Identität durch Normalitätserwartungen : Konnektoren und Kontrastrelationen im deutschen Kolonialdiskurs

Abstract

Comprising the period from 1884/5 when the first territories in Africa were acquired by Germany, and the end of World War I in 1918, German colonialism was relatively short-lived. One reason for this was the reluctance of German officials to engage in colonial activity at all. Only after the establishment of the a Deutsche Reicha as one state was this reluctance replaced with the idea that the newly established state had to be imperialistic in the eyes of its founding fathers in order to be taken seriously as a world power. Consequently, most German colonies initially had been established by private traders and only from about 1884 on received official status as a Schutzgebietea (protected areas) by the German state. The discrepancy between officiala s reluctance towards colonies and the public's enthusiasm resulted in a large number of texts being produced by German authors on the topic of colonies. On the one hand, these texts can be seen as an attempt to make up in writing for what was missing in political will. On the other hand, they also contributed to the development of a common identity among Germans, which gained topicality due to the establishment of the "Deutsche Reich" a few years before. The texts cover legal and economic issues as well as questions of daily life, linguistic, ethnological and geographical research. The corpus composed these texts forms the basis for the linguistic analysis, which is focused on relations of contrast. That type of relation was chosen because it matches the situation in the colonies where different cultural, economic, and educational backgrounds clashed. Analyzing the content of the relations of contrast thus is conducted to shed a light on how social actors constructed their roles and identity models by contrasting themselves against other groups of social actors. With the vast majority of texts being written by white colonizers, it goes without any doubt that the perspective is exclusively that of Europeans. The analysis revealed that colonized people who were already established in the colonized territories are only rarely taken into consideration during this process of role model building. Instead, terms such as "African" are used to describe colonizers. Thus the entire process of contrasting one s own group of actors to another one is self-referential in the sense of being focused on actors who had moved from Europe to Africa or Asia at some point. The results and figures derived in the analysis offer a variety of links to be drawn to other fields of linguistic research. Because the texts included in the corpus cover many areas of daily life, the results of the analysis can even be transferred to non-colonial contexts within the same period of time. Moreover, within the context of colonial engagement, the implicit self-definition of actor groups in German colonies is comparable to that of actor groups in the colonies of other imperialistic countries.