in order to explain imperial expansion, cultural historians and scholars exhort us to examine the impact that Germans had on the colonial world and the influences that colonies had in shaping German society and culture.11 As Geoff Eley argues, “rather than show interest mainly in origins (in colonial policy as an expression of conflicts and pressures coming from inside German society), recent work focuses on consequences and the impact of the colonial encounter.”12 A colonial encounter that, as many now believe, started not with the colonial debates of the 1870s and 1880s, but with Germans’ own informal incursions in colonies and the circulation of knowledge from “exotic” places in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.13
Cultural historians in German studies are particularly interested in understanding how German colonial experiences made a fundamental impact on developing discourses of gender, race, and sexuality and how these cultural exchanges were reflected back into projects of modernization and social transformation. If earlier historians were emphasizing Germany’s particular path to modernity, the new trend is to show the connections shared with other countries and study colonialism as a pan-European project.14 Therefore, more attention is currently being given to international collaborations, transnational ideologies, and comparative approaches.15
This normalization of German history is in part a reaction against optimistic views of theories of modernization that for a long time considered British and French models as the norm from which Germany had diverted since early on in modern history. This Sonderweg (special path) theory of Germany’s past, which was a popular view even in the nineteenth century, was highly influential in the analysis of German colonialism from the perspective of social imperialism. In this approach, colonialism was significant to German history merely for helping to bring popular consent to conservative policies that went against the interests of most of the German population in the metropole and for helping to explain the aggressive German international politics of the early twentieth century. Lora Wildenthal has argued that “as a result, colonialism, by way of social imperialism, became a central part of German history—but in a way that obviated reference to actual colonial affairs or to any people besides white German speakers living in Central Europe.”16 If, in analyzing the internal formation of policies, social imperialists were too critical of the German modernization process, they were also too optimistic about liberalism and the process of modernization in other west European countries.17 The current use of postcolonial views in German studies is both a reflection and an integration of the criticisms that the process of decolonization and the civil rights movement brought to the fore when scholars were identifying the paradoxes of liberal and bourgeois ideals in a colonial setting. Rather than considering liberalism and the bourgeoisie as weak forces of the German Empire, recent studies have analyzed precisely how powerful these elements were in shaping the politics of the German state.18
Uncovering Polish encounters with the colonial world is also significant for a Polish historiography that for decades has limited its study to Poles within the realms of the European borders. Although the emigration movement was quite strong in the Polish lands during the nineteenth century for political and socioeconomic reasons, Polish endeavors in the colonies have not been carefully examined by scholars, apart from a few monographs in history and survey books that ethnologists and anthropologists in Poland have published in the last decades about Polish travels to the Americas, Africa, and Asia.19 Most historians have entirely dismissed the question of Polish colonial imagination because for a long time Poland was considered the victim of imperial aggressions, and, consequently, their works have been mainly guided by ideas of “national revival” and nation-building. Studying the relationship with overseas colonies makes no sense without the constitution of the nation-state. Therefore, the few historical analyses of Poles and the colonies that we have are those regarding the interwar years, when Poles achieved their independence and the Maritime and Colonial League (Liga Morska i Kolonialna) was founded.20 Even then, the colonial movement is considered a weak one, because Poles were just beginning to reconstruct their own state and because the development of the movement was interrupted by Nazi advances in 1939.
The colonial archives and the sanitization of Polish complicity with colonial movements during the Communist period have also posed great challenges to the study of the Polish colonial imagination. When Poles were traveling to overseas colonies, they were mainly using the networks of imperial powers such as Germany, Great Britain, and France to go abroad, and on many occasions were identified not as Poles, but by their citizenship or other affiliation with these countries. To recover Polish experiences in the colonies one would need to retrieve the sources from these state archives (including the Vatican’s, for missionary works) and see how these subjects were identifying themselves and what contacts they had with the Polish lands. Travel accounts published in Polish newspapers and journals are also helpful in reconstructing this history, as is the nationalist literature of the interwar period. In trying to legitimize their own colonial projects, nationalists of the Second Polish Republic left a valuable archive documenting nineteenth-century Polish endeavors in different regions of the world.21 The main problem with the nationalist literature is that members of the Maritime and Colonial League tended to overemphasize the colonial question: according to their account, every Pole who ventured out into the world was a colonialist and dreamt of founding an independent Poland.
In the Communist period, Polish scholars were successful in marginalizing Polish involvement in the colonies by bracketing these experiences into the interwar years and by pointing out, during the decolonization process of the 1950s and 1960s, that Poles did not have anything to do with European colonial oppression. If colonialism was at all engaged, it was mainly to show how Poles themselves had a long history of subalternity, having been colonized by Germans, Austrians, and Russians. Certainly, the experience of World War II had an enormous influence on postwar memory and interpretations of the past. An example of this is the statement that Ryszard Kapuściński makes in his travel account, The Soccer War, which takes place during the decolonization years:
“My country has no colonies” . . . “and there was a time when my country was a colony. I respect what you’ve suffered, but, we too, have suffered horrible things: there were streetcars, restaurants, districts nur für Deutsch. There were camps, war, executions. . . . That was what we called fascism. It’s the worst colonialism.”22
Through the experience of fascism Poles could identify with the suffering of the colonized, but not on equal terms. For some, whites colonizing whites was not just another form of colonialism, but the “worst colonialism.” Still today, there is a romanticized notion of otherness in which many Poles feel that they are the leading brothers of the oppressed. Although after the 1990s more scholars began to explore Polish relationships with the colonial world to understand Polish identity, there is no critical history that interrogates Polish racial views and images of non-Europeans.23
The present book has been written in response to this gap in Polish historiography. It analyzes how Poles in the German Empire were both objects and subjects of colonial agendas and how they positioned themselves in relation to other Germans and local populations in German Africa and Brazil. It also studies the projects and ideas that traveled from colonies to the German metropole, and vice versa, which were influential in the racialization of Slavic populations and in bringing scientific conceptions of race to the everydayness of the German Empire. By recovering Polish experiences with overseas colonialism and addressing projects of internal colonization at home, the book argues that fantasies of colonial conquest and an imperial past, conflated with the German sense of civilizing missions in Prussian Poland, engendered a Polish need for decolonizing Polish culture under German dominion. Polish nationality was thus strongly shaped by colonizing and “civilizing” experiences in the borderlands.
The word “fantasies” has been borrowed from psychoanalytic and literary studies to indicate Polish and German dreams of colonial dominance throughout the nineteenth century.24 Some of the texts analyzed in this work narrate stories from the unconscious, abounding in desires, anxieties, and imaginary identifications. In the German case, these colonial
