entanglement of individual German entrepreneurs with slavery, one has to turn to trading companies and their participations as sales and trading powers as well as financiers. Already among the early Atlantic players, one is able to find German companies that were well known and successful during their own era such as the Welser and Fugger families, both from Augsburg, a city in the southern part of today’s Germany, and the Ehinger family from Konstanz, a southern city as well. Their members became important partly because they helped finance the Portuguese slave trade in the early 1600s, as the Fuggers did, or, held economic titles to slave plantations in today’s Venezuela, as the Welser did. The financial participation, often more in forms comparable to public holding companies, emerged again during the late seventeenth century; large sums came from the Baring brothers in the city of Bremen, for instance, who were partners in the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa; the Duke Johann Friedrich von Württemberg and Konrad von Rehlingen, a financier from Augsburg, were both shareholders in the Dutch West India Company; Johann Abraham Korten, a trader in textile goods from the city of Elberfeld, held shares from the South Sea Company.¹³ Eventually, in 1682, after the earlier Fugger and Welser companies, another German trading company entered the market: by the order of the Prussian Duke Friedrich Wilhelm, the Brandenburgisch-Afrikanische Compagnie (Brandenburg African Company) was founded first and foremost for the purpose of participating in the transatlantic slave trade.¹⁴ Otto Friedrich von der Groeben, a German aristocrat, became the duke’s representative in West Africa; because of his efforts, in 1682 and 1683, the company was able to establish two trading posts in West Africa, Fort Groß-Friedrichsburg and Fort Dorothea (which became Dutch in 1690), and a base on the Danish West Indian island of St. Thomas. It is estimated that from 1682 until 1717, the Compagnie brought about 19,000 captured Africans to the Caribbean.¹⁵ When Germans began to dream of their own colonial empire at the end of the nineteenth century, Emperor Wilhelm II rediscovered the Prussian Duke Friedrich Wilhelm I as a worthy colonial forefather in Africa. What is remarkable here is that Wilhelm II – in an earlier instance of what Zimmerer later calls “colonial amnesia” – plays down the duke’s participation in the slave trade because the dominant rhetoric of the time in regard to any colonial expansion in Africa emphasized Germany’s humanitarian mission with its fight against the inner-African slave trade.¹⁶ Several years later, in 1896, in the context of a colonial exhibition in Berlin, a bank of the river Spree in Berlin was named after the company’s most involved representative, Otto von der Groeben. It took until 2011 for a public initiative to fight for the renaming of the area and to replace the colonial name with that of May Ayim, an Afro-German writer and activist. Interestingly, the public debate about the act of renaming the riverbank was sparked off because several politicians and historians had refused to consider von der Groeben a persona that figured prominently in the slave trade.¹⁷ The legacy of von der Groeben in public memory and the refusal to establish a direct link between him, German entrepreneurship, and the slave trade serves as just one example of a still missing larger discourse on German entanglements with the transatlantic slave trade and resulting New World slavery.

The majority of German participation in slavery, however, happened via individual traders. In her research on traders in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London, historian Margrit Schulte Beerbühl found that about five hundred of them were of German descent. According to Schulte Beerbühl, the majority of these traders were not directly involved in the actual trafficking of Africans, but more in the business of trading goods that were part or product of the transatlantic slave plantation economy.¹⁸ Several German entrepreneurs became financially involved only after their relocation to London; two trading families from Hamburg, the Rückers, one of the city’s leading senator families, and the Schröders, founders of the successful bank Henry Schröder & Co. in London, can serve as examples here. Probably the financially most successful German who built his family’s wealth via his multiple entanglements in the slave trade as well as in the plantation economy was Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann (1724–1782). Born into a financially rather humble trading family in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, he rose to such financial success during his appointment as the financial counselor to the Danish monarch Frederick V that he was considered at that time to be one of the richest people in Europe. After moving to Hamburg, he began his trading by shipping German manufactured goods such as cotton, weapons, and alcohol to West Africa where he bought captured Africans destined for the slave market in the Americas; his returning ships brought goods produced by slave labor such as sugar and tobacco to Europe. In addition, he himself owned large plantations with more than a thousand slaves in the Danish West Indies. Remarkably, in 2006, the city of Hamburg included him in a group of former citizens who had brought wealth and fame to the city by dedicating busts in one of the city’s central places to them, thus testifying once more not only to a public amnesia with regard to Germany’s colonial past but also to Germany’s entanglements with slavery. Similar to the civic engagement that led to a revision of the memorialization of von der Groeben in Berlin, the Schimmelmann bust had to be removed due to fierce public protest.¹⁹

