Post on 03-Feb-2023
German History final version October 19, 2009
Published with minor revisions in German History Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 143–166Click here to go to the journal site.
Between colonial violence and socialist worldview:The conversions of Ernst Däumig
Todd WeirQueen’s University Belfast1
In May 1900, Ernst Däumig (1866-1922) submitted an
article entitled “The Sacrificial Victims of Militarism”
to Die Neue Zeit, the leading intellectual journal of the
German socialist movement. In an accompanying letter to
editor Karl Kautsky, Däumig related how his recent
service in the Prussian military and his earlier
involvement in the French Foreign Legion had now led him
to convert to socialism. “Bitter experiences felt on my
own body taught me to see the world with different eyes,”
he wrote. Stimulated by reading Bertha von Suttner’s1 This article is based on a paper originally given at the workshop “German Imperial Biographies: Soldiers, Scientists, and Officials andthe ‘Arendt Thesis’” held on May 4, 2006 at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. I would like to thank the GHI and the organizers, Eric Weitz and Jürgen Zimmerer, for the invitation to attend. A subsequent draft was presented at the Irish Conference of Historians: “Empires and their contested pasts,” Queen's University Belfast, 18–20 May 2007. I would also like to thank Kristi Weir, Andrew Zimmerman, Katy Turton, and especially the two anonymous reviewers for German History for their useful suggestions.
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pacifist bestseller Die Waffen Nieder!, he “delved into the
study of socialist literature and received a new life and
world view (Lebens- und Weltauffassung).”2 Kautsky printed this
and two subsequent articles by the writer and helped
launch his career as a socialist journalist and editor.
Däumig went on to become a key figure in the German
socialist left and played a central part in the
revolutionary upheavals of 1918 to 1921.3 As co-chairman
of the Independent Socialist Party (USPD) between 1919
and 1920, Däumig became the chief theorist of the council
movement in Germany.4 He greeted the slogan of the Russian2 International Institute for Social History (IISG), Amsterdam, NL Kautsky, DVIII, no. 237, 7 May 1900. [Is this an archive?] Baroness Bertha von Suttner was Europe’s leading pacifist and winner of a Nobel Peace Prize. Although she was not a socialist, von Suttner was widely read in socialist circles. 3 “Däumig has been arrested,” wrote Harry Graf Kessler in his diary on Monday, 31 March 1919. This he found was “a fresh piece of folly which will sooner or later probably result in [Däumig] becoming head of Government, provided that he is not murdered in prison.” Harry Graf Kessler, Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (1918-1937), trans.Charles Kessler (New York: Grove Press, 1971), 92.4 During the German Revolution Däumig became identified with the “reine Rätegedanke” (“pure council idea”) that favored an amorphous and basis-democratic structure of organization. Däumig saw no role for a dictator nor for a state or party bureaucracy in the councils. For this reason, his theory of a network of communitarian councils was criticized from both the left and right as completely impracticaland dangerously romantic. See the criticism in Dr. Ludwig Bendix, Bausteine der Räteverfassung. Neue Gesichtspunkte zu ihrem staatsrechtlichen Aufbau nebst einer Auseinandersetzung mit den “Irrungen und Wirrungen” des Herrn Däumig (Berlin:
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Revolution “All power to Councils;”5 however, unlike the
Bolsheviks, Däumig wanted to see the dictatorship of the
proletariat exercised not by the revolutionary party but
by the radically democratic councils themselves.6 Däumig’s
most momentous act was to deliver the left wing of his
party to the Comintern and into a union with the much
smaller Communist Party (KPD) in December 1920. His co-
chairmanship of the newly created United Communist Party
of Germany (VKPD) was stunningly short lived. He resigned
following disagreements with the Comintern policy that
was pushing the German party into an ill-conceived and
W. Moeser Buchhandlung, 1919). See also the discussion in Todd Weir, “The Fourth Confession: Atheism, Monism and Politics in the ‘Freigeistig’ Movement in Berlin 1859-1924” (PhD, Columbia University, 2005), 568-575.5 “Pure democratic ideals,” he told the delegates of the second council congress in April 1919 “could never be reached, as long as formal political equality was not founded on economic equality.” In other words, socialization carried out by fiat of the proletarian dictatorship had to precede democracy. Däumig, Der Aufbau Deutschlands unddas Rätesystem: Koreferat und Schlußwort auf dem 2. Rätekongreß in Berlin. 8. - 14. April 1919 (Berlin: Der Arbeiter-Rat, 1919), 7.6 In May 1919, Lenin complained bitterly about Däumig’s critiques of the “putschism” and “Byzantinism” of the Communist Party and his denial of the need for central leadership of the revolution. V. I. Lenin, “The Heroes ofthe Berne International” Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th ed, (Progress: Moscow, 1972) vol. 29, 392-401.
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ultimately disastrous insurrection in March of 1921.7
Däumig died shortly after rejoining the USPD in 1922.
The following investigation of Däumig’s early life is
intended less as a complement to existing political
biographies that have focused on his deeds during the
revolutionary period of 1918 to 1921.8 Instead, it takes
the corpus of texts—articles, letters, a play and a
collection of tales—Däumig authored in the years between
1900 to 1904 and investigates how he rewrote his life
story as part of the dramatic social, political and
professional transformation that Däumig himself referred
to as “conversion” in a letter to Kautsky. All of these
texts deal with the problem of military and colonial
violence and refer explicitly or implicitly to his own
“bitter experiences.” In the process of conversion,
Däumig endowed these personal experiences of violence
with new meaning according to the moral narratives
7 The writer of an obituary (almost certainly Paul Levi, Däumig’s co-chairman of the VKPD) stated “how often had he—an enthusiastic admirer of the Russian Revolution—told the comrades in private, that one cannot make a revolution!” P.L., “Zum Andenken an Ernst Däumig,” Freiheit, 13 July 1922.8 David Morgan, “Ernst Däumig and the German Revolution of 1918,” Central European History XV, no. 4 (1982): 303-331; Horst Naumann, “Ein treuer Vorkämpfer des Proletariats. Ernst Däumig,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, no. 6 (1986): 801-13.
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contained within the new systems he embraced. By
analyzing his life story this essay seeks to demonstrate
how biography can tease out the individual’s complex
negotiation of personal experience, competing worldviews
and the social structures in which they are embedded.
Däumig’s case is particularly rich for this
hermeneutical exercise because he underwent not one but
three conversions prior to May 1900. These brought him in
and out of three aggressive, expansive and jealous
systems that together produced much of the domestic and
international anxiety of the age of European imperialism.
Däumig turned to the French colonial service, the German
military, and the socialist movement not only for new
opportunities, but also for the new narratives they
provided for his life. As we shall see, the fantasy of
the colonial adventurer lured him to join the French
Foreign Legion in 1887. Following his stint as a sergeant
in a Prussian cavalry regiment in Metz that began around
1893, Däumig wrote from a corresponding patriotic
imperialist perspective. Finally, the anti-colonial
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socialist “worldview” beckoned him to become a socialist
journalist in 1900.
A further aspect that makes Däumig’s early life an
interesting object of hermeneutical analysis, is the
nature of the sources, which were written for different
audiences and in different genres. Discussion of Däumig’s
colonial experiences will be based largely on his first
article, “Travel Impressions of a Foreign Legionnaire,”
which was written before his conversion to socialism in
the style of a “ripping yarn.” It appeared in early 1900
in Der Soldaten-Freund, a journal catering to past and
present members of the German military. Through this
critique of French colonialism Däumig constructed a
nationalist life story for himself. Däumig switched
styles for his three articles in Die Neue Zeit, which were
written in the third person in keeping with the scholarly
tone of the journal. This essay will examine how the
scathing attacks on German and French colonial and
military policy in these articles renarrated past
experiences and helped justify his own path to socialism.
Finally, the essay will examine his 1901 drama Maifeier
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(“May Day”), which is a tale of multiple personal
transformations made possible by socialism. The story’s
hero was a thinly disguised version of Däumig, and his
redemptive sacrifice in the final act invoked the specter
of colonial violence Däumig experienced in Tonking.9
Ernst Däumig’s early career was a picaresque
transnational journey that took him to some of the
flashpoints of European high imperialism. His accounts of
this journey remain valuable not for their theoretical
insights or keen observations. Däumig’s writings are a
pastiche of familiar tropes; he was really more of a
consumer than a producer of worldviews. Rather, his
writings are valuable for the connections Däumig
established between the French Foreign Legion, the
Prussian military and German socialism as he forged and
reforged his life story. Before delving into these life
9 Däumig’s chief published texts used in this essay are: Ernst Däumig, “Reiseerinnerungen eines Fremden-Legionärs,” Der Soldaten-Freund67, no. 9, 10, 11 (1900): 553-64, 619-27, 83-93; idem, “Schlachtopferdes Militarismus,” Die Neue Zeit 18/II, no. 39 (1900): 365-71, idem, “Eine Deutsche Kolonialarmee,” Die Neue Zeit 18/II, no. 47 and 48 (1900): 616-622, 651-655; idem, “Die dreijährige Dienstzeit der berittenen Truppen,” Die Neue Zeit 19/I, no. 7 (1900-1901): 196-200; idem, Maifeier: Soziales Drama in drei Aufzügen, vol. 17, Sozialistische Theaterstücke (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1901); idem, Moderne Landsknechte: Erzählungen aus dem Kolonial-Soldatenleben (Halle: Verlag der Volksbuchhandlung, 1904).
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stories, a discussion is warranted of the methodological
approaches and historiographical questions that have
informed this analysis.
