(This takes 4⅓ minutes to read.)
Quoting Shelley Baranowski’s Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler, pages 55–56:
Social Darwinian ideas were not confined to the natural or social sciences. In addition to being disseminated in the press, popular literature became yet another means for legitimating imperialism and its underlying notions of race war. Popular fiction in the Wilhelmine era described Poles as racially different from the Germans. The so-called Eastern Marches novels (Ostmarkromanen) depicted seductive and suspiciously dark-skinned Polish women, whose sexual conquests inevitably polonized (i.e., defiled) blond, strong, and young, but naïve, German heroes. The settings for such novels, the uncivilized “wild east” where filth, degeneracy, and an untamed nature prevailed entrapped their protagonists in a swamp of decay.¹¹²
Popular fiction after the Herero War explicitly justified the army’s concentration camps and extermination programs in Social Darwinian terms. Allegedly unable to build permanent settlements, cultivate the land, or establish roots, the natives deserved to yield to the colonizers. Similar to the Jew who became the unyielding opposite of the German, Africans became the “other.”
In Gustav Frenssen’s popular novel, Peter Moor’s Journey to Southwest Africa, the elimination of the black threat served as the background to the hero’s recognition that his personal fulfillment lay in his identification with the German ethnic community (Volksgemeinschaft). The hero’s visits to German settlements with their immaculate and well-kept homesteads and model German housewives contrasted with the filth, nudity, and squalor of Africans.¹¹³ Monuments to fallen German troops both in the colonies and the metropole embodied similar assumptions regarding the necessary sacrifices of German soldiers to advance the triumph of civilization over blackness.¹¹⁴
Pages 152–153:
Yet, because the wounds of Versailles cut deeply, the popularization of imperialism [in the Weimar Republic] was arguably broader than under the Second Empire, beginning with the colonial nostalgia mediated through fiction. Easily the most popular novel was Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum, first published in 1926. By 1935, it had sold well over three hundred thousand copies. Closely associated with the Colonial Society and the German National People’s Party, Grimm articulated through his characters Germany’s mission to settle its Volk overseas, particularly in Africa, and supplant Great Britain as the world’s dominant imperial power.
The acquisition and settlement of living space would allow Germans to remake their social order. They would recover their spiritual and cultural values and, by providing opportunity for its surplus population, eliminate the class divisions that drew workers to socialism. Disturbingly, Grimm’s retrospective novellas on prewar Southwest Africa, published in 1929, betrayed his approval of von Trot[h]a’s genocide as necessary to eliminate the contradiction of prewar settler colonialism between preserving apartheid and allowing male settlers to exercise dominion over native women.⁸³
It may be helpful to liken these novels to the Westerns that were popular in Imperial America during the nineteenth century. In fact, we have some evidence that the similarities between these two genres were not merely coincidental. Quoting Kristin Kopp’s Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space, pages 21–22:
There was, however, the fundamental problem of convincing German emigrants to exchange their planned destinations on the North American frontier for those in the East that, as the Grenzboten complained, didn’t “offer the imagination the same allure of the otherworldly as did America.”⁴⁴
The most prominent response to this problem mapped iconographic elements of the Wild West onto the eastern territories, thereby constructing a “Wild East” on the Prussian–Polish plains. If the American West was attractive to potential emigrants because they imagined it as a space where they could exercise free will and autonomous agency, or even because they entertained fantasies of proving their mettle against hostile “Indian” forces, then mapping these potentialities onto eastern space enhanced its attractiveness.
The scene was set during the Poland Debate, when Julius Ostendorf, a liberal Westphalian, argued against conquest based upon warfare but, like Jordan before him, recognized “the right of conquest by the plow, which was also exercised by the free North American vis-à-vis the native Indians.”⁴⁵ Ostendorf’s analogy equated German interventions in the eastern Prussian territories with the colonization of the North American frontier, and positioned the Pole as equivalent to the Indian.
In the same year, an anonymous writer for the Grenzboten—now held to be the author Gustav Freytag⁴⁶—began propagating this image of a Polish “Wild East” with the article “Beobachtungen auf einer Geschäftsreise in das Großherzogthum Posen” (Observations on a trade expedition to the Grand Duchy of Posen). Written under the pseudonym “William Rogers,” the author takes on the persona of an American cowboy recounting his adventures in the Prussian East. This perspective allows him to look at a group of Poles and “see” Indians.
In the light of the setting sun, they looked like a beautiful painting executed by the hand of a master. But may I never again shake the hand of an honest man if in this very moment they didn’t appear to me as tribe of wild Indians, as a herd of Pawnee Loupes out on the grassy plains of the Missouri, good for border skirmishes, for novels and tragedies, but unfit for survival.⁴⁷
In rendering the Poles equivalent to a “herd of Pawnee Loupes,” the narrator casts Germany’s neighbor in the rôle of a non-European Naturvolk (primitive people), which he then identifies as a structural antagonist existing merely for the sake of European advancement: it is the Europeans who will prove their intellectual strength by manipulating the “noble savage” in their literary and philosophical ruminations, and it is the Europeans (Germans) who will prove their mettle by expanding the frontier border against the resistant force of the Indians (Poles). Independent of these antagonistic functions, the Indians (Poles) have no reason to exist, and indeed lack the human faculties necessary to ensure their continued survival.
The Naturvolk become an integral component of the primitive terrain that the European sets out to cultivate. But, whereas the landscape will be brought into a higher state of culture, rationality, and productivity, the native population must be pushed back, eliminated from this space. Their increasingly distant border skirmishes are necessary to mark the progressive stages of European advancement, but they can play no positive rôle inside of the space thus conquered.
(Emphasis added.)
Germany’s Wild East goes into greater detail concerning this genre, which I am omitting out of respect for your time.
Further reading: ‘La germanisation par l’école en Alsace-Moselle et en Poznanie : une politique coloniale ?’
