Karolin Wetjen's book is an excellent study and presentation of the intercourse between Germany's colonial and metropolitan worlds. From its assertive opening sentence, “Diese Arbeit betritt Neuland,” the book introduces a study of the Leipzig Mission Society and its work among the Chagga people on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro in German East Africa around 1900 (7). The claim is not false: this book opens new territories for analysis in colonial history. Throughout its pages, Wetjen makes the convincing argument that as the missionaries cultivated Christianity among the Chagga, their activities reflected their own and others' concerns that German Christianity was in crisis. Thanks to this compelling argument, Wetjen's work goes beyond a narrative of missionary activities in the field. It finds new insight by demonstrating the centrality of missionaries to turn-of-the-twentieth-century religious history. Mission tactics and theory centered the worries of metropolitan Protestant theologians, especially Lutherans, even as the missionaries approached seemingly novel problems. The book is a carefully and extensively researched proposal that scholars of Germany's nineteenth century, colonialism, and religion attend to Germany's missionary history.
In the 1890s, the Leipzig missionaries began work in East Africa, expanding on their existing activities in India. By 1913, they had built fourteen mission stations and baptized several thousand new congregants. Wetjen explains the intellectual labor behind these activities and places them within a wider network of Lutheran organizations. These organizations, part of a so-called Lutheran international, are identified, but the international element is not a central focus of the book, less important to Wetjen than the Leipzig and Saxon connections of the mission society. Within this network, Wetjen argues, the mission field and the challenges of evangelization served as a laboratory in which missionaries—theologians in their own right—developed new solutions to the challenges facing the Lutheran church writ large. As her title says, missionaries thought that the mission field served as space in which they could negotiate possible solutions to persistent challenges facing the church.
As a scholarly contribution, Mission als theologisches Labor does for missionaries what, for example, Sebastian Conrad did for German conceptions of labor (and some missionaries) (Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich [2006]), David Ciarlo did for advertising imagery (Advertising Empire [2011]), and Andrew Zimmerman did for sociologists and cotton (Alabama in Africa [2010]). The book integrates the colonial and metropolitan contexts to further reveal that Germany's nineteenth-century history is colonial history. Simultaneously, Wetjen demonstrates the centrality of missionaries to nineteenth-century religious history.
The book is organized into four long chapters, each developing the case for the author's argument that missionaries' work in the field had a reciprocating relationship with scholarly and theological debates about the state of the Church in Germany. The first chapter details the emerging conviction among Leipzig and other missionaries that mission work, analyzed through rigorous scholarship, Missionswissenschaft, could guide the church through the current crisis. The second chapter shows how the study of religion in the colonial context guided the missionaries' relationship to the colonial state, to the colonized, and to knowledge of the colonized and colonial state. In the third chapter, Wetjen turns to two specific “problems” of missionary work: translation of the Bible and of the Christian message through preaching. In both cases, she skillfully demonstrates that missionaries' concern over the politics of translation and how conversion in the colonial context reflected conflicts in Germany between rationalist and fundamentalist strains of thought. Similarly, the fourth chapter exhibits that missionaries' anxious debates around the proper formation and creation of new church communities in the mission field. These colonial debates reflected contemporaneous perceptions that Germany's congregations were losing their vitality and even viability. As Wetjen points out, the drive to create new churches around Kilimanjaro came at the same time as a new period of church building designed to (re-)establish the faith in Germany (301).
The sequence of chapters and the course of Wetjen's argument make for the strongest elements in the book. Her presentation of the material follows an effective pattern: a discussion of missionary activities and ideas in the colonial context followed by a discussion of the indirect and direct valences those activities and ideas had in the metropole. For example, Wetjen brings to the fore the explicit connections made by Lutheran missionaries around 1900 between the challenges of building Christian communities in Africa and rebuilding them in Europe, between the Foreign and Inner Mission movements. The evidence masterfully supports her overall claim for understanding German religious history within a colonial frame. Another major strength of the work is Wetjen's outstanding facility with a broad range of primary and secondary sources. She weaves together published and archival sources to repeatedly illustrate the symmetry between missionaries' internal debates and similar debates in wider theological circles. The richness of Wetjen's research can be seen in the extensive and regular substantive footnotes that informatively expand upon the main text.
Karolin Wetjen has written a compelling book. Its only noteworthy flaw for the researcher is that its backmatter is of limited utility. Though the book does have an Ortsregister, Namensregister, and Sachregister, even taken together they leave the collective index a bit sparse. A second, minor criticism: within the content of the book, it would have helped to have Wetjen develop with more detail the Lutheran international in which she identifies the missionaries as working. Their network extended beyond German-speaking territories, and it would have amplified her claims of the missionaries' impact if readers could learn more about these broader Lutheran and Protestant networks.
Mission als theologisches Labor is an effective and forceful argument for the importance of colonial history for understanding Germany's religious history. Wetjen joins a growing chorus of scholars that insist on the essentiality of events in places like Kilimanjaro to culture and politics in the Kaiserreich. Karolin Wetjen broadens historians' understanding of the colonial and metropolitan empire with this very fine book.
