Unofficial Empire: Germans Between Germany and Tanganyika, 1925–1945

FAIN: FT-259521-18

Willeke Sandler, PhD
Loyola University Maryland (Baltimore, MD 21210-2601)

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on Germany's former African colony Tanganyika (1925-1945).

Although Germany was stripped of its overseas empire in 1919, from the mid-1920s through the mid-1940s hundreds of Germans immigrated to the former colony of German East Africa (now the British Mandate of Tanganyika). They established tightly-knit communities in the Mandate that received support from the German Foreign Office as well as Nazi organizations. I use the case study of Tanganyika to explore the (re)creation of an expatriate community within the context of a territory that had once been German. This obstinate form of “colonialism without colonies” ignored the reality of Germany’s official position in Africa and helped to establish an unofficial German colony in Tanganyika. A space of overlapping imperial claims, of German pasts and hoped-for futures, and of individual Germans’ economic goals, Tanganyika in the interwar period demonstrates the continued importance of the African continent to the German nation and state after the end of formal empire.