Introduction

Summary

In the preface to a recent interdisciplinary volume about “colonial pasts” and the “(post-) colonial present” the editors note that “empires are in vogue” in the arts and humanities (“Imperien haben Konjunktur”). This new curiosity with imperial and colonial history extends well beyond academia, indicating that imperialism and colonialism resonate with the political, economic, and cultural challenges of a globalizing world. In Germany this new fascination with the colonial past can be traced back to the 1990s, when for example cities such as Hamburg and Berlin began to explore their colonial histories, building on changes in cultural awareness that began with the “discovery” of the so-called Third World as the subject of German intellectual debates during the 1960s and 1970s and the countercultural One World movement of the 1980s. The fact that most of Germany's former colonies were located in Africa — roughly corresponding to today's states of Togo, Cameroon, Namibia, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi — means that the reappreciation and reassessment of colonial history since the 1990s overlaps with a focus on Africa, which has also been attracting renewed attention since the mid-1990s. Indeed, the editor of a recent volume on German literary and cultural discourses about Africa complements the earlier statement about the topicality of colonialism by summarizing: “In recent years there was increasing interest in Africa in ‘low’ as well as ‘high’ culture and literature — a fascination which vacillates between the renewal of clichéd images and unprejudiced interest in the African ‘other’ [dem Fremden].”