Between colonial violence and socialist worldview. the conversions of Ernst Däuming, Todd Weir,...

German History Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 143–166

© The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghq040

Between Colonial Violence and Socialist Worldview: The Conversions of Ernst Däumig1

Todd Weir

In May 1900, Ernst Däumig (1866–1922) submitted an article entitled ‘The Sacrificial Victims of Militarism’ to Die Neue Zeit, the leading intellectual journal of the German socialist movement. In an accompanying letter to the editor, Karl Kautsky, Däumig related how his recent service in the Prussian military and his earlier involvement in the French Foreign Legion had now led him to convert to socialism. ‘Bitter experiences felt on my own body taught me to see the world with different eyes’, he wrote. Stimulated by reading Bertha von Suttner’s pacifist bestseller Die Waffen Nieder!, he ‘delved into the study of socialist literature and received a new life and world view’ (Lebens- und Weltauffassung).2 Kautsky printed this and two subsequent articles by the writer and helped launch his career as a socialist journalist and editor.

Däumig went on to become a key figure in the German socialist Left and played a central part in the revolutionary upheavals of 1918 to 1921.3 As co-chairman of the Independent Socialist Party (USPD) between 1919 and 1920, Däumig became the chief theorist of the council movement in Germany.4 He welcomed the slogan of the Russian Revolution ‘All power to Councils’;5 however, unlike the Bolsheviks, Däumig wanted to

1 This article is based on a paper originally given at the workshop ‘German Imperial Biographies: Soldiers, Scientists,

and Officials and the “Arendt Thesis”’ held on 4 May 2006 at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.

I would like to thank the GHI and the organizers, Eric Weitz and Jürgen Zimmerer, for the invitation to attend.

A subsequent draft was presented at the Irish Conference of Historians: ‘Empires and their contested pasts’, Queen’s

University Belfast, 18–20 May 2007. I would also like to thank Kristi Weir, Andrew Zimmerman, and especially the

two anonymous reviewers for German History for their useful suggestions.

2 International Institute for Social History (IISG), Amsterdam, Kautsky papers DVIII, no. 237, 7 May 1900. Baroness

Bertha von Suttner was Europe’s leading pacifist and winner of a Nobel Peace Prize. Although she was not a socialist,

von Suttner was widely read in socialist circles.

3 ‘Däumig has been arrested’, wrote Harry Graf Kessler in his diary on Monday, 31 March 1919. This he found was ‘a

fresh piece of folly which will sooner or later probably result in [Däumig] becoming head of Government, provided

that he is not murdered in prison’. Harry Graf Kessler, Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (1918–

1937), trans. Charles Kessler (New York, 1971), p. 92.

4 During the German Revolution Däumig became identified with the ‘reine Rätegedanke’ (‘pure council idea’) that

favoured an amorphous and basis-democratic structure of organization. Däumig saw no role for a dictator nor for a

state or party bureaucracy in the councils. For this reason, his theory of a network of communitarian councils was

criticized from both the Left and Right as completely impractical and dangerously romantic. See the criticism in

Ludwig Bendix, Bausteine der Räteverfassung. Neue Gesichtspunkte zu ihrem staatsrechtlichen Aufbau nebst einer

Auseinandersetzung mit den ‘Irrungen und Wirrungen’ des Herrn Däumig (Berlin, 1919). See also the discussion

in Todd Weir, ‘The Fourth Confession: Atheism, Monism and Politics in the “Freigeistig” Movement in Berlin

1859–1924’ (PhD, Columbia University, 2005), p. 568–75.

5 ‘Pure democratic ideals’, he told the delegates of the second council congress in April 1919 ‘could never be reached,

as long as formal political equality was not founded on economic equality’. In other words, socialization carried out

by fiat of the proletarian dictatorship had to precede democracy. Däumig, Der Aufbau Deutschlands und das

Rätesystem: Koreferat und Schlußwort auf dem 2. Rätekongreß in Berlin. 8.–14. April 1919, (Berlin, 1919), p. 7.

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see the dictatorship of the proletariat exercised not by the revolutionary party but by the radically democratic councils themselves.6 Däumig’s most momentous act was to deliver the left wing of his party to the Comintern and into a union with the much smaller Communist Party (KPD) in December 1920. His co-chairmanship of the newly created United Communist Party of Germany (VKPD) was stunningly short lived. He resigned following disagreements with the Comintern policy that was pushing the German party into an ill-conceived and ultimately disastrous insurrection in March 1921.7 Däumig died shortly after rejoining the USPD in 1922.

The following investigation of Däumig’s early life is not intended to be a complement to existing political biographies that have focused on his deeds during the revolutionary period of 1918 to 1921.8 Instead, it takes the corpus of texts—articles, letters, a play and a collection of tales—that Däumig wrote in the years between 1900 and 1904 and investigates how he rewrote his life story as part of the dramatic social, political and professional transformation that Däumig himself referred to as ‘conversion’ in a letter to Kautsky. All of these texts deal with the problem of military and colonial violence and refer explicitly or implicitly to his own ‘bitter experiences’. In the process of conversion, Däumig endowed these personal experiences of violence with new meaning according to the moral narratives contained within the new systems he embraced. By analysing his life story, this essay seeks to demonstrate how biography can tease out the individual’s complex negotiation of personal experience, competing worldviews and the social structures in which they are embedded.

Däumig’s case is particularly rich for this hermeneutical exercise because he underwent not one but three conversions prior to May 1900. These brought him in and out of three aggressive, expansive and jealous systems that together produced much of the domestic and international anxiety of the age of European imperialism. Däumig turned to the French colonial service, the German military and the socialist movement not only for new opportunities, but also for the new narratives they provided for his life. As we shall see, the fantasy of the colonial adventurer lured him to join the French Foreign Legion in 1887. Following his stint as a sergeant in a Prussian cavalry regiment in Metz that began around 1893, Däumig wrote from a corresponding patriotic imperialist perspective. Finally, the anti-colonial socialist ‘worldview’ beckoned him to become a socialist journalist in 1900.

A further aspect that makes Däumig’s early life an interesting object of hermeneutical analysis is the nature of the sources, which were written for different audiences and in different genres. Discussion of Däumig’s colonial experiences will be based largely on his first article, ‘Travel Impressions of a Foreign Legionnaire’, which was written before his conversion to socialism in the style of a ‘ripping yarn’. It appeared in early 1900 in Der

6 In May 1919, Lenin complained bitterly about Däumig’s critiques of the ‘putschism’ and ‘Byzantinism’ of the

Communist Party and his denial of the need for central leadership of the revolution. V.I. Lenin, ‘The Heroes of the

Berne International’, Lenin’s Collected Works (4th edn, Progress, 1972) vol. 29, pp. 392–401.

7 The writer of an obituary (almost certainly Paul Levi, Däumig’s co-chairman of the VKPD) stated ‘how often had

he—an enthusiastic admirer of the Russian Revolution—told the comrades in private, that one cannot make a revo-

lution!’ P.L., ‘Zum Andenken an Ernst Däumig’, Freiheit (13 July 1922).

8 David Morgan, ‘Ernst Däumig and the German Revolution of 1918’, Central European History 15, 4 (1982),

p. 303–331; Horst Naumann, ‘Ein treuer Vorkämpfer des Proletariats. Ernst Däumig’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der

Arbeiterbewegung, 6 (1986), pp. 801–13.

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Between Colonial Violence and Socialist Worldview: The Conversions of Ernst Däumig 145

Soldaten-Freund, a journal catering to past and present members of the German military. Through this critique of French colonialism Däumig constructed a nationalist life story for himself. Däumig switched styles for his three articles in Die Neue Zeit, which were written in the third person, in keeping with the scholarly tone of the journal. This essay will examine how the scathing attacks on German and French colonial and military policy in these articles renarrated past experiences and helped justify his own path to socialism. Finally, the essay will examine his 1901 drama Maifeier (‘May Day’), which is a tale of multiple personal transformations made possible by socialism. The story’s hero was a thinly disguised version of Däumig, and the manner of his redemptive sacrifice in the final act suggests that Däumig was still haunted by the colonial violence experienced in Tonking.9

Ernst Däumig’s early career was a picaresque transnational journey that took him to some of the flashpoints of European high imperialism. His accounts of this journey remain valuable not for their theoretical insights or keen observations. Däumig’s writings are a pastiche of familiar tropes; he was really more of a consumer than a producer of worldviews. Rather, his writings are valuable for the connections Däumig established between the French Foreign Legion, the Prussian military and German socialism as he forged and reforged his life story. Before delving into these life stories, a discussion is warranted of the methodological approaches and historiographical questions that have informed this analysis.

I. Autobiographical Life Stories and Conversion in Recent Historical Writing

Many historians now writing biographies agree that the common assumption that lives unfold according to a course charted by the autonomous subject is ‘a biographical illusion’.10 This illusion originates, in part, in the very function of the modern individual’s life story, which is to present the past as a series of coherent and meaningful events leading up the present. As the context of the present changes, the narrative is rewritten, which is why life stories, whether oral histories or memoirs, are considered difficult, if not unreliable, sources.

