Random Quotes

Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a German monk and professor of theology. He was the most important figure in the Reformation which challenged the power of the Catholic Church.

Quote: Heinz-Josef Bontrup (2009): Arbeit und Kapital. Wirtschaftspolitische Bestandsaufnahme und Alternativen. In: Johannes Rehm / Hans G. Ulrich (Hrsg.): Menschenrecht auf Arbeit? Sozialethische Perspektiven, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, p. 164.
Picture: Wikimedia.

Luther saw work as a form of service, stressing that both secular and spiritual professions were of equal value. Over the following centuries, the Protestant conception of work served as one of the ideological arguments for justifying the imprisonment in workhouses of those not considered hardworking. In Calvinism in particular, property and wealth were viewed as signs of divine pleasure. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904/1905), the sociologist Max Weber described the close connection between the Protestant work ethic and capitalism.

*BBC (27.03.2014): In Our Time. Weber’s The Protestant Ethic.

Annual report of the Governor General of the Belgian colony of the Congo.

Nzula et al. 1979 quoted in Henry Bernstein (2000): “Colonialism, Capitalism, Development.” In: Tim Allen and Alan Thomas (Eds): Poverty and Development into the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 264.

European colonies in Africa, Asia and Latin America economically exploited people and their labour, together with nature and its resources. In addition to direct enslavement and the compulsion to work (e.g. through the introduction of taxes), colonisers always tried to morally justify forced labour, e.g. as character forming. Still today, many people are forced into quasi-slave labour, both in Europe (e.g. 145.000 people in Italy in 2016, GSI) as well as in Asia (e.g. 3, 8 million people in China in 2016, GSI). Conditions in US prisons are also dire. For example, working conditions
for inmates in the former Louisiana plantation known today as “Anglola”
are little better than slave labour (peopeoplesworld.org, May 4th, 2018).

*Henry Bernstein (2000): Colonialism, Capitalism, Development. In: Tim Allen / Alan Thomas (Hrsg.): Poverty and Development into the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, S. 241–270.
*GSI Global Slavery Index (2016): Country reports

The Bolivian constitution was drafted after the 2006 election of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales.

Article 9, 1  of the Bolivian Constitution.

The experience of colonial subjugation impacts identities in Bolivia to this day. Long after the formal end of colonial rule in 1825, asymmetrical power relations in terms of race, gender and class still prevail. However, there is now a (vice) ministry for decolonisation (including a director for de-patriachalisation), and a centre for the rehabilitation of the country’s indigenous majority after 500 years of colonial rule. In 2020, Silvia Lazarte was appointed the first indigenous woman President of the Constitutional Assembly (laestrella.com, 30.06.2020).

*Interview with Elisa Vega Sillo (2015): Decolonizing Bolivia’s History of Indigenous Resistance.
*Decolonizing Bolivian Education (2010): A Critical Look at the Plurinational State’s Vision.

Ludwig Külz (1875-1938) was a doctor and from 1902 head of the Nachtigal Hospital in Togo. The indigenous population was denied access and treatment there. He was also a government doctor in other German colonies. From 1920 onwards he trained so-called emigrants as a professor at the Hamburg Tropical Hygiene Institute. In the quote, Külz referred to the prevailing “motto”, “Black hands, white heads”, which was first postulated by Friedrich Wulffert in a lecture.

Quoted by Wolfgang U. Eckart (1997): Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus Deutschland 1884-1945, S. 59. Original Source: Ludwig Külz (1911): Grundzüge der kolonialen Eingeborenenhygiene, in: Beihefte z. Arch. f. Schiffs- u.Trophyg. 15 (1911) 3, 386-475; Wesen und Ziele (1910).

In the collective memory, German colonial medicine is often associated with “adventure”, dangerous tsetse flies or the self-sacrificing efforts of German doctors “far from home”. At the latest with the “colonial entry” of the German Empire in 1884, many (especially young) doctors took advantage of their assignment in the colonies to advance their medical careers. In this context, they developed dangerous drugs that they tested on the colonized population. This happened primarily in the sleeping sickness concentration camps and leprosy homes in Togo, Cameroon and “German East Africa”. From 1907 onwards there was to be a more “social” colonial policy, based on “humanity, justice and charity”. However, here too, the “effective exploitation of the land and people” – such as the “arms” of the colonized mentioned in the quote, i.e. the labor of the colonized – to maintain and improve the German colonial economy was the actual goal. Ludwig Külz called for a “colonial human economy” that should implement acculturation and the implementation of “colonial racial hygiene” as “sanitary pedagogy”. The task of the “tropical hygienist” is to strengthen the weakening German colonial economy by preserving “valuable” life within the colonized population (e.g. “strong men”). At the same time, it was Külz’s central concern to avoid “bad” or “inferior” lives, especially in the sense of a so-called “mixed-race population”.

