The German Empire: an Empire?

The ‘Aufarbeitung ’ – the exploration or investigation – of Germany’s imper-ial past has been one of the more exciting developments in the recent histor-iography of modern Germany, and a crucial element in the recent discussion among German historians of the potentials of transnational history. A growing flood of studies of German imperial policy, life and death in the German colonies, German colonialist organizations, German colonial literature, and colonial ideas, influences and tropes in German culture has poured from the presses in the past decade or so. Increasingly, German historians interested in empire have begun to assert that this work, taken together, now requires us to rethink the nature and dynamics of German nationalism, German politics and German culture. Given the growing bulk of scholarly production on the subject, this seems a plausible expectation; and yet, in some respects it is still not clear, from the literature, precisely what the terms of such a revision should be. At the most basic level, for example, there is actually growing disagreement as to what the term ‘empire’