ABSTRACT

When the German Empire collapsed under the double stress of a lost war and a revolutionary movement in 1918, it also lost its colonies. The Treaty of Versailles stipulated that all German colonies were to be transformed into mandates of the League of Nations under the jurisdiction and rule of other European colonial powers. Germany became, legally speaking, a “Postcolonial State in a Still-Colonial World” (Klotz 2005). Yet for a long time, the German colonial past was regarded to be of little consequence to German society as a whole. Sebastian Conrad has coined the term “double marginalization” to describe this traditional perception, which, on the one hand, generally denied the notion of modernity as the result of a co-constitutive, shared historical process and on the other, assumed that the brief colonial encounter and its negligible impact distinguished the German national history from that of other European nation states (Conrad 2002, 148). Given this background, it is no surprise that many German scholars ignored postcolonial critique for a long time.