*Wolfgang U. Eckart (1997): Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus Deutschland 1884-1945. Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh: Paderborn.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, economist and journalist, and co-founder of the First International (International Workingmen’s Association). His main work Das Kapital is one of the most important books for the international labour movement.

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1960): Werke. Band 9. Berlin/DDR: Dietz, p. 221.

Even Karl Marx, who fought for the liberation and empowerment of the European proletariat, submitted to the European ideology of supremacy. Nonetheless, his ideas and theories inspired movements in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America to throw off colonial or bourgeois rule, and were still prominent during the First World War (starting with the Russian October Revolution of 1917). However, the newly created systems were by no means free from domination. There were also mass communist movements in England, Spain, Italy and Germany, as well as, for a short period, Soviet republics (Räterepubliken) in Bremen, Leipzig and Munich. Many theorists and activists in Third World liberation movements referred to Marx, e.g. Walter Rodney from Guyana or Fidel Castro in Cuba and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. There was also a strong Marxist movement in India. Intellectuals still invoke Marxism today, e.g. the historian Vijay Prashad (author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2007)) or the literary scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Can the Subaltern Speak (1988)).

*Vijay Prashad (2007): The Darker Nations. A People‘s History of the Third World. New York: The New Press.
*The Times of India (2018): “Marxism Should be Re-imagined”: Spivak.

Paul Ettighoffer (1896 – 1976) was a German writer. Amongst other things, he wrote two travel books in 1938 and 1943 that are part of German colonial literature where he describes his travels.

Paul Ettighoffer (1938): So sah ich Afrika. Mit Auto und Kamera durch unsere Kolonien. Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann.

Ettighoffer’s books were distributed as factual reports in Nazi Germany (Lampert 2004). ‘As the Nazi system worked towards another war, Ettighoffer’s books became radicalised in terms of militancy, racism, belief in authorities and colonial ideas’ (ibid.). Nature was constructed by Ettighoffer as an absolute threat, especially for white life. This idea lent legitimacy to the idea of the need for its total domination, including ecocide and genocide. To this day, the destruction of nature and humans are linked.

*Andreas Lampert (2004): Ettighoffer, Paul Coelestin.
*United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Nazi Imperialism. An Overview.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was the most famous German philosopher of the Enlightenment. He spent most of his life in Königsberg. He was central to the shaping of racial theory in the German-speaking world.

Immanuel Kant (1764): Physische Geographie 2. T. 1. Abs. § 3 (IX 195). Königsberg: Göbbels und Unzer. Translation by David Harvey (2000): p. 4.

Although universal human rights are commonly associated with the era of the Enlightenment, this was also the period in which racial theories emerged. The idea that all people were free and equal was a threat to those who benefited from inequality. So a parallel theory was needed in order to prove why some could not, after all, be fully equal (see above, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment). Immanuel Kant attempted to construct a “race hierarchy” based on “reason”, “morality”, “maturity”, “the potential for being educated” and “laziness” as characteristics of otherness. He placed the white man at the centre of this ideology and made him the norm by which progress was measured. Kant’s devaluation of people of colour went so far that he wondered why certain regions of the world existed at all.

*Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (ed. 2007): Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
*Devin J. Vartija (2021): The Color of Equality Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Pliny the Elder was a Roman historian.

Plinius, Historia naturalis 33,1. 33,33. 33,73

During the Roman Empire, the Mediterranean region was extensively deforested for the construction of ports and cities. The soil was destroyed by mining, metal and precious metal extraction. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder critiqued this in his work Natural History (Historia naturalis), in which an examination of social relations with nature and the appropriation of nature were already hinted at. In this quote, he was describing the devastating consequences of gold mining (Müller 2017).

*Franziska Müller (2020) “Can the subaltern protect forests? REDD+ compliance, depoliticization and Indigenous subjectivities”, Journal of Political
Ecology 27(1), p.419-435.