In addition to these economic and material entanglements throughout several centuries, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw another encounter: the German intellectual elite, writers, and a reading public were very much influenced by travelers, among them scholars, missionaries, adventurers, sailors, doctors, and business men, who offered narratives of these faraway places overseas. Their reports about slavery and black people in the Americas sparked a widespread interest among Germans, ranging from a general public, who enjoyed rather sensationalist accounts of the New World, to German intellectuals, who publicly debated the economic and moral consequences of the slave trade and slavery. One representative of a German progressive thinkers’ critical assessment of slavery was Matthias Christian Sprengel (1746–1805), a professor of history at Göttingen and Halle, who in 1779 chose the transatlantic slave trade and the involvement of the British colonies in America in this trade as the topic of his inaugural lecture at the university in Halle. He became a fierce opponent of slavery throughout his entire career.²⁰

The probably best-known traveler who brought factual details and judgmental evaluations about slavery to the general German public was the Prussian natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). His extensive travels throughout the Americas, where he observed slavery first hand, turned him into an outspoken opponent of the institution; the brutality on Cuban slave plantations he had observed during his visits to the island in 1800 and 1804 led him to declare that slavery is “possibly the greatest evil ever to have afflicted humanity” in his book Essai politique sur l’isle de Cuba in 1826.²¹ Humboldt’s clear antislavery stance and his meticulous thoughts on the economic and political necessity to abolish slavery resulted not only in a ban of the Spanish translation of this publication in colonial Cuba but – perhaps a less known fact in English-speaking countries – also turned him into a cause célèbre for American abolitionists when he criticized, for example, Massachusetts’ senator Daniel Webster’s support for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.²² Humboldt’s popularity among opponents of slavery in the USA is attested to by numerous reports about him in antislavery newspapers.²³ This popularity stems first and foremost from his protest against an 1856 translation of his essay on Cuba by John Sidney Trasher, a pro-slavery advocate and promoter of the annexation of Cuba. Despite the explicit critique of slavery inherent in the work, Trasher, in what he presented as merely an act of translation, omitted the chapter which contained most of Humboldt’s arguments against the slave economy from the Essay on the Island of Cuba and subsequently used Humboldt’s work as evidence for his pro-slavery agenda.²⁴

However, travel narratives such as Humboldt’s that openly and forcefully condemned the institution of slavery were seldom. The German reading public was rather presented with narratives like the one by Baron Albert von Sack (1757–1829). In his function as a chamberlain to the Prussian king, von Sack traveled to Suriname and North America from 1805 to 1807. As a scientist and explorer, his mission was to report not only about the flora and fauna of Suriname, but also about local customs and public life. In his narrative, he offers very detailed impressions of the slaves’ daily living conditions, which he mixes with his own personal thoughts about the institution of slavery. Addressing his own initial doubts about the institution, he is able to put any misgivings to rest by employing the argument of the good vs. the bad master. He writes:

I confess, that the result of my observations has greatly diminished the prejudice which I brought with me from Europe, in respect to the situation of the negroes in the colonies. It must, indeed, be acknowledged, that the fate of the negro depends entirely on the temper and disposition of the master; for, while I have found the negroes happy on some plantations, I have at times, in my rural walks, seen, and still heard more of, the severe correction of others.²⁵

Utilizing the “bad vs. good master”-rhetoric, he sprinkles his text with plenty of examples of his encounters with the enslaved who allegedly assure him that they are better off in slavery as long as they have a good master; one reads, for instance,

Mastera, when we have good master, we find ourselves more happy that those free negroes are, and when we see one of them, we make him hear this, for they live upon nothing but mackarel, whilst we other negroes have plenty of different provisions on the plantations.²⁶

