Exploring White Germanness in Wilhelmine Adventure Novels

This chapter addresses the construction of white German identity at the dawn of the twentieth century and looks at how whiteness and Germanness come to be synonymous. The chapter analyses diverse examples of colonialist and imperialist adventure novels set in Africa, the American West, and South and Central America from authors such as Carl Falkenhorst, Friedrich Pajeken, Sophie Wörishöffer, and Karl May to show the messages that young people in Wilhelmine Germany read about what it meant to be German and white around the turn of the previous century. Intersectional readings of these texts show that debates and concern about the meaning of German whiteness moved beyond the realm of colonial authorities and colonialist newspapers and became part of the cultural fabric of the metropole, turning young readers into what Susanne Zantop called armchair colonizers.