ABSTRACT
Bulow was probably the best-known woman in the German colonial movement before the First World War. The themes of her fiction and nonfiction included the German colonies, the industrialisation of Germany, the material and emotional difficulties facing women of the impoverished Prussian nobility and of the bourgeoisie, and racial conflict in the colonies and in Germany. As her writings show, her colonial, national, and sexual politics, as well as her personal relations, were based on a profound and explicit racial paranoia. To appreciate how prominently racial paranoia and hatred, on the one hand, and feminist concerns, on the other, inform her writing is to see how the histories of white racism and Euro-American feminism at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries cannot be written in isolation from each other. Bulow's life and writings demonstrate the intertwining of those histories, both at the practical level of political activism and at the abstract level of the conceptualisation of female emancipation.