Biographers have found that memories are not just selective, they are often false. As Mark Roseman has shown in his sensitive portrait of a Holocaust survivor, individuals sometimes borrow memories from others to suit their own life stories. Through interviews with many GDR citizens, Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato and Dorothee Wierling established that supposedly individual memories of the Second World War were in fact

9 Däumig’s chief published texts used in this essay are: Ernst Däumig, ‘Reiseerinnerungen eines Fremden-Legionärs’,

Der Soldaten-Freund, 67, nos 9, 10, 11 (1900), pp. 553–64, 619–27, 83–93; Däumig, ‘Schlachtopfer des Militarismus’,

Die Neue Zeit 18/II, no. 39 (1900), pp. 365–71; Däumig, ‘Eine Deutsche Kolonialarmee’, Die Neue Zeit 18/II, no. 47

and 48 (1900), pp. 616–22, 651–55; Däumig, ‘Die dreijährige Dienstzeit der berittenen Truppen’, Die Neue Zeit 19/I,

no. 7 (1900–1901), pp. 196–200; Däumig, Maifeier: Soziales Drama in drei Aufzügen (Sozialistische Theaterstücke,

17, Berlin, 1901); Däumig, Moderne Landsknechte: Erzählungen aus dem Kolonial-Soldatenleben (Halle, 1904).

10 For Simone Lässig the frequent invocation of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘biographical illusion’ by historians

demonstrates the ‘centrality of the problem of coherence’ to the task of writing biography. Lässig, ‘Introduction:

Biography in Modern History–Modern Historiography in Biography’, in Lässig and Volker Berghahn (eds), Biography

between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography (New York and Oxford,

2008), pp. 1–26.

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tropes circulated among an entire generation.11 These analyses demonstrate the importance of false, manipulated or tropified memories in mastering past traumatic experiences. Hence, if sensitively analysed, the elisions of selective memory can reveal more than they hide.

A useful sociological method for the analysis of life stories has been developed by Ulrich Oevermann. According to Oevermann, ‘crises of mastery’ (Bewährungskrisen) form the nodal points in biographies of modern individuals. They arise at the point when the routinized practices or the social and professional relations of an individual’s life no longer make sense—they have lost their rationality. This creates an opening for irrational solutions offered by a charismatic event. Rewriting the life story plays a crucial role in the individual’s effort to reassert mastery and create a new rationality or routine.12 Oevermann developed ‘objective hermeneutics’ as a method for analysing the relationship between the objective data of an individual’s life, in particular these crises and points of transition, and the stories created by the individual to provide a meaningful narrative of past misfortune, recent decisions and future hopes.13 In their case studies, Oevermann and others who have used this method often take both objective data and narrative from the same ego-documents.14 This is also a necessity for any examination of Däumig’s early life, given that all available sources have been written by Däumig himself.

The paradigmatic resolution to a crisis of mastery is conversion, which has emerged as a fascinating subgenre of biographical study in its own right. Although conversion appears as a radically contingent event, often described by the convert as the penetration by a spiritual force or an idea, the embrace of a new faith has its own structured rationality. It has to create a meaningful link between the structures and experiences of the convert’s past and those of his or her desired future. The very experience of conversion itself often follows a preconceived moral structure. Theologian Bruce Hindmarsh found that, like works of fiction, early modern Evangelical autobiographies obeyed the rules of their genres. The saved generally had the type of conversion experiences expected of them by

11 As anecdotal evidence of this type of collective memory, I have been struck by the frequency with which older

Germans recalled a visit to the ‘kind Jewish doctor’ in the 1930s or having given a piece of bread to a passing Polish

or Soviet forced labourer during the war. Mark Roseman, ‘Contexts and Contradictions: Writing the Biography of a

Holocaust Survivor,’ in Lässig and Berghahn, Biography between Structure and Agency, pp. 201–14; Lutz Niethammer,

Alexander von Plato and Dorothee Wierling, Die volkseigene Erfahrung: Eine Archäologie des Lebens in der

Industrieprovinz der DDR (Berlin, 1990).

12 Ulrich Oevermann, ‘Ein Modell der Struktur der Religiösität: Zugleich ein Strukturmodell von Lebenspraxis und von

sozialer Zeit’, in Monika Wohlrab-Sahr (ed.), Biographie und Religion: Zwischen Ritual und Selbstsuche (Frankfurt

and New York, 1995), pp. 27–102. esp. 44–51.

13 Ulrich Oevermann, ‘Strukturelle Religiösität und ihre Ausprägungen unter Bedingungen der vollständigen

Säkularisierung des Bewusstseins’, in Christel Gärtner, Detlef Pollack and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr (eds), Atheismus

und religiöse Indifferenz (Opladen, 2003), pp. 339–87. See a discussion of Oevermann’s theory in the context of a

broader effort by German sociologists to overcome the ‘oppositional positing of “objective” social reality and “sub-

jective” accounts’ in Ursula Apitzsch and Lena Inowlocki, ‘Biographical Analysis: A “German” School?’ in Prue

Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat, and Tom Wengraf (eds), The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science:

Comparative Issues and Examples (London and New York, 2000), pp. 53–70, 58.

14 For an example of a biographical case study using only ego-documents, see Axel Jansen, ‘Die objektive Hermeneutik

als Instrument der historischen Fallrekonstruktion. Analyse eines Briefes von Anne Morgan’, Traverse. Zeitschrift für

Geschichte/Revue d’histoire, 2 (2006), pp. 43–56.

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their respective denominations. Thus, the London Moravians had ‘quiet’ inward conversions, which were mistrusted by the Methodists, who experienced an outwardly emotional conversion.15

In the case of conversion to modern worldviews, such as Däumig’s, the narrative becomes more complicated. Very often the tropes of Christian conversion were used to describe the turning from the ‘old’ (Christian) to the ‘new’ (scientific) worldview. Däumig’s account of his conversion to Kautsky, in which corporeal suffering ‘taught [him] to see the world with different eyes’, harkens back to St Paul’s Damascus experience. It also conforms to the conversion narrative common to the Pietist traditions of Däumig’s hometown of Halle, whereby the illumination of grace follows a crisis of inward suffering and self-examination.16

Such borrowing of Protestant conversion narratives is an example of the importance of religion to the formation of political identities in an age marked by both secularist anticlericalism and ongoing confessional identification. Däumig certainly understood his new worldview as both secular and religious. Within two years of moving to Berlin in 1912, Däumig became very involved in the Berlin Free Religious Congregation, an atheistic freethinking association of many thousands of members, which had originated in a dissenting Catholic sect in 1845.17 In lieu of mass, the Free Religious offered public weekly lectures on monistic, natural-scientific Weltanschauung and ethics. During the First World War Däumig wrote a Free People’s Catechism and through the Revolution he managed to lecture on church history.18

Another aspect of recent writing on conversion that deserves mention here relates to the role of social identity. In her fascinating study of nineteenth-century conversions in Britain and India, literary scholar Gauri Viswanathan has shown that, as they resolved their own crises of mastery, converts transgressed social, religious, national and racial identities.19 They thereby revealed a constitutive antinomy of the British Empire.

15 D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England

(Oxford, 2005), pp. 162–80.

16 There are contrary accounts of Däumig’s religious socialization. In his satirical sketch of Däumig of 1920, Erich

Dombrowski claimed that he was born without confessional affiliation (konfessionslos); however, this would have been

essentially legally impossible in 1866 and is probably a mistaken reference to his anticlerical agitation on behalf of the

Komitee Konfessionlos in 1914. By contrast, Horst Naumann states (without giving a source) that Däumig’s father was

a sexton in the local church. Däumig did attend the Gymnasium in Halle founded by one of the chief German Pietists,

August Hermann Francke (1663–1727). Francke’s own autobiographical Vita gave his followers a paradigmatic account

of the breakthrough (Durchbruch) of grace that followed ‘inward penitential struggle’ (Busskampf). Johannes Fischart

(pseud. for Erich Dombrowski), Das Alte und Neue System, vol. 3: Köpfe der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1920), p. 257;

Naumann, ‘Ein treuer Vorkämpfer’, p. 801; Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, pp. 58–59.

17 For Däumig’s Free Religious activities, see Todd Weir, ‘The Fourth Confession’, pp. 568–78; and Horst Naumann,

‘Ernst Däumig—ein freireligiöser Revolutionär’, in Horst Groschopp (ed.), ‘Kein Jenseits ist, kein Aufersteh’n’.

Freireligiöse in der Berliner Kulturgeschichte (Berlin, 1998), pp. 190–9. For an investigation of the structural relation-

ship between religious dissent and socialism, see Todd Weir, ‘Towards a History and Sociology of Atheist

Vergemeinschaftung: The Berlin Free Religious Congregation 1845–1921’, in Lucian Hölscher and Michael Geyer

(eds), Formen religiöser Vergemeinschaftung in der Moderne (Göttingen, 2006), pp. 197–229.

18 Ernst Däumig, Wanderungen durch die Kirchengeschichte (Berlin, 1925). In the final months of the war, Däumig wrote

a pamphlet that contrasted the ethics of militarism and militarized Christianity with those of socialism and natural reli-

gion. It was subject to wartime military censorship. Ernst Däumig, Freier Volkskatechismus: Ein Wegweiser zur echten

Nächstenliebe und freien Menschenwürde (Berlin, no.date.; [1918]).

19 Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton, 1998).

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While the right to conversion was anchored in the religious liberty guaranteed by the modern liberal state, by making good on the promise of pluralism and crossing over communal boundaries, converts challenged assumptions about the naturalness of those group identities upon which relations of domination were founded. In the realm of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century politics, historian Heinz-Gerhard Haupt has argued similarly that political converts were held in low esteem precisely because intellectuals and politicians expected convictions and personalities to be uniform and coherent.20 In that period of great political and confessional polarization, hybrid identities were viewed as suspect.21 Hence, conversion usually implied the renunciation of past identities. By examining how converts conformed to and subverted taboos on identity formation, biography can reveal otherwise hidden aspects of the landscape of social identities and the authorities that enforced them.