Autobiographical life stories and conversion in recent
historical writing
Many historians now writing biographies agree that
the common assumption that lives unfold according to a
course charted by the autonomous subject is “a
biographical illusion.”10 This illusion originates, in
part, in the very function of the modern individual’s
life story, which is to present the past as a series of
coherent and meaningful events leading up the present. As
the context of the present changes, the narrative is
rewritten, which is why life stories, whether oral
histories or memoirs, are considered difficult, if not
unreliable, sources.
10 For Simone Lässig the frequent invocation of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the “biographical illusion” by historians demonstrates the “centrality of the problem of coherence” to the task of writing biography. Lässig, “Introduction: Biography in Modern History–Modern Historiography in Biography,” in Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography, ed. Simone Lässig and Volker Berghahn (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008): 1-26.
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Biographers have found that memories are not just
selective, they are often false. As Mark Roseman has
shown in his sensitive portrait of a Holocaust survivor,
individuals sometimes borrow memories from others to suit
their own life stories. Through interviews with many GDR
citizens, Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato and
Dorothee Wierling established that supposedly individual
memories of the Second World War were in fact tropes
circulated amongst an entire generation.11 These analyses
demonstrate the importance of false, manipulated or
tropified memories in mastering past traumatic
experiences. Hence, if sensitively analyzed, the elisions
of selective memory can reveal more than they hide.
A useful sociological method for the analysis of life
stories has been developed by Ulrich Oevermann. According
to Oevermann, “crises of mastery” (Bewährungskrisen) form
11 As anecdotal evidence of this type of collective memory, the author has been struck by the frequency by which older Germans recalled a visit to the “kind Jewish doctor” in the 1930s or having given a pieceof bread to a passing Polish or Soviet forced laborer during the war. Mark Roseman, "Contexts and Contradictions: Writing the Biography of aHolocaust Survivor," in Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography, ed. Simone Lässig (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008): 201-14; Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato, and Dorothee Wierling, Die volkseigene Erfahrung: Eine Archäologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1990).
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the nodal points in biographies of modern individuals.
They arise at the point when the routinized practices or
the social and professional relations of an individual’s
life no longer make sense, i.e., they have lost their
rationality. This creates an opening for irrational
solutions offered by a charismatic event. Rewriting the
life story plays a crucial role in the individual’s
effort to reassert mastery and create a new rationality
or routine.12 Oevermann developed “objective hermeneutics”
as a method for analyzing the relationship between the
objective data of an individual’s life, in particular
these crises and points of transition, and the stories
created by the individual to provide a meaningful
narrative of past misfortune, recent decisions and future
hopes.13 In their case studies, Oevermann and others who12 Ulrich Oevermann, “Ein Modell der Struktur der Religiösität: Zugleich ein Strukturmodell von Lebenspraxis und von sozialer Zeit,” in Biographie und Religion: Zwischen Ritual und Selbstsuche, ed. Monika Wohlrab-Sahr(Frankfurt, New York: Campus, 1995): 27-102. esp. 44-51.13 Ulrich Oevermann, “Strukturelle Religiösität und ihre Ausprägungen unter Bedingungen der vollständigen Säkularisierung des Bewusstseins,”in Atheismus und religiöse Indifferenz, ed. Christel Gärtner, Detlef Pollack, and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2003): 339-87. See a discussion of Oevermann’s theory in the context of a broader effort by German sociologists to overcome the “oppositional positing of ‘objective’ social reality and ‘subjective’ accounts” in; Ursula Apitzsch and Lena Inowlocki, "Biographical Analysis: A 'German' School?" in The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science: Comparative Issues and Examples, ed. Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat, and Tom Wengraf
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have used this method often take both objective data and
narrative from the same ego documents.14 This is also a
necessity for any examination of Däumig’s early life,
given that all available sources have been written by
Däumig himself.
The paradigmatic resolution to a crisis of mastery is
conversion, which has emerged as a fascinating subgenre
of biographical study in its own right. Although
conversion appears as a radically contingent event, often
described by the convert as the penetration by a
spiritual force or an idea, the embrace of a new faith
has its own structured rationality. It has to create a
meaningful link between the structures and experiences of
the convert’s past and those of his or her desired
future. The very experience of conversion itself often
follows a preconceived moral structure. Theologian Bruce
Hindmarsh found that, like works of fiction, early modern
Evangelical autobiographies obeyed the rules of their
genres. The saved generally had the type of conversion
(London, New York: Routledge, 2000): 53-70, 58.14 For an example of a biographical case study using only ego documents, see Axel Jansen, "Die objektive Hermeneutik als Instrument der historischen Fallrekonstruktion. Analyse eines Briefes von Anne Morgan," Traverse. Zeitschrift für Geschichte/Revue d'histoire, no. 2 (2006): 43-56.
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experiences expected of them by their respective
denominations. Thus, the London Moravians had “quiet”
inward conversions, which were mistrusted by the
Methodists, who experienced outwardly emotional
conversion.15
In the case of conversion to modern worldviews, such
as Däumig’s, the narrative becomes more complicated. Very
often the tropes of Christian conversion were used to
describe the turning from the “old” (Christian) to the
“new” (scientific) worldview. Däumig’s account of his
conversion to Kautsky, in which corporeal suffering
“taught [him] to see the world with different eyes,”
harkens back to St. Paul’s Damascus experience. It also
conforms to the conversion narrative common to the
Pietist traditions of Däumig’s hometown of Halle, whereby
the illumination of grace follows a crisis of inward
suffering and self-examination.16
15 D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), 162-80.16 There are contrary accounts of Däumig’s religious socialization. In his satirical sketch of Däumig from 1920, Erich Dombrowski claimed that he was born “konfessionslos,” however, this would have been essentially legally impossible in 1866 and is probably a mistaken reference to his anticlerical agitation on behalf of the Komite Konfessionlos in 1914. By contrast, Horst Naumann states (without giving a source) that Däumig’s father was a sexton in the local
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Such borrowing of Protestant conversion narratives is
an example of the importance of religion to the formation
of political identities in an age of marked by both
secularist anticlericalism and ongoing confessional
identification. Däumig certainly understood his new
worldview as both secular and religious. Within two years
of moving to Berlin in 1912, Däumig became very involved
in the Berlin Free Religious Congregation, an atheistic
freethinking association of many thousand members, which
had originated in a dissenting Catholic sect in 1845.17 In
lieu of mass, the Free Religious offered public weekly
lectures on monistic, natural-scientific Weltanschauung and
church. Däumig did attend the Gymnasium in Halle founded by one of thechief German Pietists, August Hermann Francke (1663-1727). Francke’s own autobiographical Vita gave his followers a paradigmatic account of the breakthrough (Durchbruch) of grace that followed “inward penitentialstruggle.” (Busskampf). Johannes Fischart (pseud. for Erich Dombrowski), Das Alte und Neue System, vol. III, Köpfe der Gegenwart (Berlin: Oesterheld, 1920), 257; Naumann, “Ein treuer Vorkämpfer,” 801; Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England, 58-59.17 For Däumig’s Free Religious activities, see Todd Weir, “The Fourth Confession,” 568-578; and Horst Naumann, "Ernst Däumig - ein freireligiöser Revolutionär,” in “Kein Jenseits ist, kein Aufersteh'n” Freireligiöse in der Berliner Kulturgeschichte, ed. Horst Groschopp (Berlin: Bezirksamt Prenzlauer Berg, 1998): 190-99. For an investigation of the structuralrelationship between religious dissent and socialism, see Todd Weir, “Towards a History and Sociology of Atheist Vergemeinschaftung: The Berlin Free Religious Congregation 1845-1921,” in Formen religiöser Vergemeinschaftung in der Moderne, ed. Lucian Hölscher and Michael Geyer (Göttingen, Wallstein, 2006): 197-229.
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ethics. During the First World War Däumig penned a Free
People’s Catechism and through the Revolution he managed to
lecture on church history.18
Another aspect of recent writing on conversion that
deserves mention here relates to the role of social
identity. In her fascinating study of nineteenth-century
conversions in Britain and India, literary scholar Gauri
Viswanathan has shown that, as they resolved their own
crises of mastery, converts transgressed social,
religious, national and racial identities.19 They thereby
revealed a constitutive antinomy of the British Empire.
While the right to conversion was anchored in the
religious liberty guaranteed by the modern liberal state,
by making good on the promise of pluralism and crossing
over communal boundaries, converts challenged assumptions
about the naturalness of those group identities upon
which relations of domination were founded. In the realm
18 Ernst Däumig, Wanderungen durch die Kirchengeschichte, 2 ed. (Berlin: 1925 (1918)). In the final months of the war, Däumig wrote a pamphlet that contrasted the ethics of militarism and militarized Christianity with those of socialism and natural religion. It was subject to wartime military censorship. Ernst Däumig, Freier Volkskatechismus: Ein Wegweiser zur echten Nächstenliebe und freien Menschenwürde (Berlin: A. Hoffmanns, no year (1918)).19 Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton:Princeton UP, 1998).
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of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century politics,
historian Heinz-Gerhard Haupt has argued similarly that
political converts were held in low esteem precisely
because intellectuals and politicians expected
convictions and personalities to be uniform and
coherent.20 In that period of great political and
confessional polarization, hybrid identities were viewed
as suspect.21 Hence, conversion usually implied the
renunciation of past identities. By examining how
converts conformed to and subverted taboos on identity
formation, biography can reveal otherwise hidden aspects
of the landscape of social identities and the authorities
that enforced them.
