A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...

Nonetheless, not all German papers were wholly in support of the government’s
colonial policy. 62 For instance, when the Zelewski expedition of 1891 was defeated by a
native uprising, the Berliner Tageblatt determined the K-A’s native policy to have been
the cause of the unrest and the deaths of Germans. 63 But in a more comprehensive
picture, continual support came from the colonialist organs, augmented by occasional
support during times of crisis from the conservative press, and later criticisms of the
abuses of the government’s colonial policy by many popular journals across the political
spectrum. In this respect, the primary deterritorializing forces appear to be the efforts of
the colonial lobby which sought to shift public opinion with their propaganda but were
countered by the reterritorializations of the German public who resisted and ignored the
efforts of the propagandists. This in turn reveals what little support colonial expansion
enjoyed in the German populace.
To aid the efforts of these social groups, the imperial government was not afraid
of overtly advocating in favour of colonial growth. In addition to allowing free reign to
favourable newspaper coverage of colonial issues, the government under Bismarck and
Wilhelm II worked to inform Germany society and the Reichstag of the benefits that
could accrue from increased colonial involvement. 64 State Secretary Dernburg gave
public lectures stressing the importance of colonial business and calling for public
support of increased involvement in Africa. This government propaganda is significant
because it wove government policy together with social, economic and political
objectives. This advocacy was a reciprocal reaction to both exogenous and endogenous
pressures, for it was an effort by Germans to create domestic support for colonial
adventures that in turn was predicated upon more public support for colonialism.
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