Finally, there is the question of experience. While conversion speaks to the ability of the individual to embrace a new worldview and transgress boundaries, the new life story must respond to the individual’s specific past. It must provide ‘an apologetic of the self ’.22 Experience may be redeemed or repressed through the life story, but even where past events are ostensibly omitted, they generally still inform the life story in some way. Analysis of life stories can trace relationships between historically significant events and political or religious worldviews otherwise missed in conventional political or intellectual history. The historically important events of Däumig’s early life that interest us here were his experiences of violence in the French colonial service and Prussian military. How were these experiences reflected in Däumig’s life stories? This question brings us to an important debate in recent German historiography.

II. Colonialism and Violence in Recent German History Writing

Däumig’s early writings centre on systems of domination and the acts of violence they engender. He understood himself to be primarily a victim of this violence, yet he was also a perpetrator. He described killing a Chinese ‘pirate’ in hand-to-hand combat while on a thirty-month tour in French Indochina.23 In order to make meaning of his own experiences of violence in the colonies and in the military, he had to translate them into the socialist imaginary both for himself and for his readership.

Explaining how systems of colonial violence and domination were translated into metropolitan culture has emerged as a key research objective, prompted by the shift of colonial history from the periphery to the centre of the study of modern Germany. This shift has brought German historians in line with the trend across many disciplines towards what historian Frederick Cooper has critically called ‘unbounded colonialism’,

20 Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, ‘Politische Konversion in historischer Perspektive. Methodische und empirische

Überlegungen’, in Uta Gerhardt (ed.), Zeitperspektiven: Studien zu Kultur und Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, 2003),

pp. 267–304, here p. 279.

21 A linguistic trace of the exclusive thinking about identity is found in the term of approbation ‘Zwitter’ (hermaphrodite/

hybrid), which was regularly invoked in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to impugn anything deemed

unmanly and unnatural.

22 Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, p. 16.

23 Däumig, ‘Reiseerinnerungen’, p. 686.

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meaning the use of colonialism as a megatheory of global modernity.24 For German historians the stakes here are particularly high, since the stated or unstated point of orientation of many of the new histories of German colonialism is the hypothesis, initially put forward by Hannah Arendt, that colonial violence returned to Europe in National Socialist racial war.25

Whereas earlier research focused on the impact that the lack of overseas possessions had on a particularly German colonial fantasy,26 historians are now addressing the actual practices and experiences of German colonization. As the authors of a recent article on German racism put it, the history of ‘blackness without blacks’ has been replaced to one of ‘blackness with blacks’.27 Isabel Hull has inserted the genocide carried out by the German Army against the Herero people from 1904 to 1907 into her examination of Prussian military culture from the Franco–Prussian War of 1870/71 through to the First World War. This act of colonial violence, she demonstrates, reflected and further reinforced patterns of war conduct specific to German militarism.28 Jürgen Zimmerer has argued, by contrast, that genocide emerged less from military-cultural responses to the exigencies of war than from a specifically colonial intersection of ‘race and space’. National Socialist policies in eastern Europe were, according to Zimmerer, a continuation of colonial practices developed across the globe by the imperial powers.29

Däumig’s biography cuts across the new studies of German colonialism. On the one hand, an account of his experiences in the French colonies overcomes the methodological

24 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005), p. 4. The title of Dipesh

Chakrabarty’s book may serve as a programmatic statement for the rising place of post-colonial theory in European

history writing: Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000).

25 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London, 1986; 1st edn, 1951), pp. 183–84. For recent surveys of the

new literature on colonialism/imperialism in German history, see Uta Poiger, ‘Imperialism and Empire in Twentieth-

Century Germany’, History and Memory, 17 (2005), pp. 117–43; Matthew Jefferies, Contesting the German Empire,

1871–1918 (Oxford and Malden, Mass., 2008), pp. 164–78.

26 Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham

and London, 1997); Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German

League (Boston, 1984); Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ‘Imperialism and Revisionism in Interwar Germany’, in

Wolfgang Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds), Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities

(London, 1986), pp. 90–119.

27 Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse and Yara-Colette Lemke-Muniz de Faria, ‘Blacks, Germans, and Politics of Imperial

Imagination, 1920–60’, in Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (eds), The Imperialist Imagination:

German Colonialism and its Legacy (Ann Arbor, 1998), pp. 205–29, here p. 206. Sander Gilman describes German

colonial literature as existing ‘apart from that of the other colonial powers’: Sander Gilman, On Blackness without

Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany (Boston, 1982).

28 Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practice of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca and London,

2005).

29 Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi

Policy of Conquest and Extermination’, Patterns of Prejudice, 39, 2 (2005), pp. 197–219; Zimmerer, ‘Colonialism

and the Holocaust: Towards an Archaeology of Genocide’, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society:

Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York and Oxford, 2004), pp. 49–76.

Pascal Grosse has argued that the relationship between German colonialism and National Socialism should not be

conceived of as one of continuity, but rather as two manifestations of a ‘shared governing structure based on a com-

mon biopolitical intellectual foundation—namely, eugenicist ideas of racial selection, racial reproduction, and terri-

torial expansion’. Grosse sees German exceptionalism not in Germany’s conduct in the colonies, but rather in the

sudden loss of its colonies at the height of world imperialism. Pascal Grosse, ‘What Does German Colonialism Have

to Do with National Socialism? A Conceptual Framework’, in Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz and Lora Wildenthal (eds),

Germany’s Colonial Pasts (Lincoln, 2005), pp. 115–34, here p. 118.

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predicaments of supposedly transnational studies that take their examples solely from German colonies.30 On the other, the manner in which he renarrated his colonial and military pasts shows how the experience of violence was translated into the socialist public sphere in ways that both conformed to and inverted colonial narratives. Däumig’s early writings reveal that colonial violence penetrated far beyond the political imaginary of the German nationalist Right, but that in so doing, it underwent complex mediations.

III. The Road to Tonkin

Däumig gives no precise account of his decision at the age of twenty to leave his native Halle and join the French Foreign Legion. We may assume that he too had fallen victim to the combination of ‘lust for adventure’ and social pressure that he described in Modern Mercenary: Tales from the Life of a Colonial Soldier (1904). Put another way, his decision ‘to try his luck in foreign service’ responded to the ‘pull factors’ of colonial fantasies and to the ‘push factors’ of personal and social crisis.31

Given that they were written from a critical perspective and ex post facto, Däumig’s articles of 1900 give scant attention to the pull factors, except to say that the decision to enter the Foreign Legion was a ‘foolish blindness’ (thörichte Verblendung) based on ‘youthful dreams’.32 The push factors, by contrast, receive greater attention. Däumig called the Foreign Legion the collection point of the ‘lost sons of Europe’ that attracted young men alienated from their homes by virtue of social friction, personal failure, crime or poverty.33

In Däumig’s case, his first documented failure was his non-completion of the prestigious Latina, the grammar school (Gymnasium) of the Franckische Stiftung in Halle. By dropping out just short of completion, he ended his ascent out of his lower middle class upbringing.34 ‘My career (Laufbahn), upon which I had embarked with such high-strung hopes, was interrupted’, he wrote to explain his later regret at having ‘irresponsibly’ joined the Foreign Legion.35 The primary reason for Germans to ‘sell

30 While arguing for a complicity of all imperial powers in the Holocaust by virtue of the international nature of the colonial

project, Zimmerer illustrates his points using research on the genocide against the Herero in German South-West Africa.

This, it may be argued, practically reinforces the argument he theoretically opposes, namely that the Nazi regime was a

continuation of the ‘deviant path’ or Sonderweg of the German Empire. A similar problem is presented by a recent

anthology, Das Kaiserreich transnational, where the editors argue that colonial history is the primary vehicle for a new

transnational history of Germany, yet the contributors with few exceptions focus on the German colonies. These studies

thereby extend German history to include its colonies and peripheries, but do not ultimately deliver on the promise of a

transnational history that accounts for transferrals between British, French, Turkish, American and German imperialisms.

Jürgen Osterhammel and Sebastian Conrad, Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914

(Göttingen, 2004). The genuinely transnational study of German and American imperialism by Andrew Zimmerman is

an exception that proves the rule: ‘A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the

Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers’, American Historical Review, 110, 5 (2005), pp. 1362–98.

31 Däumig, Moderne Landsknechte, pp. 2–3.

32 Däumig, ‘Reiseerinnerungen’, pp. 556, 558.

33 Däumig, Moderne Landsknechte, p. 8.

34 According to Horst Naumann, Däumig’s father was a sexton (Küster), while Colin Ross (1920) claimed he was an

army sergeant. Naumann, ‘Ein treuer Vorkämpfer’, p. 801, Ross cited in Morgan, ‘Ernst Däumig’, p. 304.

35 Däumig, ‘Reiseerinnerungen’, p. 558. It is not clear what Däumig understood this ‘career’ to be. It may have been

theology, which according to one obituary had been his intended course of study. It may have been the Prussian

military. Däumig wrote to Kautsky that ‘when I became a soldier, I had been at the Gymnasium up to Prima [final

year]’. Morgan, ‘Ernst Däumig’, p. 304; IISG, Kautsky papers, DVIII, no. 237, 7 May 1900.

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their skins to a foreign power’ was, according to Däumig, desertion from the Prussian-German army. Given the fact that he went to jail upon return to Germany, it is likely that Däumig, too, was a deserter from the Prussian army.36

The school failure followed by likely military insubordination indicates a volatile personality with difficulty identifying with authority.37 Such a personality type and its related crises correspond to someone for whom the figure of the colonial adventurer and the enticements of a permissive colonial environment were particularly attractive. The identity cultivated by and about adventurers, as romantic, autonomous and deadly outsiders, made heroic the alienated position that many volunteers for colonial service had already experienced in their home environment.