Von Sack’s account of slavery in Suriname and his repeated emphasis on the need for the “good master” would be taken up again by the German Empire’s colonial rhetoric at the end of the nineteenth century. These so-called first-hand impressions of slavery which did not condemn the institution of slavery as a moral wrong, but merely criticized “bad masters” helped lay the ideological groundwork for German colonial actions against people in Africa. The exploitation of the colonized was camouflaged with the discourse of offering a morally better institution: while the German colonial system still required a master, albeit a good one, because Africans would benefit or even prefer such a system, it also could bring civilization to the supposedly uncivilized Africans. As historian Andrew Zimmerman points out, it was precisely at the moment when Germans began to create colonial state institutions and large-scale colonial trade businesses in Africa towards the end of the nineteenth century that they also:

began to reconceptualize their colonial subjects as “Negroes” (Neger), rather than Naturvölker or natives (Eingeborene). Central to this new racial concept was the project, as many colonial thinkers put it, of “educating the Negro to work” (Erziehung des Negers zur Arbeit). […] The supposed naturalness of Africans and other colonized societies gave way to a supposed capacity for obedience and agricultural labor that could be realized only through authoritarian, but ostensibly benevolent white rule.²⁷

The ascribed naturalness of enslaved and colonized peoples was used as a trope which justified their exploitation with the argument that manual labor and rigid governance are forms of education and thus civilization.

Von Sack’s narrative also serves as an important historical document for another ideological construct. Many of the writings that seemingly pretended to be taken aback by the institution of slavery portrayed people of African descent, without any inhibitions, in the most racist ways. By employing all forms of racial stereotypes, travel narratives such as von Sack’s nurtured already prevalent notions of white European superiority with statements like “for even the free negroes in the colony [Suriname] possess but little humanity”²⁸ or “our method of reasoning respecting the negroes is often mistaken.”²⁹ Often, he describes the enslaved Africans as easily satisfiable with small offers of entertainment; one reads, for example:

[…] a good and sensible master will never fail to allow these dances to his negroes, as they are very fond of the diversion, and it gives them fresh life and activity to go cheerfully to work again; at those plantations which I have visited, the negroes receive each of them a glass of rum, on their return in the evening from their work.³⁰

Presentations like this testify to the fact that widespread German intellectual interest in slavery might have been concerned with the institution, but otherwise did not see any contradiction in simultaneously harboring racist attitudes towards black people that perceived them admittedly as fellow human beings, but nevertheless as inferior, helpless, childlike, and uncultured. These so-called first-hand impressions contributed to a strengthening of philosophical and pseudo-scientific reasoning regarding notions of racial superiority; German philosophers and natural scientists like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), or Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) were able to build their racist theories on such historical “testimonial” material.³¹

Racist stereotypes and notions of white superiority were also disseminated by several popular German writers who brought the excitement of traveling to faraway places via fiction to the reading public at home. Balduin Möllhausen (1825–1905) and Friedrich Gerstäcker (1816–1872), to name just two prominent examples, were widely read, well-known authors. Möllhausen and Gerstäcker collected their material for their much-loved, self-styled ethnographic adventure novels during their own extensive travels to North America. While the purpose of their texts was the playful invitation to travel, at least fictitiously, to these places in the New World, their writings either employed already well-established white supremacist attitudes or nurtured new notions of superiority. In his travel diary, Möllhausen, for example, while on a Mississippi steamboat, writes enthusiastically about the landscape along the riverbanks and the wonderful economic opportunities this part of America would offer to any enthusiastic entrepreneur; during his “economic bliss” ramblings, he does not mention slavery at all. Yet, he is very well aware of the existence of the institution because he also marvels about the wonderful dinner atmosphere on the steamboat which, according to him, is even further enriched by accompanying music of enslaved black men who do their job with “grinning joy.”³² With small, interspersed remarks such as these, writers could claim that they had not intended any stereotyping of black people, nevertheless depictions like these inevitably contributed to the image of the childlike, always happy, even in unfree circumstances, black person as long as he or she could play some music.

