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From colonialism to National Socialismto postcolonialism: Hannah Arendt'sOrigins of TotalitarianismPascal GrossePublished online: 08 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Pascal Grosse (2006) From colonialism to National Socialism to postcolonialism:Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism , Postcolonial Studies, 9:1, 35-52

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From colonialism to NationalSocialism to postcolonialism: HannahArendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism1

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In a highly symbolic way, Hannah Arendt (1906�/1975) has come to reside atthe heart of the new German Republic. One of the streets lining thecontroversial ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’ (Denkmal fur dieermordeten Juden Europas) in Berlin was recently named after Arendt.2 Thedecision to use Arendt’s name in this context is interesting. Unlike CoraBerliner and Gertrud Kolmar, for whom two other streets around thememorial site were named and who were both murdered in the Holocaust,Arendt had by 1933 already fled from Berlin to Paris, and then, in 1941, tothe United States of America, where she lived for the rest of her life. Strictlyspeaking, therefore, she is not one of those to whom the memorial isdedicated. Nevertheless, as she stated in a legendary 1964 interview on WestGerman television, when she heard about Auschwitz in 1943 it became thelinchpin of her subsequent political and intellectual work: it was ‘as if thechasm opened up.’3 Probably every line she wrote after 1943 revolved in oneway or another around understanding how National Socialism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust had come about as the crystallisation ofmodern human evil. Thus, rather than being a victim of the Holocaust,Arendt was one of the most passionate and rigorous interpreters of theNational Socialist regime and the murders committed in this period. Amongher most notable work on this topic is her very controversial Eichmann inJerusalem , published in 1963, but also her earlier The Origins of Totalitar-ianism , which came out in 1951. With this background, at first glance it doesseem reasonable to honour this challenging thinker and critic of Germany’spre- and post-World War II history at one of the most compelling sites ofremembrance in the new German Republic. However, it remains unclearwhether those who advocated naming the street for Arendt were fully awareof how controversially her work has been received over the past decades,including debates about whether she was politically reactionary, racist orsexist. And it is almost certain that Arendt herself would not have wished toserve as such a revered icon. Rather than becoming a figure of reverence, shewould probably have preferred that we engage with her as one of the fewcompelling intellectuals of German descent who related the central pre-occupations of her time*/anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and the politicalphilosophy of human evil*/to global historical developments.

ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/06/010035�/18#2006 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies

DOI: 10.1080/13668250500488819

Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 35�/52, 2006

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Arendt’s enshrinement at the memorial is one of the clearest examples ofwhat Walter Laqueur has recently diagnosed as the exploding ‘Arendt cult’:the many university institutions, schools, and awards named after her as wellas the ever-growing literature on her work and personal life.4 Over the pasttwo decades or so Arendt has become a fashionable icon of scholarlyintellectual life, not only in the United States and in France, but also,somewhat later, in Germany. A deluge of books, articles, and special issueshas re-examined her work intensively and revised our understanding of herbiography. Additionally, from the German perspective, she is part of the seriesof recently ‘rediscovered’ epigones of German intellectual life, such as GeorgForster, Alexander von Humboldt, and Albert Einstein, to name just a few,who for different reasons never found true acceptance in Germany (nor, afterWorld War II, in West Germany, though some experienced a more welcomingreception in East Germany) and usually spent most of their lives outsideGermany. Their affiliation as Germans has remained uncertain, but inGerman public life today they are often used to represent the morecosmopolitan ‘better Germans’ in past and present.

In this essay I shall argue that Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism , in whichshe reflects on colonialism, is one of the constitutive books of postcolonialstudies, though through a very specific avenue: National Socialism.5 Inter-estingly, despite the increasing scholarly appreciation of Arendt’s historicalwork on German-Jewish history, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust, herexploration of European colonialism/imperialism6 has received almost nosystematic attention.7 Yet colonialism is one of the key topics she analyses indepth in the Origins. True, she deals with colonialism only in Part Two of thethree-part volume Origins, and in the articles leading up to the publication ofthe book between 1944 and 1950.8 Neither before nor after this writing didshe evince much concern about colonialism. It may therefore seem to be atopic of mere functional utility for the broader arguments she makes in theOrigins, not one that deserves attention in its own right.9 However, as I shallargue in the following, colonialism is central to her analysis of totalitarian-ism, both as a self-contained historical period as well as a social and politicalformation related to totalitarianism.

To take the Origins seriously as a constitutive book for postcolonial studiesis to broaden the meaning of postcolonial studies by focusing on theimplications of European colonialism for Europe itself in the interwar period,specifically the ideological and political formation of National Socialism.What is crucial here is Arendt’s observation that totalitarianism and itsprototypes, such as colonial regimes, are fundamentally opposed to theconcept of nation-state as it developed in the course of the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries. If today’s postcolonial world is viewed as a challenge tothe classical European nation-state model, it should be worthwhile to lookcloser at Arendt’s interpretation of how colonialism related to the dissolvingnation-state and the emergence of National Socialism. Such a view does notautomatically lead to the reiteration of a Eurocentric colonial perspective(which of course dominates Arendt’s own writing on these matters); rather itacknowledges that colonialism affected and modified the European world at

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its core and that Europe, and maybe also the United States, are to be definedas postcolonial societies in their own right. In this sense the Origins still offersthe single most insightful and synthetic framework for theorising a linkagebetween the eras of European pre-World War I colonialism, both overseasand on the European continent itself, and National Socialism.

To date, what has almost exclusively captivated the attention of Arendtspecialists or political scientists who have shown interest in the Origins hasbeen Arendt’s conceptualisation of totalitarianism, especially her awkwardjuxtaposition of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.10 More detailedanalyses of the other two parts, ‘Anti-Semitism’ and ‘Imperialism’, arelacking, as if her interpretations of anti-Semitism and colonialism were oflesser importance than the third section on totalitarianism. Conversely,scholars of German and European colonial history have referenced her bookquite frequently*/though without any systematic analysis of the differentsub-chapters or reference to the intentions of the book as a whole regardingtotalitarianism. Therefore, in this essay I shall attempt to extract andreconstruct Arendt’s main thoughts on European colonialism. To this end,the whole of Origins has to be taken into account, because her discussion ofcolonialism is embedded in the broader picture of the emergent totalitarianstructures of power organisation. After all, Arendt’s intention is to integratethe history of European colonialism into a general account of modern evil inthe first half of the twentieth century.

