"Becoming Nature" with the German Nation?

Citizenship and affiliation of people from the German colonial territories during the German Empire

Why the acquisition of German citizenship was desirable for people from the German colonial territories can only be explained specifically for the time and place as well as the individual situation of individuals. However, there are some constants: From the perspective of colonial migrants, the possession of citizenship determined the possibilities of living and surviving in the German Reich. During the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, there was no differentiated law that would have regulated the residence of people without a German passport in the Reich, so that the police authorities could deport foreigners considered "annoying" at any time. Thus, the possession or non-possession of German citizenship^[1] represented a kind of internal border of the German Reich. ^[2] The few migrants who stayed in the Reich from the German colonial territories were permanently threatened with deportation. ^[3] This means that if colonial migrants could not avoid contact with German authorities, especially since they were visually conspicuous in the streetscape, the possession of a nationality could have been a security for their residence. Especially for colonial migrants who married in Germany, started a family and thus developed a permanent perspective of staying, the possession of German citizenship became central. In the following sections, the (im)possibilities of obtaining German citizenship by people from the German colonial territories are analyzed. It is shown that in addition to culturalizing, racializing attributions, class affiliation also played a decisive role in obtaining citizenship and at the same time even the possession of a citizenship did not protect against social exclusion.

"Becoming Nature" with the German Nation

People from the German colonial territories did not automatically have German citizenship. Rather, they had the status of so-called protectoratemembers or natives. This vaguely defined status, which restricted their rights, had been introduced by the German colonial administration and the power to define who received this status was a component of colonial rule. The so-called nativelaw, to which people who came from the colonized territories themselves were subject, incapacitated them and allowed punishments such as corporal punishment. The people became objects of the arbitrariness of the colonial administration. ^[4] This right did not apply in the German Reich, where the concrete legal status of colonial migrants was unclear. This is due, among other things, to the fact that their permanent presence in the German Reich was never envisaged. Since 1919, the Treaty of Versailles regulated the surrender of German colonies to so-called mandated powers. In fact, however, the former German colonial territories were placed under a new colonial rule. The colonial migrants who were still in the German Reich at that time became stateless due to a lack of regulations. ^[5]

For people from the German colonial territories, there were different ways to obtain German citizenship: through birth, marriage or through so-called naturalization. ^[6] Obtaining citizenship through birth and marriage was a process that took place without any action on the part of those involved. When a legitimate child was born, it acquired the citizenship of the father, an illegitimate child the citizenship of the mother. Women automatically acquired their husband's citizenship when they married, if it differed from their original citizenship. So-called naturalization refers to what we now call naturalization. People who were considered so-called foreigners had to go through the process of "naturalization". The term refers to what the German government was concerned with naturalization: Applicants were supposed to prove that they had become "nature" with the German nation and had therefore earned the award of German citizenship.

The "Protected AreaAct" of 1888 created the possibility for people referred to in the law as "natives" to receive German citizenship from the Reich Chancellor. ^[7] Theoretically, residents of the German colonies could thus also become German citizens of the Reich. ^[8] The Reich and Nationality Act (RuStAG) of 1913 also explicitly stated that residents of the German colonies could acquire German citizenship. However, this was hardly implemented in practice, as the example of Manga Bell's application shows, the process of which can be found in the files of the Reich Colonial Office (RKA). ^[9] Manga Bell's father, King Bell, was one of the chiefs who had signed the Douala's trade treaties with the representative of the Hamburg company C. Woermann. These treaties were placed under German protection in July 1885 by Reich Commissioner Gustav Nachtigal, thus establishing the German colony in Cameroon. ^[10] Bell argued in his application for German citizenship from 1902 with his "previous education and high position". ^[11] Bell was referring to his social position in the Douala elite and his position as an intermediary between the German colonial authorities and the Douala. During the processing of the documents in the Colonial Department, all the speakers confirmed that they were not aware of any process of "naturalization" of natives so far. Although they classified Manga Bell as intelligent, he was "on a far too low cultural level" for them to have been naturalized. ^[12] Internally, the rejection was justified by the fact that the presence of naturalized natives would have called into question the racialized social order in the colonies and that Manga Bell was "culturally" not ready for full citizenship rights. ^[13] This means that for the majority of colonial migrants, the acquisition of Reich citizenship was actually not a way to secure a permanent perspective of remaining in the German Reich or to improve their legal status.

