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I progetti di Bismarck per la costruzione dell'impero tedesco durante l'impero prussiano hanno investito nel mitico storie di conquista tedesca, resuscitando i ricordi della colonia Welser in Venezuela. Nel l'era della Republica di Weimar, queste colonie perdute sarebbero state lamentate insieme ai ricordi di più recenti perdite territoriali, mentre durante il Terzo Reich gli autori ne esaltavano la visione dei primi conquistatori tedeschi. Simile ai dibattiti in corso negli Stati Uniti che circondano Monumenti confederati, dall'inizio del XXI secolo, ci sono stati tentativi in ​​Germania di “decolonizzare” la storia dei Welser e i Fugger nelle Americhe e ripropongono le loro eredità in una luce meno glorificante.

This article explores the mostly-forgotten history of the sixteenth-century Welser colonization of Venezuela as it was reinterpreted in Germany’s cultural memory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When Imperial Germany began to colonize parts of Africa and the South Pacific, the Welser episode resurfaced in its popular culture. The colonial legacy left by the imprint of the Welser period drove the idea that Imperial Germany had a legitimate right to the project of colonization in Africa and the Pacific, but, historians, politicians, and writers in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries recalled the failure of the Welser colony amidst racialized proposals for the German colonization of Africa, and eventual genocide, including that of the Herero people.[2] For some Germans, the Welser colony in Venezuela became a hopeful symbol for their own utopian colonial desires. Later, after the loss of its colonies at the end of WWI, Germany continued to try and make sense of its colonial past while paving the way for the transition between the short-lived German Empire, the democratic Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich. After Germany’s defeat in World War I, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles drafted by the victorious powers of Great Britain, France, the United States and other allied states imposed significant territorial provisions on Germany including the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France and the cessation of parts of its European territories to Belgium, Denmark, Lithuania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Germany lost 13 percent of its European territory and one-tenth of its population while simultaneously surrendering all of its extra-European colonies.[3] This national loss had tremendous consequences for how the first German colony was reimagined: Post-WWI writers continued the project of remembering the Welser period as part of an ethnic German national identity.[4] Historians and novelists writing in Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1944 continued to interpret the Welser period in a manner that facilitated the image of Aryan conquistadors planting the seed of German nationhood on the American continent. Historical records such as the chronicle of the Spanish Dominican Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484-1566), author of A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias; 1552), critique the Welsers’ actions in Venezuela; Las Casas reappears in later German literature as an antagonist who unjustly smears the Welser family name. Venezuelan historiography, on the other hand, continued the Spanish colonial depiction of their German competitors as barbaric,[5] before a post-WWII revisionist wave in Latin America and Germany revisited this period with a critical eye to debunk the pro-nationalist agendas prevalent on both sides.[6]

I will first provide a short history of the Welser period before analyzing German works of history and historical fiction from the nineteenth century through the Third Reich which revive the legacy of the Welser Venezuela colony. I argue that the Welser colony was resurrected first to serve Imperialist expansionist aims, to rectify the Spanish-driven “smear” campaign against the Welsers, and to racialize German colonization. After discussing the ways through which German colonialism has been linked to the Holocaust, and specifically how the Welser episode was historicized during the Third Reich, I argue that young Germans’ attempts to “decolonize” public space by contextualizing the history of colonial street names, for example, is a new form of engaging with Germany’s colonial past and combating contemporary racism and anti-Semitism.