One problem with the Origins deserves specific mention: the languages inwhich Arendt wrote this book and the resulting bouncing back and forthbetween translations. In short, the original and later revised English editionsand the German editions11 differ from each other to a great extent, not somuch in the general outline of the book, but rather in its details and mostnotably in the clarity of the language. As a result, many meanings changesignificantly between the German and English versions, and with themsometimes also the core of her arguments. Whereas the English versionbetrays a non-native speaker trying to write correct English (and parts of the‘original’ English edition are translations from articles previously written inGerman), the German text is powerful in its syntax and expressions, andcareful in its choice of words. It is, in fact, representative of the educatedGerman middle class (Bildungsburgertum) in the first half of the twentiethcentury: often broad-brushed, omniscient, authoritative if not authoritarian,sometimes even opinionated and condescending. In other words, if one wishesto select a master-edition of the Origins, then it will likely be the Germanedition.

Making sense of Origins of Totalitarianism

Published in the wake of decolonisation in South and Southeast Asia andanticipating decolonisation in Africa, the Origins is one of the first criticalhistoriographical analyses of colonial practices published by a politicaltheorist in either German or English.12 Nevertheless the book certainly lacksany explicit anti-colonialist commitment. Interestingly, the title of the first

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British edition in 1951, The Burden of Our Time,13 employed the classicalimperialist phrase of ‘the white man’s burden’, but reversed the colonialistperspective by alluding to the legacies of National Socialism and colonialismas constituting the new burden for post-World War II Europe. Unlikemuch subsequent scholarship on colonialism, Arendt sees colonialism asan interface between the traditional European nation-state and otherinnovative organisations of power as developed through expansionistpolicies. She systematically envisaged for the first time how colonial rulehas affected the European colonial powers themselves*/a process that, sheargues, is exemplified most fully by National Socialism. Obviously, thequestion arises whether and how National Socialism can be a point ofdeparture for the history of European colonialism and for some aspects ofpostcolonial studies.

To Arendt, colonialism overseas around 1900 is the much-cited ‘laboratoryof modernity’, in the sense that new forms of power management were testedwithin the colonial matrix. The rough outline of her interpretation ofcolonialism is as follows. During the late nineteenth century, Europeancolonialism overseas served as a site in which older racial doctrines andanonymous bureaucratic policies were gradually amalgamated to establish aracial order to guarantee power to the Europeans. More or less at the sametime, continental expansionism in Central and Eastern Europe developed intoa kind of volkisch nationalism, as expressed in the pan-movements in Russia,Austria, and Germany. Thus, with the beginning of the twentieth century, anew global pan-imperialist matrix took shape and fused with a newlyracialised anti-Semitism, a configuration substantially reinforced by theexperiences of World War I. Defeat in World War I led to different inflectionsof totalitarian rule in Germany (including Austria) and Russia/Soviet Union:a racial order in the case of Germany, and a classless society in the case of theSoviet Union. Both systems had a common structural foundation, accordingto Arendt: a scientific interpretation of how society should be organised anddeveloped to replace liberal ideas of the rule of law. In short, as she puts it,totalitarianism followed the scientific foundations of either Darwin orMarx.14

Though Arendt’s considerations offer a working model for explaining thetransfer of racialised practices from a colonial to a metropolitan Europeancontext, her work raises more questions than it answers. For instance, Arendtrefers almost exclusively to British and French, rather than German,colonialism. But if colonialism is linked to National Socialism, then whyturn to Britain and France at all, as the latter remained non-totalitarian?Some scholars have resorted to psychoanalytical explanations to fill theintellectual gap that Arendt has left here, evoking the ‘moral and psychicpatterns of racism in the pre- and unconscious of European settlers, whicheventually were carried from overseas into the home country’.15 But even ifwe accept such an all-inclusive interpretation of a common European colonialexperience, the question still remains why the Holocaust happened inGermany and not, for example, in Britain. Was it because Germany lostWorld War I? And how can Arendt account for Germany’s singularity when

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authoritarian regimes were the rule rather than the exception at times duringthe interwar period? Regarding the emergence of racial doctrines, Arendtstates explicitly in the chapter ‘Race-Thinking before Racism’ that neither theGermans nor the Nazis invented racial theories.16 But once in power, why didGermany’s National Socialist variant of authoritarian rule establish such athoroughgoing racial order as compared to the other authoritarian regimes,and despite Germany’s relatively short colonial experience? At first glance,such questions seem only to point to the shortcomings of Arendt’sinterpretation of the link between European colonialism and totalitarianism,especially when we accept her overall framework which also includes theSoviet Union.

As many have noted, Origins is an often puzzling and contradictory book,with many digressions that blur its core arguments.17 The book can beregarded as the product of a perplexed intellectual trying as a contemporaryobserver, almost as an eyewitness, to comprehend the quasi-industrialatrocities committed during World War II. Possibly this perplexity led toArendt’s many digressions. One may even gain the impression that she hasoffered an array of explanations of how the Holocaust came about, fromwhich the reader is invited to pick and choose at will. Let us take up thisquestion of coherence in Origins in more detail.

At first glance, Origins is a traditional historiographical account. It buildsits argument by covering selected aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history in the form of a historical topography, all the whiledrawing on a variety of fields such as political theory, economic history, andfiction. Yet Arendt did not intend her work to be a historical monograph, nordid she consider herself to be a historian. Furthermore, the book’s threeparts*/anti-Semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism*/stand unrelated toone another in the layout of the book, each with separate forewords. Even thechapters within each part appear disconnected, since Arendt often does notweave them together in any explicit way. Finally, in terms of Arendt’s overallargument, we see that while she sets out to explain the origins and the specificelements of totalitarian rule in Germany, she ends up turning suddenly to theSoviet Union as the second prototype of the new totalitarian state. However,she offers no analysis of the Soviet Union to underpin this shift, and with thissuperficial analogy seems to undermine the whole argument she has beenassembling.

It is very likely that some of the inconsistencies encountered in Originscan be traced to its genesis. Arendt started the project at the end ofWorld War II and published many chapters of the later book in essayor article format in the second half of the 1940s.18 Though it was a book-length project right from the outset, it remained mainly a work in progressgoing through several distinct stages. The latter characteristic is clearlyreflected in the revised editions, which always carried a new foreword inwhich Arendt justified alterations in the text due to new intellectual insights,new contemporary political developments, or access to new material. Buteven in its initial stages, the project was rather vague and took manydetours.19 Thus the many tentative titles such as The Elements of Disgrace:

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Anti-Semitism*/Imperialism*/Racism , The Three Pillars of Hell , or AHistory of Total Domination suggest that Arendt was seeking all along tocombine the history of racial thinking with the histories of anti-Semitism andcolonialism in order to understand National Socialism. It is obvious thatArendt struggled to bring together the loose ends of the divergent historicaldevelopments she investigated, but she was not particularly successful in theend. It makes more sense to regard the book as an essay collection instead ofa coherent monograph. Thus, rather than criticising the book for its lack ofunity and overall coherence, it seems much more compelling to explore thebasic arguments that Arendt deploys to tie the book together.

