Germany, Palestine, Israel and the (Post-)Colonial Imagination

Abstract

This thesis explores the complex and multifaceted relationship between Germany and Palestine from the mid-nineteenth century to 1948 and its effect on the post-war relationship between West Germany and Israel until 1967. By situating my research within colonial and post-colonial contexts, this study will show that the post-war West German relationship with Israel in the formative years of both nations was grounded in a substantial imagined and physical relationship with Palestine that includes religious, Orientalist, nationalist and, above all, persistent colonial subtexts. These trajectories were directed both outward and inward, and used in the context of German nation building and in the relationship between Germans and German Jews. What is more, they had a direct bearing on how German or German-speaking Zionists formulated their ideas for a Jewish state in Palestine. Taken together, these aspects embedded shared colonial, political, cultural, spatial, moral, and visual reference points into post-war West German and Israeli narratives that to this day have a substantial bearing on how Germans relate to Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Such a reading also transcends established lines of demarcation in German historiography. It reveals Germans to be frustrated colonialists, whose solidarity and admiration for Israel particularly prior to 1967 was less an expression of atonement for National Socialist crimes than a form of a redemptive proxy-colonialism that formed a constituent part in the German post-war cultural and physical rebuilding process, the blurring of its immediate past and its consequences, and functioned as compensation for the loss of external and internal territory. This thesis thus questions generally accepted arguments that locate the essence of the “special relationship” between Germany and Israel exclusively in the common historical inheritance of the Holocaust. I argue instead that an additional powerful inheritance between Germans and Jews exists based on a common colonial imagination and a shared German historiography.