Even writers such as Mathilde Anneke (1817–1884), who became ardent critics of slavery when they emigrated to the USA, were not devoid of employing racial stereotypes. In her 1866 novella Uhland in Texas, for instance, she depicts German immigrants, due to their innate humanism, as model citizens of the New World, who inevitably also attack slavery as an inhuman institution and moral wrong. Although German American antislavery authors like Anneke at times come up with unconventional inclusions such as a Black Columbia or interracial marriage, her black characters, however, do not feature as prominently as her German immigrants, but function rather as supporting cast for the German lead characters. Her works, ultimately, serve to celebrate German moral, cultural, and intellectual superiority. Unfortunately, many of the assumptions and racial constructs delivered in these texts are still widely accepted in contemporary Germans’ attitudes towards people of African descent.³³

Our argument for this collection is that to begin charting the history of German colonialism, one cannot neglect the important precursors to this discourse, namely Germany’s early economic entanglement in slavery in the Americas and the genealogies of pre-colonial German intellectuals’ participation in the creation and dissemination of racial stereotypes. It is this entanglement of slavery and colonialism that needs to be examined more thoroughly in German (colonial) history. For this entanglement, utilized by the German Empire for the justification of its entry into its own colonial era, a variety of German travelers played a crucial part; as so-called explorers, they traveled to different parts of Africa to test economic possibilities for Germany. In their reports, one is able to repeatedly detect that American slavery is used as an ethical reference point for an ideological justification for the German entry into colonialism; America with its unfree labor system is a “bad master” whereas Germany would never introduce such a labor arrangement in their colonies, thus being the “good master.”³⁴ One of these travelers, Carl Peters (1856–1918), first a traveler and then himself a colonial landowner, became one of the prime movers for the ideological and economic foundation for the German Empire’s entry into East Africa as colonial power. Already in one of his early reports, the myth of the “good German master” is utilized when he writes that “the difficulty was to replace slavery with a contract between employer and employee that was in accordance with our European ethical sense of right and wrong.” [“lag die Schwierigkeit darin, an die Stelle der Sklaverei das unserem europäischen sittlichen Rechtsbewußtsein entsprechende Kontrakts-Verhältnis zwischen Arbeitgeber und Arbeiter treten zu lassen.”]³⁵ Yet, while he propagates the self-perception of the ethical “good” German, he also outlines the capitalist system of colonial exploitation:

The cheapest results were achieved by Mr. Hermes from Petershöhe in Useguha, who temporarily managed to drop wages to 20–25 cents. The secret solution for the labor question according to the sense of the contract lies in the rise of necessities of the black population […] Since the black person gets nothing at this market without cash, he has to enter a wage contract. […] If we can retain the workforce with cheap conditions, we can assume – considering the general fertility of this area – that the same thing would be feasible and able to compete on the global market.

[Die günstigsten Resultate erzielte wohl Herr Hermes auf Petershöhe in Useguha, welcher die Lohnsätze zeitweilig bis auf 20–25 Pf. herabzudrücken vermochte. Das Geheimnis für die Lösung der Arbeiterfrage im Sinne des Kontraktverhältnisses liegt im Anwachsen der Bedürfnisse der schwarzen Bevölkerung […] Die Begehrlichkeit der Schwarzen richtet sich vornehmlich auf Toilette = Gegenstände und Geräthschaften [sic] verschiedener Art […] Da der Schwarze ohne Baarzahlung [sic] auf diesem Markt nichts erhält, so bequemt er sich eben dazu, in ein Lohnverhältnis zur Gesellschaft zu treten. […] Wenn wir die Arbeitskräfte zu so billigen Preisen erhalten können, so läßt sich bei der allgemeinen Fruchtbarkeit des Gebiets berechnen, daß dasselbe auf dem Weltmarkt konkurrenzfähig ist.]³⁶

Peters’ suggestions to the imperial court in Berlin remind us of Zimmerman’s thesis which claims that

[a]s German interaction with its colonial empire moved from the distance of trade to the close contact of colonial state formation and the capitalist organization of labor, German authorities borrowed ideologies developed by older racially segregated states and economies, especially the United States.³⁷

What once more comes to the fore here and what shall be further explored in this collection is how inextricably entwined discourses of slavery and colonialism have been in German economic, political, and intellectual history.

