This well-written, entertaining interdisciplinary study is a worthy contribution to the ongoing debates over the legacies of German imperialism, worldwide. For pure historians, however, it will be of more limited value than it might otherwise at first appear.
As a Professor of German (at Nebraska-Lincoln), Simpson is well-placed to observe the key texts and material culture that have mediated German engagements with empire and imperialism, and in particular the language conveyed and shaped by these. Her mastery of the language allows for some very innovative interpretations and analyses of well-trodden fields, and exposes highly complex ideas and notions that would otherwise be lost on other scholars, more focused on the language as a tool for interpreting sources, rather than a focus for analysis on its own terms. The awareness of relevant German-language scholarship that underpins the book is outstanding, therefore, although the English-language scholarship is less well represented.
What is perhaps most impressive is the way Simpson disturbs a number of the usual chronological and nationalistic presumptions that have characterized the history of German imperialism. She does so largely in the service of the twenty-first-century scholarly movement to globalize the German experience (which has perhaps reached its historiographical peak with David Blackbourn’s Germany in the World, 2023). The Eurocentricity of German history and cultural studies is confronted head-on in German Empires and Decolonial Fantasies, therefore, and readers will find quite fascinating the way engagements with Goethe’s Brazilian-themed poems rub shoulders with those of Ada Cramer’s memoir of her family’s time in Southwest Africa, a board game of 1890, and the novellas of Gustav Hermann Meinecke. Matters of race and nation are re-read through these kinds of texts in ways that will surprise and prompt rethinking, as the work itself seeks to decolonize aspects of German history in a practical way.
Case-studies that observe understandings of the initial Prussian outposts on the African coasts, as well as Enlightenment notions of scientific discovery, German settler-colonialism in places like South America (Brazil and Chile) as well as emigration to North America, present novel instances that may not be entirely familiar to most readers. As such, while the “usual suspects” of German imperialism may be largely absent from Simpson’s book (e.g., Bismarck, Fritz Fabri, Hitler), a cast of other characters expands understandings of empire and colonialism in the German context.
This said, for the historian, the book does possess a number of lacunae that make it less than satisfying as a cultural or intellectual analysis of German engagements with empire. One relates to the historiography consulted and deployed by Simpson to ground her textual and cultural analyses in time and place. While Blackbourn has informed Simpson’s focus on “a transatlantic German world,” and German involvement in the slave trade (p. 5 and esp. pp. 31–49), the other major scholar to revise understandings of German imperialism—Matthew P. Fitzpatrick—is not foundational to the book. Fitzpatrick’s explorations of the liberal origins of German imperialism (not its supposedly conservative-Prussian, or even Fascist-Nazi nature) would have helped to add nuance to Simpson’s analysis throughout. His extension of the German horizon into the Pacific, China, and Australasia—and the limiting of the Kaiser’s horizons—was also something that would more truly have globalized Simpson’s overview. And so too, Isabel V. Hull’s very different 2004 exploration of genocidal doctrine in the Prussian Army would also have helped inform a critique of the military’s practices in the case of the Herero and Namaqua genocides.
The case-study approach also tends to fracture the overall volume, which certainly ranges across the 1492–1942 scope of the volume. The 1492 starting-point, moreover, useful though it is, also pushes German understandings of empire and imperialism necessarily into the post-Columbian global context, and ignores or downplays the longer tradition of empire inherited from the Holy Roman Empire. So too, although there are identified linkages via the marriage of the Princess Maria Leopoldina of Austria to the Emperor Pedro I of Brazil, the Habsburg inflection on ideas of empire is largely sidelined. The clash between older conceptions of “Reich” with its modern incarnation—and the decolonial potential of that older notion, despite its universalist connotations—is a fertile field for analysis that Simpson has somewhat missed (despite Peter H. Wilson’s close analysis in recent years).
It is also somewhat disappointing that Simpson has not joined battle with the likes of Bruce Gilley and his Defence of German Colonialism (2022). This is really crucial to the advancement of the decolonial project into the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, it is heartening that readers of Simpson’s book will be still better equipped to address matters imperial as future scholarship unfolds across several scholarly disciplines. In that sense, Simpson’s book is a good foundation for next steps, and a useful means of broadening one’s appreciation for a larger cultural-literary context for German imperialism than might otherwise be apparent. That it is available Open Access will greatly extend its usefulness in this respect.
