Imperialism and Working-Class Readers in Leipzig, 1890–1914

Everyman’s Colonial Library:
Imperialism and Working-Class

Readers in Leipzig, 1890–1914
John Phillip Short (Columbia University)
Downloaded from gh.oxfordjournals.org by guest on February 3, 2011

His imagination was stuffed with all he read in his books about enchantments, quarrels,
battles … and all sorts of impossible nonsense. It became so rmly planted in his mind
that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read about was true, that to him no
history in the world was better substantiated … He fancied it was right and requisite,
no less for his own greater renown than in the service of his country, that he should
make a knight-errant of himself, roaming the world over in full armour and on horseback
in quest of adventures.
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Re ecting on the pleasures of reading when he was a boy in late-eighteenth-

century Mainz, the artisan Adam Henß recalled how ‘with each passing year,
my inner world expanded anew, as I lived with Robinson on his island, sailed
with Columbus across the Atlantic, accompanied Cortez in Mexico and the
heroes of A Thousand and One Nights in Baghdad, Bassora, and Cathay’.
Reading revealed the ‘shimmering world of fantasy’—a vast, unknown world
beyond Christian Europe—to boys whose horizons were very narrow. He goes
on to recount the excitement he felt upon obtaining a map:
There fell into my hands an old, brightly illuminated map of Europe. What good fortune!
… But it was only Europe, and my fantasy realm lay beyond this part of the world. I
gazed with longing after an itinerant Italian who offered beautiful maps for sale … In
order to have everything at once, I bought a planiglobium, whose puzzle long occupied
me, and nally had the other three, hitherto missing, corners of the earth.1
His geographical imagination red by maps, Henß was trans xed by the
mysteries of the non-European world. Although perhaps an extreme case, the
passage nevertheless reveals how tales of European discovery, conquest and
adventure appealed to readers among the German labouring classes even before
the revolutions in literacy and print-capitalism created a mass market for them.
I would like to thank Volker Berghahn, Wolfram Hartmann, Mark Landsman and Marcia Wright,
as well as the readers for German History, all of whom offered valuable comments on this article.
1
Adam Henß, Aus dem Tagebuch eines reisenden Handwerkers, ed. Karl Esselborn
(Darmstadt, 1923), p. 21. I rst encountered Henß in Rudolf Schenda, Die Lesestoffe der kleinen
Leute: Studien zur populären Literatur im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1976), p. 33.
German History Vol. 21 No. 4 10.1191/0266355403gh292oa Ó 2003 The German History Society
446 John Phillip Short
It also suggests a connection between reading and colonialism that was indirect
and problematic.
Henß identi es himself closely with his heroes, indeed travels and explores
with them in his imagination. He appears to make no distinction between the
real and the ctional. The historical Cortez is no more real to him than the
fabled Orient or Defoe’s desert island. This con ation prompts us to ask how
workers and artisans like Henß might have read stories of European discovery
and conquest. Travelogues and exploration accounts cultivated readers’ taste
for the exotic, the monstrous and the fantastic. They transmitted growing
knowledge about overseas empires. In the nineteenth century, they offered the
respectable enticements of the new popular science. And, as Henß describes
it, they produced in the reader a subjective mingling with imagined heroes, a

projection of the self on to the New World of discovery. It seems only reason-
able that such readings contributed to the formation and spread of colonialist
ideas and sentiments among German readers, including artisans and, later in
the nineteenth century, the working classes. The easy confusion of the real and
the imaginary nevertheless points to the complexity of reception, because it
reminds us of the individual, historical and dynamic process by which a text
comes to have meaning. It is unclear whether readers perceived colonialist texts
as adventure stories or popular science, as exotica or patriotic devotional works,
and whether, over the long run, the cultivation and satisfaction of such appetites
translated into popular colonial enthusiasm. 2
There is a tendency in the scholarship on German colonialism to assume a
straightforward relationship between reader and text, between reception and
content. This relationship implies a kind of colonialist quixotism: reading as
the inspiration, even exhortation, to colonialist acts—or at least to a romantic
identi cation with a colonial ideal. The travel writer Eugen Wolf described
how ‘accounts of the epoch-making travels of Schweinfurth, Stanley,
Livingston, and others made a deep impression’ on the young Hermann
Wissmann, who grew up to enjoy fame as an explorer, hunter and governor
of East Africa.3 While the in uence of travelogues was in this case exceptional,
according to Susanne Zantop there was already in the eighteenth century a
‘travelogue mania’ with profound consequences for Germany. These and other
texts—novels, anthropological and philosophical works, poetry and plays—
2
William H. Schneider confronts the reception problem in the French case—though without
much success— in An Empire for the Masses: The French Popular Image of Africa, 1870–1900
(Westport, Conn., 1982).
3
Eugen Wolf, Wissmann: Deutschlands Grösster Afrikaner (Leipzig, [1905?]), p. 2. Joseph
Conrad—a more famous example—recalls how, as a young boy in Poland, an arctic exploration
account rst stirred his geographical imagination. Echoing the artisan Henß, he describes how
the book ‘sent me off on the romantic explorations of my inner self; to the discovery of the
taste of poring over maps; and revealed to me the existence of a latent devotion to geography’ .
His later travels in the Congo began, in a sense, in his boyhood when, as he recalls it, ‘putting
my nger on a spot in the very middle of the then white heart of Africa, I declared that some
day I would go there’ (Conrad, ‘Geography and Some Explorers’, Last Essays (Garden City,
1926), pp. 12, 16–17).
Working-Class Readers in Leipzig, 1890–1914 447
over the course of time ‘build on one another, creating a network of implicit
references, which reinforce their message and anchor it in the minds of their
readers. Together, they create a colonialist imagination and mentality that beg
to translate thought into action.’ Although she offers no evidence, Zantop writes
that, by the 1880s, ‘colonial fantasies’ had become ‘so rmly entrenched in
Germany’s collective imagination that they formed a collective residue of
myths … that could be stirred up for particular political purposes’.4 By this
account, colonialist books somehow transformed their readers into colonial
enthusiasts.
The assumed uniformity and transparency of meaning in colonial literature
conceals, on the one hand, the subjective, individual nature of reading and, on
the other, important social differences dividing German readers. Zantop’s

notion of a ‘collective imagination’ in Germany presumably refers to its edu-
cated bourgeoisie, rather than to workers or to artisans like Henß. The term
remains vague, however, and for good reason. Determining the reading habits
of German workers is by itself a dif cult task. Reconstructing working-class
reception and connecting these readings to a more general notion of ‘mentality’
present many more problems.5 If, by the end of the nineteenth century, some
90% of Germans could read, literacy by itself was no guarantee that German
workers, with little free time or money for books, would become readers.6
Widespread literacy, cheap colportage literature, and networks of public and
workers’ libraries did form the basis for a broad working-class reading culture,
but only a minority of workers patronized libraries, and traces of the ephemeral,
novelty-driven world of colportage literature have largely faded. Not surpris-
ingly, workers left virtually no record of how they actually read particular
books. Only scattered evidence survives, usually lists of most-read books in
libraries, but also some contemporary speculation on how or why workers read
certain kinds of books, among them books on colonialism.
Historians have painstakingly reconstructed German workers’ reading habits,
but their interest in content and reception has been mostly limited to socialist
workers’ disproportionate interest in novels rather than political economy.
There has not yet been a broader analysis of the politics of reading that includes
4
Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany,
1770–1870 (Durham, N.C., 1997), pp. 32, 2–3. See also, for example, the introduction and
several of the essays in Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox and Susanne Zantop (eds.), The
Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor, 1998). On travel and
travelogue in the eighteenth century, see Wolfgang Griep and Hans-Wolf Jäger (eds.), Reise und
soziale Realität am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg, 1983). On the ideological function
of travelogues more generally, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Trans-
culturation (London, 1992).
5
One exception to the general lack of analysis of working-class reception in mid-nineteenth-
century Germany is Rainer Noltenius, Dichterfeiern in Deutschland: Rezeptionsgeschichte als
Sozialgeschichte am Beispiel der Schiller- und Freiligrath-Feiern (Munich, 1984).
6
Rudolf Schenda, Volk ohne Buch: Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der populären Lesestoffe,
1770–1910 (Frankfurt/M., 1970), p. 444.
the ideological subtexts of popular works.7 The present essay addresses this
gap by examining the relationship of working-class readers to colonial literature
in the areas of natural science, ethnography and travelogue. The rst part of
the essay describes the world of working-class reading and demonstrates that,
far from being broadly indifferent to colonialism, proletarian readers did indeed
seek out various kinds of colonial literature, including novels, travelogues, war
stories and general descriptions of the colonies, as well as cheap serialized
and pamphlet ction. The second, more speculative part addresses the dif cult
problem of reception. Lacking direct evidence, I try to reconstruct the context
in which colonialist books were read. I therefore examine late-nineteenth- and
twentieth-century discussions of workers reading colonialist texts and consider
other aspects of working-class reading that might have shaped experiences of

colonial literature.
The inquiry is set in imperial Leipzig in the years 1890–1914, during the
rule of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the heyday of German Weltpolitik, when the
colonial empire assumed its nal form. The Saxon city of Leipzig was in this
period a teeming industrial centre, doubling in population over twenty years,
to nearly 600,000 in 1910. Most of this growth occurred in the working-class
suburbs of New Leipzig, surrounding the old city centre, where migrants from
the countryside came to work in the machine, textile and chemical factories,
the printing and glass works, and in construction. 8 A large, rapidly growing
working class created their own world in these industrial suburbs, a world in
many ways quite separate from Leipzigers of other social classes.9 They formed
a heterogeneous group including both skilled and unskilled workers, factory
workers and more traditional artisans. Many, but certainly not all, were Social
Democrats who participated to varying degrees in the political and cultural life
of the party. Leipzig was a stronghold of the German Social Democratic Party
(SPD), which offered workers an extensive network of libraries and cultural
associations. 1 0 The following pages will explore one aspect of this distinctive
working-class world—the reading culture of Leipzig workers—as it developed
in lending libraries and through the colportage trade, both within the orbit of
the SPD and beyond it.
7
See, for example, Dieter Langewiesche and Klaus Schönhoven’s fundamental work,
‘Arbeiterbibliotheken und Arbeiterlektü re im Wilhelminischen Deutschland’ , Archiv für Sozial-
geschichte , 16 (1976), pp. 135–204, and Hans-Josef Steinberg, ‘Workers’ Libraries in Germany
before 1914’, History Workshop, 1 (1976), pp. 166–80.
8
Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1911), p. 9. Sean Dobson, ‘Auth-
ority and Revolution in Leipzig, 1910–1920’ (Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University, 1996), pp. 35–9.
9
On the general social history of the Leipzig working class in the Kaiserreich, see Dobson,
‘Authority and Revolution’ . On the formation of a distinct Leipzig working class, see Hartmut
Zwahr, Zur Konstituierung des Proletariats als Klasse: Strukturuntersuchung über das Leipziger
Proletariat während der industriellen Revolution ([East] Berlin, 1978). The size and organiza-
tional strength of the Leipzig working class make it especially suitable for research in the social
history of culture and politics.
10
On the SPD cultural movement in Leipzig, see Dobson, ‘Authority and Revolution’ , and
Thomas Adam, Arbeitermilieu und Arbeiterbewegung in Leipzig, 1871–1933 (Cologne, 1999).
I: Working-Class Readers and Penny Dreadfuls