Structure of contributions to this collection

The essays in this collection aim at tracing intellectual, political, and literary entanglements of Germany with slave economies in the transatlantic world. The first three essays examine the economic, religious, and cultural points of contact German traders, missionaries, and immigrants had with New World slavery in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Taken together, the essays refute the still prevalent notion that Germans had little or nothing to do with the trade of captured Africans, that Germans had so few points of contact with the institution of slavery that they could not have had any substantial knowledge of the undertakings overseas, and that Germans did little to help end both the slave trade and the institution of slavery.

Julia Roth’s essay on the two mercantile Augsburg families, the Welser and the Fugger, who were influential financiers during the Holy Roman Empire, examines how deeply involved these two trading families and their businesses were in the Spanish conquest of the New World. The financial endeavors of the Welser and Fugger, Roth shows, were not only pivotally entangled with the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the subjugation and enslavement of Amerindians, and the flourishing of the transatlantic slave trade, but they also became much-admired founding figures for German colonial fantasies at the end of the nineteenth century and during the Nazi regime. While the Welser and Fugger are still idealized as exemplary global business players, the structures of conquest, exploitation, and enslavement that enabled their financial success is to the greatest extent still omitted in German public memory today.

Heike Raphael-Hernandez addresses another facet of German entanglements with New World slavery. In her essay, she retrieves the complex and at times contradictory attitudes of Moravian missionaries, a Protestant group from Saxony, towards enslaved Africans. For her investigation, she singles out the Moravian missionary endeavors in the early eighteenth-century Danish West Indies and Dutch Suriname. She claims that, in their mission-related contacts during this very short, specific period, both groups, the enslaved Africans and the German missionaries who, at that time, mostly came from the lowest classes of their home regions, would receive glimpses of secular possibilities for future societies which eventually would help bring changes to their own specific secular settings. She demonstrates this with three aspects: the missionaries’ approach to literacy for the enslaved, their encouragement of the enslaved to implement verbal and even legal protest, and, probably the most empowering tool, their invalidation of white people’s assumed God-given superiority in the eyes of black people. The nexus of these three aspects, very likely contributed to each group’s vision of a society-to-come, which, in turn, must have led more to an ideological insistence on the human right to freedom with all its different implications than has been noted in scholarship thus far.

While Roth and Raphael-Hernandez focus on German involvements with slavery in the Caribbean and South America, Pia Wiegmink turns to North America. In her essay, she analyzes antislavery fiction by two nineteenth-century German immigrant women writers, Therese Albertine Louise von Jakob Robinson’s novel The Exiles (1852) and Matthilde Franziska Anneke’s post-bellum novella Uhland in Texas (1866). Wiegmink discusses how the intersecting discourses of antislavery, Americanization, and womanhood are negotiated in nineteenth-century German-American women’s fiction. She illustrates how these two writers expanded the repertoire of US American antislavery literature by strategically using the immigrant’s insider-outsider perspective to provide an ethnically distinct, yet effective critique of slavery for a North American audience.

These three essays on New World slavery are complemented by two essays that turn to East Africa. The essays by Jörg Haustein and Katharina Stornig are contributions to a field that has been little studied to date.³⁸ Both essays draw attention to the ways in which antislavery politics and activism in Europe became inextricably entwined with German colonial endeavors in East Africa.

Jörg Haustein examines the antislavery rhetoric with which Germans justified the occupation of Tanganyika in 1889. In his analysis, Haustein illustrates the highly strategic employment of this rhetoric by German colonizers and explores how it was built on the complex and at times contradictory relationship of German colonization with slavery and Islam. With regard to Tanganyika, Haustein’s essay demonstrates how the issue of slavery became part and parcel of strategic concerns that comprised government politics, missionary work, and economic decision-making. While German colonizers at first presented slavery as a “Muslim” institution and emphasized Germany’s (Christian) civilizing mission, once they established their rule in the colony, political affiliations changed and antislavery arguments became enmeshed in a discussion of labor shortage.

