Kolonie and Heimat: race, gender, and postcolonial amnesia in Veit Harlan's Opfergang (1944).

After completion of her ground-breaking study Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany (1997), Susanne Zantop had begun to explore the legacy of colonial thinking in the shaping of German cultural identity, attributing its persistence in large measure to widespread ignorance of the colonialist past. In her bold exploration of Veit Harlan's deployment of gender relations at home as metaphors to mask colonial ambitions abroad in Opfergang (1944), Zantop demonstrates how this film reinvigorates the colonial fantasy in a way that also enables it to obliterate and forget the failures of Nazi Germany. The material in this essay was planned as a chapter in her book-in-progress, to be entitled "Postcolonial Amnesia." A shorter version was delivered at the German Studies Association annual conference in Houston, Texas, in October 2000. The version that appears here was prepared and lightly edited by her Dartmouth College colleagues Gerd Gemunden and Irene Kacandes after the author's death. (PH)

 
   Aber der deutsche Mensch braucht Raum um sich und Sonne uber sich und 
   Freiheit in sich, um gut und schon zu werden (Hans Grimm, Volk ohne Raum, 
   1926). (1) 

In the opening of Veit Harlan's 1944 film Opfergang (Sacrifice), the camera first provides us with an aerial shot of the Elbe River and Hamburg harbor, from which it pans to a bird's-eye view of the city. It then descends deep down into the recesses of Hamburg's commercial district--the dark streets around the harbor, the ships whose bowels are filled with overseas merchandise, the loading docks and cranes--before focusing, from below, on a monument of Bismarck, erstwhile chancellor and founder of the German Empire, who looms dark and imposing against the bright sky. Finally, we catch a glance of the coat of arms of the so-called Deutscher Kolonialbund--an unspecified German colonial association (O'Brien, 443 fn. 8) (2)--and quickly move into the splendid panelled hall in which the assembled members of that distinguished society celebrate the achievements of one of them: Alfred Froben, son of a senator and hence from a distinguished merchant family, has recently returned from his travels around the world, which had led him to survey Portuguese Guinea, the Sudan, the former German colonies in Africa (Togo, Cameroon, German Southwest Africa, and German East Africa), the Belgian Congo, Ceylon, Singapore, and the Philippines, before arriving in Japan, Germany's ally in World War II. In recognition of his "pioneering work in the service of the German colonial idea," the venerable colonialists award Froben an antique globe. They literally and figuratively bequeath to him "die ganze Welt," the whole world, as they say during the ceremony, and literally and figuratively Froben takes possession of it, as his finger moves across the globe to trace his recent explorations.

The downward and inward movement circumscribed by the camera in the first frames of the film correlates with a movement in the opposite direction in its conclusion. Having returned the ashes of Alskling, his deceased object of desire, to the waves of the North Sea, Froben and his wife Octavia ride along the shore toward some distant horizon. They have sealed their new pact with a symbolic handshake and kiss, gestures that are accentuated by complementary colors: his white glove joins her black glove, her black horse his white horse. United by their backgrounds, sizes, and shapes, they ride off toward the southwest, as the camera moves toward the east, the rising sun, and the wide open ocean. Between the two scenes--the return from the Kolonie to the Heimat (to borrow the title of the women's journal of the real Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft) at the beginning of the film and the sally forth into the vast expanse of an open, promising future at the end--lies an experience that is supposed to have profoundly affected both protagonists: their fateful encounter with Alskling, the alluring, exotic neighbor who had threatened to break up their marriage, but whose death has reunited the couple.