There are two different ways of reading the book. One is genealogical, suchthat Part One on anti-Semitism and Part Two on imperialism lead up to latertotalitarianism, analysed in Part Three. Indeed, Arendt wrote that the worldpolitics that emerged from colonialism after 1880 was a prerequisite fortotalitarianism because ‘before the imperialist era, there was no such thing asworld politics, and without it, the totalitarian claim to global rule would havenot made sense’.20 As a genealogy the three parts represent three eras: PartOne on anti-Semitism covers the ‘long’ nineteenth century; Part Two onimperialism covers the period from the 1880s to the 1930s, with an emphasison the early twentieth century; and Part Three on totalitarianism covers thetime since the late 1920s.

The second way of reading the book considers the three parts as parallelessays, as variations of the same topic*/totalitarianism*/at different stagesin European history and in different geopolitical sites. The latter reading is, infact, what Arendt seems to recommend in the foreword to the 1967 Americanedition, where she writes that ‘the reader will find the imperialist andtotalitarian versions of twentieth-century anti-Semitism, respectively, in thesecond and third volume of this work’.21 Here, totalitarianism becomes avariation of anti-Semitism, not its culminating point. Interestingly, theGerman title of the book, Elemente und Urprunge totaler Herrschaft(Elements and Origins of Total Rule), reflects these two reading optionsbetter than the title of the American edition, which mentions the Originsalone and thereby suggests genealogy and teleology.

These two ways of reading Origins can even be regarded as complementary,since Arendt seems to argue against a single master-narrative to explain thebuild-up to the Holocaust. On the one hand, she posits that there is ahistorical evolution towards National Socialism and the Holocaust as well astowards Stalinism. Yet on the other hand, she suggests that there is afoundation of a common political ideology variously expressed as anti-Semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism. To her, this common basis ispredicated on the decline of the classical eighteenth- and nineteenth-centurynation-state model. This decline is the single most important recurrent topicthroughout the book, and seems to be its strongest analytic principle. Hercentral argument in Part One is that anti-Semitism, as it developed in thesecond half of the nineteenth century, was a secular ideology that graduallydisentangled itself from Jewish life in the respective nation-states, mostnotably in France and Austria. Anti-Semitism around 1900, Arendt argues,

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therefore served purposes other than the traditional and religiously inspiredhatred of Jews: she suggests it in fact reflected the gradual corrosion of thenation-state as anti-Semitism aimed at excluding Jewish citizens on ‘racial’grounds. Moreover, she views imperialism as fundamentally at odds with thenation-state. To Arendt, the history of imperialism ‘tells the story ofthe disintegration of the nation-state that proved to contain nearly all theelements necessary for the subsequent rise of totalitarian movements andgovernments’.22 Totalitarianism thus becomes the ultimate expression of howthe classical nation-state is superseded; totalitarianism is the recreation of thestate according to ‘transnational’ ideas of a racial or a classless society. Henceanti-Semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism were each manifestations aswell as gradations of totalitarian rule over time.

If the destruction of the nation-state in Europe is the overarching themethat holds Origins together, then the reader would expect a detailed analysisof exactly what the nation-state is. But Arendt provides no such analysis. Inher account, the nation-state is an impersonal agent in its own right, inopposition to society and subverted by it (especially by the bourgeoisie andthe ‘mob’).23 To Arendt, the nation-state represents an abstract model withthree components: territory, culture, and language. These three elementsconverge, creating the symbiosis of Staatsnation and Kulturnation*/ verymuch in the German bourgeois tradition of the nineteenth century.Imperialism, she holds, destroyed this symbiosis by trying to associate distantand (culturally as well as linguistically) alien regions of the world with thenation-state, and eventually even attempting to incorporate these regions intothe nation-state by implementing racial categories in the organisation of thenation-state. Such an implementation of racial categories in the order ofnation-states inevitably reverberated back to Europe, destroying its ownfoundations as a homogenized political and cultural entity. Since thisdiscussion is crucial to Arendt’s understanding of colonialism and the wholeof her theoretical enterprise in the Origins, let us turn to it in more detail.

Nation-state vs. colonial empire

In Part Two of the Origins Arendt carefully analysed how, between the 1880sand the 1920s, the racial and volkisch concepts of imperialistic politics insub-Saharan Africa as well as in Central and Eastern Europe destroyedthe classical nation-state. The first chapter considers the emergence of thebourgeoisie as a new political power within the nation-state. Driven bythe need to invest surplus capital, the bourgeoisie became the motor for‘expansion for the sake of expansion’ after the 1870s. Arendt then flashesback to the genesis of racial ideologies prior to the 1880s and she identifiesrace ideologies as born of aristocratic anti-nationalistic sentiments in Franceand Britain. She traces such sentiments back to the revolution of 1789, wherethey served as an aristocratic counter-narrative to French nationalisticrepublicanism. In the following chapter on ‘race and bureaucracy’, shearticulates the core argument of the entire second section. According toArendt, post-1880s colonial racialism became intertwined with bureaucratic

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forms of governance through ‘decrees’ (Verordnungen) instead of a rule of law.In this constellation she sees the prototype for National Socialist rule,including the arbitrary killing of humans*/the hallmark of any totalitarianform of governance. Jumping from sub-Saharan Africa to Eastern Europe shethen examines continental imperialism as displayed in the pan-movements inAustria, Germany, and Russia. The paradox inherent in all pan-movementswas that they acted in the name of the nation-state, intending to homogenisethe geopolitical and cultural (linguistic) map in Central and Eastern Europe(which was composed of an array of ethnic groups, not nations, tied togetherunder the dynastic empires Russia, Austria, Germany, and the OttomanEmpire), even as these movements’ expansionist ambitions in the name of thenation destroyed the very notion of the nation-state. Lastly, in anticipation ofPart Three on totalitarianism she scrutinises the dissolution of the nation-state in the wake of World War I, as illustrated by Central and EasternEuropean migration, statelessness, and artificial nation-state building whichdid not follow ethno-geographical tracks. Statelessness signifies for Arendtthe advanced disintegration of the nation-state, a development whichproduced a new category of people with no legal status and uncertainpersonal identity, people who were ‘forced to live outside the common world’and who were prone to be killed.24 Implicitly, Arendt is asserting that only thenation-state can guarantee the ‘rights of man’ through the avenue of(nationalised) citizenship rights, since no other agency can defend universalhuman rights. The disintegrated nation-state served as the new matrix for there-emergence of older expansionist aspirations of the pan-movement kind inGermany and the Soviet Union, leading to the rise of National Socialism andStalinism in the 1930s.

