Migrants and Agents of Empire: 19th-Century German-Speaking Colonization and Settlement in the South Atlantic

According to popular cultural memory, German-speakers in the South Atlantic came to prominence with the brief colonial overseas empire in South-West Africa between 1884 and World War I and with Nazis finding a new home in Argentina after World War II. What is less known is that German-speaking merchants and missionaries started travelling to and settling in both Argentina and South-Western Africa from the 1820s onwards. They were influenced by the changing conditions in Europe: the increasing mobility of people and goods through the advancement of technology and the growing dominance of nation-states.

While the numbers of German-speakers in the South Atlantic were small, they were not a negligible minority. On the contrary, the study of those German-speakers allows for the questioning of established historiographies. Most existing studies have examined how these people relate to the larger historiographies of the respective continents: migration in the case of Argentina and colonialism in the case of South-West Africa (Namibia). Drawing on Dirk Hoerder’s “German-language diaspora,” I propose to study these German-speakers within one single analytical field. Following the example of scholars of the British Empire, I consider nation-states as an “imperialized spaces.” After its founding in 1871, the new German nation-state expanded its political reach with its increasing desire for power on the global market. Particularly after 1900, it sought to undermine the increasing economic competition from the United States by attempting to redirect German-speaking migrants from their U.S. rival to areas deemed more apt for continued German state aid and control. Analyzing publications and archival material of nineteenth-century German-speakers on both sides of the South Atlantic, I argue that despite variations in the respective political circumstances, their everyday life experiences were more similar than different: they were both migrants and agents of empire.