The enthusiasm for colonies in Germany coincided with a series of advances
in print capitalism that had far-reaching effects on working-class culture. The
colporteur novel, sold door-to-door in ten-pfennig instalments, helped create a
mass market for books by the 1870s. 1 1 By the late 1880s, cheap pamphlet
ction—American detective stories and frontier tales, pirate stories and exotic
adventures, with colourful cover illustrations—surpassed the colporteur novel
in popularity. By 1910, Germans were buying tens of millions of penny
dreadfuls (dime novels) every year, along with illustrated newspapers and
mass-circulation magazines, from peddlers, kiosks and tobacco shops. 1 2 A new
working-class reading culture emerged with the formation of the mass market

just as the age of high imperialism reached its peak. Colonial exploration and
the ‘scramble for Africa’ generated a stream of travelogues, war stories and
ethnographic exotica that became the stuff of working-class readers’ encounter
with the world beyond Europe.
Workers got their hands on these books in the new public and SPD libraries,
in railway stations and from peddlers. In a publishing centre like Leipzig—
where typesetters, printers and binders produced books by many popular col-
onialist writers—they doubtless got their hands on them in other ways too,
whether from binderies and warehouses or from secondhand bookshops. 1 3 Still,
colportage was probably the most common and effective means of distribution.
In 1896 there were more than 150 such dealers in Leipzig selling cheap prints,
postcards and penny dreadfuls with ‘enticing titles’ in pubs, beer gardens and
door to door. According to one critical observer, the ‘better novels’ appealed
to shop girls and milliners, while most readers of sensationalist pulp novels in
Leipzig were factory workers and servants. 1 4 Moritz Bromme, a socialist
worker and bibliophile from the Leipzig area, described turn-of-the-century
colportage and proletarian literary taste among the workers in a machine-
making factory in the Thuringian town of Gera:
At rst, the workers read mostly the Berliner Illustrierte and the Reporter. [Some] read
the newly established Gerichtszeitung, which contained mainly sensational illustrations
of murder. The younger fellows were of course consumers of Hintertreppenromane,
with a murder on every page. Only those with whom we enlightened ones came into
direct contact followed our advice and subscribed to the Freie Stunden, or …
Langkavel’s Der Mensch und seine Rassen, [or] Bommeli’s Geschichte der Erde …
The nineteen- to twenty-two-year-old skilled people loved war stories or something racy,
11
Ronald A. Fullerton, ‘Creating a Mass Book Market in Germany: The Story of the
“Colporteur Novel”, 1870–1890’, Journal of Social History, 10 (1977), pp. 266–83. See also
Gabriele Scheidt, Der Kolportagebuchhandel, 1869–1905: Eine systemtheoretische Rekonstruk-
tion (Stuttgart, 1994).
12
Ronald A. Fullerton, ‘Toward a Commercial Popular Culture in Germany: The Development
of Pamphlet Fiction, 1871–1914’, Journal of Social History, 12 (1979), pp. 495–500.
13
Karl Heinrici, ‘Die Verhältnisse im deutschen Colportagebuchhandel’ , Schriften des Vereins
für Sozialpolitik , 79 (1899), p. 203.
14
Ibid., pp. 205, 209–11.
showing as many naked women as possible, like Album, Frauenschönheiten, Das kleine
Witzblatt, Flirt, Satyr and Sekt. Then came the compulsive readers with Buch für Alle
and Gartenlaube.15
Tales of faraway battles and adventures set in colonial Africa, Asia or the South
Seas easily t the paradigm of the colporteur novel. Dashed off by hack writers
and cheaply produced for the mass market, they have left relatively few traces.
Surviving titles like In Kamerun! Erlebnisse eines jungen Deutschen an der
Westküste von Afrika or Unter den Battacks, den Menschenfressern auf Suma-
tra suggest that stories set in the European colonies promised suf cient com-
mercial appeal to attract the publishers of mass-circulation pulp ction.1 6 These
were exciting tales of German or European merchants, explorers and settlers
confronting the dangers of life in the colonies. Cannibalism, especially, was

an enduring theme of such literature. At the turn of the century, following the
German seizure of Kiaochow and coinciding with the Boxer Rebellion, readers
could purchase in fty instalments the 1,202 pages of the breathlessly titled
Prinz Tuan, der geheimnißvolle Kaiser von China. Oder: Die Giftmischerin
von Peking. Schicksale eines deutschen Mädchens im Wunderlande China.
Chinesisch-deutscher Sensationsroman . The ‘Unter deutscher Flagge’ series-
‘Koloniale Unterhaltungsliteratur für Jugend und Volk’—included ten-pfennig
titles like Patrouillenritte in Deutsch-Südwest, Auf Grenzwacht in Südwest-
Afrika, and Die Eroberung von Kamerun: ‘lively, thrillingly told tales based
for the most part on true experiences’, their covers illustrated in vibrant colour.
Inevitably, though, colonial themes represented only a small part of penny-
dreadful plots, which encompassed everything from enslavement and murder
to fortune-telling and royal scandals to emigrant misadventures and every sort
of ‘schreckliches Schicksal’. Around 1900, with the appearance in Germany
of the cheap American serial novel, it was the Wild West tales of Buffalo Bill
and the Nick Carter detective stories, rather than the trash novels of empire,
which became enormous bestsellers.1 7 A cheap, popular colonial literature
ourished, but on a smaller scale.
The new mass reading culture presented the colonial movement with the
task of identifying books suitable for the ordinary reader and distinguishing
good literature from bad. The Kolonialfreund, a guide to ‘popular’ colonial
literature for book dealers, librarians and teachers, attempted to ‘separate the
15
Moritz William Theodor Bromme, Lebensgeschichte eines modernen Fabrikarbeiters , ed.
Paul Göhre (Jena, 1905), pp. 285–7.
16
Rudolf Schenda, ‘Tausend deutsche populäre Drucke aus dem 19. Jahrhundert’ , Archiv
für Geschichte des Buchwesens, 11 (1971), pp. 1,466–651. For a sense of popular themes, see
Schenda’s list of a thousand titles, which includes religious tracts, colporteur novels and diverse
ephemera of the period. Among relevant titles on Schenda’s list are Anarkalli, die indische
Bajadere, oder der Sepoy-Aufstand in Indien and Die Gefangenen unter den Wilden der Südsee-
Inseln, oder: Schreckliche Schicksale der Mannschaft des Schiffes Mentor. As was typical of
this sort of literature, most have no date of publication.
17
Fullerton, ‘Popular Culture’, pp. 497–9; Hans Friedrich Foltin, ‘Zur Erforschung der
Unterhaltungs- und Trivialliteratur, insbesondere im Bereich des Romans’, in Studien zur
Trivialliteratur , ed. Heinz Otto Burger (Frankfurt, 1968), pp. 254–5.
wheat from the chaff’, reminding readers that, ‘in the eld of German colonial
literature, alongside much chaff, there are also hundreds of good books that
have remained completely unknown in broad circles’. A number of recom-
mended titles nevertheless belonged to the world of cheap colportage literature
and seemed to merit only grudging recognition. Twenty-pfennig booklets from
the ‘Hurra! Durch alle Welt!’ series, for example, were often lled with ‘too
much blood and impossible, exaggerated adventures’. That they were ‘never-
theless more worthwhile than the awful Indian-literature’ was ‘beyond ques-
tion’. The editor recommended Langheld’s Im schwarzen Erdteil and Liebert’s
Im Kampf gegen die Wahehe from another series, but warned that ‘not all
authors in [the series] are “outstanding”, and many remind one of colportage
literature’. And among twenty-pfennig books brought out by Globus was Afri-

kanische Sklavenräuber, whose illustrations were ‘as horrible as the text’. But
it was better to have workers reading books on colonialism, even the bad ones,
if it might spark their interest and cultivate an inclination toward the better
colonial literature:
The colourful covers of the booklets are very enticing to the young, but remind one in
many cases of the notorious Indian penny dreadfuls. In terms of content, they for the
most part cannot be characterized as unobjectionable … Still, it is commendable that
these series provide quite enthusiastic colonial descriptions and can serve partially to
encourage the reading of more substantial colonial works.18
Of course, colportage brought not only the penny dreadful but also other kinds
of books, including religious works and popular science, into the working-
class household. 1 9 Missionary tracts, travelogues and popular ethnographical
lexicons all treated colonial themes in more explicit, more serious ways. A
peddler might offer, for example, Gaetano Casati’s Zehn Jahre in Aequatoria
und die Rückkehr mit Emin Pascha, advertised as an ‘impartial account’ of the
sensational Emin Pasha story, ‘awaited with feverish impatience and suspense
by the whole world’. (Indeed, in 1897 Casati was one of the most popular
authors in the library of the educational association of Leipzig engravers.) A
book ‘of the highest geographical, colonial and topical interest’, it promised
answers to ‘many burning questions about the Dark Continent’, in forty rather
expensive instalments at fty pfennigs each.2 0 More affordable were the
sentimental and exotic stories sold in pamphlet series by Christian colporteurs.
Peddlers of Bibles, prayer books, portraits of the emperor and the like, the
Christian colporteurs worked with the church, religious associations, and
missionary societies.2 1 They sold titles like the ten-pfennig Wie der Herero
18
Emil Sembritzki (ed.), Der Kolonialfreund: Kritischer Führer durch die volkstümliche deut-
sche Kolonial-Literatur (Berlin, 1912), pp. 5–6, 19–20, 32, 21.
19
On the broad range of works sold by colporteurs, see Heinrici, ‘Colportagebuchhandel’ ,
p. 215.
20
Advertisement in Über Land und Meer, 1891, p. 542; Konrad Haenisch, ‘Was lesen die
Arbeiter?’, Die Neue Zeit, 18, no. 49 (1899–1900), p. 693.
21
Heinrici, ‘Colportagebuchhandel’ , pp. 219–21.
lebt und stirbt, oder, Die Gottlosen haben keinen Frieden, the work of mission-
ary societies eager to popularize their role in spreading Christianity and German
culture overseas.2 2 The ‘heathen world’ of the colonies was an inexhaustible
source of variously exciting, inspirational and affecting tales of missionary life,
costing from ve to fty pfennigs each. Pamphlets like Erlebnisse im Hinter-
lande von Angra-Pequena and Unter den Zwartboois auf Franzfontein: Ein
Beitrag zur Missions- und Kolonialgeschichte Südafrikas, heavily illustrated
with missionary genre scenes and portraits of local converts and chieftains,
were calculated to appeal to a popular audience.2 3 The broad hostility of the
SPD and Leipzig’s socialist workers to the Lutheran church probably under-
mined the purpose of missionary colportage literature for many readers.2 4 For
the workers who did read it, the prospect of an exotic adventure story probably

