Gilroy, "Hitler Wore Khakis"

[Dave Monroe]

... was led to this by an editorial on Leni Riefenstahl in the current
issue of Sight and Sound, of all places.  Fans of reggae and hip-hop
here might well be interseted in Paul Gilroy's There Ain't No Black in
the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: U of
Chicago P 1991 [1987]) and The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993), respectively, but, in
the meantime, from his recent Against Race: Imagining Political Culture
beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000), pub. in the UK
as Bewteen Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), Chapter 4, "Hitler Wore Khakis," pp.
137-76 (UK pagination may differ) ...

The loss of German colonies after 1918 turned German racial science in a
distinctive direction by reducing opportunities to study colonial
peoples at a stroke.  By itself, the history of German anthropology,
which was closely connected to teh develoopment of racial hygiene,
raises what can only be described as an interesting prima facie case for
the importance of raciology as a critical link between colonial
administration and the subsequent catastrophic direction of genocidal
social policy under Nazism.  One pivotal figure in establishing that
connection was Eugen Fischer, a prominent figure in teh intellectual
pantheon of the Nazi academy.  He was his country's most distinguished
anthropologist and expert on "race-mixing" during the interwar years.
He is remembered now as the director of teh Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Anthropology, Genetics, and Eugenics and as teh author of The Rehoboth
Bastards and the Problem of Miscegenation among Humans ....   Fischer
had conducted the fieldwork for his ground-breaking study in teh German
colony of South West Africa in 1908--one year after the defeat of teh
Hereros.  His subject was defined through a study of teh results of
racial intermixture bewteen Dutch and Hottentot populations.  The impact
of his work would be felt later in the racial legislation enacted under
the Nazis.  (141-2)

>From this auspicious beginning, Fischer's career, which parallels the
professional odyssey of his dear friend Martin Heidegger in a number of
ways (not least hsi role in cleansing Germany's most prestigious
university of Jews), took him to teh Nazi-appointed rectorship of Berlin
University in 1933, and to such tasks as judging the "ideal Nordic head"
in a competition ....  He would later employ teh sam scientific skills
in training the SS physicians who would make camp selections in physical
anthropology and racial science ....  In concert with his better-known
colleague Hans Gunther ... Fischer also helped to organize the
anthropological evaluation of the "Rheinlandbastarde," the mongrel
offspring of German women and the French colonial troops who had been
placed in teh Rheinland as an accupying army after 1918. (142)

If anthropologists and distinguished professors like Fischer made use of
their colonial experiences in later activities inside Europe, might not
the military men have done the same thing?  The possibility of any
linkage need not, of course, be approached exclusively in a negative
mode.  We might also ask whether, by the time the Nazis had siezed
power, there was any lingering life left in teh political and religious
opinion that had protested over General von Trotha's lusty but
controversial attempts at the extermination of teh Herero people he held
in "protective custody." (143)

... but it's the sources cited in Gilroy's endnotes that might be of
particular interest here.  First off, he cites what seems to be a
veritable genre of "German novels dealing with the suppression of the
Herero uprising in South West Africa" (p. 369, n. 10), e.g.,

Frenssen, Gustav.  Peter Moors Fahrt nach Sudwest: Ein Feldugs-
    bericht.  Berlin: Thousand, 1936 [1907].

Grimm, Hans.  Sudafrikanishe Novellen.  Frankfurt/Main, 1913

... and refers the reader to ...

Ridley, Hugh.  Images of Imperial Rule.  London: Croom Helm, 1983.

.. on Fischer et al., see, apparently ...

Proctor, Robert.  "From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde in the German
    Anthropological Tradition."  Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on
    Biological Anthropology.  Ed. George W. Stocking.  Madison: U of
    Wisconsin p, 1988.

__________.  Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis.
    Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.

Weindling, Paul.  Health, Race and German Politics between National
    Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945.  (New York: Cambridge UP, 1988)

Weiss, Sheila Faith.  "The Race-Hygiene Movement in Germany."
    Osiris (2nd series), 3 (1987), pp. 193-236.

... these might be of particular interest ...

Lester, Rosemarie K.  "Blacks in Germany and German Blacks:
    A Little Known Aspect of Black History."  Blacks and German
    Culture.  Ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand.  Madison:
    U of Wisconsin P, 1986.

Pommerin, Reiner.  Sterilisierung der Rheinlande bastarde:
    Das Schiksal einer farbigen deutschen Minderheit, 1918-1937.
    Droste, 1979.

If anyone's familiar with any of these (Proctor I know, and Stocking has
been publishing on and editing collections about colonialism and
anthropology for some time, otherwise ...), let me know ...