Colonial timelessness: The past and future of the German colonial empire in the public discourse of the Weimar Republic

Throughout the Weimar Republic’s existence, public discourse frequently engaged with the colonial experience and the prospects for restoring Germany’s overseas empire. A relatively understudied aspect of these discussions is the temporal perception of the concept of the “colonial empire”, which provides insight into how the politically active segments of the population viewed both the colonial legacy of the Second Reich and the young republic’s foreign policy efforts to revise the Treaty of Versailles. This article examines the “chronotope” of the colonial empire in the writings of key figures involved in post-colonial debates in the Weimar Republic, exploring how this concept was situated on the mental chronological scale of German public discourse. An analysis of the works of leading colonial-revisionist figures – Heinrich Schnee, Theodor Seitz, Emil Brückner, and Johannes Schacht – along with publications by the German Colonial Society and materials from the 1924 Colonial Congress, reveals a duality in the temporal perception of Germany’s colonial empire. It was simultaneously framed as an idealised past, deployed to counter the Allied-imposed thesis of Germany’s “colonial guilt”, and as a future aspiration, reflecting the Weimar Republic’s political elite’s readiness to campaign – primarily through diplomacy – for the restitution of lost overseas territories. At the same time, two distinct factions emerged among proponents of colonial restoration: “unitarians”, who advocated for the re-establishment of the Second Reich’s colonial empire by reclaiming the territories lost under the Treaty of Versailles, and “federalists”, who favoured neocolonial strategies of economic and cultural penetration into Germany’s former overseas possessions. Despite their differences, both groups perceived the Weimar Republic as a period “of colonial timelessness” – a state of stagnation that had to be overcome. This perception, in turn, undermined the legitimacy of the young republic and contributed to its eventual collapse in the early 1930s.