eclipsed the intended Christian message.
II: The New Public Libraries

It was not, of course, the religious and scienti c works that critics associated
with the colportage trade, but the sensationalist, scandal-ridden Hintertreppen-
romane. According to a critic in the Preußische Jahrbücher, this was worthless
‘trash literature’, morally corrupting—a ‘school for crime’. ‘In the hovels of
the poor, in workers’ apartments, among families of artisans—everywhere we
nd the colourful booklets whose outward appearances are just as odious to
educated taste as are their contents.’ 2 5 ‘Is it not a disgrace’, wrote Ernst
Schultze, leader of the movement for public libraries, ‘that in Germany and
Austria some twenty million among the “people of thinkers and poets” obtain
their intellectual nourishment from 45,000 penny-dreadful colporteurs?’ The
notion that the ‘educational elevation of the people also entails an increase in
love of fatherland’ served to underscore the appeal of libraries to bourgeois
social reformers.2 6 Interpreting the new working-class reading culture as a
serious moral and social problem, they vied for in uence over workers’ taste
and reading habits by building libraries and conducting studies of their
working-class patrons. Reformers hoped to ensure the transmission of national
22
Schenda, Volk ohne Buch, pp. 318–19; Schenda, ‘Populäre Drucke’, p. 1,630. See also
Sembritzki (ed.), Kolonialfreund .
23
Johannes Olpp, Erlebnisse im Hinterlande von Angra-Pequena. Missionstraktate (Barmen,
1896); H. Riechmann, Unter den Zwartboois auf Franzfontein: Ein Beitrag zur Missions- und
Kolonialgeschichte Südafrikas, Rheinische Missions-Schriften, no. 83 (Barmen, 1899). I am
grateful to Wolfram Hartmann for making several of the Rhenish Missionary Society tracts
available.
24
On Leipzig workers’ rejection of the church, see Dobson, ‘Authority and Revolution’ ,
p. 106.
25
Tony Kellen, ‘Der Massenvertrieb der Volksliteratur’ , Preußische Jahrbücher, 98 (1899),
p. 83.
26
Ernst Schultze, Freie öffentliche Bibliotheken: Volksbibliotheken und Lesehallen (Stettin,
1900), pp. 12–13, 16.
culture—the culture of the cultivated bourgeoisie—represented by the canon

of classical German literature developed during the nineteenth century.
Around 1910, the Dresden public librarian Walter Hofmann undertook an
analysis of workers’ reading patterns in order to penetrate the murky ‘psy-
chology of the proletariat’. ‘We are better informed about the living conditions
of half-savage African peoples’, he observed, ‘than about the lower classes
among our own people’. As it turned out, the workers shared this interest in
colonial topics. Of the fty proletarian readers analysed most carefully, over
a fth read books about African exploration and colonization. Both a typesetter
and a turner, for example, read Margarethe von Eckenbrecher’s Was Afrika
mir gab und nahm. An unskilled worker borrowed Hedwig Irle’s Wie ich die
Herero lieben lernte, as did a construction worker, who also read Max

Schmidt’s Aus unserem Kriegsleben in Südwestafrika on the Herero and Nama
wars, both volumes of Rochus Schmidt’s Deutschlands Kolonien and other
books on the Boer War and Sumatra.2 7 One thirty-year-old worker, apparently
consumed by interest in the colonies, read almost exclusively books about
German Africa, colonial wars and cannibals. 2 8
Works like these were common in lending libraries and reading rooms,
though they were not nearly as popular as belletristic literature. In Hofmann’s
library, for example, the ‘Länder- und Völkerkunde’, or geography and ethno-
graphy section, included ‘among other things, numerous exciting true accounts,
travel adventures, and descriptions of exotic cultures’, many of which treated
colonial themes.2 9 In the public library in Leipzig-Gautsch, the same section
contained Frieda von Bülow’s Reiseskizzen und Tagebuchblätter aus Deutsch-
Ostafrika, a ve-volume Europas Kolonien and Schmidt’s popular two-volume
Deutschlands Kolonien.3 0 Authors in this category generally recommended for
the new public libraries included the widely read Henry Morton Stanley and
Hermann Wissmann, something of a bestseller among German explorers.3 1
27
Walter Hofmann, ‘Die Organisation des Ausleihdienstes in der modernen Bildungsbibliothek’,
part 2, ‘Zur Psychologie des Proletariats’, Volksbildungsarchiv , 2 (1911), pp. 227, 312–44.
28
Among the books listed were Joachim von Brenner, Besuch bei den Kannibalen Sumatras
(Würzburg, 1894); Karl Dove, Südwestafrika: Kriegs- und Friedensbilder aus der ersten
deutschen Kolonie (Berlin, 1896); Kurt von Morgan, Durch Kamerun von Süd nach Nord: Reisen
und Forschungen im Hinterlande, 1889 bis 1891 (Leipzig, 1893); Paul Reichard, Deutsch-
Ostafrika: Das Land und Seine Bewohner (Leipzig, 1892); Rochus Schmidt, Deutschlands
Kolonien: Ihre Gestaltung, Entwicklung und Hilfsquellen , 2 vols. (Berlin, 1895); Kurd Schwabe,
Mit Schwert und P ug in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Vier Kriegs- und Wanderjahre (Berlin, 1899);
Franz Stuhlmann, Mit Emin Pascha ins Herz von Afrika: Ein Reisebericht (Berlin, 1894);
Hermann Wissmann, Unter deutscher Flagge quer durch Afrika von West nach Ost, von 1880
bis 1883 (1st edn, Berlin, 1888; references to 7th edn, Berlin, 1890). Three other workers—a
coppersmith, age twenty-nine, a millworker, twenty-one, and a machinist, nineteen— had similar
pro les. Hofmann, ‘Psychologie’ , p. 313.
29
Ibid., p. 261.
30
Bücher-Verzeichnis der Öffentlichen Bibliothek des Vereins ‘Volkswohl’ in Gautsch, ca.
1905. Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig, AH 2737.
31
Blätter für Volksbibliotheken und Lesehallen, 3 (1902), p. 84. On Wissmann’s popularity,
see Cornelia Essner, Deutsche Afrikareisende im neunzehnten Jahrhundert: Zur Sozialgeschichte
des Reisens (Stuttgart, 1985), p. 116.
Patronized by over a quarter of Hofmann’s adult male working-class readers,

and over a fth of adult male bourgeois readers, the geography and ethnography
section was ‘typically the most requested among the educational categories in
the whole library’. And among the subcategories of the belletristic section, it
was the ‘ethnographic-fantastic’ to which speci cally working-class men
resorted, where ‘a tangible need for excitement and experience nds grati -
cation’. According to Hofmann,
the by and large quite unsophisticated category of ethnographic, fantastic and adventure
novels … is overall (within the belletristic category) the most commonly used by work-
ers. The 2,376 volumes borrowed by adult male workers once more give expression to
the need to expand the narrow, everyday reality of existence through imagined excur-
sions into the faraway and exotic, the same need that drove lending gures for the
geographical and ethnographical section of the educational category so extraordinarily

high.
Over the course of 1907 and 1908, 1,372 male workers borrowed 11,638
volumes of German belletristic literature, of which 2,376 belonged to the
ethnographic-fantastic category. Not all of these readers, however, were
inclined toward the speci cally colonial titles among the ethnographic-fantastic.
While ‘Länder- und Völkerkunde’ in this period signi ed colonialist literature,
the ethnographic-fantastic included not only Rudyard Kipling or Gustav
Frenssen’s Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest but also, and more importantly,
the works of wildly popular authors like Friedrich Gerstäcker, whose tales of
emigrant adventures in the New World are only indirectly related to German
colonial literature. Only nine workers borrowed Peter Moor, while the library
lent various volumes by Gerstäcker 489 times.3 2 Still, together with the 3,232
volumes of geography and ethnography, this indicates a substantial, and per-
haps surprising, interest in books—other than penny dreadfuls—about German
and European colonies.
In 1906, the Volksbibliotheken in forty large cities counted among them some
1.4 million readers borrowing 5.4 million books. Around 400,000 of these
readers were workers borrowing some 1.6 million books. 3 3 At the turn of the
century in Leipzig, however, only about 6% of readers in the public libraries
were workers and another 31% artisans.3 4 In 1906, the municipal and state
governments, together with the Association for Public Welfare, supported seven
public libraries for which, according to the police, ‘there was much demand
among workers’.3 5 But apart from the thriving colportage trade, it was the SPD,
not the Volksbibliotheken, that supplied working-class Leipzig with books.
32
Hofmann, ‘Psychologie’ , pp. 261, 270, 291. The gures exclude the belletristic subcategory
of new ction where we nd the colonial novels of Frieda von Bülow, who was, in any case,
most popular among bourgeois women.
33
Langewiesche and Schönhoven, ‘Arbeiterbibliotheken’ , p. 151.
34
Rolf Engelsing, Analphabetentum und Lektüre: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Lesens in
Deutschland zwischen feudaler und industrieller Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1973), pp. 124–5.
35
Stadtarchiv Leipzig, Polizeiberichte, 1906, 25–25b.
According to the Bibliothekar, the journal of the socialist library movement,

the ‘bourgeois’ public libraries in 1912 lent 87,844 volumes to 4,547 readers,
while over 16,000 readers borrowed nearly 200,000 books from the fty-nine
SPD and trade union libraries.3 6 A fairly small but signi cant and constant
number of working-class readers sought out colonialist literature—mainly in
the form of ‘Geography and Ethnography’—in the public libraries. But many
more workers in Leipzig patronized SPD libraries and reading rooms.
Surprisingly—given SPD hostility to the colonial empire—these socialist
workers reproduced this reading pattern in their own libraries.
III: Socialist and Workers’ Libraries

