Between Colonial Violence and Socialist Worldview: The Conversions of Ernst Däumig

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.

Weir 1

http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/2/143.short


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:

Weir 2


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.

Weir 3


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.

Weir 4


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

Weir 5


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

Weir 6


(“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).

Weir 7


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.

Weir 8


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).

Weir 9


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

Weir 10


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.

Weir 11


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

Weir 12


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.

Weir 13


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).

Weir 14


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.

Weir 15


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.

Weir 16


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).

Weir 17


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).

Weir 18


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.

Weir 19


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.

Weir 20


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.

Weir 21


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.

Weir 22


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.

Weir 23


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).

Weir 24


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.

Weir 25


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).

Weir 26


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,

Weir 27


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.

Weir 28


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.

Weir 29


(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

Weir 30


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.

Weir 31


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.

Weir 32


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.

Weir 33


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.

Weir 34


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.

Weir 35


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.

Weir 36


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

Weir 37


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

Weir 38


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.

Weir 39


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.

Weir 40


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.

Weir 41


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.

Weir 42


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.

Weir 43


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.

Weir 44


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.

Weir 45


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

Weir 46


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.

Weir 47


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.

Weir 48


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.

Weir 49


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

Weir 50


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.

Weir 51


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.

Weir 52


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).

Weir 53


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).

Weir 54


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).

Weir 55


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

Weir 56


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

Weir 57


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.

Weir 58


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.

Weir 59


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

Weir 60


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

Weir 61


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

Weir 62


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).

Weir 63


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

Weir 64


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.

Weir 65


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

Weir 66


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.

Weir 67

Between Colonial Violence and Socialist Worldview: The Conversions of Ernst Däumig

Documents

Transcript of Between Colonial Violence and Socialist Worldview: The Conversions of Ernst Däumig