Finally, there is the question of experience. While
conversion speaks to the ability of the individual to
embrace a new worldview and transgress boundaries, the
new life story must respond to the individual’s specific
20 Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, “Politische Konversion in historischer Perspektive. Methodische und empirische Überlegungen,” in Zeitperspektiven: Studien zu Kultur und Gesellschaft, ed. Uta Gerhardt (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner,2003): 267-304, 279.21 A linguistic trace of the exclusive thinking about identity is foundin the term of approbation “Zwitter” (hermaphrodite/hybrid), which wasregularly invoked in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to impugn anything deemed unmanly and unnatural.
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past. It must provide “an apologetic of the self.”22
Experience may be redeemed or repressed through the life
story, but even where past events are ostensibly omitted,
they generally still inform the life story in some way.
Analysis of life stories can trace relationships between
historically significant events and political or
religious worldviews otherwise missed in conventional
political or intellectual history. The historically
important events of Däumig’s early life that interest us
here were his experiences of violence in the French
colonial service and Prussian military. How were these
experiences reflected in Däumig’s life stories? This
question brings us to an important debate in recent
German historiography.
Colonialism and Violence in Recent German History Writing
Däumig’s early writings center on systems of
domination and acts of violence they engender. He
understood himself to be primarily a victim of this
violence, yet he was also a perpetrator. He described
killing a Chinese “pirate” in hand-to-hand combat while22 Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 16.
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on a thirty-month tour in French Indochina.23 In order to
make meaning of his own experiences of violence in the
colonies and in the military, he had to translate them
into the socialist imaginary both for himself and for his
readership.
Explaining how systems of colonial violence and
domination were translated into metropolitan culture has
emerged as a key research objective, prompted by the
shift of colonial history from the periphery to the
center of the study of modern Germany. This shift has
brought German historians in line with the trend across
many disciplines towards what historian Frederick Cooper
has critically called “unbounded colonialism,” meaning
the use of colonialism as a megatheory of global
modernity.24 For German historians the stakes here are
particularly high, since the stated or unstated point of
orientation of many of the new histories of German
colonialism is the hypothesis put forward initially by
23 Däumig, “Reiseerinnerungen,” 686.24 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 4. The title of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book may serve as a programmatic statement for the rising place of post-colonial theory in European history writing: Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000).
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Hannah Arendt that colonial violence returned to Europe
in National Socialist racial war.25
Whereas earlier research focused on the impact that
the lack of overseas possessions had on a particularly
German colonial fantasy,26 historians are now addressing
the actual practices and experiences of German
colonization. As the authors of a recent article on
German racism put it, the history of “blackness without
blacks” has been replaced to one of “blackness with
blacks.”27 Isabel Hull has inserted the genocide carried
out by the German Army against the Herero people from
25 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Deutsch, 1986 [1951]), 183-184. For recent surveys of the new literature on colonialism/imperialism in German history, see Uta Poiger, “Imperialism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Germany,” History and Memory17 (2005): 117-43; Matthew Jefferies, Contesting the German Empire, 1871-1918 (Oxford, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), 164-178.26 Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870 (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1997); Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League (Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1984); Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, “Imperialism and Revisionism in Interwar Germany,” in Imperialism and After:Continuities and Discontinuities, ed. Wolfgang Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986): 90-119.27 Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse, and Yara-Colette Lemke-Muniz de Faria, “Blacks, Germans, and Politics of Imperial Imagination, 1920-60,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998): 205-229, 206. Sander Gilman describes German colonial literature as existing “apart from that of the other colonial powers.” Sander Gilman, On Blackness without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982).
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1904 to 1907 into her examination of Prussian military
culture from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 through
the First World War. This act of colonial violence, she
demonstrates, reflected and further reinforced patterns
of war conduct specific to German militarism.28 Jürgen
Zimmerer has argued, by contrast, that genocide emerged
less from military-cultural responses to the exigencies
of war than from a specifically colonial intersection of
“race and space.” National Socialist policies in Eastern
Europe were, according to Zimmerer, a continuation of
colonial practices developed across the globe by the
imperial powers.29
28 Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practice of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2005).29 Jürgen Zimmerer, “The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquestand Extermination,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 197-219; idem, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Towards an Archeology of Genocide,” inGenocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004): 49-76. Pascal Grosse has argued that the relationship between German colonialism and National Socialism should not be conceived of as one of continuity, but rather as two manifestations of a “shared governingstructure based on a common biopolitical intellectual foundation—namely, eugenicist ideas of racial selection, racial reproduction, andterritorial expansion.” German exceptionalism he finds not German conduct in the colonies, but rather in Germany’s sudden loss of its colonies in 1918 at the height of world imperialism [This sentence seems to be incomplete]. Pascal Grosse, “What Does German Colonialism Have to Do with National Socialism? A Conceptual Framework,” in Germany's Colonial Pasts, ed. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2005): 115-134, 118.
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Däumig’s biography cuts across the new studies of
German colonialism. On the one hand, an account of his
experiences in the French colonies overcomes the
methodological predicaments of supposedly transnational
studies that take their examples solely from German
colonies.30 On the other, the manner in which he
renarrated his colonial and military pasts shows how the
experience of violence was translated into the socialist
public sphere in ways that both conformed to and inverted
colonial narratives. Däumig’s early writings reveal that
colonial violence penetrated far beyond the political
30 While arguing for a complicity of all imperial powers in the Holocaust by virtue of the international nature of the colonial project, Zimmerer illustrates his points using research on the genocide against the Herero in German South-West Africa. This, it may be argued, practically reinforces the argument he theoretically opposes, namely that the Nazi Regime was a continuation of the “deviant path” or Sonderweg of the German Empire. A similar problem is presented by a recent anthology, Das Kaiserreich transnational, whose editors argue that colonial history is the primary vehicle for a new transnational history of Germany, yet whose contributors with few exceptions focus on the German colonies. These studies thereby extend German history to include its colonies and peripheries, but do not ultimately deliver on the promise of a transnational history that accounts for transferals between British, French, Turkish, American and German imperialisms. Jürgen Osterhammel and Sebastian Conrad, Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871-1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). The genuinely transnational study of German and American imperialism by Andrew Zimmerman is an exception that proves the rule: “A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers,” American Historical Review 110, no. 5 (2005): 1362-98.
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imaginary of the German nationalist right, but that in so
doing, it underwent complex mediations.
The Road to Tonkin
Däumig gives no precise account of his decision at
the age of twenty to leave his native Halle and join the
French Foreign Legion. We may assume that Däumig, too,
had fallen victim to the combination of “lust for
adventure” and social pressure that he described in
Modern Mercenary: Tales from the Life of a Colonial Soldier (1904). Put
another way, his decision “to try his luck in foreign
service” responded to the “pull” factors of colonial
fantasies and to the “push” factors of personal and
social crisis. 31
Given that they were written from a critical
perspective and ex post facto, Däumig’s articles of 1900 give
scant attention to the “pull” factors, except to say that
the decision to enter the Foreign Legion was a “foolish
blindness” (thörichte Verblendung) based on “youthful
dreams.”32 The “push” factors, by contrast, receive
greater attention. Däumig called the Foreign Legion the31 Däumig, Moderne Landsknechte, 2-3.32 Däumig, “Reiseerinnerungen,” 556, 558.
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collection point of the “lost sons of Europe” that
attracted young men alienated from their homes by virtue
of social friction, personal failure, crime or poverty.33
In Däumig’s case, his first documented failure was
his non-completion of the prestigious Latina, the
Gymnasium of the Franckische Stiftung in Halle. By
dropping out after the Prima, he ended his ascent out of
his lower middle class upbringing.34 “My career (Laufbahn),
upon which I had embarked with such high-strung hopes,
was interrupted,” he wrote to explain his later regret at
having “irresponsibly” joined the Foreign Legion.35 The
primary reason for Germans to “sell their skins to a
foreign power” was, according to Däumig, desertion from
the Prussian-German army. Given the fact that he went to
jail upon return to Germany, it is likely that Däumig,
33 Däumig, Moderne Landsknechte, 8.34 According to Horst Naumann, Däumig’s father was a sexton (Küster), while Colin Ross (1920) claimed he was an army sergeant. Naumann, “Eintreuer Vorkämpfer,” 801, Ross cited in Morgan, “Ernst Däumig,” 304.35 Däumig, “Reiseerinnerungen,” 558. It is not clear what Däumig understood this “career” to be. It may have been theology, which according to one obituary had been his intended course of study. It may have been the Prussian military. Däumig wrote to Kautsky that “when I became a soldier, I had visited the Gymnasium up to the Prima.” [Is this the translation given in the Morgan article? It’s very ‘German’! I’d have preferred ‘when I became a soldier, I had beenat the Gymnasium up to Prima [level]’], “Ernst Däumig,” 304; IISG, NL Kautsky, DVIII, no. 237, 7 May 1900.
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too, was a deserter from the Prussian army.36
The school failure followed by likely military
insubordination indicates a volatile personality with
difficulty identifying with authority.37 Such a
personality type and its related crises correspond to
someone for whom the figure of the colonial adventurer
and the possibilities the colonial environment offered
for flight and transgression were particularly
attractive. The identity cultivated by and about
adventurers, as romantic, autonomous and deadly
outsiders, made heroic the alienated position that many
volunteers for colonial service had already experienced
in their home environment.
In his autobiographical work African Games (1936),
Germany’s leading reactionary modernist novelist Ernst
Jünger (1895-1998) provides an idealized account of the
dialectic of “pull” and “push” leading up to his own
36 Däumig, “Schlachtopfer,” 370.37 The author of a rather eclectic study of anti-imperialism, found that the “inventory of traits ascribed to the imperialist can be foundin the anti-imperialist [E.D.] Morel: the racial antipathy, the sense of personal inadequacy to be overcome, the ‘blocked mobility’ in a conventional career, the rebellion against paternal authority, the messianism, and the unscrupulousness, conjoined with the conviction that historical right was on one’s side.” Lewis Feuer, Imperialism and the Anti-imperialist Mind (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1986), 154.