In his autobiographical work African Games (1936), Germany’s leading reactionary modernist novelist Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) provides an idealized account of the dialectic of pull and push leading up to his own decision to join the Foreign Legion in 1913. Jünger recounts the flight from his Gymnasium to France as the combined result of the anxiety provoked by the ‘narrowness’ of his town, family and school and of the beckoning of exotic fantasies symbolized in Africa. After some months of fantasizing, Jünger finally committed himself to flight through a transgressive criminal act: the misappropriation of his school funds in order to purchase a used revolver, ammunition and a copy of Die Geheimnisse des dunklen Erdteils, most probably a translation of Henry M. Stanley’s classic Through the Dark Continent (1878).38

Jünger’s pairing of gun and travelogue is indicative of the close relationship between violence and knowledge in the colonial imaginary. In the 1870s, when Stanley wrote his account, the age had not ended in which gentleman adventurers and autodidact scientists made wondrous discoveries in the tropics in the name of science. The Gymnasium dropout and military deserter Gerhard Rohlfs fought for the French Foreign Legion in Algeria between 1856 and 1860 and then went on to became one of Germany’s best-known ‘Africa researchers’, publishing numerous accounts of his expeditions.39 Such travelogues produced ongoing colonial desires in the European public, and yet opportunities were evaporating for voyages of discovery such as Livingstone’s exploration of the upper Congo River or Rohlfs’s pioneering journey through the Sahara.40

36 Däumig, ‘Schlachtopfer’, p. 370.

37 The author of a rather eclectic study of anti-imperialism found that the ‘inventory of traits ascribed to the imperialist

can be found in the anti-imperialist [E.D.] Morel: the racial antipathy, the sense of personal inadequacy to be over-

come, the “blocked mobility” in a conventional career, the rebellion against paternal authority, the messianism, and

the unscrupulousness, conjoined with the conviction that historical right was on one’s side’: Lewis Feuer, Imperialism

and the Anti-Imperialist Mind (Buffalo, 1986), p. 154.

38 Ernst Jünger, Afrikanische Spiele (Hamburg, 1936), p. 12. Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent (New York,

1878).

39 Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 21 (Berlin, 2003), pp. 767–68.

40 Joseph Conrad had the adventurer Marlow describe this transformation in Heart of Darkness: ‘Now when I was a

little chap . . . there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on the

map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there . . . [Africa] had got

filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a

white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness’: Conrad, Heart of Darkness

(London, 1995), pp. 21–22.

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In an age of imperialist competition, as Susanne Zantop has noted, the German colonial fantasy moved away from identification with noble scientists, such as the ‘German Columbus’ Alexander von Humboldt, and towards conquest.41 After weighing various options, Jünger settled upon allowing himself ‘to be recruited as a foreign legionnaire, in order to thereby reach at least the outskirts of the promised land and then penetrate into its interior on his own’. This detour through the Foreign Legion was, however, a goal in its own right. Jünger did not wish to pass through North Africa, ‘without having participated in a few battles, because the whistling of bullets appeared to me as music from higher spheres, which one could only read about in books, but which to experience one must make a pilgrimage, like the Americans to Bayreuth’.42

Violence was always a constitutive part of the colonial encounter. Even one of the great scientists of the era, zoologist Ernst Haeckel, prominently displayed a pistol in his belt in a promotional photo he had taken of himself during his studies in Ceylon.43 In the adventurer’s fantasy, however, violence was not just a means to an end, but an end in itself. The dehumanization of the natives through racism turned the colonies into an arena for killing without morality. Resisters to colonial rule became equated with tropical animals, whose perceived threat to European colonizers justified their hunting.44

Unlike other sixteen year olds, Jünger did not want to become an ‘inventor, revolutionary, soldier or some benefactor of humanity—I was much more attracted by a zone in which the battle of natural forces found pure and purposeless expression . . . I transferred [this zone] into the tropical world’. Däumig surmised a similar attitude in the volunteers in the German military expedition to China in 1900, who were, he thought, motivated less by patriotism than by ‘real German rowdiness and lust for adventure’.45 A similar amoralism belonged to the esprit de corps of the reactionary Freikorps after the First World War.46

Colonial amoralism was for Jünger ‘the extraordinary beyond (Jenseits) of the social and moral spheres that surrounded me’, and he hoped to achieve personal autonomy through transgression of bourgeois normality. The destruction of his bourgeois identity was not free from self-destructive wishes. Rather than frightening him, Jünger found that newspaper reports of the ‘dangers, privations and atrocities’ in the Foreign Legion were enticements for ‘good-for-nothings of my type’. Däumig’s essays give ample

41 Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies.

42 Jünger, Afrikanische Spiele, p. 7.

43 Ernst Haeckel, Indische Reisebriefe (Berlin, 1909).

44 Nearly all white men and many white women who visited colonial Kenya used guns to hunt game. In some cases

there was a fluid boundary between hunting animals and hunting people, as in the example of Sir Champion de

Crespigny, a white hunter in East Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century, who joined British punitive cam-

paigns as an extension of his sport: ‘chasse de nègres’. Edward Steinhart, Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social

History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya (Oxford, 2006), p. 84.

45 Jünger, Afrikanische Spiele, p. 11; Däumig, ‘Eine Deutsche Kolonialarmee’, p. 621.

46 The Freikorps often cultivated a rough-hewn, anarchic manner and identified with the moral nihilism of the merce-

nary. One Freikorps officer, Major Joseph Bischoff, had spent eight years in Africa and four in the First World War and

called himself ‘an old freebooter’. Robert Waite, Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar

Germany 1918–1923 (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 110. See also Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, vol. 2:

Männerkörper—zur Psychoanalyse des weißen Terrors (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1980).

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examples of the desperation, immaturity, compulsiveness, self-hatred and alienation of many legionnaires.47

IV. Experiences in the French Foreign Legion

The participation of thousands of German volunteers in the French Foreign Legion is a good indication of the power of the colonial fantasy. The Foreign Legion filled a niche in the market for colonial adventurers, namely for men from countries without extensive colonial involvement, such as Switzerland, the United States and Germany.48 An inspection in 1866 showed that Germans made up over half of the Foreign Legion.49 The Franco–Prussian war of 1870 greatly lessened the appeal of French service to German nationalists, but it created a new source of recruits among the residents of occupied Alsace-Lorraine. In his first article for Die Neue Zeit in 1900, Däumig wrote that 45% of the volunteers for the Foreign Legion were Alsatians, who did not want to wear the ‘spiked helmet’ (serve in the Prussian Army), followed by other Germans (12%), Swiss (8%) and Belgians (7%).50

Because their service to the French state was considered illegal or dishonourable in a period of heightened nationalism, the experiences of the German legionnaires remained a repressed colonial history. Despite the current trend towards transnational history, recent studies of German colonialism have essentially neglected the role of German mercenaries. Yet, it may well be that prior to the German expeditionary force to China in 1900, more Germans died in French than in German colonial wars.51

47 Jünger, Afrikanische Spiele, p. 8. An American legionnaire of the 1920s asks at the outset of his published account:

‘Why did I join the Legion? I have been asked that question many times. And usually I say, “I don’t know”. As a mat-

ter of fact I don’t know. Who is sure of all the elements of the internal turmoil which sling a man into an abrupt deci-

sion?’: Bennett Doty, The Legion of the Damned: The Adventures of Bennett J. Doty In the French Foreign Legion as

Told by Himself (Garden City, 1928), p. 12.

48 The Swiss writer Blaise Cendras is another former legionnaire, who, like Jünger, valorized transgression and vio-

lence, albeit from a leftist political position.

49 This survey found that 58% of the men came from one of the German states. David Jordan, The History of the

French Foreign Legion: From 1831 to the Present Day (Staplehurst, 2005), p. 40. A former legionnaire from England

noted in 1985 that the number of German volunteers seemed ‘at times to dominate the institution’. Cited in Tony

Geraghty, March or Die: A New History of the French Foreign Legion (New York, 1986), p. 8.

50 Däumig, ‘Schlachtopfer’, pp. 365–6. Evidence of the continuing and dominant role of Germans in the Legion can be

found in the memoirs of the American Maurice Magnus who joined the Foreign Legion in Tunis in 1915. To his

declaration that he wished to join ‘to fight the “Boches”’, a guard on duty at the Tunisian barracks laughingly

replied, ‘You have come to right place—you will see enough of the “Boches” in the Legion’. Soon Magnus was

horrified to discover that ‘seventy percent of the Legion were Germans, and it was German food, German manners,

German discipline, German militarism, German arrogance, German insolence and German arbitrariness . . . [E]very

sergeant-major but one was German, every sergeant but two was German, the cooks were Germans, the infirmary

nurses were German. The severity of the punishments was decidedly German. It was a German regiment of the lowest

type transported to Africa’: Maurice Magnus, Memoirs of the Foreign Legion (London, 1924), pp. 120, 143–44.

51 Däumig estimated that of the 17,000 Germans who served in the French colonies between 1870 and 1900, 14,000

were killed or permanently debilitated by tropical disease. Däumig, ‘Schlachtopfer’, pp. 365–6, 370. These casualty

figures seem high, given that between 1887 and 1909 only 271 legionnaires died in combat in Indochina, while

2,705 perished from disease. Douglas Porch, The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary

Fighting Force (New York, 1991), pp. 220–23.

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Following two years in Algeria, Däumig spent thirty months in French Indochina. Vietnam was an attractive destination that offered legionnaires opportunities for occasional combat with Chinese ‘pirates’ and a decadent lifestyle with kept women and opium. Tropical disease, however, made colonial Vietnam lethal. Thus Däumig describes how each member of his company embarked for Vietnam ‘thrilled by an adventurous future . . . But most did not suspect that they were heading towards an immense field of corpses’.52

From start to finish, Däumig’s ‘Travel Impressions’ recount episode after episode of death, violence and sadism. By the end of his tour, death by drowning, by wild animals, by guerrilla attack, by suicide and above all by disease had reduced the 450 men who had come over together to a band of 50 survivors. The bodies of the legionnaires left behind, he would later write, formed the ‘cultural fertilizer’ (Kulturdünger) of European colonialism.53

Death among the natives received less attention in Däumig’s account. The only killing described in any detail was one he himself committed while engaged in hand-to-hand combat during an assault on a village harbouring ‘pirates’. After an enemy’s sabre-blow got caught in the leather case on his chest, Däumig parried and with a ‘well-meaning jab of the bayonet put an end to the further bellicose intentions of the Chinese warrior and transported him to Buddha’s heavenly realm’.54 The cold irony of these words documents the dehumanization of victim (and perpetrator) and the devaluation of culture/religion through colonial violence.