On the surface, this domestic melodrama follows a rather conventional plot line familiar to us from countless eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels and plays: the returning traveler Froben marries his wealthy, somewhat prudish cousin Octavia, who lives with her parents in somber Buddenbrookian decadence; yet he falls in love with the unmarried Swedish "water sprite" and unwed mother "Als" next door, who emerges from the waters as he is rowing out onto the Elbe, and who subsequently takes him on wild riding excursions. Torn between admiration for his "divine" pure wife and the alluring natural woman, Froben briefly wavers. He is kept from committing adultery, however, by Als's unexpected disease. To sustain her spirit during her prolonged decline, Froben rides by her window every day to salute her. When, in an attempt to save the life of Als's young daughter (who, raised in the harbor district by her nurse, is threatened by an epidemic), Froben falls ill from cholera, Octavia steps in: willing to sacrifice herself for her husband and for her marriage, she dresses in his clothes and rides up to Als's window to offer her dying rival her last salutes. As Als dies, Froben recovers, and the reunited couple rides off: healthy domesticity and virtue triumph over illicit desire, renewed vigor and strength over disease.

The film could easily be read and checked off as another domestic melodrama--in every sense: it takes place in Hamburg, not some exotic setting; and it reiterates the highly conventional plight of the adulterous man caught between two women, the proverbial saint-whore dyad. What makes this film unusual, however, is not what the spectators see or witness on screen, but what the film represses. Curiously, after the first heavy-handed focus on colonialist symbolism and on colonialism as a source of both individual and national wealth and glory, the film seems to abandon the topic in favor of the domestic drama outlined above: Froben, who has the whole earth at his fingertips, concentrates on domestic conquests instead of overseas pursuits, and on taming his own "savage" impulses instead of subjugating "natives." Yet while Opfergang supposedly suggests that the drive for colonial possession needs to be mastered, contained, and overcome--a conclusion offered, for example, by Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien--I want to propose a very different, and much more twisted, reading. As I want to argue, rather than using colonialism as an allegory, once again, for "male conquest of the female continent" (O'Brien 431, 433), Harlan creates a film in which self-conquest, self-restraint, and self-sacrifice become prerequisites for (renewed) expansionist activity. In other words, rather than using colonialism as a metaphor for gender relations at home, Harlan uses gender relations at home as metaphors to mask national colonialist ambitions abroad. By drawing on colonial fantasies from the nineteenth century (such as the "lay of the land" or the domestication of the wild) and postcolonial fantasizing of the twentieth (such as the fantasies of the restitution of "Lebensraum" or of racial purity), he participates in keeping the colonial idea alive, in re-invigorating it, while working toward obliterating the memory of lived colonial realities. As a film that rewrites or over-writes the German colonial experience and that represses its colonial investment, Opfergang participates in Germany's first "postcolonial" amnesia during the Nazi years. As a film about recasting past German colonialism as a moment of national "re-masculinization" and proposing colonialism as an attractive "idea" to strive for, it actively intervenes in the debates of the 1930s and 1940s about colonial restitution. It also shapes the processes of forgetting that affected the cultural memory of the second postcolonial phase, which began after World War II and lasted well into the 1960s. What is more, produced between 1942 and 1944, that is, shortly after the Nazis' desert campaign in North Africa had resulted in defeat and their attempt to conquer Russia had disastrously failed in Stalingrad, Opfergang also participates in the politics of obliterating and forgetting the present.

Before I proceed with an analysis of the film's peculiar strategies of repression and rewriting, let me briefly identify the discursive context in which it so powerfully and deceptively intervenes. As is well known, Germany lost its colonial possessions--which it had acquired in the 1880s and 1890s and held for only 30 years--not because of nationalist liberation movements in the colonies or international processes of decolonization, but as a consequence of being vanquished in World War I. In 1914 the German colonial empire had extended over 1,000,000 square miles (Crozier 5), and German politicians were planning to expand it even further. According to Crozier, who studied German-British colonial negotiations during the Weimar Republic, "On entering the First World War, Germany entertained grandiose war aims that included a vast expansion of the African part of her colonial possessions." Foreign Minister Bethmann Hollweg's memorandum of 5 September 1914 listed the "creation of a cohesive Central African colonial empire" among other aims, such as the acquisition of Luxemburg and southern Belgium or the establishment of a central European economic federation under German leadership. According to Colonial Secretary Wilhelm Solf,