What then is the specific role of the new kind of European colonialism afterthe 1880s? Couldn’t Arendt have told her story leaving colonialism overseasaside? Crucial to her understanding of imperialism is that expansionismoverseas was not a ‘natural’ outflow of the nineteenth-century Europeannation-state model, but rather an ‘unnatural’ development: race ideologiesdid not parallel nationalism, but rather were in sharp opposition to it. Arendtargues that

the fact that racism is the main ideological weapon of imperialistic politics is soobvious that it seems as though many students prefer to avoid the beaten track oftruism. Instead, an old misconception of racism as a kind of exaggeratednationalism is still given currency. . . .From the very beginning, racism deliber-ately cut across all national boundaries, whether defined by geographical,linguistic, traditional, or any other standards, and denied national-politicalexistence as such.25

With this argument Arendt parallels Part One (Anti-Semitism) of the work ina more abstract way and in a different historical setting. In the first part of thebook she had shown that the European Jewry, along with the higharistocracy, were the only elements in their respective societies whichtransgressed the borders of their nation-states*/in the case of Jews, throughtheir very existence as Jews. As simultaneously a ‘Volk ’ and ‘race’, Jews

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formed a genealogy of their own, apart from the population of the majoritysocieties, as long as they did not intermarry with non-Jews or convert. Theconsequences were twofold: on the one hand, only the nation-state couldserve as an institutional platform to guarantee Jews their human rights ascitizens of a nation*/this despite their Jewishness. On the other hand, this iswhy anti-Semitism, and other racist groups, could operate with a transna-tional perspective: because anti-Semitism targeted a group intrinsicallytransnationally organised*/it by default transgressed the territorial, cultural,and linguistic foundations of the modern nation-state. Principally, Arendtused her analysis of colonialism to reinforce and distil these remarks on anti-Semitism.According to Arendt, to overrule the nation-state through racism and anti-Semitism meant to depart from the idea of a common human mankind:

Race-thinking, rather than class-thinking, was the ever present shadow accom-panying the development of the comity of European nations, until it finally grewto be the powerful weapon for the destruction of those nations. Historicallyspeaking, racists have a worse record of patriotism, than the representatives of allother international ideologies together, and they were the only ones whoconsistently denied the great principle upon which national organizations ofpeoples are built, the principle of equality and solidarity of all peoples guaranteedby the idea of mankind.26

As such, her point of departure, reiterated throughout the chapters on Frenchand British colonial politics in sub-Saharan Africa (and in some examplesfrom the Middle East and South Asia), is the way that colonialism overseasrelied on a racial order to implement a political order, thus opposing theorganising principles of the nation-state.

One of Arendt’s main shortcomings in her discussion of colonialism is herconflation of two different stories, leading to some inconsistencies in herargument. The first story involves the way that racial categories becameimplemented in the political order of all sub-Saharan Africa except SouthAfrica. Studying jingoistic attitudes of the likes of Carl Peters and others, aswell as the practices of English and French colonial civil servants, she arguesthat colonialism in Africa subverted European standards of morals and therule of law (including human rights) as guaranteed by the nation-state. Thesecond central story on which Arendt relies is the development of SouthAfrica after the diamond rush of the late 1860s. This is the story Arendt trulywanted to tell, because it was in this part of the world that she saw the firstelements of an emerging totalitarian rule. For her, South Africa, with its mixof native populations (Boers assimilated to local conditions and behaving likenatives, whites*/including Jews*/from Britain and other parts of the world,etc.), became the harbour for all the declassed people of the world. InArendt’s parlance, this was the mob, which was led by economic interestscompletely dictated by western European metropoles. The liaison between themob and capital (which she also considered crucial for the upsurge of theNational Socialist movement) in South Africa created a proto-racial society,unique to sub-Saharan Africa, far removed from any principles rooted in the

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nation-state. Arendt depicted South Africa as the classical imperialistmicrocosm, the representation of a truly racialised society with the Boersas the driving force behind racialisation, where secular as well as religiouslyinspired anti-Semitism could flourish within an overall racial order.27

In terms of consistency, her argument would probably have been moreconvincing had Arendt abandoned her general analysis of colonialism andfocused instead on South Africa alone, since this is the site where shedeployed the thrust of her argument regarding the correspondence betweencolonialism and National Socialism. Other aspects of colonialism she raisesare not key to her argument, and are sometimes badly related to one another,puzzling, or even irrelevant. In her ambition to identify origins of NationalSocialist practices of governance (specifically in occupied Eastern Europe)she perhaps tried to follow too many different historical developments atthe same time. Arendt was probably tempted to identify the precursorsof bureaucratically administered genocide somewhere on the Africanmap and ended up pointing to late nineteenth-century South Africaas a historic constellation of a new racial order prior to, yet in correspon-dence with, National Socialism. In other words, she sees South Africaas a society which shared many aspects she later describes as central to aracially ordered totalitarian regime, especially in the brutalisation ofEuropeans and the emergence of anti-Semitism in that society, but whichdoes not lend itself to explain the Holocaust in the sense of industrialisedmass-murder.

With her insistence on the dissolving nation-state Arendt proposes animportant conceptual framework for understanding both late nineteenth-century colonialism and National Socialism and the eventual historiographi-cal link between the two. The racial order as it developed in both the colonialand National Socialist matrices (and in Arendt’s view also in the classlesssociety of the Stalinist type) contested and shifted traditional criteria forinclusion and exclusion within the state. Thus, some groups of people whopreviously found accommodation within the nation-state framework becamelegally or symbolically ‘stateless’. In Arendt’s account this is most notably theEuropean Jewry. She follows here a Hobbesian line of thought which assignsto the (nation-) state the task of preventing humans from killing each other.Although her shrewd observation on the inherent tensions between thenation-state and the racial order produces a more profound understanding ofEuropean colonialism, her argument has a significant weakness: her nation-state concept is entirely underdeveloped and remains static. Why, for instance,is the nation-state the only form of governance which can guarantee basichuman rights? Conversely, why does only the racial order, but not the nation-state, turn genocidal? And finally, how could the nation-state be preserved inmetropolitan Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, even as racialsocieties developed quite fully within the British, French, Belgian, and Dutchcolonial realm*/whereas Germany and the Soviet Union, both withsubstantial colonial experience, turned totalitarian? Or, must we assumethat Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands relocated their totalitar-ianisms outside their metropolitan borders, while in Germany and the Soviet

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Union totalitarian rule occurred within the continental boundaries of thesestates? In other words, is totalitarianism a problem of spatial arrangementsbetween metropole and colonies, rather than a question of specific nationaldevelopments?