Katharina Stornig adds another facet to the relation of Germans with slavery and colonial efforts; in her essay she examines transnational Catholic associations and their confession-based activism in German-speaking Europe in the late nineteenth century. Stornig shows that these associations, as part of a transnational network of antislavery benevolent and missionary work which operated within and between Catholic Europe and parts of Africa, drew on a variety of forms of gendered antislavery organizations as well as on rhetoric that had already been proven successful in North America’s abolitionist movement. Her essay brings to the fore how the idea of the African child slave that had to be rescued by Catholics in Germany became a central reference point in Catholic benevolent work; Stornig shows how these particular practices of Catholic antislavery work not only became part of everyday life activities of German Catholics, but also decisively contributed in the dissemination of general representations of Africans, such as the innocent child that depends on Christian guidance.

The last essay in this collection turns to post-World War II Germany and asks some much-needed questions about East Germany’s socialist self-perception of owning a tabula rasa in regard to any prior, historical German colonial endeavors or white supremacist attitudes. With her analysis of one of East German author Anna Seghers’ Caribbean novellas, The Reintroduction of Slavery in Guadeloupe (Wiedereinführung der Sklaverei in Guadeloupe, 1949), Priscilla Layne examines whether Seghers succeeds in presenting a postcolonial narrative that envisions collective cross-racial revolutionary action. To support her endeavor, Layne adopts an intersectional approach and presents a nuanced reading of the affiliations of race, class, gender, and nationality in Seghers’ novella. Layne’s assessment shows that ultimately, and despite Seghers’ attempts to present a socialist vision of solidarity, the novella is not able to cut across the racial and gendered alliances the text wants to overcome and instead remains trapped in the legacy of European colonialist thinking.

The six essays in this collection re-chart the diversity of German contact zones and entanglements with slavery in the Americas and its subsequent colonial legacy in Africa. They examine a broad variety of practices that connected German entrepreneurs, missionaries, politicians, aid organizations, and writers with the trade in captured Africans, the plantation economies of the Caribbean, the peculiar institution in the USA, and German colonial politics in Africa. Furthermore, the essays examine not only how those historical players involved in these entanglements reflected upon their own, respective societies, but also how contemporary Germany has remembered and continues to remember these German participants. The research presented in these essays provides evidence of how these past entanglements still profoundly shape contemporary German cultural memory and its hesitant willingness towards any racial discourse. It is our hope that with this collection, a discourse that has already been started will continue to thrive in the academic as well as in the public arena.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our deep-felt thanks to our contributors as well as to our reviewers for their superb work, their cooperation, and their endurance in putting together this collection. Furthermore, we owe many thanks to the editors of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents for their support during the completion of this collection; especially Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and David Lambert were a great team to work with throughout the entire process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Heike Raphael-Hernandez is Associate Professor in American Studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany. In 2009, she was a Visiting Professor in the African Diaspora Studies Department at UC Berkeley where she taught courses on Black Europe. She is the editor of Blackening Europe: The African American Presence (Routledge, 2004), AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (co-edited with Shannon Steen, NYU Press, 2006), and Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture (co-edited with Leigh Raiford, U of Washington Press, 2017). She is author of The Utopian Aesthetics of Three African American Women (Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Julie Dash): The Principle of Hope (Edwin Mellen Press, 2008) and Fear, Desire, and the Stranger Next Door: Global South Immigration in American Film (U of Washington Press, forthcoming). Together with Cheryl Finley and Leigh Raiford, she was awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Collaborative Research Fellowship for 2015–2017 for their joint research project “Visualizing Travel, Gendering the African Diaspora.”

Pia Wiegmink is Assistant Professor in American Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany. Together with Birgit M. Bauridl, she heads an international research network on “Cultural Performance in Transnational American Studies,” which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). She received her doctorate from the University of Siegen (2010) and has been visiting scholar at Georgetown University (2012) and visiting professor at York University, Toronto (2017). She is author of two monographs, Theatralität und Öffentlicher Raum [Theatricality and Public Space] (Tectum, 2005), and Protest EnACTed (Winter Verlag, 2011), and one co-edited volume, Approaching Transnational America in Performance (Lang, 2016). In her current research, she examines the interdependencies between abolitionist narratives, transnationalism, and conceptions of personhood in nineteenth-century US America.

