Blood and iron in the sand: Colonialism, politics and culture in German Southwest Africa

Through an examination of a variety of texts including books, newspaper articles, letters, songs, and 'native' confessions, this dissertation traces the development of nineteenth century settler ideologies that contributed to and contested imperialism in Southwest Africa. The study contends that the German colonial discourse's dual prioritization of economic strength and culture---what I describe as Realpolitik and Kulturpolitik, respectively---became in the course of colonization increasingly problematic for German settlers. Because of the incommensurate demands of a teetering colonial economy and a German migrant population obsessed with the prospect indigenous resistance, economic and cultural policy were conceived of in ever more incongruous ways, and often involved dissimilar and even conflicting practices. Whereas colonial bureaucrats, beholden to the interests of capital and metropolitan investment, sought to modernize the imperial periphery and preserve the protectorate's limited African labor pool, settlers, beset with anachronistic conceptions of German culture and identity, touted distinctly feudal ways of managing economic production and "native affairs". In the wake of a widening rift between the periphery and metropole, as well as settlers and the Reich, new discourses of community, Germanness, and authority arose that not only challenged settler loyalty to Continental Germany, but also proffered radical notions of a distinctly Southwest African fatherland.