Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

BRADLEY D. NARANCH
politan traditions that he celebrated were not the philosophical ones
that Meinecke had in mind, however, but those of a highly mobile
commercial elite who travelled the world in search of quick profits
and lasting family fortunes. The Hanseats whose lives he chronicled
had been part of intricate global networks of trade and communication
from remote plantations and trading posts in Latin America,
Africa, and the Pacific to the metropolitan centres of world commerce.
German imperial ambitions during the reign of Wilhelm II
had shattered most of these networks by the time Schramm reached
adulthood, while the Third German Empire that emerged under
Adolf Hitler in 1933 further erased whatever linkages the Weimar
years had been able to re-attach. Hamburg did rebuild, as Schramm
himself chronicled, 97 but part of its cosmopolitan history had been lost
forever, and a new generation of social historians later undermined
the liberal mythology that he had worked so hard to construct. 98
German colonial historians are but the latest wave of scholars to
subject the history of north German merchant communities like
Hamburg’s to renewed scrutiny. 99 Cosmopolitan networks, as much
as colonial ones, were key to the successes of Hanseatic families and
trading houses, although the evidence of their generations-long history
has faded from public attention until quite recently. 100 As for the
existence of a vast network of overseas outposts in which Hanseats
once resided, the Brazilian graves of Adolphine Schramm and her
two dead children, restored by her son, Max, and preserved in written
and photographic form half a century later by her grandson,
Percy, stand as silent sentinels to anyone who cares to remember
their stories of fortunes made and loved ones lost during a time and
a place of cholera. 101 132
97 Schramm, Neun Generationen, ii. 544–86.
98 See esp. Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera
Years 1830–1910 (Oxford, 1987).
99 Heike Möhle (ed.), Bibeln, Branntwein und Bananan: Der deutsche Kolonial -
ismus in Afrika: Eine Spurensuche in Hamburg (Hamburg, 1999).
100 Joachim Zeller, Kolonialdenkmäler und Geschichstbewusstsein: Eine Unter -
suchung der kolonialdeutschen Erinnerungskulutr (Frankfurt am Main, 2000);
Winfried Speitkamp, Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte (Stuttgart, 2005), 173–87.
101 Schramm, Neun Generationen, ii. 230. Because the Schamms were Luther -
an, they were not allowed to bury Adolphine or her children in the town’s
Catholic cemetery, so they created a private plot for their remains.