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decision to join the Foreign Legion in 1913. Jünger
recounts the flight from his high school (Gymnasium) to
France as the combined result of the anxiety provoked by
the “narrowness” of his town, family and school and of
the beckoning of exotic fantasies symbolized in Africa.
After some months of fantasizing, Jünger finally
committed himself to flight through a transgressive
criminal act: the misappropriation of his school funds in
order to purchase a used revolver, ammunition and a copy
of Die Geheimnisse des dunklen Erdteils, most likely a translation
of Henry M. Stanley’s classic Through the Dark Continent
(1878).38
Jünger’s pairing of gun and travelogue is indicative
of the close relationship between violence and knowledge
in the colonial imaginary. In the 1870s, when Stanley
wrote his account, the age had not ended in which
gentleman adventurers and autodidact scientists made
wondrous discoveries in the tropics in the name of
science. The Gymnasium dropout and military deserter
Gerhard Rohlfs fought for the French Foreign Legion in
38 Ernst Jünger, Afrikanische Spiele (Hamburg: Deutsche Hausbücherei, 1936), 12. Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent. (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1878).
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Algeria between 1856 and 1860 and then went on to became
one of Germany’s best-known “Africa researchers,” who
published numerous accounts of his expeditions.39 Such
travelogues produced ongoing colonial desires in the
European public, and yet opportunities were evaporating
for voyages of discovery such as Livingstone’s
exploration of the upper Congo River or Rohlfs’s
pioneering journey through the Sahara.40
In an age of imperialist competition, as Susanne
Zantop has noted, the German colonial fantasy moved away
from identification with noble scientists, such as the
“German Columbus” Alexander von Humboldt, and towards
conquest.41 After weighing various options, Jünger settled
upon allowing himself “to be recruited as a foreign
legionnaire, in order to thereby reach at least the
39 Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 21 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2003): 767-68. 40 Joseph Conrad had the adventurer Marlow describe this transformationin Heart of Darkness: “Now when I was a little chap […] there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularlyinviting on the map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there. [… Africa] had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness.” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1995), 21-22.41 Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies.
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outskirts of the promised land and then penetrate into
its interior on his own.” This detour through the Foreign
Legion was, however, a goal in its own right. Jünger did
not wish to pass through North Africa, “without having
participated in a few battles, because the whistling of
bullets appeared to me as music from higher spheres,
which one could only read about in books, but which to
experience one must make a pilgrimage, like the Americans
to Bayreuth.”42
Violence was always a constitutive part of the
colonial encounter. Even one of the great scientists of
the era, zoologist Ernst Haeckel, prominently displayed a
pistol in his belt in a promotional photo he had taken of
himself during his studies in Ceylon.43 In the
adventurer’s fantasy, however, violence was not just a
means to an end, but an end in itself. The dehumanization
of the natives through racism turned the colonies into an
arena for killing without morality. Resisters to colonial
rule became equated with tropical animals, whose
42 Jünger, Afrikanische Spiele, 7.43 Ernst Haeckel, Indische Reisebriefe (Berlin: Patel, 1909).
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perceived threat to European colonizers justified their
hunting.44
Unlike other sixteen year olds, Jünger did not want
to become an “inventor, revolutionary, soldier or some
benefactor of humanity—I was much more attracted by a
zone in which the battle of natural forces found pure and
purposeless expression. [...] I transferred [this zone]
into the tropical world.” Däumig surmised a similar
attitude in the volunteers in the German military
expedition to China in 1900, who were, he thought,
motivated less by patriotism than by “real German
rowdiness and lust for adventure.”45 A similar amoralism
belonged to the esprit de corps of the reactionary Freikorps
after the First World War.46
44 Nearly all white men and many white women who visited colonial Kenyaused guns to hunt game. In some cases there was a fluid boundary between hunting animals and hunting people, as in the example of Sir Champion de Crespigny, a white hunter in East Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century, who joined British punitive campaignsas an extension of his sport: “chasse de nègres.” Edward Steinhart, Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya (Oxford: James Curry, 2006), 84.45 Jünger, Afrikanische Spiele, 11; Däumig, “Eine Deutsche Kolonialarmee,” 621.46 The Freikorps often cultivated a rough-hewn, anarchic manner and identified with the moral nihilism of [missing word ‘the’?] mercenary. One Freikorps officer, Major JosephBischoff, had spent eight years in Africa and four in WWI and called himself “an old freebooter.” Robert Waite,
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Colonial amoralism was for Jünger “the extraordinary
beyond (Jenseits) of the social and moral spheres that
surrounded me,” and he hoped to achieve personal autonomy
through transgression of bourgeois normality. The
destruction of his bourgeois identity was not free from
self-destructive wishes. Rather than frightening him,
Jünger found that newspaper reports of the “dangers,
privations and atrocities” in the Foreign Legion were
enticements for “good-for-nothings of my type.” Däumig’s
essays give ample examples of the desperation,
immaturity, compulsiveness, self-hatred and alienation of
many legionnaires.47
Experiences in the French Foreign Legion
Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany 1918-1923(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1952), 110. See also Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, vol. 2 Männerkörper—zur Psychoanalyse des weißen Terrors (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch, 1980).47 Jünger, Afrikanische Spiele, 8. An American legionnaire of the 1920s asks at the outset of his published account: “Why did I join the Legion? I have been asked that question many times. And usually I say, ‘I don’t know.’ As a matter of fact I don’t know. Who is sure of all the elements of the internal turmoil which sling a man into an abrupt decision?” Bennett Doty, The Legion of the Damned: The Adventures of Bennett J. Doty In the French Foreign Legion as Told by Himself (Garden City: Garden City Publishing, 1928), 12.
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The participation of thousands of German volunteers
in the French Foreign Legion is a good indication of the
power of the colonial fantasy. The Foreign Legion filled
a niche in the market for colonial adventurers, namely
for men from countries without extensive colonial
involvement, such as Switzerland, the United States, and
Germany.48 An inspection in 1866 showed that Germans made
up over half of the Foreign Legion.49 The Franco-Prussian
war of 1870 greatly lessened the appeal of French service
to German nationalists, but it created a new source of
recruits among the residents of occupied Alsace-Lorraine.
In his first article for Die Neue Zeit in 1900, Däumig wrote
that 45% of the volunteers for the Foreign Legion were
Alsatians, who didn’t want to wear the “spiked helmet”
48 The Swiss writer Blaise Cendras is another former legionnaire, who, like Jünger, valorized transgression and violence, albeit from a leftist political position. 49 This survey found that 58 percent of the men came from one of the German States. David Jordan, The History of the French Foreign Legion: From 1831 to the Present Day (Staplehurst: Spellmont, 2005), 40. A former legionnaire from England noted in 1985 that the number of German volunteers seemed“at times to dominate the institution.” Cited in: Tony Geraghty, March or Die: A New History of the French Foreign Legion (New York: Facts On File, 1986),8.
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(i.e. serve in the Prussian Army), followed by other
Germans (12%), Swiss (8%) and Belgians (7%).50
Because their service to the French state was
considered illegal or dishonorable in a period of
heightened nationalism, the experiences of the German
legionnaires remained a repressed colonial history.
Despite the current trend towards transnational history,
recent studies of German colonialism have essentially
neglected the role of German mercenaries. Yet, it may
well be that prior to the German expeditionary force to
China in 1900, more Germans died in French than in German
colonial wars.51 50 Däumig, “Schlachtopfer,” 365-66. Evidence of the continuing and dominant role of Germans in the Legion can be found in the memoirs of the American Maurice Magnus who joined the Foreign Legion in Tunis in 1915. To his declaration that he wished to join “to fight the ‘Boches’,” a guard on duty at the Tunisian barracks laughingly replied, “You have come to right place—you will see enough of the ‘Boches’ in the Legion.” Soon Magnus was horrified to discover that “seventy percent of the Legion were Germans, and it was German food, German manners, German discipline, German militarism, German arrogance, German insolence and German arbitrariness. […] [E]very sergeant-major but one was German, every sergeant but two was German, the cooks were Germans, the infirmary nurses were German. The severityof the punishments was decidedly German. It was a German regiment of the lowest type transported to Africa.” Maurice Magnus, Memoirs of the Foreign Legion (London: Martin Secker, 1924), 120, 143-44.51 Däumig estimated that of the 17,000 Germans who served in the Frenchcolonies between 1870 and 1900, 14,000 were killed or permanently debilitated by tropical disease. Däumig, “Schlachtopfer,” 365-66, 370.These casualty figure seem high, given that between 1887 and 1909 only271 legionnaires died in combat in Indochina, while 2,705 perished
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Following two years in Algeria, Däumig spent thirty
months in French Indochina. Vietnam was an attractive
destination that offered legionnaires opportunities for
occasional combat with Chinese “pirates” and a decadent
lifestyle with kept women and opium. Tropical disease,
however, made colonial Vietnam extremely lethal. Thus
Däumig describes how each member of his company embarked
for Vietnam “thrilled by an adventurous future. […] But
most did not suspect that they were heading towards an
immense field of corpses.” 52
From start to finish, Däumig’s “Travel Impressions”
recount episode after episode of death, violence and
sadism. By the end of his tour, death by drowning, by
wild animals, by guerrilla attack, by suicide and above
all by disease had reduced the 450 men who had come over
together to a band of 50 survivors. The bodies of the
from disease. Douglas Porch, The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force (New York: Harper Collins, 1991): 220-223.52 Isabel Hull noted the correlation between colonial wars in the Far East and prostitution revealed in the extraordinarily high (140 percent due to repeat infections)rate of venereal disease among German soldiers in China, ascompared with 93 percent in South West Africa and 42 percent during the Franco-Prussian war. Hull, Absolute Destruction, 151. Däumig, “Schlachtopfer,” 564.