Like the Volksbibliotheken, the workers’ libraries and reading rooms emerged
in response to the ood of colportage literature. As Wilhelm Liebknecht put
it in a speech before the Leipzig Workers’ Educational Association in 1872,
the colporteur novel was ‘in its form, miserable trash, and in its content, opium
for the mind and poison for morality’.3 7 The socialist libraries, too, sought to
divert workers from mass-produced penny dreadfuls and to offer them the
chance of self-improvement through reading: ‘Our young people and our adult
comrades have other, better things to read than Karl May’s fantastic “travel
accounts” of the Orient—Persia, Turkistan, and so on—or of America, of the
Indian territories.’3 8 They also, of course, hoped to inculcate workers with
socialist ideas, and in this sense competed with public, company and school
libraries. The Leipzig librarian Gustav Hennig, editor of the Bibliothekar,
observed that the latter ‘contain an enormous amount of worthless stuff, and
moreover, all the jingoist (hurrapatriotisch ), bigoted rubbish and fabrications
of history that wreak devastation among our youth. There are even notable
educators’, he went on, ‘who do not hesitate in the least to allow the books
of Mr Karl May into school libraries’.3 9 The SPD libraries would presumably
have served to lter out literature exhibiting vulgar or reactionary tendencies.
The party’s vociferous opposition to colonialism, propagated in the party press,
in lectures, and in speeches, might reasonably have shaped its librarians’
approach to acquiring and recommending books. 4 0 We might therefore expect
36
Gustav Hennig, ‘Proletarisches und bürgerliches Bibliothekwesen in Leipzig im Jahre 1912’,
Der Bibliothekar, 5 (1913), p. 671.
37
Wilhelm Liebknecht, ‘Wissen ist Macht—Macht ist Wissen’, Kleine Politische Schriften ,
ed. Wolfgang Schröder (Leipzig, 1976), p. 149.
38
In Bibliothekar, 3 (1911), p. 279.
39
Gustav Hennig, Zehn Jahre Bibliothekarbeit: Geschichte einer Arbeiterbibliothek (Leipzig,
1908), p. 25.
40
See, for example, Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Develop-
ment of the Great Schism (Cambridge, 1955), pp. 59–87; Hans-Christoph Schröder, Sozialismus
und Imperialismus: Die Auseinandersetzung der deutschen Sozialdemokratie mit dem Imperia-
lismusproblem und der ‘Weltpolitik’ vor 1914 (Hanover, 1968); Helmuth Stoecker and Peter
Sebald, ‘Enemies of the Colonial Idea’, in Arthur J. Knoll and Lewis H. Gann (eds.), Germans
in the Tropics: Essays in German Colonial History (New York, 1987).
that colonial literature would nd no place in the workers’ libraries of Leipzig.

The contrary, however, was the case.
Classi ed variously as geography, ethnography or travelogue, German and
foreign—particularly English—colonial literature consistently appealed to a
small segment of the readership in workers’ libraries, and not only in Leipzig.
For example, of 1,432 responses to a survey of Berliners enrolled in workers’
education courses (1906–8), 168, or 8.5%, named ‘Erd- und Völkerkunde’ the
subject most interesting to them.4 1 In the library of the Berlin Woodworkers’
Association, an average of about 20% of the books borrowed each year (1891–
1911) came from the ‘Reisebeschreibung und Völkerkunde’ section.4 2 A work-
ers’ library in Bremen reported in 1913 that the ‘travel narratives were almost
always out, so that this area … had to be substantially expanded through new

acquisitions’. To help socialist librarians satisfy ‘the well-known appetite for
travelogues, which one can observe in every library’, the Bibliothekar provided
a list of books. It includes accounts by the heroes of African exploration—
Gerhard Rohlfs, Wilhelm Junker, Gustav Nachtigal—and of course Stanley’s
celebrated works. It also includes titles by three former colonial governors,
several volumes on the Herero uprising and other episodes of colonial violence
and even a book by the notorious Carl Peters.4 3
In Hennig’s own library—that of the Social Democratic Association of Leipzig-
Plagwitz-Lindenau-Schleussig— the situation was much the same. In a brief
history of his library over a ten-year period (1898–1907), Hennig includes a list
of most-read works from the ‘Reisebeschreibungen und Naturwissenschaften’
section. During this period, workers borrowed altogether over 80,000 books.
More than half were novels, and only about a quarter belonged to ‘educational’
41
E. Graf, ‘Die Bildung Berliner Arbeiter’, Zentralblatt für Volksbildungswesen , 9 (1909),
p. 22.
42
Wilhelm Nitschke, ‘Wie und nach welcher Richtung entwickelt sich das Lesebedürfnis der
Arbeiterschaft?’ , Sozialistische Monatshefte, 19 (Jan.-May 1913), p. 366.
43
Bibliothekar, 5 (1913), p. 655; 1 (1909), pp. 61–2. The list includes Franz von Bülow, Im
Felde gegen die Hereros: Erlebnisse eines Mitkämpfers (Bremen, 1905); Dove, Südwestafrika ;
Helene von Falkenhausen, Ansiedlerschicksale: Elf Jahre in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, 1893–1904
(Berlin, 1905); Curt von François, Deutsch-Sü dwest-Afrika: Geschichte der Kolonisation bis zum
Ausbruch des Krieges mit Witbooi, April 1893 (Berlin, 1899); Graf Gustav von Götzen, Durch
Afrika von Ost nach West: Resultate und Begebenheiten einer Reise von der Deutsch-Ostafrikani-
schen Küste bis zur Kongomündung in den Jahren 1893/94 (Berlin, 1895); Wilhelm Junker, Dr
Wilhelm Junkers Reisen in Afrika 1875 bis 1886 (Vienna, 1889–91); Ottokar Schupp, Am Zam-
besi: Eine Geschichte aus Dr. Livingstones Entdeckungsreisen in Süd-Afrika (Altenberg, 1906);
Gustav Nachtigal, Sahara und Sudan: Ergebnisse sechsjähriger Reisen in Afrika (3 vols., Berlin,
1879–89); Carl Peters, Im Goldland des Altertums: Forschungen zwischen Zambesi und Sabi
(Munich, 1902); Magdalene von Prince, Eine deutsche Frau im Innern Deutsch-Ostafrikas: Elf
Jahre nach Tagebuchblättern erzählt (1903; 2nd edn Berlin, 1905); Gerhard Rohlfs, Quer durch
Afrika: Die Erstdurchquerung der Sahara vom Mittelmeer zum Golf von Guinea, 1865–1867 (2
vols., Leipzig, 1874–5); Schwabe, Mit Schwert und P ug in Deutsch-Sü dwestafrika ; H. M. Stan-
ley, Im dunkelsten Afrika (2 vols., Leipzig, 1890); Hermann Wissmann, Im Innern Afrikas: Die
Erforschung des Kassai während der Jahre 1883, 1884 und 1885 (Leipzig, 1888), In den Wild-
nissen Afrikas und Asiens: Jagderlebnisse (Berlin, 1901), Meine zweite Durchquerung Äquator-
ial-Afrikas vom Kongo zum Zambesi während der Jahre 1886 und 1887 (Frankfurt/Oder, [1890])
and Unter deutscher Flagge.
categories, including the colonial literature grouped under ‘Travel Accounts

and Natural Sciences’. The most popular among these titles was Unter
Menschenfressern, borrowed 199 times, followed by Fünf Jahre unter den
Stämmen des Kongostaates, borrowed 122 times. Workers borrowed Stanley’s
Im dunkelsten Afrika and Wissmann’s ubiquitous Unter deutscher Flagge
eighty-one times each, and Unter den Kannibalen Borneos sixty-eight times.
By way of comparison, the library lent Gerstäcker’s adventure novels over
2,800 times, and thirty-two titles by Émile Zola over 2,000 times.4 4 The pattern
in the library of the Leipzig Association of Printers’ and Typesetters’ Assistants
was similar. In the late 1890s, about 500 workers per year used the library. In
the three years 1896–1898, readers took home, respectively, 274, 332 and 328
volumes from the ‘Geographie, Länder- und Völkerkunde’ section. Among

them was Im dunkelsten Afrika, borrowed nineteen, ten and twenty-nine times
over the three years—a fairly small number compared to the eighteen volumes
by Gerstäcker borrowed 177, 106 and 200 times.4 5
IV: The Politics of Reading

We have established that workers in Leipzig consistently sought out and found
books about the German and European colonial empires, whether in public and
workers’ libraries or through colportage. This kind of evidence, however, can
present only a part of the picture: that workers were aware of and interested—
sometimes passionately—in the distant, exotic world of the colonies; that,
through reading, colonialism in some sense penetrated the interior world of the
worker’s imagination. To conclude from this that a certain segment of the work-
ing class was indeed colonialist is not possible because we do not know how
workers read these books. It is far from clear that reading narratives of explo-
ration and colonization produces explorers or colonizers, or even the sentiments
and ideological convictions of the metropolitan colonial enthusiast. Friedrich
Fabri, Germany’s leading colonial publicist in the heyday of African explo-
ration, touched on this problem in his Bedarf Deutschland der Colonien? in
1879:
The present has, rightly, been referred to as an age of travels and of geographical surveys
… Our compatriots are engaged in research expeditions in all the quarters of the globe.
44
Hennig, Zehn Jahre Bibliothekarbeit , pp. 10–11. Among the most-read titles in the ‘Reise-
beschreibungen und Naturwissenschaften’ section are Carl Bock, Unter den Kannibalen auf
Borneo. Eine Reise auf dieser Insel und auf Sumatra (Jena, 1887); G. Antonio Farini, Durch
die Kalahari-Wüste (Leipzig, 1886); Karl Lumholtz, Unter Menschenfressern: Eine vierjährige
Reise in Australien (New York, 1892); Richard Oberländer (ed.), Westafrika vom Senegal bis
Benguela: Reisen und Schilderungen aus Senegambien, Ober- und Niederguinea (Leipzig, 1878);
Stanley, Im dunkelsten Afrika; Herbert Ward, Fünf Jahre unter den Stämmen des Kongostaates
(Leipzig, 1891); Wissmann, Unter deutscher Flagge. Among most-read authors in the youth
section were Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) and Rudyard Kipling (three volumes borrowed
129 times).
45
A. H. Th. Pfannkuche, Was liest der deutsche Arbeiter? (Tübingen, 1900), pp. 21–3.
The number of our geographical periodicals … as of our geographical societies is stead-

ily growing; interest in geographical, ethnographic and anthropological studies has been
powerfully stimulated by scienti c research and popular illustrated accounts, and is now
very much more widespread among us than it was in earlier decades. This is certainly
encouraging. But are we to be and remain only theoreticians in this eld too, merely
collecting and researching for the bene t of the world at large? Are we to continue
sitting in our studies and making ourselves familiar with all the quarters of the globe,
without nding a second national home anywhere overseas?46
Fabri celebrates the widespread interest in geography and anthropology aroused
by the new illustrated magazines, but laments his compatriots’ inability to trans-
form this impulse into active colonialism instead of remaining passively ‘in
their studies’ reading. Colonialist literature—exploration accounts or geo-
graphical magazines like Globus—seemed to fall short of inspiring colonialism

