GloVib (junior research group): Global entanglements and racial categorizations. The Iberian Roots of German Racial Thought (16th-20th Century)

GloVib researches the history and global circulation of racial categorizations from the early modern period to the present day. Our starting point is the thesis that racism and racial thinking in the German-speaking world are not to be understood as autochthonous developments. Instead, corresponding categories and practices of human differentiation emerged decisively in the context of the political, economic and intellectual integration of German territories into European and especially Iberian expansion. Mediated by the global circulation of people and ideas, Iberian ideas about natural hierarchies, “purity” and “mixing” were circulated in the German-speaking world at an early stage. Our project explores how this ongoing exchange influenced the discussion of key questions about biology and human nature as well as nationalism and imperialism.

The world-historical roots of a German story

The relations between the German-speaking world and Latin America have so far received little attention with regard to the history of racial categorization in the German-speaking world. Our aim is to reveal these hidden social and ideological interdependencies. We are investigating the question of how this colonial prehistory situated later German colonialism and nationalism and are working on this in archives in Africa, Europe, North and South America. In this way, the project lifts the discussion of racism and racial thinking in Germany out of its nation-state provinciality and makes visible a shared history that connects Latin America, Germany and the former German colonies.
 
 

For a critical awareness of the history of racial categorization

The second goal of GloVib is to implement an understanding of these historical dynamics in didactic and educational policy terms. Through cooperation and dialogue with actors from civil society, political education and teacher training, we develop mediation strategies and formats that encourage critical reflection on the categorization of people. By addressing the origins of racial categorizations and highlighting their artificiality, contradictory nature and mutability, the project aims to contribute to strengthening skills that are critical of racism. Contrary to provincialist and nationalist narratives, we make visible a German history that has been characterized by colonial entanglements for centuries. In this way, GloVib provides impulses for a critical historical awareness that can contribute to a more equal coexistence in today's global Germany.

 

The project is led by Dr. Adrian Masters and is divided into four sub-projects:

 

Bastard Enlightenment: categories of 'mixing' from the Spanish caste system to the Enlightenment

Dr. Adrian Masters
Sub-project 1 examines the early modern interactions between the regimes of human difference in the Iberian overseas territories and the racial thinking of important German natural philosophers such as Kant, Blumenbach, Meiners and Girtanner. It explores the ways in which Iberian ideas about “human races” and “racial mixture” influenced the racial ideologies of the Enlightenment. The sub-project asks why these Iberian ideas became one of the foundations of the natural philosophy of the German Enlightenment and how exactly these ideas reached the German-speaking world from the Iberian overseas territories.
 

“Bastard Nation": Entanglements of racial anthropology, colonialism and mission in German South-West Africa

Moritz Peter Herrmann
Subproject 3 deals with the transatlantic entanglement of colonialism, mission, racial anthropology and German nationalism in South and Southwest Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The focus is on the encounter between the German colonial power and the Basters, a group that traced its origins back to the mixing of indigenous Khoikhoi with European settlers. The sub-project examines how pre-colonial narratives and experiences pre-structured this encounter and how their consequences influenced racist practices of human differentiation in Germany and Namibia.
 

Colonialism in didactics: How German textbooks conceal indigenous history

Stephanie Wegener
Sub-project 4 uses textbooks to examine how early colonial history has been taught in the Federal Republic of Germany since the 1970s. Particular attention is paid to references to racial discrimination. The sub-project aims to provide a critical inventory of school lessons, develop considerations on the possibilities and limitations of teaching history in schools and draw up didactic proposals.