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legionnaires left behind, he would later write, formed
the “cultural fertilizer” (Kulturdünger) of European
colonialism.53
Death among the “natives” received less attention in
Däumig’s account. The only killing described in any
detail was one he himself committed while engaged in
hand-to-hand combat during an assault on a village
harboring “pirates.” After an enemy’s sabre-blow got
caught in the leather case on his chest, Däumig parried
and with a “well-meaning jab of the bayonet put an end to
the further bellicose intentions of the Chinese warrior
and transported him to Buddha’s heavenly realm.”54 The
cold irony of these words documents the dehumanization of
victim (and perpetrator) and the devaluation of
culture/religion through colonial violence.
If the Foreign Legion provided an outlet for violent
fantasies, it was not a permanent solution to the crises
of young men like Däumig and Jünger. In fact, mercenaries
often replicated within the Legion the types of
antagonistic relationships to their social environment
53 Däumig, “Schlachtopfer,” 366,54 Däumig, “Reiseerinnerungen,” 693, 686.
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that had led them to join up in the first place.55
Disciplinary problems and desertion were endemic. A
popular history of the Foreign Legion found that
“[d]esertion was part of the legionnaire’s existential
search for satisfaction, a flight from reality,
encouraged by the tendency of legionnaires to fantasize,
something that the mournful garrisons of southern Algeria
probably did little to hold in check.” In 1908, one
legionnaire inspired by the recently publicized story of
the “Captain of Köpenick” conned a group of fellow German
legionnaires in Algeria into group desertion by
pretending to be a staff member of the Prussian Minister
of War with orders for them to report back to Germany
immediately.56
55 The same “desolate, deadening life in the barracks” that led German soldiers to volunteer by the thousands to take part in the 1900 China mission, had led legionnaires stationed in Algeria to volunteer for missions in Tonkin, Madagascar, or Sudan “although many of them knew precisely that they faced a certain death, or at least untold dangers and privations.” Däumig, “Eine Deutsche Kolonialarmee,” 620.56 In 1906 the shoemaker Wilhelm Voigt impersonated an army captain anddirected a group of swim school guards to take over the Rathaus of Köpenick, a suburb of Berlin. After arresting the mayor, Voigt absconded with the city treasury. The story of the “Captain of Köpenick” provided material for a book, a play and numerous films lampooning the willingness of Germans to blindly follow military authority. The story of his Algerian imitator is found in: Porch, French Foreign Legion, 327.
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The Critique of French Colonialism from a German National
Position
In 1901 Die Neue Zeit reviewed a popular account of the
German colonies. “The ready market that this work has
found,” the reviewer lamented, “proves that today, when
the imperialistic-weltpolitische current spreads ever wider
into the circles of the financially solvent middle class,
even works about colonies and colonial questions with
very little overall scientific value can reckon with a
sure sale.”57 The burgeoning interest in an expansive
“Weltpolitik” sparked by the German invasion of China in
1900 was not, however, limited to middle-class supporters
alone, as is here suggested. Working-class readers also
showed an avid, though by no means uncritical, interest
in colonial politics and travelogues.58
The existence of these markets was an important
condition of the possibility of the transformations that
57 Review by H. C. (Heinrich Cunow?) of Karl Heßler, Die deutschen Kolonien. Beschreibung von Land und Leuten unserer auswärtigen Besitzungen (Leipzig 1900) in: Die Neue Zeit. vol. 19/I, no. 3 (1901), 96.58 John Short, “Everyman's Colonial Library: Imperialism and Working-Class Readers in Leipzig, 1890-1914,” German History 21, no. 4 (2003): 445-75.
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Däumig underwent between 1898 and 1900. Having left the
Prussian military in 1898 he first sought to establish
himself as a (nationalist) journalist, before becoming a
socialist critic of German militarism and colonialism in
1900.
Däumig’s first article, “Travel Impressions of a
Foreign Legionnaire,” appeared in early 1900 in Der
Soldaten-Freund. It was likely the text that Däumig penned
while serving in the German military but was prohibited
from publishing by his commanding officer.59 The text
clearly identifies with a German military audience and
constructs his stint in the Foreign Legion in French
Indochina as a misguided detour from the correct path of
military service for his own nation.
Däumig begins his tale by informing the reader that
risking probable death in Vietnam had been a self-imposed
punishment for having foolishly betrayed his country to
join the French. The monotonous days aboard a steamer
traveling from Oran in Algeria to Tonkin sent him into a
depression at his “misspent life.” He regretted his
decision to leave “the homeland (Heimath), to which all59 Däumig, “Schlachtopfer,” 370.
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chords of my heart were tied, […] in order to serve a
foreign cause in a foreign colony, when my youthful
dreams might have allowed me to act for Germany in its
young colonies.”60
Däumig gives detailed descriptions of the emotions
evoked in him by the appearance of German ships during
the voyage. His heart soars at the “smart appearance” and
the “sight of the German colors” of the navy vessel
“Leipzig” off Ceylon. He describes the desertion of a
“young Pole from a good family” in Singapore, who jumped
ship and swam to the refuge of a “small, smart” German
steamer. This anecdote serves to highlight Däumig’s
national alienation and prefigure his own later journey
“home” to the Prussian military.61
The positive descriptions of German (and English)
military and commercial activities in the colonial sphere
contrast strongly to the negative description of the
direct rule by the French, who took “no great profit out
of their colonies.”62 Däumig inserts the description of a
60 Däumig, “Reiseerinnerungen,” 558.61 Däumig claims that he did not follow the Pole’s example, because “atthat time I had fully given up on my life” and expected to find his death in Tonkin. Ibid, 560, 561.62 Ibid, 564.
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walk around the French “Citadelle” in the Vietnamese town
of Sontay as a literary device that allows him to distill
his criticism of the French colonial misadministration
and to link it to the depravity of the natives. His tour
begins with a description of the Vietnamese (Anamiten),
who swarm into the French quarter in the morning hours
“in order to take up their occupations as boy, coolie and
the like. They were small, weakly, powerless figures, out
of whose yellow faces crooked-slitted black eyes gazed
shyly at the European. [They were] a slavish, nervous
race, destined to be ruled by the more powerful; it was
only a question of whether they felt better under the
rule of the French than [they had] a year before under
the pigtailed Chinese.” Even a passing detachment of
native soldiers, who had “almost no military value,”
appeared feminine (and thereby invited domination): “At
first glance I did not know if I had a band of children
or women in front of me.” French non-commissioned
officers lazily supervised the exercises of the native
soldiers, intervening only occasionally, “by giving one
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of the little fellows such a dig in the ribs that he
nearly fell to the earth.” 63
Däumig then turns to the splendid residence of the
French colony. “From this house were issued the orders,
which, instead of bringing peace, development and growth
for the rich, hopeful colony, were dictated by egotism
and avarice, which did not ask about human lives as long
as the almighty Herr Resident found his profit.”64 Rather
than working cooperatively to battle the “Chinese
pirates,” the civilian governor—“in most cases a Parisian
hobnob without knowledge of the colonial conditions”—
undermined military efforts. The cost of the governor’s
ill-planned campaigns was born by the soldiers.
Illustrating this point, Däumig’s walk next takes him
past the citadel’s cemetery, which was full of the
remains of the legionnaires—mostly Germans—who fell in
the famous battle of 1884: “How much German blood had
flowed here as in many other places for a foreign cause!”
65
63 Ibid, 621, 622.64 Ibid, 622, 623.65 Ibid, 623, 624. The battle of 1884, in which most of the French Foreign Legion regiments had been annihilated, had been the decisive battle between the French State and elements of the Chinese military
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Däumig then passes a “half-collapsed Chinese pagoda”
that serves in his text as a symbol for the state of
native governance. Behind bamboo huts full of starving
prisoners, he discovers a native court at work, the
description of which draws on nearly every trope of
oriental despotism. The judge was “an old, gray Anamit,”
whose “dull” staring eyes and “slack” features revealed
him to be an opium-smoker. Behind this mask was hidden a
sadist, who had an accused man repeatedly tortured during
an interrogation. Däumig dedicated an entire page to a
minute description of the gruesome methods and outcomes
of this torture session. The French had permitted this
court to continue, “to reconcile [the natives] at least
somewhat with their rule.” To clinch the connection made
between native and French despotism, Däumig describes
finally how, on the journey back to his barracks, he
passed again by the residence, where he saw the
resident’s wife, dressed in white and swaying in a
who tried to maintain Chinese rule over Vietnam. Subsequent Foreign Legion expeditions, such as those Däumig joined, were “mopping up actions.” German colonies had a similar competition between military and civilian authorities, which in the case of the 1904 Herero rebellion in German Southwest Africa was decided in favor of the military.