in readers.
To be sure, most of the geographical and travel books popular among
workers in Leipzig were explicitly, even stridently, colonialist. Their authors—
men like Karl Dove, Hermann Wissmann and Carl Peters—were among the
leading propagandists of empire and their works were emphatic exhortations
to patriotic colonialism. 4 7 Colonialists identi ed this kind of reading, along
with the ubiquitous lantern-slide lecture, as the principal means of inculcating
in the masses the economic theories and ardent patriotic feelings of the colonial
movement. Few seemed to doubt the power of reading to re the colonialist
imagination. The real problem, indeed, was to counteract the in uence of the
socialist press. Colonialists needed to ‘start from below, among the working
classes, where two paths to enlightenment present themselves: the printed and
the spoken word’. The ‘literary propaganda’ of the printed word most often
took the form of political yers and pamphlets, but also books of various
genres.4 8 Die deutschen Kolonien, for example, based on a lecture series at the
Colonial Museum in Berlin sponsored by the Berlin-Charlottenburg section of
the Colonial Society, eventually made its way into the hands of workers in
Dresden.4 9 The propagandist’s ideal was a ‘true Volksbuch’—a book for the
people—de ned as both ‘thrilling and easily understood’. Frenssen’s infamous
novel Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest, about the war in Southwest Africa,
evidently t the colonialists’ purpose. The story of Peter Moor, a North German
46
Friedrich Fabri, Bedarf Deutschland der Colonien? Eine politisch-ökonomische Betrachtung
(1879; reprint, bilingual edn, trans. E. C. M. Breuning and M. E. Chamberlain as Does Germany
Need Colonies? Lewiston, N.Y., 1998), pp. 57, 59.
47
Among works dealing with the themes and ideological subtexts of colonial literature, see
Sibylle Benninghoff-Lü hl, Deutsche Kolonialromane 1884–1914 in ihrem Entstehungs- und
Wirkungszusammenhang (Bremen, 1983); Amadou Booker Sadji, Das Bild des Negro-Afrikaners
in der Deutschen Kolonialliteratur, 1884–1945: Ein Beitrag zur literarischen Imagologie
Schwarzafrikas (Berlin, 1985); Joachim Warmbold, Germania in Africa: Germany’s Colonial
Literature (New York, 1989).
48
Dr Zacher, ‘Ein Aktionsprogramm für koloniale Volksaufklärung’, Kölnische Zeitung, 17
Feb. 1908.
49
The book was Adolf Heilborn, Die deutschen Kolonien [1905?]. Hofmann, ‘Psychologie’ ,
pp. 312–44.
blacksmith’s son who goes to ght the Herero, it describes the harsh, alien
colonial landscape, the agony and sacri ce of German soldiers, and the
immense, destructive violence of the war. In Germany itself, ‘Frenssen’s book
was an event. It contributed like no other to the German people’s laying aside
its indifference to colonialism, learning to value the heroism of its sons and
taking increased interest in “New Germany”.’ The book’s descriptions—‘full
of vigour, gripping simplicity … and artistic perfection’—were said to ‘stir the
young to pure, unadorned heroism and plant loyalty to the fatherland deep in
their hearts’.5 0
Colonialists frequently resorted to books and libraries to generate enthusiasm
for the empire. The German Colonial Society erected at the 1896 Colonial
Exhibition in Berlin a reading room that was emblematic of the broad effort

to get colonialist books into the hands of German readers of all classes. Here,
among potted palms, elephant tusks and busts of famous explorers, visitors
could examine maps of the colonies, enjoy picture books and albums, or read
magazines and books on colonial topics (Fig. 1). When they left, they could
take home with them a free colonial atlas. In 1905, the Bochum section of the
Colonial Society introduced a ‘proposal from industrial circles’ at the national
board meeting in Berlin. Turning the discussion ‘from the Massai in distant
Africa to a people somewhat closer to home’, the speaker envisioned
‘approaching the working class’ and inspiring ‘whole masses with enthusiasm
for colonial policy’. (The comparison of German workers to African ‘savages’
was by this time something of a rhetorical convention.) Anecdotes about
workers reading colonial literature formed the better part of his ‘particular
observations made in Bochum’. He reported with enthusiasm that
in a large school for continuing education attended almost exclusively by workers, a
library of two hundred books—a large part of them colonial books—is nearly always
entirely out. It’s a thought-provoking observation. It shows that students, who … after
their day’s work attend the continuing education school at night, still nd time to read
books of this sort at home. And when the school’s director calls in the books, they
repeatedly explain that ‘my parents are still reading the book’, and that sort of thing.
That shows that there are people among the working class who display understanding
and interest in our colonial goals.51
Similarly, having ‘arranged for a number of copies of the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung
to be left in a restaurant that was not of the very rst rank’, he af rmed with
satisfaction that ‘after some time he could either no longer nd the papers or
noticed that they showed signs of heavy use’.5 2 The Augsburg section likewise
enjoyed some small success with the reading public after depositing its book
collection in the Augsburg Municipal Library. ‘The hope that this might also
50
Sembritzki (ed.), Kolonialfreund , pp. 111, 103. Gustav Frenssen, Peter Moors Fahrt nach
Südwest: Ein Feldzugbericht (Berlin, 1906).
51
Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde, R8023/108, Bl. 127, ‘Bericht über die Sitzung des
Vorstandes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft’ , 28 Nov. 1905.
52
Ibid.
Fig. 1. German Colonial Society Reading Room, Colonial Exhibition, Berlin

(1896). Source: Arbeitsausschuß der Deutschen Kolonial-Ausstellung,
Deutschland und seine Kolonien im Jahre 1896: Amtlicher Bericht über die
erste deutsche Kolonial-Ausstellung (Berlin, 1897). Reproduction: New York
Public Library
be a way to make propaganda for the colonies has not been in vain since,
according to the municipal librarian, the colonial library has been frequently
in demand.’5 3 While such ‘thought-provoking’ examples may reveal more
about the na‡¨veté of bourgeois colonial propagandists than about the tendency
of working-class readers to absorb enthusiasm for the empire, they nevertheless
demonstrate how colonial literature became part of direct, unmediated attempts
to win workers over to imperialism.
More often, however, the diffusion of colonialist writing among working-
class readers was less direct than this. The organized colonial movement played
a relatively small role in getting colonial literature into working-class hands.
Popular illustrated magazines are a much better example of the multiple indirect
channels through which colonialism circulated as entertainment and education.

These are to be distinguished from the more specialized geographical maga-
zines, mentioned by Fabri, which projected a forthright, thoroughly colonialist
position in the heyday of exploration and imperialism. General-interest maga-
zines, intended for the edi cation and diversion of middle-class families—Die
Gartenlaube, Daheim and Westermanns Monatshefte—were popular among
both workers and the ‘Geography, Tourism, and Colonial Affairs’ reader
generally.5 4 Peddlers sold the magazines door to door and in factories, and the
panoply of family, fashion and other titles consistently made up the largest
share of colportage sales.5 5 Bound annual volumes of these middle-class maga-
zines were frequently among the most-read works at both public and workers’
libraries. As a metalworkers’ association library in Nuremberg reported, there
was ‘not much interest among our members for the rubric “Geography and
Travelogue”’, because magazines were suf cient to satisfy the workers’
appetites in this area.5 6
Occasionally there was some relationship between such magazines and the
colonial movement, or some explicit editorial commitment to colonialism. As
a letter from the Leipzig publisher of Welt und Haus: Moderne Deutsche
Wochenschrift to Colonial Secretary Dernburg makes clear, colonialist
propaganda could turn up in unlikely places:
Inspired by the lecture your Excellency delivered on ‘Colonial Education’, I have
decided to add an eight-page colonial supplement to my Welt und Haus every four
weeks, so that suitable texts and pictures might systematically shape in the German
family a generation both enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the colonies. 57
53
Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten, 8 July 1911.
54
Bibliothekar, 1 (1909), p. 28. This example of a periodicals category encompassing ten titles
in a public library in Berlin encapsulates the thematic constellation of discourses and disciplines
so typical of the period: science, the mass-cultural encounter with overseas worlds and
colonialism.
55
Heinrici, ‘Colportagebuchhandel’ , pp. 215, 217.
56
Pfannkuche, Was liest, p. 42.
57
Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde, R1001/4691, Bl. 35.
Similarly, at least one of the editors of the Gartenlaube was a member of the
Colonial Society in Leipzig (which had not a single working-class member).
While these were exceptions, there was nevertheless no mass-circulation maga-
zine in Wilhelmine Germany that did not give the colonial empire a prominent
place in its pages. The illustrated magazines normally displayed a broad,
inclusive patriotism that remained as removed from divisive party politics as
from the cheap thrills and violence of colonial colportage literature. The texts
and iconography in Westermanns Monatshefte, Über Land und Meer and Die
Gartenlaube all served to popularize a brand of German colonialism that was
not stridently political but rather forward-looking, scienti c and exciting. 5 8
Which is not to say that they were free of ideological content, or of the exoti-
cism, racism and celebrations of war typical of colonial literature. The standard

fare of racist cartoons, colonial battles and exploration accounts lled the pages
of Über Land und Meer throughout the 1880s and 1890s (Fig. 2). Pygmies
and other human ‘curiosities’ excited interest, but in a different key: more
restrained and respectable than in penny dreadfuls. Maps, ethnographic reports
and descriptions of ora and fauna in the colonies contributed to the
transmission of colonial knowledge and the cultivation of an informed public.
Westermanns contained the same sort of stuff but was much more explicitly
political and pro-colonialist. It published articles on the slave trade and settler
life in Southwest Africa, on Stanley and the Emin Pasha story, as well as
reviews of colonial literature and long pieces on the ‘colonial woman question’
and on German colonial cities. Among contributors were Peters and Dove, two
of the best-known exponents of colonial expansion.
V: Colonial Literature as Popular Science

