ABSTRACT
The trivial 'colonial novel' of the late nineteenth century, it is the texts of Wilhelm Raabe that carry the most explicit traces of the German colonial empire in German literature. In Raabe's novel Abu Telfan oder Die Hetmkem vom Mondgebirge, published in 1867, that is long before the inauguration of a German colonial empire in Africa, the 'dark continent' even appears in its title. In this novel Raabe uses Africa to satirize Germany's philistine attitudes: living in German society is equated with being a slave in the remotest inner-African province, with both societies having important traits in common. Raabe's reference to the Republic of Haiti in the same sentence can be taken to refer to a seminal text in nineteenth-century German literature that dealt with the conflict between colonizers and the colonized, Heinrich von Kleist's Die Verlobung von St. Domingo. Raabe fuses the topoi of first contact and deja vu to unmask not the stranger but attitudes rooted in the German consciousness.