Notes

1 Tamm, “Semiotic Theory of Cultural Memory,” 127.

2 During its duration from 1884 to 1918, the German Empire’s overseas colonies consisted of German East Africa (Tanganyika, Ruanda-Urundi, Wituland), German South-West Africa (present-day Namibia), German West Africa (Cameroon, Togoland), several southern Pacific islands (Solomon Islands, Marshall Islands, Caroline Islands), German New Guinea, Micronesia, and German Samoa.

3 Similar initiatives have been taken place in other European countries such as the Netherlands and Great Britain; see, for example, Kardux, “Monuments”; Rice and Kardux, The Slave Trade’s Dissonant Heritage.

4 Zimmerer, “Kolonialismus und kollektive Identität,” 9.

5 See, for example, Brian, “Beasts Within and Beasts Without”; Conrad, Globalization and the Nation in Imperial Germany; Geulen, “World Order and Racial Struggles”; Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten; Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt; Sobich, Schwarze Bestien, Rote Gefahr; Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting; Zimmerer, ed., Kein Platz an der Sonne; Zimmerman, “Race and World Politics”; and Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany. A very recent endeavor to revise public perceptions about German colonialism was the exhibition German Colonialism: Fragments Past and Present which opened in 2016 at the German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum) in Berlin and was accompanied by a comprehensive exhibition catalogue. See Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum, German Colonialism.

6 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas.

7 See, for example, Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists; Diedrich, “From American Slaves to Hessian Subjects”; Jones, “‘On the Brain of the Negro’”; Levine, “‘Against All Slavery’”; Paul, “German Reception of African American Writers”; Paul, “Cultural Mobility Between Boston and Berlin.” Collections such as McBride, Hopkins, and Blackshire-Belay, eds., Crosscurrents and Honeck, Klimke, and Kuhlmann, eds., Germany and the Black Diaspora can be seen as vanguard collections because their essays address encounters of Germans with African Americans or Africans in a variety of political and cultural settings throughout several centuries.

8 See, for instance, Weber, “Deutschland,” 37–67.

9 Brahm and Rosenhaft, “Introduction,” 6.

10 In their compelling research, some of the contributors to Slavery Hinterlands explicitly focus on the multifaceted entanglements of German society with the system of slavery; Anka Steffen and Klaus Weber bring evidence of these entanglements via their research in the Prussian textile industry; Rebekka von Mallinckrodt inquires the mutual impact of the system of slavery and other forms of forced labor, such as serfdom; and Daniel Hopkins’ essay shows how the work of German scientists, in particular that of the botanist Julius Philip Benjamin von Rohr (1737–1793), was inextricably connected to the economic matrix of slavery that encompassed not only the cotton and sugar plantations in the New World but also conducted agricultural research that aimed at transplanting cotton production to Africa. See Steffen and Weber, “Spinning and Weaving”; Mallinckrodt, “No Slaves in Prussia?”; and Hopkins, “Julius von Rohr.”

11 Brahm and Rosenhaft, “Introduction,” 13.

12 Weber, “Deutschland,” 54.

13 For more information, see Weber, “Deutschland,” 37–67.

14 See Koslofsky and Zaug, “Ship’s Surgeon,” 28; Kopp, “Mission Moriaen,” 2.

15 For more information, see van der Heyden, Rote Adler. See also Kopp, “Mission Moriaen,” 2–7. We would like to thank Dorothea Fischer-Hornung who alerted us to the existence of Fort Dorothea in Ghana and shared relevant information about its history with us; see the entries for Fort Groß-Friedrichsburg and Fort Dorothea on the website of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, “Forts and Castles.”

16 Kopp, “Mission Moriaen,” 7.

17 Ervedoza, “May-Ayim-Ufer,” 432–437.

18 See Schulte Beerbühl, Deutsche Kaufleute in London.

19 Krieger, “Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann,” 319. Although the controversy over the bust is an indicator of a growing public awareness about Germany’s past entanglements with slavery, historian Martin Krieger rightly observes that while the legacy of Schimmelmann and in particular his profits from his plantations in the Caribbean have been critically researched and made public in Denmark in the latter half of the twentieth century, “we can only wish that projects like those [in Denmark] will function as inspiring models for Germany.” The German original reads: “es bleibt zu wünschen, dass derartige Projekte auch in Deutschland eine Vorbildfunktion entfalten” (our translation). Ibid., 321.