Friedrich Fabri’s linkage of reading, science and colonialism points to a second
important con guration in Leipzig’s working-class reading culture: the
equation of colonialist literature with popular science. The popularity of science
common to all social classes in the nineteenth century helps explain the appeal
of colonialist literature to workers. We have seen how both public and workers’
libraries catalogued various genres of colonial literature under educational and
scienti c headings—‘Länder- und Völkerkunde’ or ‘Reisebeschreibungen und
Naturwissenschaften’, for example. Publishers developed inexpensive popular
science series like the ‘Geographische Bibliothek’, consisting of slender, well-
illustrated volumes costing eighty pfennigs apiece.5 9 The many volumes on
scienti c research expeditions and anthropological encounters with strange
peoples were one facet of the burgeoning popular-science world of lantern-
58
On colonialism in the Gartenlaube, see Kirsten Belgum, Popularizing the Nation: Audience,
Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853–1900 (Lincoln, Nebr.,
1998). See in particular chap. 6, ‘Colonialism, Myth, and Nostalgia’.
59
See, for example, Karl Dove, Die Deutsche Kolonien, vol. 1, Togo und Kamerun (Leipzig,
1909), vol. 2, Das Südseegebiet und Kiautschou (Leipzig, 1911).
Working-Class Readers in Leipzig, 1890–1914
Fig. 2. ‘The First Victory of the Germans in Africa’. Source: Über Land und Meer, 53 (1885), p. 436. Reproduction: New
463
York Public Library

slide lectures, evening enrichment courses, illustrated magazines and popular

ethnographic lexicons. 6 0 Travelling wax museums, with their ‘anthropological
cabinets’, and the famous mises-en-scène of primitive everyday life in the
Völkerschauen, extended a scienti c ‘sensibility’ into the sphere of popular
culture and commercial mass amusements.
Their reverence for science explains to a considerable extent SPD librarians’
willingness to buy and recommend colonialist texts. It is no doubt true that
many socialist librarians offered travel literature and ethnology in spite of
strong political and pedagogical convictions, and that they did so out of the
need to compete with Volksbibliotheken and colportage. 6 1 They were certainly
aware of the contradictions inherent in lending colonialist texts in the libraries
of the anti-colonialist SPD. Social Democratic newspapers—the Leipziger

Volkszeitung not least among them—poured scorn, sarcasm and ridicule on the
colonial enterprise. Frequent, biting criticism of colonial scandals and violence
concealed ssures within the party leadership on the question of colonialism,
and indeed the acceptance of colonial travelogues as science perhaps re ected
broad ambivalence about the utility and ethics of the empire.6 2 The daily press,
however, was unremitting, and could be scathing in its criticism of colonialist
literature. For example, in response to the enthusiastic reception of Frenssen’s
Peter Moor, a socialist paper accused reviewers of either not having read it or
having ‘become so hardened that the most terrible accusations of human
barbarism and blind madness no longer arouse in them any feeling’. The
novel—as a representation of reality, of colonial violence—was ‘more reliable
than any government report or colonialist travelogue, a ringing accusation
against the decay of German culture apparent in our colonial policy’.6 3
Colonial literature could nevertheless nd redemption in science. The SPD’s
Bibliothekar, for example, recommended Peters’s Im Goldlande des Altertums,
with the parenthetical assurance that the ‘results of the investigations described
in it are recognized by science’. A review of Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklen-
burg’s account of his travels in Central Africa negotiates the problem in similar
fashion. The reviewer advises SPD librarians that
60
On the origins and development of popular science, see Andreas W. Daum, Wissenschafts-
popularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und
die deutsche Öffentlichkeit, 1848–1914 (Munich, 1998); Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin:
The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill, 1981), pp. 10–18.
61
On the contradictions between ideological-pedagogical goals and realist practice in workers’
libraries, see Langewiesche and Schönhoven, ‘Arbeiterbibliotheken’ , pp. 162–3.
62
The majority opposed colonialism as exploitation not only of the colonized but also of the
German workers whose taxes paid for it, while a small minority of revisionists argued that a
humane colonialism was both essential to the German economy and bene cial to the
‘uncivilized’ peoples of the colonies. See Abraham Ascher, ‘Imperialists within German Social
Democracy prior to 1914’, Journal of Central European Affairs, 20 (1961), pp. 397–422; Roger
Fletcher, Revisionism and Empire: Socialist Imperialism in Germany, 1897–1914 (London,
1984); Schorske, German Social Democracy ; Hans-Christop h Schröder, Gustav Noske und
die Kolonialpolitik des Deutschen Kaiserreichs (Berlin, 1979), and his Sozialismus und
Imperialismus.
63
Schwäbische Volkszeitung, 27 Dec. 1906.
the contents are to be read critically, not only because various passages work as a pecul-
iar sort of propaganda for German colonial policy but also on account of contradictions
in judging the savages, their morality, etc. … These are neither the only—nor the most
glaring—contradictions. One has only to read how … the duke praises the embarrassing
justice that the German colonial authorities exercise over the natives … That the work
contains other jingoist [hurrapatriotisch] passages need astonish no further. Alongside
these, to be sure, one nds abundant material on land and people, and reading the work
pays handsomely.64
The geographical and ethnographical information—the innocuous sounding
‘abundant material on land and people’—somehow counterbalances the jingoist-
colonialist content, as if these aspects of the work contradicted one another.
Socialists thus seemed to count on a discerning working-class public to grasp
and preserve this distinction when reading colonialist texts. That the distinction

was dubious in the rst place does not appear to have come up.
The development of geography and ethnography as popular science was, of
course, an important point in the dense ideological grid of Wilhelmine col-
onialism. To emphasize workers’ readings of colonialist literature as science—
even within the context of the SPD library—in no way implies a simple
suppression or displacement of the ideological function of these texts. Rather,
popular geography and ethnography in this period constituted a particular form
of colonial knowledge that operated within the broader eld of colonialist
ideology. As Leipzig professor Hans Meyer insisted, science was political.
Beginning with the acquisition of the rst African protectorates in 1884,
‘scienti c research assumed a national character’. Both chair of the Leipzig
Geographical Society and member of the board of the Colonial Society, Meyer
exempli ed the connections between science, commerce and colonialism com-
mon not only in Leipzig. ‘Just as the English, French and Belgians have for a
long time pursued political and mercantile aims on their research expeditions’,
Meyer continued, ‘so now the Germans follow this example in their own colon-
ies’.6 5 Popular ‘scienti c’ literature—exploration accounts above all—re ected
this constellation. Science did not redeem a popular book from its jingoist-
colonialist contents; it sanctioned and legitimized them, just as colonial adven-
ture added lustre to science.
A brief comparison of popular Darwinism and Stanley’s bestsellers suggests
one way that respective working-class readings of scienti c and travel literature
may have produced ideological effects. Popularizers of Darwin—including the
prominent Leipzig colonialist Friedrich Ratzel—attracted widespread interest
among Social Democratic workers and party functionaries. Darwinism was a
fundamental part of the self-consciously progressive, secular socialist world-
64
Bibliothekar, 1 (1909), p. 62; 5 (1913), pp. 571–2. The book was Vom Kongo zum Niger
und Nil: Berichte der deutschen Zentralafrika-Expedition 1910–11, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1912). The
duke served as the last German governor of Togo (1912–14).
65
Hans Meyer, Das Deutsche Kolonialreich: Eine Länderkunde der deutschen Schutzgebiete ,
vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1909), p. 7.
view in this period.6 6 At the same time, the celebrated Stanley had many working-
class fans. For example, among the most-read titles under ‘Naturwissenschaft
und Reisebeschreibungen’ in an SPD library in Leipzig in 1911 were four titles
by Darwin, borrowed altogether twenty-seven times, and three copies of Roth’s
Stanleys Reise durch den dunklen Weltteil, borrowed twenty-one times. A
dozen years earlier, Stanley’s Im dunkelsten Afrika and various volumes on
Darwin were consistently prominent among ‘works with educational content’
borrowed by Leipzig printers’ and typesetters’ assistants.6 7 Aside from their
popularity, there was no obvious connection between Stanley and the Darwin-
ists, and it is not necessarily the case that the same workers read both. Still,
given the broad popularity of Darwinist theory among socialists and the
tendency to think of colonial literature as science, it is not unreasonable to

infer a kind of cross-fertilization linking the discourses represented in the differ-
ent texts. This is especially true of their respective representations of racial
difference.
The circulation of Darwinist theory—usually associated with progressive
politics—shaped conditions for the working-class reception of colonialist texts
just as colonial travelogues—associated variously with both science and reac-
tionary politics—shaped readings of Darwinist theory. Darwinists turned to col-
onial Africa to illustrate evolutionary theories of race just as explorers invoked
Darwin when describing Africans. Both genres used the common racial idiom
of the imperialist era; they were among its most important sources. In his In
Darkest Africa, Stanley indulges in displays of pseudo-scienti c erudition that
lent the work an aura of scholarly respectability in the minds of many readers.
Inclined toward physiognomic readings of race, Stanley perceives in one
African the ‘true negroidal cast of features’, distinguishes in others between
the semi-Ethiopic and the full. Though his typologies appear vaguely
scienti c—they were borrowed from popular Darwinism—he wears his science
lightly as, shifting his gaze from one specimen to the next, he tosses off
spontaneous racial classi cations:
The monkey-eyed woman had a remarkable pair of mischievous orbs, protruding lips
overhanging her chin, a prominent abdomen, narrow, at chest, sloping shoulders, long
arms, feet turned greatly inwards and very short lower legs, as being tly [sic] character-
istic of the link long sought between the average modern humanity and its Darwinian
66
Kelly, Descent of Darwin, chap. 7, ‘Darwin, Marx, and the German Workers’, traces this
development among workers.
67
Bibliothekar, 4 (1912), pp. 390–91; Pfannkuche, Was liest, p. 22. For further examples of
workers reading Darwin, see Bibliothekar, 1 (1909); 3 (1911), pp. 261–2, 284; J. S. and E. F.,
‘Was lesen die organisierten Arbeiter in Deutschland?’ , Die Neue Zeit, 13, no. 5 (1894–5), pp.
154–5; Advocatus [pseud.], ‘Ein weiterer Beitrag zur Frage: “Was liest der deutsche Arbeiter?” ’,
Die Neue Zeit, 14, no. 20 (1895–6), p. 633; Steinberg, ‘Workers’ Libraries’. On Stanley, see
examples cited above and Bibliothekar, 4 (1912), p. 512. See also Daum, Wissenschaftspopulari-
sierung, pp. 241, 300–8.
progenitors, and certainly deserving of being classed as an extremely low, degraded,

almost a bestial type of a human being.68
Images of the primitive, the apelike, the bestial, degenerate and prehistoric
African lled the pages of colonial literature in its variously respectable and
trashy forms. In ‘scienti c’ travel accounts like Stanley’s, they counted as
anthropological observations.
The images bear unmistakable resemblance to what progressive working-
class readers encountered in the pages of Darwin’s German interpreters. There
was a simple, powerful reciprocity between colonial-scienti c and popular-
Darwinist discourses about race. The various African peoples were ‘incapable
of a true inner culture and of a higher mental development’, according to Ernst
Haeckel. The geographical distribution of the four lowest species of mankind—

