Decolonization in Germany
Subtitle: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss And Foreign Occupation (Studies in Modern German Literature)
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing; Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, Peter
Published: July 31, 2005
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 281
ISBN-13: 9783039102839
Subjects: History; History - General History; History: World; European - German; General; Europe - Germany; 20th century; Decolonization in literature; German literature; History and criticism; Postcolonialism in literature
First sentence: Amid the catastrophe and cacophony of the early days of the Weimar Republic a man returned home from an American prison camp and visited his mother in the occupied Rhineland.
Description: When Germany lost its colonial empire after the Great War, many Germans were unsure how to understand this transition. They were the first Europeans to experience complete colonial loss, an event which came as Germany also wrestled with wartime collapse and foreign occupation.
In this book the author considers how Germans experienced this change from imperial power to postcolonial nation. This work examines what the loss of the colonies meant to Germans, and it analyzes how colonialist categories took on new meanings in Germany's «post-colonial» period. Poley explores a varied collection of materials that ranges from the stories of popular writer Hanns Heinz Ewers to the novels, essays, speeches, pamphlets, posters, and archival materials of nationalist groups in the occupied Rhineland to show how decolonization affected Germans. When the relationships between metropole and colony were suddenly severed, Germans were required to reassess many things: nation and empire, race and power, sexuality and gender, economics and culture.
Notes: Introduction
Chapter One: Fiction and autobiography	
Chapter Two: Travel, collecting, and disease	
Chapter Three: Whipping
Chapter Four: Voodoo queens	
Chapter Five: Hybridity	
Chapter Six: Occupation, rape, and the African imperialist
Chapter Seven: Publicity, race, and the politics of postcolonial resistance
Chapter Eight: The occupation as inverted colonization
Conclusions