Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

It is tempting to see the genocidal brutality of the German
officials and settlers in South-West Africa as reflective
of a peculiar mind-set that would later sanction the annihilation
of European Jewry. Perhaps Hannah Arendt was
right, at least in the German case, when she postulated that
the seeds of totalitarianism were sown during the colonial
experience in Africa. 22 It needs to be noted, in all fairness,
however, that word of the order to exterminate the Hereros
aroused sufficient protest in Germany itself to oblige the
government in Berlin to disallow it, although it did so too
tardily and ambiguously to prevent the genocide from taking
place. 23 But the often overlooked tragedy of German
colonialism in southern Africa shows that pre-Nazi German
racism was not directed exclusively at Jews. Hitler’s view
of blacks as Untermenschen was not exceptional. The history
of German colonialism also suggests that “final solutions”
to the “problems” created by ethnoracial groups considered
useless or dangerous were acceptable to at least some Germans
as early as 1904 and 1905.
The German Jews themselves enjoyed a temporary respite
from flagrant expressions of political antisemitism
during the period between the late 1890s and World War
I, partly because the attention of racial chauvinists and völkisch
nationalists was directed outward rather than inward.
This era saw the demise of the antisemitic parties and the
incorporation of antisemitism into the rhetoric of the Conservative
Party and the Pan-German League as a theme
subsidiary to the main emphasis on the pursuit of national
prestige and power on the world stage. But this hiatus did
not mean that Jews were immune from prejudice and discrimination.
Antisemitism continued to function as a “cul-
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