If the Foreign Legion provided an outlet for violent fantasies, it was not a permanent solution to the crises of young men such as Däumig and Jünger. In fact, mercenaries often replicated within the Legion the types of antagonistic relationships to their social environment that had led them to join up in the first place.55 Disciplinary problems and desertion were endemic. A popular history of the Foreign Legion found that ‘[d]esertion was part of the legionnaire’s existential search for satisfaction, a flight from reality, encouraged by the tendency of legionnaires to fantasize, something that the mournful garrisons of southern Algeria probably did little to hold in check’. In 1908, one legionnaire inspired by the recently publicized story of the ‘Captain of Köpenick’ conned a group of fellow German legionnaires in Algeria into group desertion by pretending to be a staff member of the Prussian Minister of War with orders for them to report back to Germany immediately.56

52 The correlation between colonial wars and prostitution in the Far East is revealed in the extraordinarily high rate of

venereal disease among German soldiers in China (140 veneral disease infections for every 100 soldiers, due to

repeat infections), as compared with 93% in South West Africa and 42% during the Franco-Prussian war. Hull,

Absolute Destruction, p. 151. Däumig, ‘Schlachtopfer’, p. 564.


54 Däumig, ‘Reiseerinnerungen’, pp. 693, 686.

55 The same ‘desolate, deadening life in the barracks’ that led German soldiers to volunteer by the thousands to take

part in the 1900 China mission, had led legionnaires stationed in Algeria to volunteer for missions in Tonkin,

Madagascar, or Sudan ‘although many of them knew precisely that they faced a certain death, or at least untold

dangers and privations’. Däumig, ‘Eine Deutsche Kolonialarmee’, p. 620.

56 In 1906 the shoemaker Wilhelm Voigt impersonated an army captain and directed a group of guards to take over

the Rathaus of Köpenick, a suburb of Berlin. After arresting the mayor, Voigt absconded with the city treasury. The

story of the ‘Captain of Köpenick’ provided material for a book, a play and numerous films lampooning the willing-

ness of Germans blindly to follow military authority. The story of his Algerian imitator is found in Porch, French

Foreign Legion, p. 327.

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V. The Critique of French Colonialism from a German National Position

In 1901 Die Neue Zeit reviewed a popular account of the German colonies. ‘The ready market that this work has found’, the reviewer lamented, ‘proves that today, when the imperialistic-weltpolitische current spreads ever wider into the circles of the financially solvent middle class, even works about colonies and colonial questions with very little overall scientific value can reckon with a sure sale’.57 The burgeoning interest in an expansive Weltpolitik sparked by the German invasion of China in 1900 was not, however, limited to middle-class supporters alone, as is here suggested. Working-class readers also showed an avid, though by no means uncritical, interest in colonial politics and travelogues.58

The existence of these markets was an important condition of the possibility of the transformations that Däumig underwent between 1898 and 1900. Having left the Prussian military in 1898 he first sought to establish himself as a (nationalist) journalist, before becoming a socialist critic of German militarism and colonialism in 1900.

Däumig’s first article, ‘Travel Impressions of a Foreign Legionnaire’, appeared in early 1900 in Der Soldaten-Freund. It was probably the text that Däumig penned while serving in the German military but was prohibited from publishing by his commanding officer.59 The text clearly identifies with a German military audience and constructs his stint in the Foreign Legion in French Indochina as a misguided detour from the correct path of military service for his own nation.

Däumig begins his tale by informing the reader that risking probable death in Vietnam had been a self-imposed punishment for having foolishly betrayed his country to join the French. The monotonous days aboard a steamer travelling from Oran in Algeria to Tonkin sent him into a depression at his ‘misspent life’. He regretted his decision to leave ‘the homeland (Heimath), to which all cords of my heart were tied . . . in order to serve a foreign cause in a foreign colony, when my youthful dreams might have allowed me to act for Germany in its young colonies’.60

Däumig gives detailed descriptions of the emotions evoked in him by the appearance of German ships during the voyage. His heart soars at the ‘smart appearance’ and the ‘sight of the German colours’ of the navy vessel ‘Leipzig’ off Ceylon. He describes the desertion of a ‘young Pole from a good family’ in Singapore, who jumped ship and swam to the refuge of a ‘small, smart’ German steamer. This anecdote serves to highlight Däumig’s national alienation and prefigure his own later journey ‘home’ to the Prussian military.61

The positive descriptions of German (and English) military and commercial activities in the colonial sphere contrast strongly with the negative description of the direct rule by

57 Review by H.C. (Heinrich Cunow?) of Karl Heßler, Die deutschen Kolonien. Beschreibung von Land und Leuten un-

serer auswärtigen Besitzungen (Leipzig, 1900), Die Neue Zeit, 19/I, 3 (1901), p. 96.

58 John Short, ‘Everyman’s Colonial Library: Imperialism and Working-Class Readers in Leipzig, 1890–1914’, German

History, 21, 4 (2003), pp. 445–75.



61 Däumig claims that he did not follow the Pole’s example, because ‘at that time I had fully given up on my life’ and

expected to find his death in Tonkin. Ibid., pp. 560, 561.

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the French, who took ‘no great profit out of their colonies’.62 Däumig inserts the description of a walk around the French Citadelle in the Vietnamese town of Sontay as a literary device that allows him to distill his criticism of the French colonial maladministration and to link it to the depravity of the natives. His tour begins with a description of the Vietnamese (Anamiten), who swarm into the French quarter in the morning hours

in order to take up their occupations as boy, coolie and the like. They were small, weakly, powerless figures, out of whose yellow faces crooked-slitted black eyes gazed shyly at the European. [They were] a slavish, nervous race, destined to be ruled by the more powerful; it was only a question of whether they felt better under the rule of the French than [they had] a year before under the pigtailed Chinese.

Even a passing detachment of native soldiers, who had ‘almost no military value’, appeared feminine (and thereby invited domination): ‘At first glance I did not know if I had a band of children or women in front of me’. French non-commissioned officers lazily supervised the exercises of the native soldiers, intervening only occasionally, ‘by giving one of the little fellows such a dig in the ribs that he nearly fell to the earth’.63

Däumig then turns to the splendid residence of the French colony:

From this house were issued the orders, which, instead of bringing peace, development and growth for the rich, hopeful colony, were dictated by egotism and avarice, which did not ask about human lives as long as the almighty Herr Resident found his profit.64

Rather than working cooperatively to battle the ‘Chinese pirates’, the civilian governor—‘in most cases a Parisian hobnob without knowledge of the colonial conditions’—undermined military efforts. The cost of the governor’s ill-planned campaigns was borne by the soldiers. Illustrating this point, Däumig’s walk next takes him past the citadel’s cemetery, which was full of the remains of the legionnaires—mostly Germans—who fell in the famous battle of Sontay in 1884: ‘How much German blood had flowed here as in many other places for a foreign cause!’ 65

Däumig then passes a ‘half-collapsed Chinese pagoda’ that serves in his text as a symbol for the state of native governance. Behind bamboo huts full of starving prisoners, he discovers a native court at work, the description of which draws on nearly every trope of oriental despotism. The judge was ‘an old, grey Anamit’, whose ‘dull’ staring eyes and ‘slack’ features revealed him to be an opium-smoker. Behind this mask was hidden a sadist, who had an accused man repeatedly tortured during an interrogation. Däumig dedicated an entire page to a minute description of the gruesome methods and outcomes of this torture session. The French had permitted this court to continue, ‘to reconcile [the natives] at least somewhat with their rule’. To clinch the connection made between native and French despotism, Däumig describes finally how, on the journey back to his barracks, he passed again by the residence, where he saw the resident’s wife, dressed in

62 Ibid., p. 564.

63 Ibid., pp. 621, 622.

64 Ibid., pp. 622, 623.

65 Ibid., pp. 623, 624. The battle of 1884, in which most of the French Foreign Legion regiments had been annihilated,

had been the decisive battle between the French state and elements of the Chinese military who tried to maintain

Chinese rule over Vietnam. Subsequent Foreign Legion expeditions, such as those Däumig joined, were

‘mopping-up actions’. German colonies had a similar competition between military and civilian authorities, which in

the case of the 1904 Herero rebellion in German Southwest Africa was decided in favour of the military.