Mohammad Mossadegh (1882-1967) was an Iranian lawyer, politician and the first prime minister of independent Iran. The quote is from his speech in court in 1953, in which he defended himself against charges of high treason.

Mohammad Mossadeghs Biography

As part of a wave of anti-colonial movements, Mohammad Mossadegh became Iran’s first democratically elected prime minister in 1951. In the same year, he was voted Man of the Year by the US Time Magazine for making the nationalisation of British-controlled oil production his first official act. However, in 1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower came to power in the USA, and he promoted a strongly anti-communist course and condemned any form of nationalisation. The CIA had previously noted that the situation in Iran could only be “saved” with a “new prime minister” (File Foreign Relations of the United States 1951: 87). From 1953 onwards, the CIA incited the ruling elite in Iran against Mossadegh and bribed the population with money, as corroborated by documents published in 2017 (Deutsche Welle 2017). In Latin America (e.g. Chile 1973, Allende vs. Pinochet), Africa (e.g. 1961 in Congo, Lumumba vs. Mobuto) and Asia (e.g. 1967 in Indonesia, Sukarno vs. Suharto), governments also emerged from socialist or anti-colonial movements and were overthrown and replaced by dictatorships.

*Deutsche Welle (2017): 1953: Irans gestohlene Demokratie.
*Foreign Relations of the United States (1951-1954).
*Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (2013): Zwischen Kolonialismus und Nationenbildung.

Prof. Ranabir Samaddar is the director of the Calcutta Research Group and conducts research on migration and flight, the theory and practice of dialogue, nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labour control.

*Ranabir Samaddar (2017, in German): Die Krise des Kapitalismus bedeutet nicht das Ende des Kapitalismus. In: glokal e.V. (Hrsg.): Connecting the dots. Lernen aus Geschichte(n) von Unterdrückung und Widerstand, p. 72.

Samaddar is posing a central question in current debates: how can one grasp the historical and global dimensions of migration? How does the global division of the world relate to neo-colonial relationships of dependency? Does migration only move from the Global South to the Global North, as an attempt to escape from the effects of global patterns of dependency? Does it in this way propel the realities of post-colonial exploitation and oppression into Europe’s “white field of vision”? Wars are mostly take place in the Global South. Poverty, hunger and drought, on the other hand, are not social phenomena that can be explained purely in local and regional terms. Their relationship with global capitalist contexts, in which the Global North continues to be hegemonic, is patent. The wars in the Global South are being waged with weapons made in the Global North. Debt in the Global South leads to profits and economic power in the Global North. Samaddar’s position is key to the argument for a global understanding of responsibility, which perspective is currently insufficiently reflected in debates about migration.

Ranabir Samaddar (2020): The Postcolonial Age of Migration. New Delhi: Routledge.

Golo Mann (1909–1994) was a German-Swiss historian, publicist and writer. He was the son of Thomas Mann, the Nobel prize winner for literature, who had had to leave Germany when the Nazis took power in 1933.

Bildzeitung from 30. January 1991, quoted from Ulrich Herbert (2001: 305).

Golo Mann’s defensive attitude towards migrants represents the practice of German foreigner policy since the end of the guest worker agreement in 1973. At the time the quote was written, the deadly arson attacks on migrants and their houses in East and West Germany began: Rostock, Lichtenhagen, Hoyerswerda, Mölln , Solingen. In all cases, the state in East and West Germany failed to provide adequate protection for the victims or a dignified expression of condolences. In debates, it is argued that one can see from the attacks that the Germans have exceeded their resilience limit and that the right to asylum must therefore be abolished. Finally, the right to asylum was radically curtailed by the CDU, CSU and FDP in 1993 with the consent of the SPD.

*Ulrich Herbert (2001): Geschichte der Ausländerpolitik in Deutschland. München: C.H. Beck.
*Politics Today (06.06.2018): What Changed 25 Years After the Solingen Arson Attack.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was the most famous German philosopher of the Enlightenment. He spent most of his life in Königsberg. He was central to the shaping of racial theory in the German-speaking world.

Immanuel Kant (1764): Physische Geographie 2. T. 1. Abs. § 3 (IX 195). Königsberg: Göbbels und Unzer.

