S ean A ndrew W empe . Revenants of the German Empire

With the loss of its overseas colonies through the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the Weimar Republic became the first “postcolonial” European state. As Sean Andrew Wempe demonstrates in his lucidly written debut book, this did not end German colonial politics or the country’s colonial entanglements. Rather, “colonial Germans”—a somewhat amorphous group of former colonial officials, repatriated settlers, and procolonial business groups—worked to keep the matter of the former colonies alive through active national lobbying and by using the League of Nations to make claims as a European participant in the civilizing mission of the new liberal imperial internationalism that emerged in the 1920s and early 1930s. In making this argument, Wempe sides with critics of the Arendt thesis linking the colonial experience directly with the rise of Nazi totalitarianism, aligning himself also with a broader revisionist literature that has reevaluated the League of Nations Mandates System. In chapter 1,...

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