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white and swaying in a hammock. While within earshot of the screaming torture victim in the native court, she herself was beating ‘the naked back of her Boy’.66

Arriving finally in his quarters, Däumig sought distraction in an issue of the Petit Journal, only to discover an article on the brutal German suppression of a revolt in East Africa. The article contrasted the barbarie teutonique revealed in Major Wissmann’s execution of rebel leaders with phrases about the humanity and culture of France. Recalling the scenes just witnessed in the citadel and what they revealed about ‘how they put the beautiful ideas of civilization into practice in France’, he ‘angrily hurled the paper to the ground’.67

By showing the mutual interpenetration of French administration and Vietnamese and Chinese despotism, Däumig engaged in a critique of colonialism similar to that made by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. Colonial disease, danger and depravity infected Europeans, and absolute power encouraged sadism. The end result was a dehumanization of both colonizer and colonized that brought out their worst sides and led the Europeans into hypocrisy. Unlike Conrad, however, Däumig still held out the possibility of good colonial administration, presumably under German or English direction. This reinforced the foundational ideology of liberal colonialism, which justified the use of violence to eliminate oriental despotism and provide ‘improvement’ to the suffering colonial masses, who were depicted as effeminate and incapable of self-rule.68

A glimpse of benevolent colonial administration is offered at the end of Däumig’s ‘Travel Impressions’, when he strikes out on his own to visit a French missionary living among Vietnamese villagers. Emerging from the forest, Däumig is amazed by the ‘well-tended rice fields’ and the ‘cleanliness of the huts and their occupants’ that stood in strong contrast to the filth of other native villages and provided evidence that ‘a better spirit ruled’ here. The source of this peace, order and prosperity was the missionary, who, unlike all other whites Däumig had encountered, lived in ascetic conditions among the villagers as an equal. He led this egalitarian society by example and by the force of a luminous charisma expressed through a ‘noble face’, ‘large penetrating eyes’ and a ‘harmonious voice’ that spoke ‘most refined French’.69

In language that prefigures Däumig’s own later writings as a Free Religious speaker and a promulgator of communitarian council theory, the priest tells Däumig that the ‘enslaved people’ were initially unreceptive to the ‘holy teaching’, but that slowly he began to gather ‘souls around me’. Repeating Däumig’s own criticisms, the priest damns the ‘Chinese rule’ for its persecutions and then chides the French state for failing to improve things.70

66 The preeminence of British colonialism is documented by Däumig’s use of English names, ‘coolie’ or ‘boy’ for colo-

nial subjects. Däumig, ‘Reiseerinnerungen’, pp. 624, 625.

67 Ibid., p. 626.

68 Gayatri Spivak summed up liberal colonial ideology in the pithy formula: ‘white men saving brown women from

brown men’: Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the

Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, 1988), pp. 271–313.


70 Ibid., p. 693.

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This vision of positive colonialism, as the emanation of true culture and spirituality through the model of the early Christian community, stands in sharp contrast to the positive images Däumig offers of the German military. Violence does figure centrally in the priest’s narrative—in the course of which he points out three holes in his table from bullets fired ‘at close range by fanatical Buddhists’—and he does possess ‘a pair of hunting guns in flawless condition’.71 However, his violence is merely defensive, necessary in order to again operate on the spiritual plane. In this as in all other respects, the ‘brave hero of faith’ (Glaubensheld) is the opposite of the nihilistic legionnaire.

In summary, ‘Travel Impressions’ contained two critical yet conflicting counter-narratives to French colonialism. Each offered a new role that would redeem Däumig’s ‘misguided life’ as a legionnaire: the soldier in the service of the nation and the charismatic ‘hero of faith’. By the time the piece was finally published in 1900, Däumig was about to re-evaluate his life in accordance with the second ideal.

VI. The Market for Colonial Fantasies and the Conversion to Socialism

In interpreting Däumig’s conversion to socialism in 1900, we must again inquire into the pull and push factors. Although his first letter to Kautsky states that it was the reading of pacifist literature that led him to socialism, subsequent letters make it clear that professional success as a journalist within the socialist movement was of primary importance to Däumig. Kautsky’s interest in his articles greatly strengthened his

self confidence . . . because if someone like me dedicates himself to the writer’s profession after a past as a foreign legionnaire and a Prussian Unteroffizier that was tumultuous and of little intellectual benefit, then— among other disappointments—one is not spared the doubt of one’s own abilities, particularly when one has to struggle with severe material worries and other inner conflicts.72

In addition to psychological support, Däumig also told Kautsky that he could only ‘proceed on the path [he] finally realized [was] correct’ if journalism allowed him to escape material dependence on his relatives who disapproved of his ‘views (Anschauungen) and “useless scribblings”.’73

Kautsky’s attentive cultivation of Däumig over the summer of 1900 corresponded to the interests of an editor looking for articles that shed light on the rapidly escalating crisis in China.74 Däumig’s first article appeared a few weeks before Wilhelm II’s infamous ‘Hun speech’, in which the Kaiser told the departing expeditionary force to ‘give no quarter and take no prisoners’ and to comport themselves like the Huns, so that ‘the name “Germany” may be known in China, such that no Chinese will even dare to look askance at a German’.75 In subsequent articles, Däumig was able to refer to the unfolding

71 Ibid., p. 692.

72 IISG, Kautsky papers, DVIII, no. 238, 13 July 1900.

73 IISG, Kautsky papers, DVIII, no. 240, 3 Aug, 1900.

74 Kautsky wrote extensively on the relationship of militarism and colonialism. See Nicholas Stargardt, The German

Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics, 1866–1914 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 72–87, list of Kautsky’s relevant

writings on pp. 208–10.

75 Citation from Hull, Absolute Destruction, p. 135. On Wilhelm II’s ‘Hunnenrede’, see Sabine Dabringhaus, ‘An Army

on Vacation? The German War in China’, in Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds), Anticipating

Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 465–56.

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events between Berlin and China. Kautsky sent Däumig editorial feedback, ideas for new articles, and writings by Major Wissmann, the aforementioned leader of punitive expeditions in East Africa. Däumig, for his part, recognized the timeliness of his material and offered several predictive pieces about the outcome of current German policies.

By becoming a journalist, Däumig tried to give value to his colonial experiences in two ways. First he renarrated his past experiences in line with his present perspective. Second, he tried to turn them into capital that gave him authority to provide expert testimony in the public sphere.

What were the ‘bitter experiences’ in the cavalry unit in Metz that functioned as push factors in Däumig’s conversion? Peppered throughout his Neue Zeit articles are numerous indications that his ambitions for advancement and recognition within the military had been frustrated. To begin with, his service to the French state probably brought ongoing discrimination in the German military. ‘Artificially cultivated chauvinism’ made former German legionnaires ‘branded and despised’ and hence barred their promotion ‘despite all personal excellence’, he wrote. His own effort to gain some recognition by publishing his travel memories was, after all, thwarted by his commanding officer.76

Particularly bitter to Däumig was probably his rank as Quartiermeister, the non-commissioned officer responsible for maintaining the equipment of the mounted artillery in the cavalry.77 As a non-commissioned officer, Däumig had reached a professional dead end. He was forever fated to take orders from those who, unlike him, had completed their Gymnasium studies and were thus qualified to become officers. The envy and hostility he expressed towards these officers in a letter to Kautsky reveals at the same time an identification with them:

These [military] circles are of the fixed opinion that one must be an officer to be able to penetrate into the secrets of this [military] science. Through my work I would like to provide proof that even without having visited the military academy, one can write about these things as an autodidact and on the basis of practical experiences in military and colonial domains.78

As a popularizer of this science in the socialist press, Däumig had become a military expert after all, albeit a critical one.

From his new socialist perspective, Däumig extended his earlier criticism of French colonialism to encompass German militarism as well. In ‘The Sacrificial Victims of Militarism’ he blamed the deaths of German mercenaries in French service on the systematic violence within the Prussian military that caused recruits, particularly Alsatians, to desert. The ‘irrepressible hawkishness’ (unverwüstliche Schneidigkeit) of the officers led to persistent mishandling of soldiers. Those who carried out the tortures were often the non-commissioned officers (Unteroffiziere), who were the ultimate victims of German militarism, because ‘[o]n these men weighed the pressure of the entire

76 Däumig notes with evident bitterness that in the 1860s the Africa explorer Gerhard Rohlfs was able to become an

emissary of the Prussian King despite his prior service for the French. Däumig, Moderne Landsknechte, pp. 3–4;

Däumig, ‘Schlachtopfer’, p. 370.

77 In his third article in Die Neue Zeit, he provided details of the precise standards by which the leather equipment was

polished. He found this degrading because the time-consuming polishing served no rational military purpose; in

fact, whitening the leather (blanco-ing) made the cavalry easier to target for enemy artillery: Däumig, ‘Dienstzeit’,

p. 200.

78 IISG, Kautsky papers, DVIII, no. 238, 13 July 1900.

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military institution’. According to Däumig, their own mistreatment by captains and Rittmeister explained why Unteroffiziere ‘could take it out on enlisted men (sich an den Gemeinen vergreifen)’.79

In describing the ‘pedagogical blows to the ribs’ and ‘helpful whipping’ used during training in the German military, Däumig repeated nearly exactly the ironic phrasing he had previously used in his description of the French treatment of their Vietnamese recruits. Despite the similar use of violence to maintain their hierarchical arrangements, in his Neue Zeit articles Däumig ultimately found the German military more pernicious than the French colonial army. Whereas the French army primarily abused its native (non-white) soldiers, the German military systematically dehumanized all of its recruits.

