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Postcolonial Germany: Memories of Empire in a Decolonized Nation. By Britta Schilling (New York, Oxford University Press, 2014) 258 pp. $110.00

The title of Britta Schilling’s fine monograph, Postcolonial Germany, refers to a phenomenon that has given rise to a relatively new but vital field of study. While historians have, in one way or another, always been working on the roughly 30 years of German colonialism (1884–1914/19), a ‘boom’ (1) of scholarship in this field only occurred following the emergence of postcolonial German studies, which gained momentum in the late 1990s. Schilling’s study thus builds on lively recent discussion and research on German colonialism and postcoloniality both in the Anglophone and German context. Simultaneously, the author leaves the beaten path many times. Unlike earlier works in the field of German postcolonial studies she proposes, for instance, a periodization ‘which transcends the conventional breaks marked by the Nazi takeover and the end of the Second World War’ (p. 9). She also joins the very few scholars who do not reiterate the catch-phrase of a ‘colonial’ or ‘postcolonial amnesia’ (2) that allegedly ‘affected the cultural memory’ in Germany – an amnesia that for some ‘began after World War II and lasted well into the 1960s’ (3) while for others it continues roughly to the centenary in 2004 of the colonial wars against the Herero and Nama peoples.(4) Schilling thus not only covers the entire ‘post-colonial’ time (in a chronological sense) ‘from the loss of the colonies to the present day’ (p. 2), she also maintains that there was never such a period of forgetting in Germany (p. 10).