Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany
John Phillip Short
Magic Lantern Empire examines German colonialism as a mass cultural and political phenomenon unfolding at the center of a nascent, conflicted German modernity. John Phillip Short draws together strands of propaganda and visual culture, science and fantasy to show how colonialism developed as a contested form of knowledge that both reproduced and blurred class difference in Germany, initiating the masses into a modern market worldview. A nuanced account of how ordinary Germans understood and articulated the idea of empire, this book draws on a diverse range of sources: police files, spy reports, pulp novels, popular science writing, daily newspapers, and both official and private archives.
In Short's historical narrative—peopled by fantasists and fabulists, by impresarios and amateur photographers, by ex-soldiers and rank-and-file socialists, by the luckless and bored along the margins of German society—colonialism emerges in metropolitan Germany through a dialectic of science and enchantment within the context of sharp class conflict. He begins with the organized colonial movement, with its expert scientific and associational structures and emphatic exclusion of the "masses." He then turns to the grassroots colonialism that thrived among the lower classes, who experienced empire through dime novels, wax museums, and panoramas. Finally, he examines the ambivalent posture of Germany's socialists, who mounted a trenchant critique of colonialism, while in their reading rooms workers spun imperial fantasies. It was from these conflicts, Short argues, that there first emerged in the early twentieth century a modern German sense of the global.
Product Details
About John Phillip Short
Reviews for Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany
Michael Meng
Journal of Namibian Studies
Short contends that both the elite and bourgeois of German society viewed colonial knowledge as information best suited for scientific exploration or economic growth. To most members of the working class, colonial knowledge was little more than entertainment, a means to ogle savages, animals, and artifacts... the book shines in its analysis of the actual and attempted interplay between the social classes as they tried to grapple with what colonialism meant for themselves and for the nation.
J.T. Rasel
Choice
Short contextualizes the organized colonial movement more effectively than any other scholar, treating colonialists not as an atavistic force but rather as active and sometimes creative players in a very fluid environment.
Jeff Boersox
American Historical Review
This welcome addition to our general understanding of colonial discourses in Imperial Germany is based on Short's careful research in municipal archives in places such as Augsburg, Leipzig, and Nurnberg. These are not the usual sites for such investigations, and that is one of the great virtues of his book: by taking us into colonial libraries in these cities, by introducing us to a range of populizers who actively promoted German interactions with the colonial world across Imperial Germany, and by identifying letters from seemingly naive citizens articulating their own visions of their possible futures in a colony Short provides us with a good sense of what people from the working classes were reading, seeing, and to some degree, thinking. He also shows how this compared to what members of the colonial lobby wanted them to read and think. The two were radically different. In that sense, Short's impressive social research provides us with a highly textured view of German interactions with the 'magic lantern empire'.
H. Glenn Penny
Journal of Modern History
"Magic Lantern Empire traces the unfolding interaction among colonial associationsGerman workersand the Social Democratic Party (SPD) after 1884.... his work comes closer than any other to uncovering what the German working classes actually thought about imperialismand how these thoughts did and did not translate into political action" —Matthew FitzpatrickGerman Studies Review