Däumig deepened his criticism of German militarism in his third article for Die Neue Zeit, in which he rejected a recent proposal to extend service for cavalry troops from two to three years. The Boer War had shown the cavalry to be obsolete in an age of machine guns, he argued. The real intention of extending the duration of service was to increase the psychological grip of German militarism: ‘The desire of the representatives of modern militarism to keep the soldiers in the service as long as possible rests alone on the aim of creating malleable tools through extensive drill and deadening barracks life’. The effect could already be seen in those currently serving three years, who were often ‘the most brutal torturers of the recruits’ and who voluntarily employed ‘bridle bits, belts and whips in military education’.80

Däumig’s second article in Die Neue Zeit in 1900, ‘A German Colonial Army’, begins to connect socialist political economy to his antimilitarism. A colonial army, he argued, would cost the Germans ‘immeasurable sacrifices of people and money’, while serving ‘exclusively the uses of the ruling class’. The article opens with a history of German mercenaries in colonial service since the 1500s and largely blames princes and merchants for the loss of German life in foreign colonies. Däumig saw modern colonial-military expeditions as a ploy to ‘liquidate the demands of high finance’ and enrich ‘merchants, speculators and stock jobbers’.81

Despite this application of a contemporary economic theory of imperialism, supplied perhaps by Kautsky, it is clear that Däumig viewed capitalism and militarism as two allied but semi-autonomous systems of domination. Hence, he considered in some detail how colonial expansion would benefit German militarism itself. Colonial wars offered the officer corps of European armies opportunities for profit and quick promotion and instilled in them ‘ruthless dare-devilishness’ (rücksichtsloser Draufgängertum).82 Germans, he


80 Däumig, ‘Dienstzeit’, pp. 196, 199.

81 Däumig, ‘Eine Deutsche Kolonialarmee’, p. 616. These comments place him close to Kautsky’s theory of imperial-

ism, although Däumig took this phrase from General Moltke. On Kautsky and J.A. Hobson’s theories of the relation-

ship of metropolitan ‘underconsumption’ and ‘overaccumulation’ to colonial expansion, see Mommsen, Theories of

Imperialism, pp. 9–58.

82 This view is confirmed by the recollections of Lothar Persius, a navy officer turned pacifist, who was deployed to East

Africa in 1888 during the ‘Arab revolts’. As ‘young lieutenant’ he desired ‘battle activity’ because he believed that

his happiness rested on being awarded the ‘black and white ribbon’. ‘But’, he added, ‘one only thought of battle

with negroes, south sea islanders and the like’. Cited in Peter Steinkamp, ‘Kapitän zur See a.D. Lothar Persius

(1864–1944)—Ein Seeoffizier als Kritiker der deutschen Flottenpolitik’, in Wolfram Wette (ed.), Pazifistische

Offiziere in Deutschland 1871–1933 (Bremen, 1999), pp. 98–109, p. 100.

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warned, should not fall victim to the widely held illusion that they were ‘better men’ than British or French colonizers: ‘The tropical sun can hatch the most audacious thoughts, even in an ambitious German head’. Däumig predicted that the ‘era of Weltpolitik now rising over Germany will add to the victorious battles of our fathers new colonial feats of heroism that will not fall behind the atrocities and bloodletting of the past colonial wars of the other powers’. Following the Kaiser’s ‘Hun speech’, Däumig submitted an essay to Vorwärts illustrating ‘the gruesome consequences of the [order to] “give no quarter”’ with graphic examples taken from what he had seen in Indochina.83

Däumig argued that German colonial action would widen and deepen the morally corrosive effects of militarism on German society. The physical and mental degeneration that Däumig had witnessed in the Foreign Legion would enter into many German families, as soon as their sons faced tropical diseases, alcoholism and natives armed with modern weaponry. He predicted that the volunteer nature of the proposed colonial army would vanish as foreign entanglements grew and eventually the two-year period of service would be extended to three. The soldiers would be subject to military jurisprudence that ‘under colonial—thus mostly bellicose—conditions will be incomparably harsher than in the homeland’.84

In short, Däumig believed that Weltpolitik and a colonial army would lead the German nation and its working class to deeper subjugation and moral, physical and cultural degeneration.85 Däumig was less concerned with the victimized colonial peoples, who appear in his texts primarily as sources of danger to Europeans. Nonetheless, he did find that military engagement in the colonies contradicted the supposed European civilizing mission. The training of native regiments, which were always used in colonial wars, would further develop the ‘predatory nature [that is] particularly strong in dark-skinned people’. Like other radicals of his day, Däumig used racial arguments to oppose colonial violence.86

Through his adoption of a socialist critique of colonialism Däumig was able to turn his personal failure into a case study of the systematic victimization of the German population by a military-economic elite. By linking his own suffering in the Foreign Legion and Prussian military to the suffering of the working classes, he gave his ‘misspent

83 ‘Eine Deutsche Kolonialarmee’, p. 654. In a letter to Kautsky (no. 240, 3 Aug. 1900) Däumig wrote that the essay

submitted to Vorwärts was entitled ‘Nemesis’ and was part of a collection he wanted to publish entitled

Kulturdünger: Soldatengeschichten aus vier Erdtheilen. This collection almost certainly became Moderne

Landesknecht (1904), which contains a story called ‘Nemesis’. Fitting this title it begins with the murder of a

Vietnamese concubine by a violent, amoral legionnaire and ends with his just death in a fort overrun by ‘pirates’.

Throughout the story, natives are ruthlessly enslaved and executed.

84 ‘Eine Deutsche Kolonialarmee’, p. 655.

85 Däumig’s view of German militarism prefigures some of the conclusions drawn by Karl Liebknecht, who cited

extensively from Däumig’s Neue Zeit articles in his 1906 work Militarism and Antimilitarism: With Special Regard to

the International Young Socialist Movement (trans. Grahame Lock, Cambridge, 1973).

86 Ibid., p. 653. In Reichstag debates, the socialist radical Georg Ledebour used similar racialized arguments to oppose

German colonial action in South West Africa. See Helmut Walser Smith, ‘The Talk of Genocide, the Rhetoric of

Miscegenation: Notes on Debates in the German Reichstag Concerning Southwest Africa, 1904–14’, in

Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox and Zantop, The Imperialist Imagination, pp. 107–123, on Ledebour, p. 118. Two of the

leading English Radicals, J.A. Hobson and E.D. Morel, fused racial arguments with their opposition to imperialism.

See, A.J.P. Taylor, The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy 1792–1939 (Bloomington, 1958); Bernard Porter,

Critics of Empire: British Radical Attitudes to Colonialism in Africa 1895–1914 (London, 1968).

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life’ a positive meaning, namely as the grounds for a common redemptive struggle. The rise of Weltpolitik meanwhile provided him the market in the socialist media that opened a path for professional advancement. The ultimate success of Däumig’s conversion to socialism was at least partly due to the opportunities to satisfy the ambition for leadership and intellectual recognition that had gone unfulfilled in the Gymnasium, Foreign Legion or Army. In the summer of 1900 he reported to Kautsky that it was difficult for an ‘obscure person’ such as himself to gain access to socialist circles and asked Kautsky to intervene with the editors of Vorwärts on his behalf. In April 1901 he became an editor at the Volksblatt in Halle. He later worked as chief editor of the Tribüne in Erfurt before being called to Berlin in 1911 by Rudolf Hilferding—another protégé of Kautsky’s and a theorist of imperialism—to take an editorial post for military and educational questions at Vorwärts.87

VII. The Logic of Sacrifice

Shortly after his successful transformation into a professional socialist intellectual, Däumig published a short three-act play entitled Maifeier (‘May Day’). Although given the subtitle ‘a social drama’, Maifeier is not so much about struggle between classes—workers play only supporting roles—as about struggle within a single class, the small-town lower-middle class or Kleinbürgertum of Däumig’s origin. Because all of the central characters symbolize some aspect of his past or present life, one can analyse Maifeier as a psychodrama in which Däumig reworked the narrative of his life and fused it with the historical imaginary of socialist revolution. Such an analysis provides an excellent means of concluding our discussion of how colonial fantasy and experience figured into the life and ideology of this future leader of the German Revolution.

Maifeier is constructed around the struggle between Fritz Albers, a young socialist intellectual and newspaper editor, and Gustav Neuberg, a master baker and head of the local patriotic veterans’ association (Kriegerverein). The mobile spirit between these mortal enemies, in whom Däumig’s present and past are easily recognizable, is Gustav’s sister Martha. She falls in love with Fritz and is converted to socialism, women’s emancipation, self-education and anticlericalism. (Martha was also the name of Däumig’s wife.)

The first act of the play is a confrontation between Martha and her conservative philistine family over her relationship with the ‘rabble-rouser’ (Hetzbruder) Albers. Emboldened by her recent enlightenment, Martha scores rhetorical point after point as she uncovers the hypocrisy of her family’s petty bourgeois obedience to authority. She accuses the members of Gustav’s Kriegerverein of having put on ‘sanctimonious faces’ during the pastor’s ‘unctuous speech’ at the consecration of the colours (Fahnenweihe), only to make jokes about the ‘stupid cleric’ (Pfaffen) once he had left. She then attacks Gustav’s own slavishness. ‘Have you entirely forgotten’, she asks him, ‘the sort of whining letters you wrote during your soldier days? How you lamented . . . over the insults you had to put up with?—And now you and your sort grovel before every officer’s uniform and feel blessed, when one of the notables pats you on the shoulder’. The act culminates in Martha’s declaration that she will march with Fritz in the May Day parade the

87 On Hilferding’s career, see William Smaldone, Rudolf Hilferding: The Tragedy of a German Social Democrat (DeKalb,

Illinois, 1998).

