Book Review: Penny on Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany.

David Ciarlo. Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. xvi + 419 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-05006-8.

Perry Myers. German Visions of India, 1871-1918: Commandeering the Holy Ganges during the Kaiserreich. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 304 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-137-29971-0.

Reviewed by H. Glenn Penny (University of Iowa)
Published on H-German (September, 2014)
Commissioned by Chad Ross

The Wonders of Imperial Germany and Its Intertwined Discourses on Colonialism and Race

These are two very different books that share an interest in Germans' interconnections with the world from 1871 to 1918. Both are focused on the production of images and ideas about non-Europeans in Imperial Germany, but they differ in subject matter, research methodology, geographical orientation, and historiographic implications. As a result, they can be read together quite productively. Indeed, as we read about the wonders in these pages--emerging tropes about Africans and Indians, tantalizing Kolportage and melancholic spiritual crises, and the production of texts about exotic others and exotic selves--it is hard not to wonder about the ways in which such things took shape simultaneously and coexisted so easily with other German discourses about Africa, India, non-Europeans, and the wider world. It is also difficult not to wonder about the degree to which the Kaiserreich can be credited with having either produced or contained such discourses. The more one reads, the less likely that seems. 

David Ciarlo's award-winning book has received great praise, and with good reason.
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