The spectacle haunting Europe: colonialism, commercialism, and everyday images of Africa in imperial Germany
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This study examined the simultaneous creation of a visual, consumer, and colonial culture in a rapidly industrializing and newly formed German nation-state from 1884-1914. By juxtaposing state policies and German colonial activity in Africa with images of Africa created by a burgeoning consumer media, I delineated the selective construction of a general, active, and mass disseminated German worldview. Utilizing 122 commercially-produced collector's card images alongside the works of German colonial and visual historians, this thesis explored how domestic socioeconomic transformations and global state-sponsored activity were both presented to and also designed to create the everyday Modern German public. The rationalizations of Modern German society such as national identity, industrial production, scientific thinking, commercial markets, and consumer culture enabled mass society by creating a standardized gaze. Imperial Germany witnessed an alignment of national and commercial interests that encouraged a common way of seeing that decontextualized and dehumanized in the name of objectivity, progress, unity, and pleasure. Because colonial mastery, establishing national superiority, and early forms of visual product promotion each relied on this same authoritarian discursive technique, it is here argued that colonialism be seen not as a separate entity or phenomenon from nineteenth century European Modernity. Instead, colonial thinking was foundational to a modern German identity that was increasingly nationalistic, commercial, scientific, and rationalized into a popularized mass utopia. Furthermore, it was mass visual images in particular that constructed this collective experience, communicated social norms, and regulated social belonging through reflexive associations. This reexamination of the birth of Germany's mass media, national consciousness, and consumerist fantasies holds greater implications for Germany's eventual fascist imagination and her contemporary consumer economy
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Abstract -- List of figures -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- German Structural Transitions -- The Constructs And Conclusions Of German Colonial Historians -- German Colonial Trading Cards And Their Patterns Of Portrayal -- Conclusion -- References
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M. A.