Despite everything, there were some people from the German colonial territories who were naturalized: Among other things, the naturalization of Josef Boholle, who came to Berlin in 1896 from Kribi, a city in today's Cameroon, as a performer for the German Colonial Exhibition, is known and verifiable. ^[14] Boholle had married Stephanie Urbanowski, who came from the Russian Empire, in 1909/10. Together they had a daughter and two sons and initially lived in various places in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg before moving to Karlshorst. Boholle applied for naturalization at the Berlin police headquarters in February 1926. After the end of the First World War and the takeover of the German colonial territories by so-called mandate powers, the people in the former German colonies on the African continent had been placed under French, British and South African rule. The legal status of colonial migrants residing in Germany was not regulated in the Treaty of Versailles. Accordingly, Boholle's legal status was described as "stateless" in the application for naturalization. Boholle had completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter after the end of the colonial exhibition and had worked relatively successfully in his profession until then. The official who accepted his application saw Boholle, as it was called in the language of the authorities at the time, as a "desirable addition to the German people" and advocated the admission of Boholle and his family to the Prussian state association. Despite objections by the government in Thuringia to Boholle's naturalization, the Boholle family was naturalized. It is not possible to understand why the naturalization was carried out in this particular case. Boholle probably had strong advocates at the Berlin police headquarters who worked towards his naturalization.

Nevertheless, the naturalization of the family was an exception. This means that although theoretically the possibility was created for people from the German colonial territories to become naturalized, naturalizations were hardly carried out in practice. Why was the possibility of "naturalization" included in the "Protected AreasAct" and the RuStAG at all? There are no specifically formulated reasons in the documents of the responsible ministries. However, it is likely that an explicit exclusion of people from citizenship on the basis of an assumed race would not have been able to achieve a majority in the Reichstag at that time. A formulation of the RuStAG to this effect would have required the approval of the deputies. The inclusion of the concept of race as a legal category in the RuStAG did not take place until the time of the National Socialist regime. ^[15] Thus, the German governments reserved the right to exclude people from the German colonial territories from acquiring citizenship at the administrative level for culturalist and biologistic-racist motives, instead of formulating the exclusion by law. ^[16]

The exclusion of colonized women from the state association

In addition to naturalization, women from the colonial territories had the option of obtaining citizenship by marrying a German national. With the marriage, the legal status of the man was transferred to his wife and children. ^[17] This regulation had its origins in the natural law codifications of the European states, which had been enacted in the German states at the beginning of the 19th century. The natural law codifications imagined marriage as a contract that established the supremacy of the man over his wife and granted the husband comprehensive "powers of management and control" over his wife. ^[18] The transfer of citizenship to the wife and children was also a patriarchal privilege that was granted to the man. ^[19] During the debate on the revision of the RuStAG in 1913, it was discussed whether this possibility for German men to marry women from the colonial territories could be excluded. ^[20] It was a member of parliament from the Catholic Centre Party who introduced such a proposal during a commission meeting to discuss the drafts of the RuStAG. The aim of the Centre Party was to enable marriages between German men and women from the colonial territories on the one hand, and at the same time to dispel the most important concerns about the legal validity of marriages – the transfer of citizenship to the wife and children. ^[21]

At the same time as the negotiations on the reforms of the RuStAG, debates on the prohibition of marriages took place in the German Reichstag. In 1905 and 1906, bans on marriagesbetween white and non-white people had been issued in German South West Africa and German East Africa. ^[22] In 1912, the State Secretary of the Reich Colonial Office, Wilhelm Solf, had issued a ban on said marriages in Samoa. This last ban had triggered a debate in the Reichstag. ^[23] Among other things, the bans were an attempt to exclude women and children from the German colonial territories from acquiring German citizenship by marrying a German citizen and giving birth in wedlock. ^[24] The bans on so-called colonial mixed marriages were accompanied by a public debate about marriages. The basic tenor of the debate was a racist discourse about the supposed dangers and the undesirability of "racial mixing". This was a discourse that was nourished, among other things, by the pseudo-scientific work of the racist and later member of the NSDAP Eugen Fischer. ^[25] There were different thrusts in the public debates: On the one hand, it was about the negotiation of patriarchal rights, which, in the sense of the natural law conventions, stated that it was a man's prerogative to choose a wife regardless of her origin, to marry her and, as a consequence, to pass on his nationality to his wife and children. On the other hand, there was a more recent, nationalist-racist assumption that men also bore a responsibility for the nation in the sense of national consciousness in the choice of their spouse and had to make the choice of their wife in this sense. If they did not follow this national consciousness, they were at least to be deprived of the right to transfer their citizenship to their wife and children, with all the civil law consequences. ^[26] In this context, some members of the Centre Party now proposed that the RuStAG exclude the constitutional consequences of the aforementioned marriages. But not only the deputies of the Centre Party, but also the Reich Colonial Office had made an attempt in November 1912 to introduce such a paragraph in the RuStAG. However, the staff of the Federal Foreign Office raised concerns about these proposals under international law: the German colonial administration had not yet managed to define the term "native", which was now to become a legal term. ^[27] The problem with the lack of a definition was that it left it unclear who was to be regarded as "native" among a mobile and socially very diverse population such as those living in the German colonial territories.