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hammock. While within earshot of the screaming torture
victim in the native court, she herself was beating “the
naked back of her Boy.”66
Arriving finally in his quarters, Däumig sought
distraction in an issue of the Petit Journal, only to
discover an article on the brutal German suppression of a
revolt in East Africa. The article contrasted the
“barbarie teutonique” revealed in Major Wissmann’s
execution of rebel leaders with phrases about the
humanity and culture of France. Recalling the scenes just
witnessed in the citadel and what they revealed about
“how they put the beautiful ideas of civilization into
practice in France,” he “angrily hurled the paper to the
ground.”67
By showing the mutual interpenetration of French
administration and Vietnamese and Chinese despotism,
Däumig engaged in a critique of colonialism similar to
that made by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. Colonial
disease, danger and depravity infected Europeans, and
66 The preeminence of British colonialism is documented by Däumig’s useof English names, “coolie” or “boy” for colonial subjects. Däumig, “Reiseerinnerungen,” 624, 625.67 Ibid, 626.
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absolute power encouraged sadism. The end result was a
dehumanization of both colonizer and colonized that
brought out their worst sides and led the Europeans into
hypocrisy. Unlike Conrad, however, Däumig still held out
the possibility of good colonial administration,
presumably under German or English direction. This
reinforced the foundational ideology of liberal
colonialism, which justified the use of violence to
eliminate oriental despotism and provide “improvement” to
the suffering colonial masses, who were depicted as
effeminate and incapable of self-rule.68
A glimpse of benevolent colonial administration is
offered at the end of Däumig’s “Travel Impressions,” when
he strikes out on his own to visit a French missionary
living among Vietnamese villagers. Emerging from the
forest, Däumig is amazed by the “well-tended rice fields”
and the “cleanliness of the huts and their occupants”
that stood in strong contrast to the filth of other
native villages and provided evidence that “a better
68 Gayatri Spivak summed up liberal colonial ideology in the pithy formula: “white men saving brown women from brown men.” Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313.
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spirit ruled” here. The source of this peace, order and
prosperity was the missionary, who, unlike all other
whites Däumig had encountered, lived in ascetic
conditions among the villagers as an equal. He led this
egalitarian society by example and by the force of a
luminous charisma expressed through a “noble face,”
“large penetrating eyes” and a “harmonious voice” that
spoke “most refined French.”69
In language that prefigures Däumig’s own later
writings as a Free Religious speaker and a promulgator of
communitarian council theory, the priest tells Däumig
that the “enslaved people” were initially unreceptive to
the “holy teaching,” but that slowly he began to gather
“souls around me.” Repeating Däumig’s own criticisms, the
priest damns the “Chinese rule” for its persecutions and
then chides the French state for failing to improve
things.70
This vision of positive colonialism, as the emanation
of true culture and spirituality through the model of the
early Christian community, stands in sharp contrast to
69 Däumig, “Reiseerinnerungen,” 692.70 Ibid, 693.
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the positive images Däumig offers of the German military.
Violence does figure centrally in the priest’s narrative—
in the course of which he points out three holes in his
table from bullets fired “at close range by fanatical
Buddhists”—and he does possess “a pair of hunting guns in
flawless condition.”71 However, his violence is merely
defensive, necessary in order to again operate on the
spiritual plane. In this as in all other respects, the
“brave hero of faith (Glaubensheld)” is the opposite of the
nihilistic legionnaire.
In summary, “Travel Impressions” contained two
critical yet conflicting counter-narratives to French
colonialism. Each offered a new role that would redeem
Däumig’s “misguided life” as a legionnaire: the soldier
in the service of the nation and the charismatic “hero of
faith.” By the time the piece was finally published in
1900, Däumig was about to reevaluate his life in
accordance with the second ideal.
The Market for Colonial Fantasies and the Conversion to
Socialism
71 Ibid, 692.
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In interpreting Däumig’s conversion to socialism in
1900, we must again inquire into the “pull” and “push”
factors. Although his first letter to Kautsky states that
it was the reading of pacifist literature that led him to
socialism, subsequent letters make clear that
professional success as a journalist within the socialist
movement was of primary importance to Däumig. Kautsky’s
interest in his articles greatly strengthened his “self
confidence […], because if someone like me dedicates
himself to the writer’s profession after a past as a
foreign legionnaire and a Prussian Unteroffizier that was
tumultuous and of little intellectual benefit, then—among
other disappointments—one is not spared the doubt of
one’s own abilities, particularly when one has to
struggle with severe material worries and other inner
conflicts.”72 In addition to psychological support, Däumig
also told Kautsky that he could only “proceed on the path
[he] finally realized [was] correct” if journalism
allowed him to escape material dependence on his
72 IISG, NL Kautsky, DVIII, no. 238, 13 July 1900.
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relatives who disapproved of his “views (Anschauungen) and
‘useless scribblings.’”73
Kautsky’s attentive cultivation of Däumig over the
summer of 1900 corresponded to the interests of an editor
looking for articles that shed light on the quickly
escalating crisis in China.74 Däumig’s first article
appeared a few weeks before the Wilhelm II’s infamous
“Hun speech,” in which the Kaiser told the departing
expeditionary force to “give no quarter and take no
prisoners” and to comport themselves like the Huns, so
that “the name ‘Germany’ may be known in China, such that
no Chinese will even dare to look askance at a German.”75
In subsequent articles, Däumig was able to refer to the
unfolding events between Berlin and China. Kautsky sent
Däumig editorial feedback, ideas for new articles, and
writings by Major Wissmann, the aforementioned leader of
73 IISG, NL Kautsky, DVIII, no. 240, 3 August 1900.74 Kautsky wrote extensively on the relationship of militarism and colonialism. See Nicholas Stargardt, The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics, 1866-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 72-87, list of Kautsky’s relevant writings on 208-210.75 Citation from Hull, 135. On Wilhelm II’s “Hunnenrede,” see Sabine Dabringhaus, “An Army on Vacation? The German War in China,” in Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871-1914, ed. Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999): 465-66.
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punitive expeditions in East Africa. Däumig, for his
part, recognized the timeliness of his material and
offered several predictive pieces about the outcome of
current German policies.
By becoming a journalist, Däumig tried to give value
to his colonial experiences in two ways. First he
renarrated his past experiences in line with his present
perspective. Second, he tried to turn them into capital
that gave him authority to provide expert testimony in
the public sphere.
What were the “bitter experiences” in the cavalry
unit in Metz that functioned as “push” factors in
Däumig’s conversion? Peppered throughout his Neue Zeit
articles are numerous indications that his ambitions for
advancement and recognition within the military had been
frustrated. To begin with, his service to the French
state likely brought ongoing discrimination in the German
military. “Artificially cultivated chauvinism” made
German legionnaires “branded and despised” and hence
barred their promotion “despite all personal excellence,”
he wrote. His own effort to gain some recognition by
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publishing his travel memories was, after all, thwarted
by his commanding officer.76
Particularly bitter to Däumig was likely his rank as
Quartiermeister, the non-commissioned officer responsible
for maintaining the equipment of the mounted artillery in
the cavalry.77 As a non-commissioned officer, Däumig had
reached a professional dead end. He was forever fated to
take orders from those who, unlike him, had completed
Gymnasium and were thus qualified to become officers. The
envy and hostility he expressed towards these officers in
a letter to Kautsky reveals at the same time an
identification with them: “These [military] circles are
of the fixed opinion that one must be an officer to be
able to penetrate into the secrets of this [military]
science. Through my work I would like to provide proof
that even without having visited the military academy,
76 Däumig notes with evident bitterness that in the 1860s the Africa explorer Gerhard Rohlfs was able to become an emissary of the PrussianKing despite his prior service for the French. Däumig, Moderne Landsknechte, 3-4. Däumig, “Schlachtopfer,” 370.77 In his third article in Die Neue Zeit, he provided details of the precise standards by which the leather equipment was polished. He found this degrading because the time-consuming polishing served no rational military purpose; in fact, whitening the leather (blanco-ing)made the cavalry easier to target for enemy artillery. Däumig, “Die dreijährige Dienstzeit,” 200.
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one can write about these things as an autodidact and on
the basis of practical experiences in military and
colonial domains.”78 As a popularizer of this science in
the socialist press, Däumig had become a military expert
after all, albeit a critical one.
From his new socialist perspective, Däumig extended
his earlier criticism of French colonialism to encompass
German militarism as well. In “The Sacrificial Victims of
Militarism” he blamed the deaths of German mercenaries in
French service on the systematic violence within the
Prussian military that caused recruits, particularly
Alsatians, to desert. The “irrepressible hawkishness
(unverwüstliche Schneidigkeit)” of the officers led to
persistent mishandling of soldiers. Those who often
carried out the tortures were the non-commissioned
officers (Unteroffiziere), who were the ultimate victims of
German militarism, because “[o]n these men weighed the
pressure of the entire military institution and demands.”
According to Däumig, their own mistreatment by captains
78 IISG, NL Kautsky, DVIII, no. 238, 13 July 1900.
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and Rittmeister explained why Unteroffiziere “could take it out
on enlisted men (sich an den Gemeinen vergreifen).”79
In describing the “pedagogical blows to the ribs” and
“helpful whipping” used during training in the German
military, Däumig repeated nearly exactly the ironic
phrasing he had previously used in his description of the
French treatment of their Vietnamese recruits. Despite
the similar use of violence to maintain their
hierarchical arrangements, in his Neue Zeit articles Däumig
ultimately found the German military more pernicious than
the French colonial army. Whereas the French primarily
abused its native (non-white) soldiers, the German
military systematically dehumanized all of its recruits.
Däumig deepened his criticism of German militarism in
his third article for Die Neue Zeit, in which he rejected a
recent proposal to extend service for cavalry troops from
two to three years. The Boer War had shown the cavalry to
be obsolete in an age of machine guns, he argued. The
real intention of extending the duration of service was
to increase the psychological grip of German militarism:
“The desire of the representatives of modern militarism79 Däumig, “Schlachtopfer,” 368.
