A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...

commerce in the African colonies, social organizations like the DKG and Pan-Germans
cemented close contacts due to the confluence of their interests. Through this union, a
colonial lobby was established when a section of bourgeois German society separated and
deterritorialized from the German population. The hesitation of the majority of the
German population that these groups found themselves opposing can be seen as the
concomitant reterritorialization and indicates the developing fissures in German society
over the colonial extension. The conception of deterritorialization encourages the
uncovering of the motivations for these deterritorializations and reterritorializations,
which in this case were clashing visions of the future of German society. The Pan-
Germans and DKG sought to create a Germanic utopia in the colonies, where patriotism,
economic success and traditional social norms were enshrined. Others in German society
resisted these desires, often in the interests of German domestic welfare.
To sway the population towards a pro-colonial stance, the colonial groups relied
upon propaganda, mostly the popular journal. The aforementioned social organizations
all had official organs that propounded colonialism, such as the Kolonial Zeitung,
Alldeutsche Blätter, Die Flotte and the Organ des Zentralvereine für Handelsgeographie
und Förderung Deutscher Interessen im Auslande. Even the newspapers of the
respective colonies worked with the obvious object of stirring German domestic support
for colonial expansion. 60 Alongside this advocacy, many newspapers promoted the
requirement of a colonial policy that reflected the commercial and national necessity of
colonies. The Allgemeine Zeitung declared that “eine Kolonialpolitik ist . . . nur dann
patriotisch, wenn sie rentabel ist.” 61 This statement perfectly demonstrates the conflation
of the political and the national with the commercial and the colonial.
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