The disputed nationality of Agnes Bowe

The bans on so-called mixed marriages had already brought foreign policy problems: Many of the marriages that the German government tried to invalidate retrospectively by means of the bans concerned women who were daughters of British men and women from German South West Africa. ^[28] This was due to the fact that many marriages were concluded by German nationals with so-called Rehobother Basters , who often had British citizenship because their fathers were British.

As early as October 1912, the British ambassador Sir Edward Goschen had sent a letter to the Foreign Office of the German Empire in which he demanded that British citizens in German South West Africa should not be reduced to the status of "natives". The marriages they had entered into, the letter said, were also to be recognised as valid. ^[29] A short time later, it became clear that these concerns were not purely theoretical: in April 1913, the German Embassy in London, the British Legation in Berlin and the Reich Chancellor negotiated the validity of the marriage between the British citizen Talbot Henry Bowe and Katharina Cloete, who came from the territory of what later became German South West Africa. The marriage had taken place in Walvis Bay in 1879, i.e. before the illegal seizure of the territory by the German state. The validity of this couple's marriage had an impact on the question of whether the daughter Agnes Bowe, who was born of the marriage, could be classified as a "native" by the German colonial authorities or whether she had British citizenship. ^[30] Agnes Bowe had married a Saxon citizen and had acquired Saxon citizenship or German citizenship on the basis of this.

The German colonial administration had declared this marriage invalid on the assumption that Bowe was a "native" of the German "protectorate". After the dispute with the British government over this case, Wilhelm Solf, State Secretary of the Reich Colonial Office, instructed the governor in Windhoek on 5 July 1913 that the marriage of Agnes's parents had to be considered valid, that Agnes was therefore a British citizen, that her marriage was therefore also valid and that she had thus become a German citizen of the Reich. ^[31] Depriving nationals of other states of rights was contrary to international law; therefore, the Secretary of State felt compelled to intervene in this case.

These experiences also explain why the staff of the Federal Foreign Office had reservations about the introduction of a paragraph to the RuStAG, which excluded the constitutional consequences of marriage without having a legally secured definition of the term "native". In fact, the plan to introduce such a paragraph was then abandoned. The fact that no paragraph was introduced at this time was also interpreted by historian Dieter Gosewinkel as a (short-term) victory of the patriarchal state over the state based on racialized principles. ^[32]

Intersection of Class and Race – The Case of Phoebe Parkinson

However, not only biologistic-racist considerations played a role in the acquisition of citizenship, but also the question of class affiliation, as the example of Phoebe Clothilde Parkinson, née Coe, shows. ^[33] Phoebe Coe was born in 1863 as the daughter of the American consul Jonas Myndersee Coe and Joana Le'utu, the daughter of a royal Samoan family. ^[34] Her sister Emma acquired large tracts of land in the later colony of German New Guinea and owned a number of steamships with which she traded. ^[35] Because of her position, she became known as Queen Emma. In 1879, at the age of 16, Phoebe Coe married the German ethnologist Richard Parkinson, who was 20 years her senior. Parkinson represented the Hamburg company Godeffroy & Söhne in New Guinea. The company's contracts formed the basis for the annexation of New Guinea by the German Empire in 1884.^[36] Two years after the death of her husband, Phoebe Parkinson applied for German citizenship to the governor of German New Guinea. Her application was strongly supported by the German administration, although she was considered stateless at the time because her husband had lost his citizenship after more than ten years of absence from the German Empire. ^[37] According to the legislation of the time, this status was also automatically transferred to the wife and children. Despite this, Phoebe Parkinson and her children were presented with the "naturalization certificate" on February 27, 1912. ^[38] The justification for the motion stated that Phoebe Parkinson lived like "a white woman", gave her children the "best possible education" and was "highly regarded" in New Guinea. ^[39]