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to keep the soldiers in the service as long as possible
rests alone on the aim of creating malleable tools
through extensive drill and deadening barracks life.” The
effect could already be seen in those currently serving
three years, who were often “the most brutal torturers of
the recruits” and who voluntarily employed “bridle bits,
belts and whips in military education.”80
Däumig’s second article in Die Neue Zeit in 1900, “A
German Colonial Army,” begins to connect socialist
political economy to his antimilitarism. A colonial army,
he argued, would cost the Germans “immeasurable
sacrifices of people and money,” while serving
“exclusively the uses of the ruling class.” The article
opens with a history of German mercenaries in colonial
service since the 1500s and largely blames princes and
merchants for the loss of German life in foreign
colonies. Däumig saw modern colonial-military expeditions
as a ploy to “liquidate the demands of high finance” and
enrich “merchants, speculators and stock jobbers.”81
80 Däumig, “Dienstzeit,” 196, 199.81 Däumig, “Eine Deutsche Kolonialarmee,” 616. These comments place himclose to Kautsky’s theory of imperialism, although Däumig took this phrase from General Moltke. On Kautsky and J.A. Hobson’s theories of the relationship of metropolitan “underconsumption” and
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Despite this application of a contemporary economic
theory of imperialism, supplied perhaps by Kautsky, it is
clear that Däumig viewed capitalism and militarism as two
allied but semi-autonomous systems of domination. Hence,
he considered in some detail how colonial expansion would
benefit German militarism itself. Colonial wars offered
the officer corps of European armies opportunities for
profit and quick promotion and instilled in them
“ruthless dare-devilishness (rücksichtsloser Draufgängertum).”82
Germans, he warned, should not fall victim to the widely
held illusion that they were “better men” than British or
French colonizers: “The tropical sun can hatch the most
audacious thoughts, even in an ambitious German head.”
Däumig predicted that the “era of Weltpolitik now rising
over Germany will add to the victorious battles of our
“overaccumulation” to colonial expansion, see Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism, 9-58.82 This view is confirmed by the recollections of Lothar Persius, a navy officer turned pacifist, who was deployed to East Africa in 1888 during the “Arab revolts.” As “young lieutenant” he desired “battle activity” because he believed that his happiness rested on being awarded the “black and white ribbon.” “But,” he added, “one only thought of battle with negroes, south sea islanders and the like.” Cited in: Peter Steinkamp, “Kapitän zur See a.D. Lothar Persius (1864-1944) - Ein Seeoffizier als Kritiker der deutschen Flottenpolitik,” inPazifistische Offiziere in Deutschland 1871 - 1933, ed. Wolfram Wette (Bremen: Donat, 1999), 100.
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fathers new colonial feats of heroism that will not fall
behind the atrocities and bloodletting of the past
colonial wars of the other powers.” Following the
Kaiser’s “Hun speech,” Däumig submitted an essay to
Vorwärts illustrating “the gruesome consequences of the
[order to] ‘give no quarter’” with graphic examples taken
from what he had seen in Indochina.83
Däumig argued that German colonial action would widen
and deepen the morally corrosive effects of militarism on
German society. The physical and mental degeneration that
Däumig had witnessed in Foreign Legion would enter into
many German families, as soon as their sons faced
tropical diseases, alcoholism and “natives” armed with
modern weaponry. He predicted that the volunteer nature
of the proposed colonial army would vanish as foreign
83 “Eine Deutsche Kolonialarmee,” 654. In a letter to Kautsky (no. 240, 3 August 1900) Däumig wrote that the essay submitted to Vorwärts was entitled “Nemesis” and was part of a collection he wanted to publish entitled Külturdünger: Soldatengeschichten aus vier Erdtheilen. This collection almost certainly became Moderne Landesknecht (1904), which contains a story called “Nemesis.” Fitting this title it begins with the murder of a Vietnamese concubine by a violent, amoral legionnaire and ends with his just death ina fort overrun by “pirates”. Throughout the story, natives are ruthlessly enslaved and executed.
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entanglements grew and eventually the two-year period of
service would be extended to three. The soldiers would be
subject to military jurisprudence that “under colonial—
thus mostly bellicose—conditions will be incomparably
harsher than in the homeland.” 84
In short, Däumig believed that “Weltpolitik” and a
colonial army would lead the German nation and its
working class to deeper subjugation and moral, physical
and cultural degeneration.85 Däumig was less concerned
with the victimized colonial peoples, who appear in his
texts primarily as sources of danger to Europeans.
Nonetheless, he did find that military engagement in the
colonies contradicted the supposed European civilizing
mission. The training of native regiments, which were
always used in colonial wars, would further develop the
“predatory nature [that is] particularly strong in dark-
84 “Eine Deutsche Kolonialarmee,” 655.85 Däumig’s view of German militarism prefigures some of the conclusions drawn by Karl Liebknecht, who cited extensively from Däumig’s Neue Zeit articles in his 1906 work Militarism and Antimilitarism: With Special Regard to the International Young Socialist Movement, trans. Grahame Lock (Cambridge: Rivers Press, 1973).
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skinned people.” Like other radicals of his day, Däumig
used racial arguments to oppose colonial violence.86
Through his adoption of a socialist critique of
colonialism Däumig was able to turn his personal failure
into a case study of the systematic victimization of the
German population by a military-economic elite. By
linking his own suffering in the Foreign Legion and
Prussian military to the suffering of the working
classes, he gave his “misspent life” a positive meaning,
namely as the grounds for a common redemptive struggle.
The rise of “Weltpolitik” meanwhile provided him the
market in the socialist media that opened a path for
professional advancement. The ultimate success of
Däumig’s conversion to socialism lay in part in his
ability to fulfill his ambition for leadership and
86 Ibid, 653. In Reichstag debates, the socialist radical Georg Ledebour used similar racialized arguments to opposed German colonial action in South West Africa. See Helmut Walser Smith, “The Talk of Genocide, the Rhetoric of Miscegenation: Notes on Debates in the German Reichstag Concerning Southwest Africa, 1904-14,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998): 107-123, on Ledebour, 118. Two of the leading English Radicals,J.A. Hobson and E.D. Morel, fused racial arguments with their opposition to imperialism. See, A. J. P. Taylor, The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy 1792-1939 (Bloomington: Indiana UP 1958); Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire: British Radical Attitudes to Colonialism in Africa 1895-1914 (London: Macmillan, 1968).
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intellectual recognition that he had failed to achieve in
Gymnasium, Foreign Legion or Army. In the summer of 1900
he reported to Kautsky that it was difficult for an
“obscure person” like himself to gain access to socialist
circles and asked Kautsky to intervene with the editors
of Vorwärts on his behalf. In April 1901 he became an
editor at the Volksblatt in Halle. He later worked as chief
editor of the Tribüne in Erfurt before being called to
Berlin in 1911 by Rudolf Hilferding—another protégé of
Kautsky’s and a theorist of imperialism—to take an
editorial post for military and educational questions at
Vorwärts.87
The Logic of Sacrifice
Shortly after his successful transformation into a
professional socialist intellectual, Däumig published a
short three-act play entitled Maifeier (“May Day”).
Although given the subtitle “a social drama,” Maifeier is
not so much about struggle between classes—workers play
only supporting roles—as about struggle within a single
class, the small-town lower-middle class or Kleinbürgertum87 On Hilferding’s career, see William Smaldone, Rudolf Hilferding: The Tragedyof a German Social Democrat (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois UP, 1998).
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of Däumig’s origin. Because all of the central characters
symbolize some aspect of his past or present life, one
can analyze Maifeier as a psychodrama in which Däumig
reworked the narrative of his life and fused it with the
historical imaginary of socialist revolution. As such,
this analysis provides an excellent means of concluding
our discussion of how colonial fantasy and experience
figured into the life and ideology of this future leader
of the German Revolution.
Maifeier is constructed around the struggle between
Fritz Albers, a young socialist intellectual and
newspaper editor, and Gustav Neuberg, a master baker and
head of the local patriotic veterans’ association
(Kriegerverein). The mobile spirit between these mortal
enemies, in whom Däumig’s present and past are easily
recognizable, is Gustav’s sister Martha. She falls in
love with Fritz and is converted to socialism, women’s
emancipation, self-education and anticlericalism. (Martha
was also the name of Däumig’s wife.)
The first act of the play is a confrontation between
Martha and her conservative philistine family over her
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relationship to the “rabble-rouser (Hetzbruder)” Albers.
Emboldened by her recent enlightenment, Martha scores
rhetorical point after point as she uncovers the
hypocrisy of her family’s petty bourgeois obedience to
authority. She accuses the members of Gustav’s Kriegerverein
of putting on “sanctimonious faces” during the pastor’s
“unctuous speech” at the consecration of the colors
(Fahnenweihe), only to make jokes about the “stupid cleric
(Pfaffen)” once he had left. She then attacks Gustav’s own
slavishness. “Have you entirely forgotten,” she asks him,
“the sort of whining letters you wrote during your
soldier days? How you lamented […] over the insults you
had to put up with?—And now you and your sort grovel
before every officer’s uniform and feel blessed, when one
of the notables pats you on the shoulder.” The act
culminates in Martha’s declaration that she will march
with Fritz in the May Day parade the following day. After
Gustav strikes her, Martha renounces her family and seeks
refuge with Fritz. This need to find a safe haven shows
the real and conceptual limits to female emancipation
that existed in Däumig’s day. However, this also
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expresses the very real emotional, financial and social
need of the convert for a counter-authority that offers
identity and protection. Like Martha, Däumig found this
in the socialist movement.88
The second act takes place in Fritz’s apartment and
serves to prepare the confrontation on May Day. To
circumvent an eleventh-hour police ban on the parade
Fritz directs the workers to march in loose formation,
taking into account a likely confrontation.