the woolly-haired Papuan, Hottentot, Kaf r and Negro—corresponded to the
native peoples of Germany’s colonial empire in Africa and the Paci c. This
was natural and inevitable, for among humans the ‘more highly developed, the
more favoured … possess the positive inclination and the certain tendency to
spread more and more at the expense of the lower, more backward, and smaller
groups’. Europeans, ‘by means of the higher development of their brain …
have already spread the net of their dominion over the whole globe’.6 9
These symmetrical, linked representations of race reinforced a discourse
whose origins are scarcely evident in Darwin’s own work. As Alfred Kelly
makes clear, nineteenth-century racism had an intellectual history of its own,
preceding Darwinism. In the case of Darwin’s advocates in Germany, whose
variations on evolutionary theory relied upon the example of the ‘primitive’
black African or Paci c Islander, the origins of racism lay in colonial literature.
This aspect of popular Darwinism was, Kelly suggests, ‘little more than an
updated version of the old travel literature on exotic peoples’.7 0 Indeed, the
popularizer Ludwig Büchner, in a ‘hasty sketch of the natural and moral history
of savage peoples’ emphasizing their ‘brutal degradation and irrationality’,
identi ed the travelogues as the single most valuable source of scienti c
information.
Whoever then wishes to form a judgement as to the true nature of man … must …
grasp at nature itself with both hands and draw his knowledge from the innumerable
springs which ow there in the richest abundance. Nowhere do we nd these springs
68
Henry Morton Stanley, In Darkest Africa, or the Quest, Rescue and Retreat of Emin Pasha,
Governor of Equatoria, vol. 1 (London, 1890), pp. 363, 352.
69
Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation: Or the Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants
by the Action of Natural Causes, vol. 2, trans. E. Ray Lankester (New York, 1876), pp. 307,
310–14, 324. Translation of Die Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Berlin, 1868). Cited in Kelly,
Descent of Darwin, p. 117.
70
Ibid., pp. 108–9, 117, 122.
richer and more copious than in the reports of travelers in distant lands as to the savage
men and tribes which they have met with.71
The famous anthropologist, Darwinist and colonialist Ratzel had likewise begun
as a writer of travelogue.7 2
The racial aspect of popular Darwinism in Germany was inseparable from
colonial travel literature, and the travelogue was indebted to the Darwinists.
Popular science undoubtedly formed an important framework of reception
among some working-class readers, for whom both genres were popular. Both,
however, also supplied explicit cultural and scienti c justi cations for imperial-
ism. The political and scienti c strands are so closely interwoven that it is
dif cult to attribute to either a dominant in uence over working-class reading.
Of course many, even most Social Democrats who took up Darwinism were

solidly anti-colonialist. Within the SPD rank and le, Darwinism was no less
ambiguous in this sense than colonial literature. For some readers—the SPD
librarians, for example—the spell of science was suf cient to justify recom-
mending colonialist books. For others, science no doubt justi ed colonialism
itself. Whether or not this ultimately translated into enthusiasm for the colonial
empire, the popularity of both genres among working-class readers suggests a
broad familiarity with the brand of racist worldview that sanctioned and sus-
tained imperialism.
VI: The Worker and Colonial Adventure

If, by the end of the nineteenth century, the scienti c monograph and the
travelogue had evolved into distinct genres, municipal and workers’ libraries
did not yet re ect this.7 3 As we have seen, ambivalence about the nature of
colonial literature was common. Already in the 1870s, the controversy sur-
rounding the objectivity and credibility of Stanley’s Through the Dark Conti-
nent had marked a high point in discussions about the scienti c validity of
travel accounts.7 4 Together, the popular, best-seller style and the scienti c
pretensions of Stanley’s books embodied the genre confusion that remained
typical of colonial travel literature up to 1914. By 1896, in the preface to his
Südwestafrika, Karl Dove is still making claims for ‘the scienti c rigour of
[the book’s] geographical content as much as for the truth of the actual accounts
of travel and war’, and he promises that the book will both ‘serve as a means
71
Ludwig Büchner, Man in the Past, Present and Future: A Popular Account of the Results
of Recent Scienti c Research, trans. W. S. Dallas (London, 1872), pp. 315, 324, 137–8. Trans-
lation of Der Mensch und seine Stellung in der Natur in Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft
(Leipzig, 1872). Cited in Kelly, Descent of Darwin, p. 117.
72
Woodruff D. Smith, ‘Anthropology and German Colonialism’, in Germans in the Tropics:
Essays in German Colonial History, ed. Arthur J. Knoll and Lewis H. Gann (New York, 1987),
p. 41.
73
On the mixing of science and travel narrative, see Essner, Deutsche Afrikareisende , pp. 117–
19, and Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung , pp. 329–30.
74
Essner, Deutsche Afrikareisende , p. 114.
of instruction’ and ‘offer something to those who pick it up only for entertain-
ment’.7 5 Working-class readers frequently encountered this generic ambiguity
in the interplay of science, politics and entertainment. Books that counted as
science for some readers appealed to others as tales of exotic, dangerous and
thrilling adventure.
‘Of all the sciences’, observed Joseph Conrad, it is geography that
nds its origin in action, and what is more, in adventurous action of the kind that appeals
to sedentary people who like to dream of arduous adventure in the manner of prisoners
dreaming behind bars of all the hardships and hazards of … liberty. 76
We might well extend the analogy to explain the appeal of colonial travelogues
to modern industrial workers in Germany’s big cities. Among working-class
patrons of a Berlin library in the 1890s, for example, one group of readers

‘regularly studies scienti c works’, while ‘another, larger part of the member-
ship are only casual readers, plagued by boredom, who wish to while away
the time with easily understood readings (novels, travelogues)’.7 7 Indeed, travel
and adventure literature in general appealed to working-class men more than
it did to bourgeois readers, or to women readers in general.7 8 For these seekers
of amusement and distraction from everyday life, accounts of colonial
adventures promised an occasional escape for a few hours from an oppress-
ive existence.
The many ‘true accounts’ of scienti c exploration and military action teemed
with gripping stories of brave soldiers at war, heroic explorers deep in the
jungle and encounters with pygmies and cannibals (Fig. 3). Wissmann’s famous
account of his journey in the 1880s from the Angolan coast to Lake Tanganyika
and on to Zanzibar is representative of the genre. Sponsored by the Africa
Society in Berlin, Wissmann could write as a kind of heroic geographer-
explorer whose entertaining tale of guns, crocodiles, Arab slave traders and
jungle primitives served both science and fatherland. Just as entertaining was
Herbert Ward, an Englishman living along the Congo in the days of Stanley’s
Emin Pasha expedition, who reveals the ‘secrets of tropical Africa’, among
them amulets, charm-doctors, fetish-men and human sacri ce. Anthropophagi
abound in all accounts, ‘indulging in a light repast off the limbs of some
unfortunate slave’ or, gathered in ‘orgies’, ‘banqueting upon the bodies of the
enemies slaughtered in some recent con ict’. They live in houses ‘decorated
75
Karl Dove, Südwestafrika: Kriegs- und Friedensbilder aus der ersten deutschen Kolonie
(Berlin, 1896), p. vii.
76
Conrad, ‘Geography’ , p. 247.
77
Advocatus [pseud.], ‘Was liest der deutsche Arbeiter?’, Die Neue Zeit 13, no. 2 (1894–5),
p. 817. As was typical, the ‘Länder- und Völkerkunde (Reisebeschreibungen)’ category was
second in popularity to ‘Romane und Novellen’, which included a lot of Zola and ‘a few Hinter-
treppenromane ’ of the pop-orientalist subgenre, among them Der Türkenkaiser und seine Feinde
and Die Geheimnisse des Hofes von Konstantinopel (Advocatus [pseud.], ‘Was liest’, p. 815).
78
Langewiesche and Schönhoven, ‘Arbeiterbibliotheken’ , pp. 184–8, 194.
Fig. 3. Visit to a ‘Snake Temple’ in West Africa. Source: Richard Oberländer

(ed.), Westafrika vom Senegal bis Benguela: Reisen und Schilderungen aus
Senegambien, Ober- und Niederguinea (Leipzig, 1878). Reproduction: New
York Public Library
with human skulls’ and wear necklaces of human teeth.7 9 Elements of the
fantastic and the exotic probably excited many—even most—proletarian read-
ers more than the scienti c and political content.
Walter Hofmann, the Dresden librarian, emphasized this escapist mode of
reading colonial literature. Most books identi ed by colonialists or socialists
for their propagandistic or scienti c value appeared to Hofmann as pure, un-
redeemed entertainment. Hofmann did recognize that workers might read the
same book in different ways, as science or adventure, and tried to resolve the
ambiguity by considering books within the context of a worker’s broader read-
ing pattern. When requesting books, workers rarely made a distinction between
‘war literature, travelogue and descriptions of exotic cultures’ on the one hand
and scienti c works on the other (a distinction most librarians do not seem to

have emphasized). ‘Whenever a travelogue was clearly read in the context of
other educational or scienti c works … and to the exclusion of all other travel
literature, it was listed in the corresponding scienti c section’, Hofmann
explains. Having recognized this problem, he goes on to show that workers
were much likelier to read for amusement than enlightenment. There were
occasional exceptions, like the young mechanic who was ‘driven by a strong
interest in geography and ethnography, which thrilling travel accounts by no
means satisfy’. Instead of the usual fare, he consumed ‘volume for volume
Alexander von Humboldt’s classic travels in the equinoctial regions of the new
continent’.8 0 But most working-class readers—like the twenty-year-old mill-
worker who read Thonner’s Im afrikanischen Urwald or the forty-three-year-
old instrument maker who borrowed Buchholz’s Reisen in Westafrika—were
drawn to the merely exciting, whether in the form of colonial war and travel
accounts or adventure novels. 8 1
Hofmann interpreted the similar division among readers of belletristic works
in terms of, once again, a proletarian need ‘to expand the narrow everyday
reality of existence through imagined excursions into the faraway and exotic’.
And he observed that this ‘need in a given reader is seldom paired with an
interest in modern realist and naturalist descriptions of the present, making it
clear that what we have here before us is something like two types’. These were
the ‘Zola-reader’ and the ‘Gerstäcker-reader’, the latter drawn to the delights of
the ‘ethnographic-fantastic’. In Hofmann’s hierarchy of proletarian readers, the
Zola-reader, with his naturalist appetite, is the more sophisticated, while readers
79
Wissmann, Unter deutscher Flagge; Herbert Ward, Five Years with the Congo Cannibals
(London, 1891; reprint, New York, 1969), translated as Fünf Jahre unter den Stämmen des
Kongostaates (Leipzig, 1891), pp. 132, 120; Stanley, In Darkest Africa, p. 172.
80
Hofmann, ‘Psychologie’ , pp. 278–9, 284. These were the thirty volumes of Alexander von
Humboldt’s epic Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, rst published in
French from 1805 to 1834. See Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 111–43; Daum, Wissenschafts-
popularisierung , pp. 269–79.
81
Hofmann’s ‘Buchholz, Reisen in Südwestafrika ’, appears to have been Reinhold Buchholz,
Reisen in West-Afrika (Leipzig, 1880); Franz Thonner, Im afrikanischen Urwald: Meine Reise
nach dem Kongo und der Mongalla im Jahre 1896 (Berlin, 1898).
almost exclusively of travel and war accounts ‘represent a whole other type’—
indeed, a pathologically escapist one—though they are ‘somewhat more
developed, rather more distinctive’ than ‘the simpler minds’ attracted to Jules
Verne and the Gartenlaube.8 2 Reading Zola implied a sober grappling with
social reality, while reading colonial travelogues amounted to a ight into the
realm of the ethnographic-fantastic.
The librarian’s curious system—his ‘psychological’ typology of the working-
class reader and corresponding categories of literature—suggests not only the
escapist mode of reading but also an additional context in which workers read
their colonial travelogues and war stories. If Hofmann’s ‘Gerstäcker-reader’
did not necessarily represent a truly pathological escapism, he certainly existed,
at least in the sense of reading quantities of adventure novels, most of them