Arendt’s Orgins and current scholarship of German and European colonialism

The impact of and transformations caused by colonialism in Europe itself is asubject that has recently received some scholarly attention.28 For a fewscholars of German colonialism the most obvious use of Arendt’s Origins hasbeen to draw an immediate line of continuity between German colonialismand National Socialism.29 More specifically, the question has been raised ofhow colonial settings relate to the Holocaust. Apparently, Arendt’s accountof the creation of racialised societies, the replacement of the rule of law bybureaucratic policies, and the option to physically annihilate based on racialboundaries has provided a compelling template for arguing that colonialismoverseas represents the ideal precursor to the Nazi concentration camps.Though such continuity had already been proposed by Helmut Bley in hisbook on German Southwest Africa in 1968,30 Arendt herself was quitevigorous about the uniqueness of the Nazi genocidal policies, stating that

Lord Cromer . . . would no more have dreamed of combining administrationwith massacre . . . than the race fanatics of South Africa thought of organisingmassacres for the purpose of establishing a circumscribed, rational politicalcommunity (as the Nazis did in the extermination camps).31

European colonialism, irrespective of the individual colonial power, andNational Socialism were both marked by strongly authoritarian regimes, andboth were based on a racial order which organised the whole of society.Nevertheless, one must wonder how British, French, Belgian, or Dutchcolonialism overseas became translated into Arendt’s notions of totalitarian-ism. This point remains not only one of the most challenging questions sheimplicitly raises, but also one of the most evident shortcomings in herconceptualisation of the Origins as a book. Arendt does not even address thequestion, let alone try to answer it. What she does instead*/as if it were thesolution to the problem*/is to turn to Central and Eastern Europe with itscontested borders and pan-movements as the geopolitical representation ofcontinental colonialism/imperialism. As such she draws structural andtemporal parallels between colonialism overseas and volkisch expansionistaspirations in Central and Eastern Europe as an avenue to explain theemergence of totalitarian regimes in both Germany (implicitly includingAustria) and the Soviet Union. This approach also helps her to insert EasternEuropean anti-Semitism during the interwar period into the equation, inorder to explain how the Eastern European Jewry in particular could havebecome the main target of the Nazi extermination policies.

Thus, if there were a linkage between colonialism overseas and NationalSocialism, one would have to examine the outlook of and interactionsbetween the two geopolitical spheres of German expansionist actions:

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expansionism overseas as a western European phenomenon, and expansion-ism on the continent as an Eastern and southeastern European affair. Atheart, Arendt’s work here describes a scenario of Pan-European imperialismfrom the 1870s to the 1930s with a clearly circumscribed cast. The classicalwestern European nation-states, such as Britain, France, the Netherlands,Spain, and Portugal, engaged for longer or shorter periods in colonialexpansionism overseas, with little or no interest in destabilising the Europeanmap itself after Napoleonic continental imperialism. Conversely, in Centraland Eastern Europe, the big European dynastic empires which did not followthe established nation-state model, such as Russia, Austria, Germany, and theOttoman Empire, struggled over spheres of interest and populations. Italyseems to have occupied a space in between these positions and Belgium seemsto have been a case quite apart. Regardless, both expansionist activities*/

overseas and on the continent*/imply a biological interpretation of culture,be it in terms of ‘race’ or in terms of ‘Volk’ , and a tendency to match bio-cultural traits with the geopolitical map. And both expansionist drivesultimately destroyed the very concept of the nation-state by relying on (inArendt’s parlance, supranational) organising principles such as anti-Semitismor racism which did not match the inclusionary character of the nation-statewith its citizenry. Instead, all major European powers replaced the nation-state with exclusionary racialised and/or volkisch empires. In the case of thewestern European powers, these empires were located outside the Europeanmap, while the Eastern European powers established them on the continentitself. For Arendt, World War I is the pivotal point leading to the finaldisintegration of the nation-state in Eastern and southeastern Europe, leavinga power vacuum later filled by the two totalitarian and expansionist regimes.

Though broad-brushed in its scope, Arendt’s key argument (that theimperialist drive after the 1880s affected not only areas outside Europe, butalso the European continent itself) must be taken seriously, but in a way thatdefies applying immediate lines of continuity. To date, scholars of Europeanand especially of German history have been reluctant to equate the struggleover spaces and peoples in Central and Eastern Europe with ‘colonialism’.These scholars have instead tended to conceptualise this struggle in terms of‘nationalisms’ or ‘exaggerated nationalisms’. But from the eighteenth centuryuntil the end of World War II, and then again after the dissolution of theSoviet Union and Yugoslavia around the 1990s, borders have been contested,external administrations responsible to distant governments have beensuperimposed on local and ‘national’ administrations, and populationshave been forcibly shifted. Prussian-German expansionism, partially throughinstrumentalising the Habsburg Empire, had a special place in this scenario,especially after the 1880s, since Germany acted as both a colonial poweroverseas and as a continental imperial power.32 Because of this dual outlookof its expansionist drives, only in Germany could the corresponding conceptsof ‘race’ and ‘Volk ’ converge to parallel a coherent expansionist ideology,surpassing and eventually replacing the nation-state with a racial-volkischorder on the European continent and overseas.

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There are two quite remarkable blind-spots in Arendt’s interpretation ofimperialism. The first is her negligence regarding the consequences ofcolonialism in the classical nation-states France and Britain. Despite herdetailed analyses of British and French colonial practices she does not drawany conclusions which relate back to these two colonial powers. This omissionis partly understandable because her focus, obviously, is National Socialism.However, in terms of intellectual stringency she should have asked howcolonialism might have contributed to the disintegration of these two nation-states. Had she done so, she might have identified the topics and problemswhich we, today, are considering with regard to postcolonial societies inEurope. Such issues are remarkably similar to those she enunciates for thepost-World War I context in Central and Eastern Europe: voluntary or forcedmigration, statelessness, and the challenge of asserting basic human rightsoutside the nation-state matrix.