20 Dippel, Germany and the American Revolution, 52. See also Ratzel, “Sprengel, Matthias Christian,” 299–300.

21 Humboldt, Political Essay, 144.

22 Walls, The Passage to Cosmos, 207.

23 For example, the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the official mouthpiece of the American Antislavery Society, paid tribute to the German naturalist and explorer by reprinting his writings in two issues in 1858 and 1859. For further information, see Foner, Humboldt on Slavery, 10, 26. His popularity among abolitionists is also attested by memorabilia like wallet-size cards which were given to Union soldiers during the Civil War. The Boston Public Library holds one of these wallet-sized cards. As historian Laura Dassow Walls explains, the card consists of a reprint of a letter Humboldt had written to a New Yorker in which he expressed his adoration for the city of New York and his despise for Daniel Webster. The card was given away as a token of support for wounded soldiers. See Walls, The Passage to Cosmos, 198.

24 Remarkably, it was not even a decade ago and due to the meticulous research by historian Vera Kutzinski that translations of Humboldt’s Essay into English, Spanish, and German were examined more thoroughly. See Kutzinski, “Translations of Cuba.” In 2010, a more accurate translation of Humboldt’s original essay became available in English. As historians Vera Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette, who provided the translation, observe:

It is of little surprise, then, and highly ironic given Humboldt’s recorded feelings and writings on the subject [slavery], that postcolonial critics from the English-speaking world have targeted Humboldt as an apologist for European colonialism and even for slavery in the Americas. See Kutzinski and Ette, “Inventories and Inventions,” xxxiii.

Incidents like this demonstrate the need to re-examine the material archives and to carefully scrutinize the scholarly discourse about German entanglements with slavery.

25 Sack, Narrative, 109.

26 Ibid., 114.

27 Zimmerman, “Race and World Politics,” 364.

28 Sack, Narrative, 105.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 109.

31 For further information, see Eigen and Larrimore, The German Invention of Race.

32 Möllhausen, Tagebuch, 1.

33 The following, very recent example from the city of Heidelberg, Germany, can serve as perfect example for the claim that widespread latent racism toward people of African descent is still very much part of contemporary German civil society. Since the summer of 2015, Germany has become host country to a larger number of refugees than ever before in its history. While the majority of refugees are not from sub-Saharan African countries, but from Middle Eastern countries such as Iran and Syria, complaints against refugees often utilize the stereotypes of black people. Because of its world-famous university and its large body of international researchers, students, and faculty, Heidelberg loves to present itself as a liberal, racist-free, welcoming, inclusive place. As late as 13 May 2017, the daily newspaper that is still widely read, wrote about local residents who do not feel safe anymore because of the refugees in their neighborhood, citing one resident, Ernst B., who stated that many of the refugees would drink and yell and in general completely misbehave. The explanation could be, so Ernst B., that people from Africa simply display different social behavior in public places. In subsequent letters to the editor, many readers were outraged about such a negative statement about refugees. In their rescue mission of the refugees’ and Heidelberg’s reputation, not one person addressed the racial scapegoating of people of African descent. See Hörnle, “Busbahnhof,” 3.

34 For further information on German self-perception of being the “good” colonialists, especially shortly before the outbreak of World War I, see Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten.

35 Peters, Die deutsch-ostafrikanische Kolonie, 39. Our translation.

36 Ibid., 40, 44. Our translation.

37 Zimmerman, “Race and World Politics,” 363.

38 Brahm and Rosenhaft make this compelling point that so far scholarship has paid little attention to the fact that towards the end of the nineteenth century “a phenomenal burst of anti-slavery sentiment and engagement can be observed in several continental European countries […] and it became closely linked to European colonial politics.” Brahm and Rosenhaft, “Introduction,” 20–21.