ABSTRACT
The German participation in Western military expansion in China towards the end of the 19th century led to the emergence of several slogans that would outlive the colonialist era: the German foreign secretary Bülow’s promise of ‘a place in the sun’, the British Admiral Seymour’s command ‘Germans to the front’, and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s comparison of German soldiers to ‘Huns’. The three slogans are remembered in German (and partly also in British) media to this day and are often used to refer, mostly in an ironic and/or critical sense, to present-day events. The chapter discusses the original intended meanings of these slogans, as far as they can be plausibly reconstructed, their contemporary reception and their afterlife as reminders of Germany’s colonialist and imperialist past as well as their later re-application to new socio-political circumstances. The analysis sheds light on the conditions for public reimagining of colonialism, as part of a changing national ‘identity’ of Germany, and on the role that ‘remembered’ quotations play in it.
