Titel
German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945.


Autor(en)
Guettel, Jens-Uwe
Erschienen
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292 S.
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90 $
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von
Edward Westermann, History Department, Texas A&M University San Antonio

In the shadow of the Holocaust and among the hecatombs created by World War II, the philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno questioned the premise of the Enlightenment paradigm and identified fascism as a byproduct and not an aberration of liberalism. In a similar sense, the later emergence of post-colonial theory resulted in another reappraisal and critique of the political, social and cultural beliefs and ideas of the Western liberal tradition as seen in the effects of colonialism and imperialism. Edward Said and others explored not only the ways in which colonialism created the colonized subject in the first place, but perhaps more importantly how colonial policies created a bifurcated view of the East and the West, the “Orient” and the Occident. In a sense, Jens-Uwe Guettel’s German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States, 1776–1945 engages elements in both traditions by employing the framework of intellectual history to examine “America’s role within German expansionism from its intellectual origins in the late eighteenth century to its murderous and bitter end in 1945” (p. 3).

Guettel’s analysis of the longue durée of US-German relations reveals the ways by which the United States and the concept of “American exceptionalism” became both a model for framing Imperial Germany’s, and, a foil, for the Third Reich’s views and policies on the issues of race and space. In the case of the former, Guettel argues that the American process of westward expansion served as model by which Wilhelmine liberals framed German colonial expansion. Similarly, he argues that proponents of German nationalism and colonial expansion embraced the precepts and the example of Jim Crow as they conceptualized and formulated racial policies in Germany’s colonies. In Guettel’s view, German nationalism and liberal dreams of global expansion were both “transatlantic and America-focused” and had their roots in the late eighteenth century (p. 12). With respect to the Third Reich, however, it is rupture and not continuity that distinguishes Nazi policies of race and space from the earlier German liberal tradition. Indeed, Guettel argues that Hitler’s “colonial fantasies” of a vast Eastern European empire “had hardly anything in common with the sentiments that underpinned the tenets of liberal colonialism in early twentieth-century Germany” (p. 208). Likewise, Nazi ideologues rejected Jim Crow as both flawed and incomplete manifestations of “America’s rampant liberalism and its democratic constitution” and reflective of “a liberalist mishmash-of-humanity ideology” (p. 204). For Nazi racial theorists the absence of specific anti-Semitic measures further excluded the United States as a model for the creation of the “racial state.”

As the title implies, the essence of Guettel’s work centers on his examination of the ways by which German colonialism and imperialism became “intertwined with German liberalism in general and with imperial liberalism in particular” (p. 39). With his use of “imperial liberalism,” a concept that embraces racist, nationalist, and expansionist beliefs, Guettel crosses the trajectory of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s earlier work. In fact, he argues that racism and imperialism were constitutive elements of US (and British) liberalism from the very beginning and as such became touchstones for America’s most ardent admirers, German liberals, and key tenets within German liberalism in the late 1800s. In Guettel’s view, “Exclusionary definitions of ethnicity or expansionist tendencies did not suddenly appear among liberals at some point in the late nineteenth century. Instead, these sentiments had been an integral part of this ideology since its inception - and not only in Germany” (p. 33). This statement reveals a key facet of his argument since the book is both an analysis of German perceptions of the United States, but equally a critique of liberalism writ large and by extension the role of the US as an imperial power in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century.

One of the key contentions in this argument involves a continuing assault on the concept of German exceptionalism and the once paradigmatic and much disputed Sonderweg. Guettel “dissects and contests” not only the concept of German exceptionalism, but contends that “pro-colonialist sentiments in nineteenth-century Germany grew as much from transatlantic exchanges on expansionism and race as from domestic and national contexts” (p. 3). To support this contention, he examines the writings and speeches of German “liberals” including Bernhard Denburg, Max Weber, Friedrich Ratzel, Wilhelm Solf, Friedrich Naumann, and Carl Peters. In the case of the last, he goes to great lengths to legitimize the ultranationalist Peter’s “imperial liberal” credentials. With respect to these individuals, Guettel does an admirable job of marshalling evidence from their writings and speeches to support his argument. However, a critical lacuna in this work involves his failure to sufficiently evaluate the validity of their views and the accuracy of their knowledge of the process of westward expansion and the US legal system in general.

Guettel chooses to begin his work with a quotation from Dernburg describing the colonization of the US as involving “the complete extermination of its native peoples” (p. 1). To be sure, acts of mass atrocity and mass killing accompanied westward expansion as the massacres of Sand Creek and Wounded Knee demonstrate, but Dernburg’s comment coming in 1907 was not only historically inaccurate, but it was made at a time when Native American populations were in fact experiencing a process of growth and recovery that would continue into the twentieth-century. 1 Likewise, as German liberals posited the extinction of the Native American tribes, they seem to have completely ignored the efforts of Eastern Reform groups and the role of the US government in attempting to prevent this result especially after 1870. This ultimately leads to the critical question of whether Guettel’s cohort accurately perceived the experience of American expansion or simply chose to interpret it through a lens that supported their own “colonial fantasies.” 2 Similarly, Guettel, like the subjects of his study, fails to address in detail the empirical process of westward expansion in which the tribes were not only objects, but agents who choose both resistance and accommodation. For example, one need only cite the experience of the “Comanche Empire” and the Comanche control over much of the southern Plains until the 1870s.3

If the American West was indeed a contested space, then so was the issue of race and racial measures in the US. In this case, Guettel notes that German liberals, including the ubiquitous Dernburg, adopted the post-Reconstruction American South as the model for German policies on a variety of issues involving racial segregation and miscegenation. Guettel convincingly demonstrates how German colonial administrators and settlers “likened their cause to that of the American Confederacy” and used the Jim Crow South as both: a model and a justification for their own racial policies and the “genocidal campaign against the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa” (p. 141). He offers numerous examples of the ways in which advocates of German colonialism, including most prominently Wilhelm Solf, investigated and attempted to profit from the “American double standard of federal racial equality provisions that tolerated local race codes” (p. 155). While it is clear that Solf and other German liberal observers correctly identified the contradiction between the legal rights guaranteed to persons of color and their actual ability to enjoy these rights, Guettel fails to answer a critical question in this regard. This question centers on whether the post-Reconstruction South was representative of US “liberalism” in its own right. While German liberals may have cast their eyes to the US example, Solf’s rejection of the so called Reconstruction Amendments and the complete omission of a discussion of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 perhaps demonstrate more about German liberal perceptions than their understanding of the contestation of liberal ideals in the post-Civil War period. Although not explicitly addressed, Guettel’s examination of the contestation between the role and action of Imperial policymakers in Berlin and policy making efforts by local colonial administrator themselves, raises an intriguing parallel between the debates surrounding the role of the ‘center versus the periphery’ in contemporary discussions of Nazi policymaking in the occupied East.

If German liberals were looking for evidence of racial prejudice and acts of atrocity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century US history in order to justify their own colonial conquests, then there were surely manifold examples from which to choose. However, the more important question, and the one that this book fails to answer, seems to be that, if there were counter-narratives to this storyline, why did these same liberals either ignore them or why could they not see them? In short, if German liberals saw American frontier society and the post-Reconstruction South as both an inspiration and a model for German policy in Africa, were they looking into a mirror or through a prism of their own construction? For his part, Guettel clearly believes that Germany’s reflection had a strikingly American visage.

Notes:
1 Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492, Norman 1987, pp. 159–185.
2 Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870, Durham 1997.
3 Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, New Haven 2008.

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