Scholars have increasingly argued for the salience of Germany's colonial project in the social and cultural world of the Kaiserreich and even of the Weimar Republic; yet, few historical works have directly engaged with the ongoing impact of colonial culture in the post-1945 period. Britta Schilling's investigation of German postcolonialism is a thoughtful, informative, and interesting look at the memory of German colonies and colonialism in German society from the 1920s to the present day. Whether in the “colonial balls” of Weimar, the colonial heroes of Nazi-era schoolbooks, the state gifts of the 1950s, or the family keepsakes of the 1990s, traces of Germany's engagement with the former colonies continued to linger. The significance of this colonial memory, Schilling argues, “lies not in its mass appeal, which varied, but in its controversial nature, longevity, and repeated impact on politics and cultural life” (12).

The author's focus on memory makes for an intriguing organization: each of her chapters covers a single decade and foregrounds a different source base, while engaging with a different methodological theme. The first chapter, for instance, covers the years 1925 to 1935 and follows Natalie Zemon Davis's ideas about exploring books as more than just a sources of ideas, but as carriers of relationships; Schilling argues, in fact, that books can be a “textual monument to the past” (16). The Afrikabücher—a collection of quasi-commemorative publications that included war stories and fictionalized accounts—were a means through which Germans grappled with the loss of their colonies. The “Africa-books” portrayed the colonies as a “lost paradise” (22) and Germans as ideal colonizers who had won the loyalty of the so-called natives. Schilling's second chapter embraces the broader “dream world” of consumption between 1925 and 1935. In colonial balls (many staged by the Women's League of the Colonial Society) or in the wild music of jazz performances, dreams of lost paradise could blend with those of illicit exoticism in the world of Weimar amusements. Sigmund Freud is Schilling's theorist here, and she argues that the “colonial” dream condensed contradictory representations of blacks (as loyal servants, as savages, as exotic or erotic objects) into a composite figure—a figure that fulfilled latent desires of Germans.

The third chapter, which engages with the decade of National Socialist rule, shifts to Nazi-era schoolbooks, in which the colonies served a didactic purpose to demonstrate German heroism. Schilling describes how Nazi-era textbooks, seeking to militarize colonial “heroism,” abandoned the reluctance of earlier schoolbooks to discuss the Herero and Maji Maji wars. It is particularly chilling to read about an eighth-grade textbook from the 1930s that outlined the war in German Southwest Africa as “an Endkampf for dominance” (88). These textbooks “were meant to fire [school children's] imagination and encourage their willingness to defend their nation's honor both at home and abroad” (89). And these “lessons” for German youth persisted long after 1945, as later chapters show.

The chapter on the post-Nazi decade turns to official relations as a site of memory. State gifts given to former colonies by the two new Germanies after 1949 consisted of more than just foreign aid; they were “objects of memory” (95) in their own right. Following the work of Marcel Mauss (The Gift [1990]), Schilling approaches gift-giving as a semi-mystical ritual meant to form social bonds. In the pursuit of such bonds, West German state gifts to Cameroon and Togo sought to conjure the positive aspects of the colonial relationship. Gifts like a mobile medical station (Klinomobil) or an X-ray machine, for instance, sought to tap into the benevolence of “colonial medicine,” while other gift ideas (such as an airplane or a Mercedes-Benz) seemed less appealing because they would not evoke a shared past.

Chapter five explores conflicts over colonial-era monuments and history in the 1960s and beyond. An eight-foot bronze statue of Hermann von Wissmann, the colonial “hero” of German East Africa in the 1880s and 1890s, was toppled by student activists in 1968—after surviving the bombings of the 1940s—while other monuments were either removed or rededicated. Schilling argues that, apart from a few instances of conflict over colonial memory in the streets and in historiography, “Germany's colonial past ceased to play a significant role in public space, and therefore receded from the nation's (or rather, both nations’) collective memory” (134). Drawing on Rudy Koshar's work on monuments and traces (From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990 [2000]), Schilling argues for the significance of absence: while the monuments of German colonialism disappeared from the public sphere, “the empty plinth holds equal weight to the statue” (154). But as her intriguing final chapter shows, colonial memory nevertheless lived on as personal memory in the form of family heirlooms. Families that had had ancestors in the colonial Schutztruppe or had been otherwise engaged in colonialism or in domestic organizations (such as the Colonial Scouts) carefully preserved their mementos, keepsakes, and photographs; in the process, they determinedly held onto a markedly benign memory of German colonial rule. This is Schilling's most groundbreaking chapter in terms of sources: tracing the memory of colonialism through interviews with living members of families such as the Gaudchaus, the Meyers, the Puttkammers, the Wissmanns, and the von Trothas, Schilling insightfully juxtaposes colonial memories based on family heirlooms against family memories of World War II. A public direction of memory reshaped personal memories after the Third Reich; after German colonialism, however, the absence of such public direction of memory allowed personal memories to remain unaltered.

Schilling's book is strongly situated in the current historiography and shows an impressive breadth of research. Its exclusive focus on the post-Versailles era nevertheless misses some of the direct connections to the colonial project of the Kaiserreich, losing sight of the ways in which Weimar's colonial memory was simply a continuation of earlier practices. How much of the colonial idyll portrayed in the Africa-books of the 1920s, for instance, was nothing more than an extension of the publishing traditions of the Colonial Society stretching back to the 1880s? Similarly, to what extent was the dream world of Weimar-era “colonial wares”—with its simplified, yet contradictory, images of blacks—a deliberate construction by advertisers and Völkerschau organizers over the previous four decades? One wonders, too, whether these durable colonial memories were really so specific to just the German experience. These are small points, however. Schilling's book navigates through a great deal of dense material in the early chapters and breaks new ground in its second half, particularly with respect to state gifts and family heirlooms. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and legacy of German colonialism.