"Race relations" are a controversial topic in today's Germany. Have Germans learned from the past? How far back must one go to understand the tensions, prejudices, and strategies that have marked race relations in the recently unified nation? The Imperialist Imagination explores the German preoccupation with racial and ethnic differences throughout the past two centuries, in a colonial and "postcolonial" context.
Germany's belated national unification in 1870, its short colonial period (1884-1918), and the loss of its colonies as a consequence of World War I, rather than through...