War, Genocide and Memory. German Colonialism and National Identity - Sheffield/UK 09/06

Convenors: Jürgen Zimmerer/Michael Perraudin

Workshop of the Arbeitskreis Militärgeschichte e.V.
in cooperation with the Department of Germanic Studies, Department of
History and Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, University of
Sheffield, the Nordic Africa Insti-tute, Uppsala, and the European
Network of Genocide Scholars (ENOGS)
11.09.2006-13.09.2006, Sheffield/UK
Deadline: 01.03.2006

For almost sixty years, since the end of World War II, the German public
had forgotten about its colonial empire. Whereas other European powers
experienced the traumatic violence of decolonisation, Germans believed
that they had nothing to do with the colonial exploitation of large
parts of Africa, Asia or South America. They were innocent - so many
believed - of the devastations brought about by European colonialism and
could therefore engage with the new postcolonial world without the dark
shadow of a colonial past. Some observers have termed this ‘colonial
amnesia’.

Such suppression was severely shaken in 2004, when the centenary of the
genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples confronted a wide German
audience with German atrocities of a hun-dred years before. The first
German genocide, as it was called, attracted media coverage, and in
August 2004 the German government officially apologised for the
atrocities. After Germany’s attempts to come to terms with its Nazi
past, this step was seen by many international observers as a major
breakthrough in global attempts to right historic wrongs, especially
those com-mitted in a colonial context. In Germany, the official
apology, far from marking closure on a dark chapter in German history,
sparked a variety of agitated responses. Instead of acknowledging the
act as a much-needed step in the process of coming to terms with the
colonial past, conservative circles denounced the German Minister for
Economic Cooperation and Development, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, who had
delivered the apology, as a ‘traitor’. Others worried about claims for
reparations by the Herero, and the German tabloid ‘BILD’ asked on its
front page, ‘What will be the cost of the minister’s tears?’, deriding
her carefully crafted statement as being the result of female sentiment.
Wieczorek-Zeul’s courageous act had obviously touched a nerve. Whereas
some felt encouraged to bring other German colonial atrocities into the
limelight, for example the Maji-Maji war in German East Africa, the
centenary of which fell in 2005, others have attempted to rewrite
Germany’s colonial past by emphasizing the exotic aspects of Germany’s
colonial undertaking, and by disconnecting the imperial past from the
positive strands of German history. A dubious documentary on prime-time
German television, which made repeated use of colonial stereotypes,
marked - for the time being - the extreme point of this endeavour.

Nevertheless, the debate shows that Germany has finally arrived at a
postcolonial European normality, where its own historical relationship
with the world is part of a lively debate not only about the past, but
also about the future. Migration, multiculturalism and xenophobia are
only some of the topics which are substantially shaped by Germany’s
memory of the past. Colonialism was central to Wilhelminian discourse on
national identity, to the country’s understanding of itself as a world
power; and now discussion about the German empire seems to be
resurfacing as part of a German discourse of self-understanding and
self-reassurance in the aftermath of Unification.

The proposed workshop will address Germany’s biased and troubled
relationship with its colonial past over the course of two centuries. As
postcolonial studies have shown, colonial engagement neither started nor
ended with formal colonial rule. Thus we invite papers dealing with all
aspects of the encounters of Germany and Germans with imagined or real
colonial empires, from the Enlightenment to the present day. Papers
addressing the problems from a transnational or comparative perspective,
papers dealing with the landscapes of memory in the former German
colonies, and papers offering literary and other cultural-historical
perspectives are all especially welcome. Contributions from
practitioners in any relevant discipline are encouraged.

Possible topics include:

- Local Histories, Local Memories
- Heroic Discourses in the Imperial Centre
- Colonialism, Literature and Culture
- Uses and Abuses of History for Postcolonial Nation-Building
- Guilt, Responsibility and National Identity
- Shared History, Shared Memory
- Coming to Terms with a Colonial Past
- Colonialism before the Empire; colonialism after the end of Empire

Papers will be 20-25 minutes long, and will be presented and discussed
in English. To apply to deliver a paper at the conference, please send
by email an abstract of a few lines plus a brief c.v. simultaneously to
BOTH j.zimmerer@sheffield.ac.uk AND m.f.perraudin@sheffield.ac.uk

Deadline for submission: March 1st 2006.

Limited funds may be available to subsidise non-salaried participants.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Juergen Zimmerer

Department of History
University of Sheffield
387 Glossop Road
Sheffield
S10 2TN
UK

URL zur Zitation dieses Beitrages
http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/termine/id=4977