German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory

Volker Langbehn (Ph.D. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1998) is Associate Professor of German at San Francisco State University, California. He is the author of Arno Schmidt's Zettels Traum: An Analysis (2003) and has published articles on Friedrich Nietzsche, Christa Wolf, Arno Schmidt, Fritz von Unruh, Novalis and Gert Heidenreich, and the visual representation of German Colonialism. He is the co-editor with Dr. Mohammad Salama of Colonial (Dis)-Continuities: Race, Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (2010). His current book project tentatively titled The Visual Representation of Cultural Identity in German Mass Culture Around 1900 focuses on visual representations of Africa in German mass culture. It is a study of how racism can develop in a modern society through subtle, everyday means, and it explores the negative consequences of race thinking upon the long-term development of German identity. He examines how images of Africa and Africans contained in four types of media – political caricatures in satirical magazines, picture postcards, black-and-white photographs, and illustrated children’s literature – helped foster a racialized German national identity.