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following day. After Gustav strikes her, Martha renounces her family and seeks refuge with Fritz. This need to find a safe haven shows the real and conceptual limits to female emancipation that existed in Däumig’s day. However, this also expresses the very real emotional, financial and social need of the convert for a counter-authority that offers identity and protection. Like Martha, Däumig found this in the socialist movement.88

The second act takes place in Fritz’s apartment and serves to prepare the confrontation on May Day. To circumvent an eleventh-hour police ban on the parade Fritz directs the workers to march in loose formation, taking into account a likely confrontation. ‘[U]nfortunately’, he says, ‘the struggle against exploitation and oppression cannot be led without sacrifice’. As the workers depart, Martha rushes in and describes how the fight with her family led her first to thoughts of suicide but ultimately to seek salvation through love. Her nocturnal visit to Fritz documents her abandonment of bürgerlich Christian morality. Fritz declares their union for ‘all times’. He places their love on the higher moral ground provided by monist naturalist worldview and socialism by equating it with ‘nature’s springtide’ (lenzfrohe Natur) and with the future of the workers’ movement. Love, nature and history are all linked together in the ‘youth force’ of the trees and the ‘flower buds’ of the lilac growing in the cemetery below the window that will be ‘kissed’ the following morning by the May sun. Martha points to the ‘crosses and gravestones’ underneath the flowers, to which Fritz responds by invoking the redemptive law of nature ‘[o]ut of decline and decomposition blooms new life’. Finally he asks her to ‘become his’ and she spends the night with him, presumably consummating their taboo-breaking common-law marriage.89

The final act begins the following morning, when Fritz leaves Martha behind in his apartment to go to May Day. Gustav arrives to force Martha to return to the family. While the two struggle, commotion and shots are heard in the Friedhofstrasse. Workers carry in the dying Fritz, whose left lung has been pierced by a bayonet. Witnessing this Christ-like death, the attending physician, Dr Bär, converts to socialism on the spot. ‘A faith that has such a martyr can be no empty madness!’ he declares and, over Fritz’s corpse, takes the hand of Martha, who affirms her decision to fight for human liberation. In this closing tableau, the converted liberal Bildungsbürger joins the liberated petty bourgeois woman over the sacrificed socialist intellectual and against a backdrop of workers.

The sacrifice of the leader and his redemption in the future revolution was a standard trope of socialist literature. Yet several details in his play indicate that Däumig was using the figure of sacrifice to process his own experiences as a perpetrator and a victim of military and colonial violence. At the critical moment of confrontation between the workers and the state, for instance, Däumig replaces the police by a company of soldiers, who rush over from the local army barracks. This unusual insertion of the military into his drama allowed him to express the direct confrontation of the two authorities of his past and present.

Although the army captain in charge was ‘otherwise the best of the whole battalion’, he ordered the soldiers to affix bayonets. His personal decency was not enough to overcome his institutional prejudice, comments a union leader: ‘What do the gentlemen

88 Däumig, Maifeier, pp. 10–11.

89 Ibid., p. 20.

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in their casinos and barracks know of us workers’. He continues, ‘[f]or all of them we are even worse than the Chinese and the Zulu-Kaffers!’ This utterance links German class conflict to recent sites of colonial violence.

As Fritz rushes forward ‘with raised hands’ to reason with the captain, he is stabbed with a bayonet, not by the captain nor by a soldier but by an Unteroffizier. The explicit mention of this rank, which Däumig held in both the Foreign Legion and the Prussian Army, and of this weapon, conjure up Däumig’s description of his own killing of a ‘Chinese fighter’ in ‘Travel Impressions’. In other words, both Fritz and his killer portray elements of Däumig’s biography. We can only guess why Däumig mirrored the parts in this way. Did Fritz’s murder redeem Däumig’s own ‘misguided life’ by making him the future victim of his own past violence?

The complicated logic of colonial violence in Däumig’s socialist imaginary is expressed in the dual meaning of the German word Opfer, which translates as both ‘sacrifice’ and ‘victim’. The word Opfer appears repeatedly in all of his writings and identifies the victims of domination but also the sacrifice of martyrdom. In the former case, death is meaningless, as when he refers to the legionnaires ironically as the ‘sacrificial offering of militarism’, or ‘cultural fertilizer’. As revolutionary sacrifice, however, death has a transformative power. The conversion to socialism inverted Däumig’s experience of colonial/military violence. In the process, it turned him from a perpetrator and victim of morally degrading violence into a potential victim (and potential perpetrator) of historically meaningful violence in revolutionary upheaval.

VIII. Conclusion

Karl Marx famously defined ‘the history of all hitherto existing society’ as ‘the history of class struggles’. Yet, following the collapse of international communism, it has become difficult to maintain the conceit that the history of socialism and the history of the working class are coterminous. Biography has emerged as a useful method for breaking up any assumptions about the identity of class position and political identity.90 The study of the lives of individuals reveals how the worldview of German socialism was able to make sense of a number of social conflicts that were homologous to the economic and political struggles of the German workers. Ernst Däumig’s Maifeier offers evidence of three types of non-workers who converted to socialism around 1900. There was Martha Neuberg, who like many women embraced socialism because it offered emancipation from petty-bourgeois patriarchy. Then there was the physician, a member of the liberal Bildungsbürgertum to whom Däumig gave the name Bär, a common Jewish name. Many educated Jews were drawn to socialism as an indirect fulfillment of wishes for full societal integration and emancipation.91 Finally, Fritz Albers was an ambitious intellectual, who may have left the Gymnasium early and, like Däumig, found an alternative career path in the socialist media.

90 Thomas Welskopp has undermined the common image of socialists as proletarians by investigating the social back-

ground of the first social democrats and discovering among them very few industrial wage earners. Thomas

Welskopp, Das Banner der Brüderlichkeit: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vom Vormärz bis zum Sozialistengesetz

(Bonn, 2000).

91 For a recent biography exploring the connection between Jewish confessional identity and socialist conversion, see

Ursula Reuter, Paul Singer (1844–1911): Eine politische Biographie (Düsseldorf, 2004).

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The chief drama of Maifeier arguably revolved around a fourth homologous conflict that socialism was able to solve: Däumig’s own experiences of frustration, subordination and guilt in the French colonies and in the Prussian military. Däumig came to socialism through colonialism and militarism. Socialist worldview and the socialist press market were two conditions of possibility for his becoming a critic. As a counter-authority, socialism offered this convert emotional and occupational security. Marxism and natural scientific monism provided Däumig with the epistemological and historical security to extend the critique of French colonialism he developed while a Prussian Unteroffizier in Metz into a general attack on German militarism and Weltpolitik.

The historical conjuncture that made Däumig’s conversion possible was the confrontation of the growing socialist movement with the new German Weltpolitik. Some of the party’s leading theoreticians sought to explain colonialism and militarism through Marxist political economy and produced some of the first theories of imperialism as an outgrowth of a particular stage of global capitalism. Other Social Democrats saw in Weltpolitik the chance—or the responsibility—to integrate the workers’ movement into the imperial nation. Reports of violence and death in the new German colonies contributed to these divisions. Whereas left-wing socialists saw colonial and military violence as morally degenerative, right-wing socialists, such as Gustav Noske, saw the death of German soldiers as an investment in its colonies that only maintained value if Germany persevered in its colonial aims. The socialist party, Noske assured the Reichstag in spring 1912, would not advocate abandoning the colonies, where ‘Germany . . . has blown through a heap of money and sacrificed a lot of human lives’.92

Ernst Däumig’s own treatment of the moral consequences of military-colonial violence—arguably the core of his early writings from 1900 to 1904—intertwined the personal-biographic with the ideological-political. His own experiences of violence were his capital as an aspiring writer for a public fascinated with Weltpolitik, yet at the same time they were a burden on him as a moral individual. In both cases his ‘bitter experiences’ had to be reinterpreted. In each of the narratives he provided, first as a writer for a nationalist military audience and then as a socialist, Däumig criticized the preceding system for what it had done to him and what it had made him do. While he described the violence as degenerative in its effects, his critique of it provided a rationale for his conversions.

In the drama Maifeier all characters were drawn into a conversion-redemption that hinged on the sacrifice of Fritz Albers. In his pre-socialist ‘Travel Impressions’ Däumig had already explored the redemptive qualities of meaningful violence through self-sacrifice in the figure of the French missionary in Indochina. Like Albers, he was a ‘brave hero of faith’, a willing victim of violence in the name of a higher humanity. The ideal of self-sacrifice was a common trope in the imaginaries of both the socialist movement and

92 Cited in Markku Hyrkkänen, Sozialistische Kolonialpolitik: Eduard Bernsteins Stellung zur Kolonialpolitik und zum

Imperialismus 1882–1914 (Helsinki, 1986), p. 253. The same sacrificial logic is found in a National Socialist

campaign poster from the early 1930s that shows a resolutely grim soldier looking directly at the viewer from under

a steel helmet with the caption ‘Otherwise the sacrifice was meaningless’.

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the German military.93 In Däumig’s own writing, however, the trope of self-sacrifice appears in his renarration of his experiences, where it functions to redeem, in part at least, his failed past as a perpetrator and a victim of senseless violence in French colonies and Prussian barracks.

Abstract

In 1900, Ernst Däumig (1866–1922) wrote to Karl Kautsky of his ‘bitter experiences’ of violence in the French Foreign Legion and then in the Prussian military that had led to his recent ‘conversion’ to the socialist worldview. This article takes up Däumig’s letters, articles and travelogues, and a drama, to explore how he recast his experiences of colonial and military violence twice, first as a writer for a German soldiers’ journal and then as an aspiring socialist journalist. As well as a burden that pushed him to critique his past, Däumig’s military and colonial experiences are shown to have been his starting capital in the world of journalism and politics. The article gives particular attention to the process of conversion, through which Däumig forged a new life narrative out of the moral tales offered by the adopted worldview and the events of his own past. In addition to providing a case study of worldview conversion, this article demonstrates how biographical research can challenge assumptions about the impact of colonial violence on German metropolitan culture. At the same time, this biographical analysis sheds light on the early career of one of the key figures in the German Revolution of 1918 to 1921. As co-chairman of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), Däumig led the USPD into union with the Communist Party in 1920.

Keywords: socialism, conversion, French Foreign Legion, German colonialism, imperialism, German milita-rism, worldview, Ernst Däumig, USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany)

Queen’s University [email protected]

93 The German military also developed a cult of self-sacrifice prior to the First World War, yet one which celebrated its

own lethality against the enemy. The army circulated myths of dead officers who showed ‘boundless initiative, inor-

dinate capacity for suffering, and blind self-sacrifice, matched only by the willingness to sacrifice others’: Hull,

Absolute Destruction, p. 145.

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