Kaiser's Holocaust (16 page)

By the start of the twentieth century the old vision of colonialism, built on the notion of the ‘white man’s burden’ and a belief in the moral duty to spread the Gospel, had, in certain circles, come to be regarded as unscientific, sentimental and inexcusably old-fashioned. Although there had always been disagreement as to how far the dark races of the world might be ‘raised up’, most colonialists had agreed that as long as the ‘natives’ accepted their subordination passively, they had a critical role to play in the colonial project. This was a world view steeped in a form of eighteenth-century racial paternalism that had emerged from the latter stages of the great political struggle over transatlantic slavery. In opposing slavery the abolitionist movements had asserted that black Africans – and by implication all other natives races – were possessed of divine souls and were therefore both ‘men and brothers’.

A palpable shift away from these views had begun in the 1850s, and by the time Africa was subdivided among the powers of Europe in the 1880s the old racism was being severely challenged by a biological view of race. The clinical clarity of the new ‘biological racism’ was used to explain away as inevitable (and even desirable) genocidal episodes – such as the extermination of the Tasmanian Aboriginals by British colonists in the 1820s and 1830s – that only decades earlier had been considered lament able tragedies.

It was an event in Asia, rather than Africa, that most graphically demonstrated how deeply the notion of ‘racial war’ had seeped into the mindset of Wilhelmian Germany and the views of Kaiser Wilhelm II himself. In 1900 the Kaiser dispatched a force of German soldiers to China, as part of an eight-nation
alliance whose mission was to put down the Boxer Rebellion. The vast majority of those killed by the rebels of the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fist – known to Europeans as the Boxers – were Chinese Christians. However, European newspapers focused on the violent deaths of a small number of Europeans. The German justification for joining the inter national coalition was that during the initial rebellion the German legation had been stormed and the envoy, Klemens von Ketterler, had been killed. The Kaiser interpreted von Ketterler’s death as a personal affront, and in one of his characteristic fits of rage demanded, ‘Peking must be razed to the ground.’
1

On the morning of 27 July 1900 the German contingent of the international force was assembled in neat lines at the harbour side in Bremerhaven ready to embark for China. On a specially built podium the Kaiser, for once out of the reach of his minders and advisers, was free to speak his own mind. Possibly improvising or deviating from a prepared speech, Wilhelm issued a command to his troops which so shocked his advisers that they immediately arrested all reporters present and confiscated their notebooks. A lone correspondent, who had been sitting on a rooftop alongside his photographer, was able to slip away and report the Kaiser’s speech.

Wilhelm began by warning his soldiers of the brutality of the Boxer rebels, but then went on to instruct them to ignore all the standard conventions of warfare: ‘When you come before the enemy, let him be struck down; there will be no mercy, prisoners will not be taken. Just as the Huns one thousand years ago … made a name for themselves in which their greatness still resounds, so let the name of Germany be known in China in such a way that a Chinese will never dare even to look askance at a German.’
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When the German contingent under the command of Alfred von Waldersee (a close friend of the Kaiser) arrived in October 1900, the Chinese Empress Dowager had already been captured and a siege of the Forbidden City brought to an end. Undaunted and determined to grab the headlines, Waldersee organised a
series of punitive expeditions. Although never seriously opposed, the Germans massacred thousands of innocent Chinese peasants. When the letters of soldiers serving in China were leaked to left-wing newspapers, the brutality of the German raids was reported in the German press. One soldier wrote to his family: ‘You cannot imagine what is going on here [in China] … everything that stands in our way is destroyed: men, women, children. Oh, how the women scream. But, the Kaiser’s orders were: no pardon will be granted. We have sworn to uphold our oath.’
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The reputation the German army acquired in China in 1900, and the Kaiser’s ridiculous speech at Bremerhaven, gave rise to the derogatory term ‘Hun’ for the Germans during World War I.

In 1900 Kaiser Wilhelm clearly had little difficulty envisaging the conflict in China as a racial war in which the normal rules of war did not apply. Five years later, writing to US President Theodore Roosevelt, Wilhelm revealed his deep conviction that a Darwinian confrontation between Europeans and the Chinese race was inevitable: ‘I foresee in the future a fight for life and death between the “White” and the Yellow for their sheer existence. The sooner therefore the Nations belonging to the “White Race” understand this and join in common defence against the coming danger, the better.’
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Wilhelm was not alone in allowing these sorts of overarching racial suppositions to influence his world view. Before World War I the German General Staff had begun to use the term ‘yellow peril’ in its official publications on China and Germany’s small colonial possessions there. The term was also applied to the Japanese, a people whose rulers were extremely pro-German and whose political structures and sense of racial mission had been partly inspired by the example of Wilhelmian Germany. Wilhelm still despised them.