“[U]nfortunately,” he says, “the struggle against
exploitation and oppression cannot be led without
sacrifice.” As the workers depart, Martha rushes in and
describes how the fight with her family led her first to
thoughts of suicide but ultimately to seek salvation
through love. Her nocturnal visit to Fritz documents her
abandonment of bürgerlich Christian morality. Fritz declares
their union for “all times.” He places their love on the
higher moral ground provided by monist naturalist
worldview and socialism by equating it with “nature’s
springtide (lenzfrohe Natur)” and with the future of the
workers’ movement. Love, nature and history are all88 Däumig, Maifeier, 10-11.
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linked together in the “youth force” of the trees and the
“flower buds” of the lilac growing in the cemetery below
the window that will be “kissed” the following morning by
the May sun. Martha points to the “crosses and
gravestones” underneath the flowers, to which Fritz
responds by invoking the redemptive law of nature “[o]ut
of decline and decomposition blooms new life.” Finally he
asks her to “become his” and she spends the night with
him, presumably consummating their taboo-breaking common-
law marriage.89
The final act begins the following morning, when
Fritz leaves Martha behind in his apartment to go to May
Day. Gustav arrives to force Martha to return to the
family. While the two struggle, commotion and shots are
heard in the Friedhofstrasse. Workers carry in the dying
Fritz, whose left lung has been pierced by a bayonet.
Witnessing this Christ-like death, the attending
physician, Dr. Bär, converts to socialism on the spot. “A
faith that has such a martyr can be no empty madness!” he
declares and, over Fritz’s corpse, takes the hand of
Martha, who affirms her decision to fight for human89 Ibid, 20.
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liberation. In this closing tableau, the converted
liberal Bildungsbürger joins the liberated petty bourgeois
woman over the sacrificed socialist intellectual and
against a backdrop of workers.
The sacrifice of the leader and his redemption in the
future revolution was a standard trope of socialist
literature. Yet several details in his play indicate that
Däumig was using the figure of sacrifice to process his
own experiences as a perpetrator and a victim of military
and colonial violence. At the critical moment of
confrontation between the workers and the state, for
instance, Däumig replaces the police by a company of
soldiers, who rush over from the local army barracks.
This unusual insertion of the military into his drama
allowed him to express the direct confrontation of the
two authorities of his past and present.
Although the army captain in charge was “otherwise
the best of the whole battalion,” he ordered the soldiers
to affix bayonets. His personal decency was not enough to
overcome his institutional prejudice, comments a union
leader: “What do the gentlemen in their casinos and
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barracks know of us workers.” He continues, “[f]or all of
them we are even worse than the Chinese and the Zulu-
Kaffers!” This utterance links German class conflict to
recent sites of colonial violence.
As Fritz rushes forward “with raised hands” to reason
with the captain, he is stabbed with a bayonet, not by
the captain nor by a soldier but by an “Unteroffizier.”
The explicit mention of this rank, which Däumig held in
both the Foreign Legion and the Prussian Army, and of
this weapon conjures up Däumig’s description of his own
killing of a “Chinese fighter” in “Travel Impressions.”
In other words, both Fritz and his killer portray
elements of Däumig’s biography. We can only guess why
Däumig mirrored the parts in this way. Did Fritz’s murder
redeem Däumig’s own “misguided life” by making him the
future victim of his own past violence?
The complicated logic of colonial violence in
Däumig’s socialist imaginary is expressed in the dual
meaning of the German word “Opfer,” which translates as
both “sacrifice” and “victim.” The word “Opfer” appears
repeatedly in all of his writings and identifies the
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victims of domination but also the sacrifice of
martyrdom. In the former case, death is meaningless, as
when he refers to the legionnaires ironically as the
“sacrificial offering of militarism,” or “cultural
fertilizer.” As revolutionary sacrifice, however, death
has a transformative power. The conversion to socialism
inverted Däumig’s experience of colonial/military
violence. In the process, it turned him from a
perpetrator and victim of morally degrading violence into
a potential victim (and potential perpetrator) of
historically meaningful violence in revolutionary
upheaval.
Conclusion
Karl Marx famously defined “the history of all
hitherto existing society” as “the history of class
struggles.” Yet, following the collapse of international
communism, it has become difficult to maintain the
conceit that the history of socialism and the history of
the working class are coterminous. Biography has emerged
as a useful method for breaking up any assumptions about
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the identity of class position and political identity.90
The study of the lives of individuals reveals how the
worldview of German socialism was able to organize a
number of social conflicts that were homologous to the
economic and political struggles of the German workers.
Ernst Däumig’s Maifeier offers evidence of three types of
non-workers who converted to socialism around 1900. There
was Martha Neuberg, who like many women embraced
socialism because it offered emancipation from petty-
bourgeois patriarchy. Then there was the physician, a
member of the liberal Bildungsbürgertum to whom Däumig gave
the name Bär, a common Jewish name. Many educated Jews
were drawn to socialism as an indirect fulfillment of
wishes for full societal integration and emancipation.91
Finally, Fritz Albers was an ambitious intellectual, who
may have failed to finish Gymnasium and, like Däumig,
found an alternative career path in the socialist media.
90 Thomas Welskopp has undermined the common image of socialists as proletarians by investigating the social background of the first social democrats and discovering among them very few industrial wage earners. Thomas Welskopp, Das Banner der Brüderlichkeit: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vom Vormärz bis zum Sozialistengesetz (Bonn: Dietz, 2000). 91 For a recent biography exploring the connection between Jewish confessional identity and socialist conversion, see Ursula Reuter, Paul Singer (1844-1911): Eine politische Biographie (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2004).
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The chief drama of Maifeier arguably revolved around a
fourth homologous conflict that socialism was able to
solve: Däumig’s own experiences of frustration,
subordination and guilt in the French colonies and in the
Prussian military. Däumig came to socialism through
colonialism and militarism. Socialist worldview and the
socialist press market were two conditions of possibility
for his becoming a critic. As a counter-authority,
socialism offered this convert emotional and occupational
security. Marxism and natural scientific monism provided
Däumig the epistemological and historical security to
extend the critique of French colonialism he developed
while a Prussian Unteroffizier in Metz into a general attack
on German militarism and “Weltpolitik.”
The historical conjuncture that made Däumig’s
conversion possible was the confrontation of the growing
socialist movement with the new German Weltpolitik. Some of
the party’s leading theoreticians sought to explain
colonialism and militarism through Marxist political
economics and produced some of the first theories of
imperialism as an outgrowth of a particular stage of
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global capitalism. Other Social Democrats saw in Weltpolitik
the chance—or the responsibility—to integrate the
workers’ movement into the imperial nation. Reports of
violence and death in the new Germany colonies
contributed to these divisions. Whereas Left socialists
saw colonial and military violence as morally
degenerative, right socialists, like Gustav Noske, saw
the death of German soldiers as an investment in its
colonies that only maintained value if Germany persevered
in its colonial aims. The socialist party, Noske assured
the Reichstag in spring 1912, would not advocate
abandoning the colonies, where “Germany […] has blown
through a heap of money and sacrificed a lot of human
lives.”92
Ernst Däumig’s own treatment of the moral
consequences of military-colonial violence—arguably the
core of his early writings from 1900 to 1904—intertwined
92 Cited in Markku Hyrkkänen, Sozialistische Kolonialpolitik: Eduard Bernsteins Stellungzur Kolonialpolitik und zum Imperialismus 1882-1914 (Helsinki: SHS, 1986), 253. The same sacrificial logic is found in a National Socialist campaign poster from the early 1930s that shows a resolutely grim soldier looking directly at the viewer from under a steel helmet with the caption “Otherwise the sacrifice was meaningless.” The implied messagewas that veterans should vote for the Nazis, who would overturn the Versailles Treaty and redeem the dead of the First World War by fulfilling some of the war aims.
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the personal-biographic with the ideological-political.
His own experiences of violence were his capital as an
aspiring writer for a public fascinated with Weltpolitik, at
the same time they were a burden on him as a moral
individual. In both cases his “bitter experiences” had to
be reinterpreted. In each of the narratives he provided,
first as a writer for a nationalist military audience and
then as a socialist, Däumig criticized the preceding
system for what it had done to him and what it had made
him do. While he described the violence as degenerative
in its effects, his critique of it provided a rationale
for his conversions.
In the drama Maifeier all characters were drawn into a
conversion-redemption that hinged on the sacrifice of
Fritz Albers. In his pre-socialist “Travel Impressions”
Däumig had already explored the redemptive qualities of
meaningful violence through self-sacrifice in the figure
of the French missionary in Indochina. Like Albers, he
was a “brave hero of faith,” a willing victim of violence
in the name of a higher humanity. The ideal of self-
sacrifice was a common trope in the imaginaries of both
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German History final version October 19, 2009
the socialist movement and the German military.93 In
Däumig’s own writing, however, the trope of self-
sacrifice appears in his renarration of his experiences,
where it functions to partially redeem his failed past as
a perpetrator and a victim of senseless violence in
French colonies and Prussian barracks.
93 The German military also developed a cult of self-sacrifice prior tothe First World War, yet one that celebrated its own lethality againstthe enemy. The army circulated myths of dead officers who showed “boundless initiative, inordinate capacity for suffering, and blind self-sacrifice, matched only by the willingness to sacrifice others.” Hull, Absolute Destruction, 145.
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