A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...

locked by both German and African initiatives. The realization of this combined
influence is absent from many of the cultural and social histories of the period.
By examining the social and the cultural, this study moves against the “statist”
vision of contemporary German history in favour of an Alltagsgeschichte of German
colonialism that refuses monolithic conceptions. In this total vision of culture, it is
evident how culture connects with social and political issues to both propel and restrain
colonial power. Thus by eschewing the thinly-veiled economic or political determinism
of some historians as well as the narrow focuses upon social and cultural manifestations,
a fuller and deterritorialized vision of Germany’s colonial expansion in Africa can
develop. But in order to most accurately render the multi-faceted and complex terms of
colonialism, studies must fuse the social and cultural with the economic and political.
This discussion has engaged the imaginaries of German colonialism, but now returns to
the concrete realities of colonial rule in order to convey the utopian and pragmatic
articulations of German colonial expansion.
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