According to ethnologist Margarete Mead, who met Phoebe Parkinson in person and worked on a biography about her, Phoebe Parkinson was close friends with Albert Hahl, the governor of New Guinea. ^[40] Hahl, according to Mead, did everything in her power to support Phoebe Parkinson after the death of her husband. This obviously includes vigorously advocating for her application for German imperial citizenship. Compared to the examples of applications for citizenship of people from West and South West Africa, two things can be seen here: On the one hand, that a distinction was made in the applications for citizenship according to origin, Samoans were on a higher "level of civilization" in the colonial-racist logic than people from the African continent. On the other hand, class affiliation played an important role, as in the case of Phoebe Parkinson. Parkinson and her sister Queen Emma owned large plantations and therefore also held central political positions in the German colony. Since there was a close friendly relationship with the governor of New Guinea, nothing seemed to stand in the way of Phoebe Parkinson's naturalization.

A question of social belonging

Regardless of whether they had citizenship, the children of marriages between German men and women from the colonial territories were often not treated as German citizens. Especially not if they lived in the German colonies. This is made clear by a letter from the lawyer Rudolf Witowski, who wrote on behalf of the Panzlaff family to the State Secretary of the Reich Colonial Office, Wilhelm Solf, in November 1913. The letter reads:

"I ask for pleasant information as to whether there is a possibility [...] to create the legal status of whites for the children and whether the document drawn up for this purpose would not be sufficient to counter possible social setbacks." ^[41]

Wilhelm Panzlaff, whose children are the subject of this letter, had married Magdalena von Wyk in 1894, in what was then the German colony of German South West Africa. ^[42] Wyk's ancestors were Nama and Boers, and the German colonial administration treated them legally as "natives" because of this, although they had received German Reich citizenship through marriage according to existing laws. The marriage had produced three children, who had also become German citizens of the Reich through their legitimate birth. However, as the lawyer described in the letter quoted, the children experienced social rejection and discrimination despite their education in the German Reich and the possession of German citizenship. Panzlaff also feared that his children would not be able to inherit their inheritance due to the prevailing mood in the German "protectorate" regarding marriages between white and non-white people, and that he would not be able to give them "the fruits of his years of work". ^[43] In other words, Panzlaff was also concerned about the civil consequences of discrimination against his children.

In the reply of State Secretary Solf to Panzlaff's lawyer, it was said that if the marriage was valid, the children would have a claim to German citizenship. The citizenship certificate would enable them to demand "legal equality with the whites". ^[44] However, the letter continued, legal equality had no influence on the "social position" of the children, but the prevailing views "in circles of the white population of the protected area" were decisive. In a letter from Theodor Seitz, governor of German South West Africa, to Solf, it was stated that the children from so-called mixed marriages in "this country were socially shunned by the majority of the population" and that "the coincidence" that they had citizenship was not taken into account. ^[45] It is clear from the answer that social stratification on the basis of racist categories had become more clearly established in the German colonies than in the German metropolis. It also shows that in the colonized territories the biologistic category of "race" was written over the legal category of citizenship; this development did not prevail in the German Reich until a little later with National Socialism.

The explanations have shown that citizenship and the process of acquiring it were (and are) a contested legal construct that effectively enabled or curtailed the life chances of different people. Depending on which racist ideas about people who applied for German Reich citizenship were dominant, they were allowed or denied access to the German state association. Interwoven with the class affiliation and social status of the applicants, this led to the approval or rejection of the applications. Obviously, it also seemed to be central whether the applicants had contact with the right people in decisive positions. At the same time, it was possible to show the limits of the effectiveness of the legal categories of citizenship, which could and can be overwritten by racist categories depending on time and place. For colonial migrants, the unclear legal status became dangerous, especially after the transfer of power to the National Socialists and the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws. ^[46] Until then, they found ways and means to make a living in the German Reich despite their lack of citizenship in most cases.