This monograph is part of a wider endeavor to re-examine the interwar years and networks of internationalism. It engages with two current debates, namely that of the effectiveness of the League of Nations and of the legacies of Weimar. By combining the two, the book succeeds in opening new directions in understanding internationalist colonialism during the interwar years.
This well-researched monograph joins a growing debate on Weimar colonialism, which was not just an interlude between German Imperial colonialism and Third Reich expansion, the latter having been analyzed so convincingly by Mark Mazower (Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe [2008]) as a variation of colonialism. Weimar colonialism, Sean Andrew Wempe argues, is likewise a continuation of German colonialism in a new environment. Out of necessity, German colonialism after World War I worked within the League of Nations and turned into a liberal international imperialism. Building on the work of Susan Pedersen (The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire [2015]), and similar to Holger Stoecker, who used the Berlin-based Afrikawissenschaften (Afrikawissenschaften in Berlin von 1919 bis 1945. Zur Geschichte und Topographie eines wissenschaftlichen Netzwerkes [2008]) as his case study to analyze post–World War I internationalization, Wempe focuses on a network of excolonial officers, settlers, and scientists to argue that there existed an ambivalent Weimar colonialism, operating between a pragmatic liberal internationalization and defiant patriotic revisionism. Toward the end of the Weimar Republic, the ties that bound the colonial lobby group together loosened, and the movement progressively fragmented.
Revenants of the German Empire is divided into three parts that chronologically chart the rise and fall of the new liberal international imperialism. Within these sections, the book analyzes public discourses and mayor political crises, such as the naturalization crisis in the mandate territory of Southwest Africa during the early 1920s, the Locarno Conference of the mid-1920s, and the Manchurian crisis during the early 1930s. At the heart of the book is a kind of group biography of powerful German men, namely the two German representatives at the League of Nations, Ludwig Kastl and Julius Ruppel, and the leaders of the colonial lobby, Carl Peters, Theodor Seitz, Wilhelm Solf, and last but not least Heinrich Schnee. Women are marginal at best. Ada Schnee née Woodhill, for example, is mentioned in only one sentence in regard to her husband's fluency in English, but not as an intellectual influence on him, nor as the editor of his memoirs.
Wempe is best when he analyzes developments in Germany and Europe. His argument is that German excolonials kept continuity of colonial engagement by Europeanizing themselves through political actions and discourses. Working with and through the League of Nations allowed them to stay connected to the former German colonies and partake in wider postwar reform through the mandate system.
It is a pity that Wempe deals with German colonials who remained in the former German colonies only marginally because this would have strengthened his overarching argument and might have given additional nuance to his concept of pragmatic liberal internationalization and Europeanization. Wempe's lack of interest in German diasporas and German settlers who remained in the mandates also causes some errors to occur. He wrongly claims, for example, that with the exception of German Southwest Africa, “all German nationals, including settlers, missionaries, and tradesmen” were deported (35), when a significant number of Germans remained in all former German colonies, though at times hiding or downplaying their Germanness. In the global south, similarly to networks in the fatherland, the collective adjustment to the new conditions after World War I led first to union among the remaining Germans and later to fragmentation. Thus, German missionaries, planters, and traders in the Pacific pragmatically joined a colonial brotherhood of whiteness. Those who could not slip into these networks, with all the sociality and business connections entailed, moved from the early 1930s into the arms of National Socialism in search of status and support. Bill Schwarz's observation of The White Man's World (2011) extends also to Weimar colonialism in the Antipodes and the global south.
Wempe also downplays the importance of missionary societies as a powerful lobby group in the former colonies and at home in Germany. In five and a half pages, Wempe attempts to cover Christian missions and argues that they were different from the excolonial lobby groups. He claims that missionaries stepped “outside of national politics and wartime animosities … and participated in ‘ecumenical internationalism’” (147). I would argue that Christian missions overall were, to the contrary, very similar to the pragmatic liberal internationalists, caught between pragmatic ecumenical engagement and defiant patriotism (Werner Ustorf, Sailing on the Next Tide: Missions, Missiology, and the Third Reich [2001]; Christine Winter, Looking after One's Own: The Rise of Nationalism and the Politics of the Neuendettelsauer Mission in Australia, New Guinea and Germany (1921–1933) [2012]).
Wempe finishes with a call to fellow historians to use an analysis of Germany's participation in the League of Nations to rethink how German colonialism is historically contextualized: “Scholars should stop thinking … in terms of a single metropole or national actor and instead consider how those case studies relate to the larger-scale history of European imperialism as a transnational whole” (232). Let us hope this call will be heard and many more studies of Weimar colonialism will follow.