The other, even more challenging omission is Arendt’s failure to mentionthe United States in her analysis of imperialism. Much of her analysis of thetensions between the nation-state and colonialist race policies should havesome implications in the context of the United States, particularly when itcomes to the emergence of post-slavery racial and imperialist policies in thelate nineteenth century. For instance, her analysis of South African historyafter the 1870s bears a striking similarity to developments in parts of theUnited States at the same time. Interestingly, in her only explicit writing onrace issues in the United States, entitled ‘Reflections on Little Rock’33 andpublished in 1959, she provides a highly interesting analysis of forcedintegration in the South of the United States. However, in this essay shedoes not refer back to her statements on imperialism previously articulated inthe Origins. Instead she returns to the issue of anti-Semitism, comparingblack children in the United Sates with Jewish children in Germany in the1920s. To Arendt, seemingly, the United States is a world apart, disentangledfrom the course of European history and only entering the global play afterWorld War II.

Other perspectives

Arendt’s Origins has become famous for her theses on totalitarianism and theensuing debates about her book in the 1950s and 1960s, debates which weredeeply rooted in the perspectives of the Cold War. Conversely, her attempt togive new meanings to European colonialism in the context of a Eurocentrichistoriography received but little attention. Most likely, this negligence is theresult of the lack of interest, until the 1970s, of most scholars of politicaltheory and political history in colonialism; such interest as existed was buriedin rather abstract intellectual frameworks such as Marxism. Additionally, inthe 1950s and 1960s key anti-colonial movement representatives such asFrantz Fanon focused almost entirely on the impact of European colonialismin Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. As such these writers virtually reiteratedthe Eurocentric perspective of European colonialism as a unidirectionaltransformation of non-European societies. The reverse view, as suggested by

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Arendt, that colonialism also reshaped Europe, has only recently come toscholarly attention. Nevertheless, unlike today’s enquiries, her analysis ofcolonialism is unique in that she subordinates events and actions overseas,namely in sub-Saharan Africa, to an interpretative framework which isinterested only in National Socialism. Though singular in its outlook, themost important methodological asset of Arendt’s analysis of colonialism isthat on the one hand she embedded National Socialism in a more globalperspective of world politics, and on the other hand she placed colonialismdirectly into a transnational account of European history. It is through theseavenues that she travels from an investigation of National Socialism topostcolonialism.

From the more specific perspective of German historiography, it istempting to ask whether National Socialism itself can be seen, at leastpartially, as a peculiar German facet of an idiosyncratic postcolonialphenomenon which still maintained a colonialist outlook. As a matter offact, after World War I, Germany was neither a colonial power overseas nor amajor (colonial) power in the European East. Germany nevertheless heldaspirations to reinstall a colonial empire in the near future, despite theobvious confrontations all colonial powers were facing vis-a-vis growing anti-colonialist claims. For the time being, the loss of the war and the colonialempire persuaded many German liberal and right-wing politicians to act asself-appointed guardians of the volkisch /racial order in Europe and agradually fragmenting colonial order elsewhere.34 Such a belief was bothexpansionist and defensive and characterises Germany’s peculiar expansionistaspirations in the interwar years. This usurped role as guardian of a racialorder to some extent replaced the factual exercise of colonial power duringthe interwar years. But such beliefs were not new, they were just the logicalextension of the baggage with which Germany had entered World War I,namely, ideas of reorganising space and race in (Central and Eastern) Europeand overseas, ideas which German radical nationalists had long advocatedprior to and during the war.

Arendt, to some extent, envisaged such perspectives in the German case atthe methodological level, since she defied a pure national historiography. Inshort, she had a historiographical perspective in mind that has only recentlyappeared in contemporary German historiography under the more catchyumbrella of transnational history.35 The way transnational history has beendiscussed in Germany over the past few years largely echoes contemporarydiscussions on globalisation and Germany’s role in it. For further consistency,it seems to be particularly important, and also quite promising, to elaborate aconceptual framework for a transnational perspective in German history forthe period between 1914 and 1945. Such a perspective would take intoaccount the longer tradition of Prussian-German (and Habsburg) expansion-ism. Though Arendt suggested such an interpretation, ironically, herjuxtaposition of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union entirely subvertedher own vision.

However, even more importantly, Arendt considers expansionism inopposition to, or at least in tension with, basic principles of the classical

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nation-state. By this logic, colonialism and National Socialism are not sequelsto exaggerated nationalisms, but rather disintegrators of the nation-stateconcept. After all, one should remember that in the course of the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries the nation (based on language) and race (based onbiological characteristics) were the two ‘modern’ genealogical systems (in thesense of establishing familial kinship) gradually supplanting the previouslydominant genealogy which based social organisation on dynastic principles.‘Class’ only made its appearance in the second half of the nineteenth century,establishing a genealogy outside a framework based on familial ties. Asgenealogical systems, ‘nation’ and ‘race’ were by no means identical, but werein fact antagonistic, since ‘race’ was inherently transnational (as was class). Inthis sense Arendt was absolutely right to identify the fundamental tensionbetween the nation-state principle and any racial order within western-stylecivil societies, and to locate this tension historically within the context ofEuropean colonialism as well as National Socialism.

In her search for this common principle which superseded the classicalnation-state, a principle which she finally called ‘totalitarianism’, Arendt infact anticipated some aspects which Michel Foucault later termed biopolitics.Arendt herself seemingly still did not have a precise notion as to whathistorical underpinnings she was targeting; it was probably the tensionbetween the ‘sovereignty of life’ (as expressed in generally applicable humanrights) and the ‘sovereignty over life’. At heart, in the Origins she tried toidentify the political ‘laws’ that allow a political order to isolate certaingroups within a population and ultimately legitimately kill them: in otherwords, to delineate the transitions from the sovereignty of life to thesovereignty over life. It was Giorgio Agamben who identified this genealogyfrom Arendt to Foucault and who has subsequently placed his own workwithin that intellectual genealogy of biopolitical theoreticians.36

Interestingly, these three thinkers have one common point of intellectualdeparture as well as one common goal: to understand National Socialistbiopolitics as the ultimate expression of ‘legitimate’ killing by the state. Whatfor Arendt represents the ‘stateless individual’ turns into the ‘abnormalindividual’ in Foucault’s parlance and into the ‘naked life’ in Agamben’sterminology. Each of these three categories is an approximation of modernexistences that are excluded from society and that can safely, i.e. withimpunity, be killed (or sacrificed). In her passionate ambition ‘to understand’,Arendt’s main asset in the Origins was probably to point to this aspect ofmodern politics, but more importantly to try to contextualise it historically.She suggested that there might have been an internal logic in the Holocaustand other atrocities, as well as a historical build-up to them, and thus, she hasopened up perspectives beyond the Holocaust. But, as often in this book,Arendt fails to be intellectually consistent, because despite all her effort toscrutinise this logic she reverts to phrases such as the ‘racial frenzy’ and the‘madness’ of colonial administrators, expressions which, as a traditionalrepresentative of the German educated middle class (Bildungsburgertum) ,only manifest her final lack of understanding regarding these atrocities. Withthis schism in mind*/between intellectual understanding and utmost

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perplexity*/she is probably an appropriate patron for the Berlin ‘Memorialto the Murdered Jews of Europe’ and some of the legacies the Holocaust hasleft to the new German Republic and to the rest of the world.

