Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler

by Shelley Baranowski

Drawing on recent studies of the links between empire, colonialism, and genocide, Nazi Empire, 1871-1945 examines German history from 1871 to 1945 as an expression of the aspiration to imperialist expansion and the simultaneous fear of destruction by rivals. Acknowledging the important differences between the Second Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich, Shelley Baranowski nonetheless reveals a common the drama of German imperialist ambitions that embraced ethnic homogeneity over diversity, imperial enlargement over stasis, and “living space” as the route to the biological survival of the German Volk.

Genres: Germany, History, Nonfiction

380 pages, Hardcover

First published September 27, 2010

Reviews

[Victoria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Shelley Baranowski’s recent book Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler attempts to synthesize recent research on German imperialism into a cohesive narrative accessible to students. She claims that Germany faced a sharp “tension of empire,” defined as the “aspiration to imperialist expansion and the simultaneous fear of dissolution at hands of . . . imperialist rivals.” (4) Baranowski claims that this tension stems from a variety of perceived imperial failures, from the late medieval decline of German lands in settlements in the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe to the break-up of the Holy Roman Empire. This tension increasingly caused Germany to be aggressive in foreign policy, and fearful of heterogeneity that could cause domestic unrest (Jews, Communists, other ethnic minorities) and weaken the state from within. The clincher came with perceptions regarding both the early rapid German imperial successes in World War I, to Germany’s defeat and occupation at the end of the war. The Nazis can thus best be understood as an outgrowth of German imperial aims; the Nazis were simply correcting past German mistakes in asserting the dominance of a German “empire” while killing all of the empire’s enemies.
On one hand, I find Baranowski’s account convincing. It is abundantly clear from her narrative and the sources she cites that fears of imperial diminishment were certainly involved somehow in the Holocaust. That said, the book also presents several problems, which are interwoven. The first is the problem of the book’s periodization. Despite Baranowski’s insistence that the tension springs from events dating back to the medieval period, there is not a strong sense of why exactly these events emerge in such a great tension in fin-de-siècle Germany. There seem to be essentially two options. Either something is unique about modernity which caused the tension to arise, even if it drew upon past defeats for its rhetorical basis, or Baranowski is giving an account of a radicalization stemming back to medieval times. Given that Baranowski provides little evidence of a “modern” problem, it seems she likely believes the latter, which presents a second problem: historical agency. If past defeats have simply been carried around in the collective unconscious of a nation that long, why do they not continue to radicalize after the Nazis are thwarted? Moreover, this would seem to support a Sonderweg thesis. Baranowski is rather adamant in her introduction that she is not producing a Sonderweg account and she insists throughout the work that it was not necessary that events would end in the Nazis. Yet, Baranowski does not present alternatives to her model, which is one of increasing radicalization. This presents a third problem, the unanswered question of what causes historical change. Throughout the narrative, Baranowski provides a lot of foreign policy and state decisions, tinged with a bit of culture and discourse accounts. Although it is obvious that Baranowski favors the state in her analysis of why the Holocaust occurred, it is really unclear where she thinks society, culture, and discourse fit in, even as she provides evidence of all three. I believe all of these problems might have been ameliorated had Baranowski included short chapter introductions and conclusions that positioned each chapter in her broader argument, rather than presenting the book as purely a narrative while relying on her short introduction for her engagement with broader audiences. Thus, while I think Baranowski’s book raises interesting questions about the role of empire leading up to the Holocaust, I think it functions better as a reference to German state imperial action from the Bismarck to Hitler rather than any sort of empirical [punny!] answer to how and why the Holocaust occurred.