The products that appealed to this colonial fantasy through elaborate illustrations or simply advertising as foreign gave the German consumer the feeling that they were getting a glimpse into an exotic new world. Depicting non-white indigenous people as subjugated and/or inferior gave the German consumer a feeling of power over them, that the indigenous people were inherently inferior and that their labor went into the product the German consumer can now purchase.

Through the commercialization process, colonialism’s role in capitalism expanded beyond a process of exploitation by which natural resources and cheap labor are accrued. Instead of only the acquired resources and labor being profitable for certain companies, the cultural idea of colonialism itself could be utilized by any company regardless of direct ties to the colonies and made profitable. The German colonies themselves were not very profitable but the colonial fantasy as it existed in German culture was and continued to be even after Germany lost them in 1919. Colonialism as a cultural idea was  a commodity sold to the German people divorced from its material conditions either in Germany or its colonies.

This exhibition examines the commercialization of German colonialism through several colonial objects. However, they are not colonial in the way that an object originating from a colony would be described as colonial. I do not believe they can provide insight into the historical reality of any of the German colonies either from the indigenous perspective or the German colonizers’ perspective. I believe they demonstrate the domestic view of German colonialism as a commodity. The incomplete perspective of the colonizer is further warped as, to the average German, the colonies are an abstract concept only given shape by the colonial imagination of the wider culture. The objects are products designed to evoke the colonial fantasy in the consumer as a marketing tactic. The goal of this exhibition is not to uncover what these objects can tell us about the indigenous people German colonizers subjugated and committed violence against or even the German perpetrators of that violence. This exhibition is meant to investigate the German culture that produced and consumed these objects and what that can tell us about popular attitudes and conceptions about colonialism within that culture.

Ciarlo, David. “Mass-Marketing the Empire: Colonial Fantasies and Advertising Visions.” German Colonialism in a Global Age, edited by Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley, Duke University Press, 2015. Proquest Ebook Central,

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cwm/detail.action?docID=1884073.  

German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, edited by Volker Langbehn, Taylor & Francis Group, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cwm/detail.action?docID=481106.