Notes1 I would like to thank Lora Wildenthal, Jeffrey Schneider, and Ross Bowling for their helpful critique

and their skilful editorial assistance.2 See S Quack, ‘Drei Strassen in Berlin’, in Marion Kaplan and Beate Meyer (eds), Judische Welten. Juden

in Deutschland vom 18. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart , Gottingen: Wallstein, 2005, pp 413�/439, forthe story leading up to the naming of the streets around the memorial. In Berlin, the naming of streets iscommissioned by the local community (Bezirk ), which in this case was Berlin-Mitte. Originally, theBezirk Berlin-Mitte suggested naming the area in front of the Reichstag after Hannah Arendt, but didnot find the necessary support. The current state thus represents only the second preference once thedecision was made to build the memorial in 1998/1999.

3 Transcribed in ‘Fernsehgesprach mit Gunter Gaus, Oktober 1964’, in H Arendt, Ich will verstehen.

Selbstauskunfte zu Leben und Werk , Munchen: Piper, 1996, pp 44�/70, here p 59, my translation.4 W Laqueur, ‘The Arendt Cult. Hannah Arendt as Political Commentator’, in Hannah Arendt in

Jerusalem , S Aschheim (ed.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, pp 47�/64.5 To my knowledge the only author alluding to Arendt’s Origins as in some way a postcolonial writing is

G Prakash, ‘Who is Afraid of Postcoloniality? Social Text 49, 1996, pp 187�/203, but he does notexplore this topic.

6 Arendt’s use of the terms colonialism and imperialism as well as the even more amalgamated notion of‘colonial imperialism’ (Kolonialimperialismus ) is inconsistent. She uses imperialism both as a theoreticalcategory and as a historical period in the sense of the ‘age of imperialism’ between 1880 and 1914. In thefollowing I will use the term ‘imperialism’ to refer to the section in Arendt’s book, while I will stick tothe notion of ‘colonialism’ when I discuss the historical events at stake.

7 A recent exception is S Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt , Thousand Oaks: Sage,1996, pp 62�/101, who analyses the Origins from the perspective of political and ontological philosophy;for a highly critical approach to Arendt’s interpretations of colonialism see N C Moruzzi, Speaking

Through the Mask: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity, Ithaca: Cornell University Press,2000, pp 61�/124.

8 H Arendt, ‘Concerning Minorities’, Contemporary Jewish Record 7, 1944, pp 353�/368; ‘Race-Thinkingbefore Racism’, The Review of Politics 6, 1944, pp 36�/73; ‘Imperialism, Nationalism, Chauvinism’, The

Review of Politics 7, 1945, pp 441�/463; ‘Parties, Movements, and Classes’, Partisan Review 12, 1945, pp504�/513; ‘The Stateless People’, Contemporary Jewish Record 8, 1945, pp 137�/153; ‘Expansion and thePhilosophy of Power’, Sewanee Review 54, 1946, pp 601�/616; ‘Imperialism: Road to Suicide’,Commentary 1, 1945/1946, pp 27�/35; ‘Privileged Jews’, Jewish Social Studies 8, 1946, pp 3�/30;‘Uber den Imperialismus’, Die Wandlung 1 1945/1946, pp 650�/666; ‘The Concentration Camps’,Partisan Review 15, 1948, pp 743�/763; ‘Konzentrationslager’, Die Wandlung 3, 1948, pp 309�/330; ‘Esgibt nur ein einziges Menschenrecht’, Die Wandlung 4, 1948, pp 754�/770; ‘The Rights of Man: WhatAre They?’, Modern Review 3, 1949, pp 24�/37; ‘The Imperialist Character’, The Review of Politics 12,1950, pp 303�/320; ‘Der imperialistische Charakter: Eine psychologisch-soziologische Studie’, Der

Monat 2, 1949/1950, pp 509�/522; ‘The Mob and the Elite’, Partisan Review 17, 1950, pp 808�/819.9 By contrast, anti-Semitism, the subject of Part One of Origins, remained a constant theme in Arendt’s

work. It was already key to her early study Rahel Varnhagen , completed in manuscript in 1933 thoughnot published as a book until 1958.

10 As an example, recently several scholars discussed the concept of totalitarianism in depth in a specialissue of Social Research on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Origins. These scholars madelittle reference to the two other topics of the book, see Social Research 69(2), 2002; In the following Ishall avoid a discussion of the problem surrounding the Soviet Union since Arendt herself is inconsistentabout whether to place the Soviet Union under the umbrella of totalitarianism. Clearly, her mainconcern was to provide a genealogy of National Socialist rule.

11 H Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism , new edition with added prefaces, San Diego and London:Harcourt Inc., 1994 [1951]; H Arendt, Elemente und Ursprunge totaler Herrschaft , unabbreviatededition, Munchen: Piper, 1986 [1955]. Notably, except for the forewords, Arendt wrote both the English

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and the German versions herself. Thus the German edition which came out in 1955 is not a mere

translation, but a rewritten version of the English edition and should be considered a publication in its

own right. Nevertheless, I will be citing from the English revised edition, when the text is more or less

identical to the German edition. In all other cases I will rely on the German edition and give an English

translation.12 See U S Mehta, Liberalism and Empire. A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought ,

Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999, p 6, for his overview on post-World War II writing on

colonialism in English.13 Published London: Secker & Warburg, 1951.14 Here the much shorter English version significantly departs from the German edition: ‘Nur wenige

Meinungen waren plausibel genug, um in dem harten Konkurrenzkampf der freien Meinungen, der

durch das ganze neunzehnte Jahrhundert tobte, bestehen zu konnen, und nur zwei erwiesen sich als

stark genug, um wirkliche Ideologien hervorzubringen*/oder richtiger in sie zu degenerieren. Die eine

ist die zur Ideologie erstarrte marxistische Lehre vom Klassenkampf als dem eigentlichen Motor der