In expressing his views on the people of Asia to President Roosevelt in 1905, the Kaiser was preaching to the converted. Between 1889 and 1896, before he took office, Theodore Roosevelt had written an epic, four-volume history of the American frontier.
The Winning of the West
was, at the time,
considered a major contribution to American history. Roosevelt argued that wars between the lower races and the white race, although characterised by extremes of violence, were ultimately necessary:

Theodore Roosevelt, like his friend the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, believed that the wars of the frontier had been part of a grand historical process that had created the American character. By the very act of becoming frontier people, the whites of America had evolved into a stronger, more virile and resourceful people. The American character, so different from that of Europeans, Roosevelt and Turner claimed, was essentially a product of the frontier, and the new freedoms it afforded those who settled there. Far from the constraints of authority and the taming influences of bourgeoisie society, life on the western edge of white dominion had created a race of rugged individualists. They were naturally distrustful of government, quick to violence and adapted in innumerable ways to an untrammelled life amid wide-open spaces.

Although the age of the American frontier had, by the 1890s, effectively come to an end, its myth still exerted enormous influence over the German imagination, in part thanks to German popular fiction.
6
The most successful author of German ‘Western’ novels was Karl May. May had been writing since the
mid-1870s, but it was in the 1890s that his books began to attract a mass audience. Karl May, like his most of his readers, had never set foot on the American frontier, yet in a series of hugely popular pulp novels he portrayed an American frontier populated by German ‘Westmen’ who found within themselves an innate predisposition for life on the frontier. May’s most successful hero, ‘Old Shatterhand’, although of average build and height and with no experience of the outdoor life, quickly became a master of the frontier and more than a match for the ‘Yankees’, the perpetual villains in May’s books. May portrayed the American ‘West’ almost as if it were a German colony. His characters drink German beer and sing traditional German folk songs around their campfires.

Karl May’s Western novels reflected and perhaps contributed to a growing fascination with notions of national and racial expansion and the frontier. May achieved what the colonial societies had been struggling to do since the 1870s, by convincing millions of ordinary Germans that they were naturally a frontier people.
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In seeing the answers to Germany’s problems – both demographic and spiritual – as lying on the colonial frontier, May was not a lone voice. With the American experience as their example, a swathe of the nation’s philosophers, geographers and politicians, along with the
Völkisch
mystics, promoted their firm belief not only that Germany’s colonies could save the
Volk
Ohne Raum
from the misery of the industrial cities, but that the colonial frontier might become a new arena in which the German spirit could undergo a revitalisation, in terms similar to those which they believed had forged the rugged character of white America.

Some of the most important of these ideas appeared in the writing of a now forgotten figure, Friedrich Ratzel. As a young journalist in the 1870s, Ratzel had travelled extensively around the United States writing articles for the
Kölnische Zeitung
. At that point in his career Ratzel had been particularly impressed by America’s burgeoning cities and had managed to avoid
romanticising life on the frontier, as so many later writers were prone to do. After returning to Germany he embarked on an academic career, and this led him to reassess the importance of the frontier in the development of culture.
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Although his early studies had been in zoology, Ratzel’s later work was in the new discipline of geography, and by the 1880s he had emerged as one of Germany’s foremost geographers. The theories that Ratzel developed as a geographer were heavily influenced by concepts drawn from his zoological background and the work of his original mentor, Ernst Haeckel. Ratzel’s interest in the anatomical sciences remained strong for much of his life. One of his many friends, with whom he maintained a healthy correspondence, was the racial anthropologist Felix von Luschan.
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It was in the late 1890s that Ratzel began to fuse ideas inspired by Social Darwinism with the theories about space and migration being developed in geography. Specifically he applied the notion of the ‘struggle for existence’ to the study of migration, both animal and human. To Ratzel the invasion and colonisation of the world outside Europe by the white race, and the displacement of indigenous peoples, was all part of the ‘struggle for existence’, motivated above all by the search for ‘living space’. Darwin had shown that when animals moved to new environments, over time they adapted and evolved to those new conditions. From this Ratzel concluded that when human races migrated they adapted their cultures to the new environment.

If a race was successful in adapting to the conditions of a different territory their culture advanced and their population increased. These two factors naturally motivated adaptable races to migrate. Human history, in Ratzel’s view, was driven forward by a constant series of migrations, each inspiring new adaptations to new environments and each adaptation advancing the culture and increasing the population of the migrating race. Ratzel even speculated as to whether the drive to migrate was, in itself, a feature of a virile and vigorous race.

Migration, Ratzel argued, was essential for long-term survival of a race. Each people had no choice but to increase the amount of space it occupied. To stop migrating and adapting to new environments was, in Ratzel’s conception, to stop advancing and risk being overtaken by other races better fitted for survival.

It was crude Social Darwinism, partly inspired by nationalism and colonialism and scribbled on a map. In 1897 Ratzel published his influential book
Politische Geographie
and named his new theory
Lebensraum
– living space. Friedrich Ratzel’s academic theories were, at times, intertwined with his political support for colonialism. During the first wave of colonial enthusiasm that swept over Germany in the 1880s, he helped found the right-wing and expansionist German Colonial Society. He became committed to the idea that any colonies Germany was able to grab hold of during the ‘scramble for Africa’ needed to be settled by German farmers, rather than just exploited by industry or traders. Ratzel claimed that territories used only as a source of raw materials or as markets for trade goods were not true colonies. Colonisation took place only when a conquered territory was farmed, and even then, only if the land was placed in the hands of small peasant farmers rather than large land companies. When discussing Germany’s empire, Ratzel specified German South-West Africa as one potential source of
Lebensraum
for the German people.