German entanglements in transatlantic slavery: An introduction

Abstract

This essay aims at bringing together research on Germany’s colonial past and imperialist endeavors with current trends in scholarship in Atlantic history and slavery studies. While scholars of German history have begun to challenge what Jürgen Zimmerer has called the “colonial amnesia of Germans,” the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery have rarely been included in discussions about national commemorative cultural debates because Germany, it is claimed, has never directly and profitably participated in the economies of slavery. For the longest time, Germany has entertained the notion that the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery involved only other European players such as England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, or Denmark, and indeed, it seems plausible that for its own history, Germany is able to claim non-participation. Yet, the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery were part of the earliest economic enterprises that embodied and inherently relied on global networks of trade that uprooted and relocated people in unprecedented numbers. Building on the pioneering work of scholars like Klaus Weber, Eve Rosenhaft, Felix Brahms, and Mischa Honeck, this essay re-charts the various routes of German participation in, profiteering from, as well as showing resistance to transatlantic slavery and its cultural, political, and intellectual reverberations. The essay thereby seeks to interrogate historical processes (or fantasies) of empire-building, colonialism, and slavery which, according to public memory, seem to have taken place in isolation from each other; yet, we claim that they should be regarded as part and parcel of a narrative that ingrained colonialism and slavery in German cultural memory and identity to a larger extent than has been illustrated and admitted so far in general discourses in contemporary Germany.