Although universal human rights are commonly associated with the Enlightenment, this was also the period during which racial theories emerged. The idea that all people were free and equal was a threat to those who benefited from inequality. So a parallel theory was needed in order to prove why some could not, after all, be fully equal (see Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment above). Immanuel Kant attempted to construct a “race hierarchy” based on “reason”, “morality”, “maturity”, “the potential for being educated” and “laziness” as characteristics of otherness. He placed the white man at the centre of this ideology and made him the norm by which progress was measured. Kant’s devaluation of people of colour went so far that he wondered why certain regions of the world existed at all.

*Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1997): Race and Enlighenment. A Reader.
*Jamelle Bouie (05.06.2018): The Enlightenment’s Dark Side. How the Enlightenment created modern race thinking, and why we should confront it. The Slate.com.

Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797) was a Nigerian-born author of the African diaspora who was enslaved as a child. Due to his education, he was later allowed to trade. He was able to buy his freedom in 1766 and campaigned for the abolition of slavery in England from 1777.

Quote: Orig.: The interesting Narrative of the Life of Oulaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the Africa, written by himself (1789).
Picture: Unknown author – Project Gutenberg eText 15399. Wikimedia. Creative Commons.

The quote comes from Equiano’s memories of warlike conflicts that took place in his childhood between neighboring states in order to capture booty and prisoners to sell to European slave traders. In the case described, the attackers were defeated and killed or enslaved. In his description Equiano emphasizes the contrast to the inhumanity of European slavery. In his autobiography, Equiano does not initially oppose all forms of slavery. He obtained the means to buy his freedom by participating in human trafficking. His initially ambivalent attitude towards slavery changed over the course of his life and ultimately led to a decisive stance against slavery.

*Olaudah Equiano (2021): The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Hoboken New Jersey.
*Resources on Equiano.

Walter Rodney (1942-1980) was a Guyanese Marxist historian and politician who was murdered in a Guyana Army bomb attack.

Quote: Walter Rodney (1979): People’s Power, no Dictator. Georgetown, Guyana: Working People’s Alliance.
Picture: By Unknown. Wikimedia. Creative Commons.

The quote comes from the speech “People’s Power, no Dictator”, which Walter Rodney gave in 1979. Rodney was a pan-African, Marxist historian and political activist. He came from southamerican Guyana and, after studying in Mona (Jamaica) and London (UK), worked as a university lecturer in Tanzania until he became a professor in Georgetown, Guyana in 1974. He was politically active against the increasingly authoritarian government of Forbes Burnham. In various speeches, he developed the ideas of self-emancipation of the working people, people’s power and multi-racial democracy. In the quote, Rodney opposes the increasingly dictatorial government of Forbes Burnham and emphasizes self-defence as a universal human right.

*Massimiliano Tomba (2019): Insurgent Universality. An Alternative Legacy of Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wolfgang Welsch (born 1946) is a German philosopher and advocate of transcultural approaches.

Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (1995): Migration und Kultureller Wandel. Schwerpunktthema der Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch, 45. Jg., 1. Vierteljahr.

The transcultural approach emerged from criticism of the intercultural approach and attempts to develop it further. One of its central characteristics is that it does not conceive of cultures as separate units, but rather as networked, mixed and dynamic. It also rejects the idea of cultural geographies. One of the criticisms of this approach, however, is that it does not take power relations into account.

Laila Abu-Er-Rub et al. (2019): Engaging Transculturality. Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies.

Karl Stojka (1931 – 2003) was an Austrian survivor of the Porajmos (genocide of Romn:ja during National Socialism). After surviving the concentration camps, Karl Stojka became an artist and author.

Projekt Kulturelles Erbe. Tradition mit Zukunft (2007): Roma und Sinti. Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. HAK International Klagenfurt.

Despite their long history in Germany, attempts have been made to exclude, suppress and deport Sint:ezza and Romn:ja from social life here over the centuries. This is still the case today if one considers the deportation of Sint:ezza and Romn:ja to so-called safe European countries of origin. Despite the discrimination and persecution they have experienced,Sint:ezza and Romn:ja organise and resist. In Germany, there are numerous clubs and associations organised by Sint:ezza and Romn:ja that work on empowerment, raising awareness of racism, documentation and political participation. Stojka’s ancestors lived in what is now Austria for an estimated 300 years before many of his family members, including his father and brother, were murdered in the concentration camps. Stojka himself survived the Porajmos and later began to paint. In his paintings he expressed the persecution of Sint:ezza and Romn:ja.

*Council of Europe: History. Remembrance. Identity. Remembrance of the persecution and genocide of Roma by the Nazi adn their allies remains a sensitive and painful issue for the Roma.

Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803) was a formerly enslaved Haitian who led the resistance against France. These lines come from a letter Louverture wrote to Napoleon, to which he attached this constitutional text.

Constitution of Haiti (1801)

It began in 1791 with an uprising of 50,000 people: Haitians, most of whom were enslaved, fighting for their independence from France. In 1794, slavery was abolished. With the war of independence dragging on for several years, Napoleon threatened to reintroduce slavery. But the Haitians won and became the first Latin American country to become independent in 1804. However, a coalition of European states and the United States boycotted the country. Since the prosperity of colonial states was based on the plantation economy and therefore on the principle of slavery, they feared that the Haitian revolution could also inspire other oppressed peoples. As a result, Haiti was forced into isolation in terms of foreign policy and the new state was obliged to make vast compensation payments to former slave owners. In return for recognising Haiti as an independent state in 1825, France demanded compensation of 150 million francs. It was not until 1883 that Haiti was finally able to pay off this amount which it did with the help of loans (Ziegler 2010). The high national debt it was saddled with immediately after independence is often seen as marking the start of Haiti’s economic dependence on the outside world. At the World Conference Against Racism in 2001, Haiti demanded compensation from France.

*Project in Haiti and the Domenican Republic where Youth work on the history of slavery and liberation.
*Jean Ziegler (2010): Haiti und der Hass auf den Westen. In Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik.

Turkey, Melitio of Sardis (ca.120-185)
Melitio of Sardis appeared in the 2nd century as Bishop of Sardis in what is now Turkey. He is venerated as a saint by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.

Melitio von Sardes, Passover Homilie, quoted by Karl-Erich Grözinger, Die “Gottesmörder, in: Julius H. Schoeps / Joachim Schlör (ed.), Bilder der Judenfeindschaft, Augsburg 1999, 57.

His writings about the Jews as murderers of God, published between 160 and 170, are considered important sources for the development of Christian anti-Judaism. Melito saw the destruction of the temple as well as the suffering of the Jews in the Diaspora as a consequence of their god-murder.

Christlicher Antijudaismus, ein Wegbereiter des Antisemitismus – juedspurenhuenfelderlands Webseite!

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was an Afro-Caribbean French writer and politician, founder of the Negritude movement that sought to liberate Black people from colonial rule.

Aimé Césaire (1968/2000)

In his 1950 essay On Colonialism, from which this quote comes, Césaire denounced the fact that while colonialism feigned a desire to “civilise”, its real goal was always exploitation (1968: 8). Both the colonised and European proletarians, he wrote, had understood this long ago (1968: 6). Here, Césaire posited a problematic connection between the Holocaust and colonial genocide, writing that ‘what he [the European citizen] does not forgive Hitler [is] not the crime per se (…) but that it is a crime against white people’ (1968: 12). in a different vein, Michael Rothberg argues for a multidimensional culture of remembrance that does not set victims against each other. For an example of such a position, see the cooperation between Ibrahim Arslan, survivor of the racist arson attack in Mölln/Northwest Germany, and Ester Bejarano, Auschwitz survivor (Möllner Reden im Exil from 2013).

*Aimee Césaire (2000): Discourse on Colonialism. A Poetics of Anticolonialism.

The General Act of the Berlin Conference of 1885, from which this quote comes, was the final document of a meeting that lasted more than 2 months. The German Empire, the USA, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain and Sweden-Norway took part in it. African representatives were not present.

Deutsches Reichsgesetzblatt (1885): Generalakte der Berliner Konferenz. Nr. 23, p. 225

In 1884, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck convened the Berlin Conference to lay the foundations for the division of Africa for trade and into colonies. The standards defined in the conference’s document, which European powers portrayed as guaranteeing protection for Africans, were violated in all colonies: oppression, violence and arbitrariness were the norm for the colonised (Zimmerer 2021). Shortly after the conference, nearly the entire African continent was divided between seven European countries. In 1914, half of the earth’s surface and a third of the world’s population was living under colonial rule (Bertelsmann Universal-Lexikon 2006: 496). Bismarck is treated as a “cautious colonial politician” in historiography (see Bpb 2015). However, this is not because he was against subjugating and exploiting other peoples, but because for him, the costs outweighed the benefits (ibid.).

*Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (2015): Bismarck und der Kolonialismus.
*DW.com (17.10.2016): Recognising Germany’s Colonial Crimes: Work in Progress.