| My subject is the cultural effect of decolonization in Germany. Germany was the first European nation to experience colonial loss, which it did amidst political collapse, defeat, and occupation following the Great War. I combine literary analysis with an examination of intellectual, institutional, biographical, cultural, and political elements to produce a historical study of "postcolonial imagination.";The first section examines the effects of colonial loss on Hanns Heinz Ewers (1871--1943), a popular writer of travel literature, horror, and decadent fiction. Analyzing how Ewers incorporated certain issues into his work in different ways after colonial loss, I am able to examine of how decolonization affected him. I examine how ideas and images originally structured within imperialism operated in the changed colonial context of the Weimar Republic. I investigate issues germane to the study of colonialism and their evolution in the postcolonial period: travel, study of "primitive religions," sexuality, decadence, power, hybridity, race, corporal punishment, tropical disease, and collecting.;Western Germany was occupied by Allied troops from 1918 to 1930. Sources culled from the archival records of the Rheinische Volkspflege [Protectors of the Rhenish People], a government office charged with analyzing and producing propaganda on the occupation, provide evidence that colonial loss and occupation were associated within a single conceptual system. I analyze how the Rhenish Women's League imagined the history of the occupation as a sexual colonization of German women by African men and how these images proliferated in the early years of the Republic. The section concludes with an analysis of the "occupation as colonization" hypothesis created by critics of the occupation who wrote about the social and cultural effects of decolonization and occupation.;These sources provide numerous images, fantasies, and cultural symbols that fit together to reveal the contours of a "postcolonial imagination." I examine issues important to a study of colonialism---sexuality, power, cultural assimilation, disease, travel, technologies of the self, gender, race, civilization, primitivity, religion, kinship, desire, education, fantasy, punishment, hybridity, artifice, relations between metropole and colony, degeneration---describing the historical legacies of imperialism and the effects of its collapse in Germany. |