set in the United States. Not only Gerstäcker’s many stories of settler life in
America but also Cooper’s ‘Leatherstocking Tales’ and May’s ‘Old Shatterhand’
adventures—not to mention countless colporteur novels, the trashy
Indianerschmöker—turn up again and again as workers’ favourite books. The
enormous popularity of these novels implicitly demonstrates the relative insig-
ni cance of colonial literature in Germany. However, while the distinction is
important, it also tends to obscure a fundamental, intertextual continuity
between the two types. Exciting novels about settler life on the American
frontier, with their images of untamed wilderness and savages, furnished the
framework of expectations that many working-class readers brought to colonial
adventure and war stories.8 3 As early as the 1840s, German colonial enthusiasts
had absorbed rhetorical conventions and imagery from political and literary
discourse on pioneers and wilderness in America. The nineteenth-century Aus-
wanderung, in particular, provided the link between colonial enthusiasm and
discourse about America. Over the course of the century, and particularly dur-
ing the colonial period, there was a transposition of American and colonial
frontiers in both political and imaginative literature. Novels by Gerstäcker and
others created an important context for colonial literature, a context that shaped
working-class expectations of the latter as entertainment, as frontier adventure,
rather than nationalist-colonial propaganda. Yet, at the same time, the romance
of white settlement in Gerstäcker is itself dif cult to separate from the ideology
of colonialism.
VII: Conclusions
The story of colonial literature and its proletarian readership does not quite t
into conventional accounts of either imperialism or working-class culture in
82
Hofmann, ‘Psychologie’ , pp. 267, 280.
83
On the links between colonial literature and novels of the American frontier, see for example
Dorian Haarhof, The Wild South-West: Frontier Myths and Metaphors in Literature Set in
Namibia, 1760–1988 (Johannesburg, 1991), and Hugh Ridley, Images of Imperial Rule
(London, 1983).
Wilhelmine Germany. Historians most often depict imperialism as the emblem

and vocation of the nationalist bourgeois, who fought the hostility of anti-
imperialist workers and lamented the Kolonialmüdigkeit of most other
Germans. The fundamental ambiguity of colonial literature, however, mirrors
the equally fundamental heterogeneity of its audience. As it turns out, Social
Democratic industrial workers and the bourgeois notables of the Colonial
Society read many of the same books. Aspects of colonialism appealed to a
broader, more diverse public than just the propertied and educated enthusiasts
organized in nationalist pressure groups. Similarly, the appeal of colonial litera-
ture tended to spill over boundaries within working-class culture. The Social
Democratic subculture of structured leisure in Leipzig developed in this period
into an extensive network of associations, libraries and educational institutions.

This was in important ways a world apart from respectable, middle-class
Leipzig, just as it distinguished itself from the burgeoning new commercialized
mass culture.8 4 Yet colonial literature appealed to readers from all strata of the
working class, through SPD libraries no less than public libraries or the
colportage trade, irrespective of class or political factors.
The interplay of ideology, science and fantasy in German colonial literature,
and the multiple, overlapping frameworks of reception, complicate the attri-
bution of particular social and political functions to such literature among Leip-
zig workers. It may be that an imagined terra incognita provided an idealized
space for the projection of workers’ utopian longings, an effect entirely
unrecognized by contemporary observers and critics.8 5 More certain was the
propaganda function in the dissemination of colonial literature, an attempted
manipulation of the masses to secure broad support for colonialism, naval
expansion and their corollaries. And there was the sheer entertainment, the
pleasure of exoticism and adventure, which may have had the additional polit-
ical function of diverting workers’ attention away from the everyday dissatis-
factions of political and social inequality endured in crowded industrial cities.
This double mechanism of manipulation and distraction leads us back,
perhaps inevitably, to the concept of social imperialism, obviously applicable
84
Among the substantial literature on the SPD subculture and its implications for German
politics, see Günther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-
Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa, 1963). Criticism of Roth’s interpretation
includes Richard Evans, ‘The Sociological Interpretation of German Labour History’, in R.
Evans (ed.), The German Working Class, 1888–1933: The Politics of Everyday Life (London,
1982), and Dick Geary, ‘Working-Class Culture in Imperial Germany’ in Roger Fletcher (ed.),
Bernstein to Brandt: A Short History of German Social Democracy (Baltimore, 1987). More
recently, Vernon Lidtke has drawn a much sharper distinction between the SPD and other spheres
of German culture; see his The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany, 1878–
1890 (New York, 1985).
85
The philosopher Ernst Bloch speculated on the potentially revolutionary and utopian content
of nineteenth-century colportage literature set in faraway places, and particularly in the work of
Karl May. See his Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley, 1990),
pp. 154–64.
in the case of workers reading popular books about the empire.8 6 It is quite
clear that some workers were receptive to the appeal of ‘bourgeois’ colonial
literature, even in SPD reading rooms. Nevertheless, the concept by itself does
not suf ce to explain the transmission and function of colonial knowledge and
sentiment among different social classes in Leipzig. As we have seen in the
case of literature, the mediation of colonialism was indirect and uncertain, fol-
lowing intricate channels and conducted by an unlikely combination of SPD
librarians, colporteur peddlers and bourgeois pressure groups like the Colonial
Society. Understanding the ideological effects of this dissemination depends
upon knowledge of much more than libraries and reading patterns: the many
dimensions of popular culture and associational life, local politics and social
structure, economy and labour relations.

Still, it is clear that colonialism did not nally succeed in peeling workers
away from the SPD, even as it began to divide the ranks of party leaders and
intellectuals. The small minority of SPD colonial revisionists failed to
transform the party’s political and moral opposition to colonialism. For Social
Democratic workers at least, party propaganda remained a powerful
countervailing force in the contest for mass support. 8 7 Leipzig’s working class
did not, for the most part, abandon the SPD in the ‘Hottentot elections’ of
1907. Nor did workers defect to colonialist associations or parties. A broad
consensus emerged among the middle classes on the advantages, necessity,
and even the inevitability of imperialism, a consensus founded in part on the
unremitting barrage of patriotic, racist and violent language and imagery in
popular colonial literature. It would hardly be unthinkable under these circum-
stances for the working-class reader to believe, like Don Quixote, that ‘the
whole fabric of invention and fancy he read about was true’, that it was ‘right
and requisite’ to go ‘roaming the world over … in quest of adventures’. All
the more remarkable, then, that so many workers in Leipzig persisted up to
the outbreak of war in 1914 in their indifference or outright hostility to the
blandishments of the imperialists.
Abstract
From the 1870s, the German colonial movement belonged wholly to
the bourgeoisie, a tendency reinforced by consistent Social Democratic
hostility. However, this did not necessarily exclude the lower classes
86
The most in uential application of this theory to German history is Hans-Ulrich Wehler,
Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne, 1969).
87
Some direct evidence of the powerful effects of SPD anti-colonial propaganda exists in the
form of Hamburg police reports transcribed by Richard Evans. These overheard working-class
conversations reproduce with striking consistency the anti-colonialist language and ideas typical
of SPD newspapers and propaganda. See Evans (ed.), Kneipengesprä che im Kaiserreich: Die
Stimmungsberichte der Hamburger Politischen Polizei, 1892–1914 (Reinbek bei Hamburg,
1989).
from enthusiasm or fascination for empire. For most of the working-

and lower-middle-class public, the transmission of colonial knowledge
occurred outside of the colonial movement, through the media of a
new mass culture that developed simultaneously with the so-called new
imperialism. By 1914, the formation of print-capitalism and the mass
circulation of texts had introduced the colonial empire to millions of
new readers of serialized ction, penny dreadfuls, and illustrated
magazines.
This essay examines the place of colonial literature—novels,
travelogues, missionary tracts, histories, geography, and ethnogra-
phy—in the reading culture of working-class Leipzig from 1890 to
1914. The rst half traces the dissemination of colonial literature

through colportage and both public and socialist libraries, and
documents a substantial working-class readership for books about the
overseas empire. The second half addresses the problem of reception,
asking how workers read colonial literature. Because almost no record
of their responses survives, the essay reconstructs the contextual frame-
work for reading, with emphasis on politics and ideology, escapism
and pleasure, and popular science.

Imperialism and Working-Class Readers in Leipzig, 1890–1914

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Everyman’s Colonial Library:

Imperialism and Working-Class

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Re ecting on the pleasures of reading when he was a boy in late-eighteenth-

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I: Working-Class Readers and Penny Dreadfuls

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II: The New Public Libraries

culture—the culture of the cultivated bourgeoisie—represented by the canon

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Patronized by over a quarter of Hofmann’s adult male working-class readers,

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According to the Bibliothekar, the journal of the socialist library movement,

III: Socialist and Workers’ Libraries

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that colonial literature would  nd no place in the workers’ libraries of Leipzig.

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categories, including the colonial literature grouped under ‘Travel Accounts

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IV: The Politics of Reading

The number of our geographical periodicals … as of our geographical societies is stead-

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Fig. 1. German Colonial Society Reading Room, Colonial Exhibition, Berlin

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V: Colonial Literature as Popular Science

York Public Library

slide lectures, evening enrichment courses, illustrated magazines and popular

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progenitors, and certainly deserving of being classed as an extremely low, degraded,

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VI: The Worker and Colonial Adventure

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Fig. 3. Visit to a ‘Snake Temple’ in West Africa. Source: Richard Oberländer

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Wilhelmine Germany. Historians most often depict imperialism as the emblem

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from enthusiasm or fascination for empire. For most of the working-

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Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen

Re ecting on the pleasures of reading when he was a boy in late-eighteenth-

that colonial literature would nd no place in the workers’ libraries of Leipzig.