Völkisch Nationalism and Its Unfolding in the Colonial Context: Adda von Liliencron’s Historical Novels Giovanna (1881) and Nach Südwestafrika (1906)

Adda von Liliencron, known as the “Baroness of Africa” in German-colonial circles, was a founding and honorary member of the German-Colonial Women’s League. The social relation that Balibar refers to is bourgeois class society, characterized by the complex entanglement of alienation-the objectification of the subject, the self-and racism-the objectification of the object, the fungible other. Giovanna was published shortly before Imperial Germany acquired its first colonial settlements in Africa and long before Liliencron took notice of them, which was only in 1906. The lack of culture of the colonized peoples is equated with their inability to speak proper German and is exemplified by Timotheus’ inarticulateness. Racial demarcation lines are reinforced through repeated emphasis on the “blackness” of the other and the “blondness” of the colonizers.