Geschichte, und die andere ist die von Darwin angeregte und mit dem marxistischen Klassenkampf in

mancher Beziehung verwandte Lehre von einem von der Natur vorgegebenen Rassenkampf, aus dem

sich der Geschichtsprozeß, vor allem der Auf- und Abstiegsprozeß der Volker, ableiten lasst. Nur diesen

beiden Doktrinen gelang es, im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert sich als offizielle, staatlich geschutzte

Zwangsdoktrinen durchzusetzen.’ (Only a few opinions were plausible enough to withstand the fierce

competition of free opinions which raged throughout the nineteenth century. And only two proved

strong enough to produce real ideologies*/or rather, to degenerate into ideologies. One ideology is a

congealed marxist doctrine of class struggle as the actual engine of history; the other*/inspired by

Darwin and somehow related to the marxist ideology of class struggle*/the doctrine of a race struggle

inherent in Nature. In the latter case, history is determined by the rise and fall of different peoples. In the

twentieth century, only these two doctrines were succesful in turning into official, state-protected forced

doctrines.) Arendt, Elemente, p. 268f.15 Benhabib, Modernism , p 71.16 Here again the German version is much more explicit than the English: ‘Den Rassebegriff haben weder

die Nazis noch die Deutschen entdeckt, er ist nur nie vorher mit solcher grundlichen Konsequenz in die

Wirklichkeit umgesetzt worden.’ (Neither the Nazis nor the Germans discovered the notion of race, but

never before had it been converted into reality with such thorough consequences.) Arendt, Elemente,

p 267.17 For a collection of her misjudgements, errors, and eccentricities in Origins see e.g. M Canovan, The

Political Thought of Hannah Arendt , New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.18 See note 9.19 E Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt. Leben, Werk und Zeit . Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1991, pp

285�/301.20 Arendt, Origins, p XXI.21 Arendt, Origins, p XVI.22 Arendt, Origins, p XXI.23 To Arendt, the mob are the declassed people of society coming from all classes. Alluding to the

‘National Socialist revolution’, she states that ‘The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all

classes are represented. This makes it so easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also comprise all

strata of society. While the people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob always

will for the ‘‘great leader.’’ For the mob hates society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament

where it is not represented.’ Arendt, Origins, p 107; in the German edition she adds that ‘the mob is the

caricature of the people’, Arendt, Elemente, p 187.24 Only in the German edition did Arendt put forward the latter thought: ‘Die Existenz einer solchen

Kategorie von Menschen birgt fur die zivilisierte Welt eine zweifache Gefahr. Ihre Unbezogenheit zur

Welt, ihre Weltlosigkeit ist wie eine Aufforderung zum Mord, insofern der Tod von Menschen, die

außerhalb aller weltlichen Bezuge rechtlicher, sozialer und politischer Art stehen, ohne jede Konsequenz

fur die Uberlebenden bleibt. Wenn man sie mordet, ist es als sein niemandem ein Unrecht oder auch nur

ein Leid geschehen.’ (The existence of such a category of individuals bears a twofold danger to the

civilised world. Their unrelatedness with the world, their worldlessness, is like an invitation for murder,

insofar as the death of humans who stand outside worldly references in the legal, social, and politic

sphere has no bearing on those who survive. If they get killed it is as if nobody experiences a sense of

injustice or even harm.) Arendt, Elemente, p 470.25 Arendt, Origins, p 160f.; the German edition is more explicit: ‘Der Rassismus ist uberall ein dem

Nationalismus entgegengesetzer und ihn wie jede Form des Patriotismus untergrabender Faktor.’

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(Everywhere racism is opposed to nationalism and racism subverts nationalism as well as every otherform of patriotism.) Arendt, Elemente, p 271.

26 Arendt, Origins, p. 160f.27 ‘Here [in South Africa], for the first time Jews were driven into the midst of a race society and almost

automatically singled out by the Boers from all other ‘‘white’’ people for special hatred, not only as therepresentatives of the whole enterprise, but as a different ‘‘race,’’ the embodiment of a devilish principleintroduced into the normal world of ‘‘blacks’’ and ‘‘whites.’’’ Arendt, Origins, p 202.

28 See e.g. A Stoler and F Cooper (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World .Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

29 E.g. J Zimmerer, ‘Colonial Genocide and the Holocaust. Towards an Archeology of Genocide’, inGenocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, DA Moses (ed.), New York: Bergham, 2004, pp 49�/76; J Zimmerer, ‘Holocaust und Kolonialismus.Beitrag zu einer Archaologie des genozidalen Gedankens’, Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft 51,2003, pp 1098�/1119.

30 H Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur in Deutsch-Sudwestafrika 1894�/1914 , Hamburg: Leibniz-Verlag, 1968.

31 Arendt, Origins, p 186.32 For a recent conceptualisation of German politics in Eastern Europe as colonial see P Ther, ‘Deutsche

Geschichte als imperiale Geschichte. Polen, slawophile Minderheiten und das Kaiserreich alskontinentales Empire’, in S Conrad and J Osterhammel (eds), Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutsch-

land und die Welt 1871�/1914 , pp 129�/148.33 H Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, Dissent 6, 1959, pp 45�/56. German translation: ‘Ketzerische

Ansichten uber die Negerfrage und equality’, in H Arendt, Zur Zeit. Politische Essays , Munchen:Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, pp 95�/117.

34 See details in P Grosse, ‘What Has German Colonialism to do with National Socialism? A ConceptualFramework’, in E Ames, M Klotz, and L Wildenthal (eds), Germany’s Colonial Pasts , Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

35 E.g. S Conrad, ‘Doppelte Marginalisierung. Pladoyer fur eine transnationale Perspektive auf diedeutsche Geschichte’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28, 2002, pp 145�/169; J Osterhammel, ‘Transnatio-nale Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Erweiterung oder Alternative?’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27, 2001, pp367�/393; A Wirz, ‘Fur eine transnationale Gesellschaftsgeschichte’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27,2001, pp 489�/498; M Werner and B Zimmermann, ‘Der Ansatz der Histoire croisee und dieHerausforderung des Transnationalen’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28, 2002, pp 607�/636.

36 G Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life , Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.Interestingly, Foucault seems to have drawn on Arendt, not in his writing, but in his teaching, since heused exactly the same sources in his analysis of how racial categories emerged that Arendt employed inher sub-chapter on ‘Race Thinking Before Racism’. Foucault also comes to quite similar conclusions:see M Foucault, Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the College de France 1975�/1976 , M Bertaniand A Fontana (eds), New York: Picador, 2003, pp 141�/187.

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