The Propaganda War in the Rhineland: Weimar Germany, Race and Occupation After World War I

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Piecing together a fractured European continent after World War I, the Versailles Peace Treaty stipulated the long term occupation of the Rhineland by Allied troops. This occupation, perceived as a humiliation by the political right, caused anger and dismay in Germany and an aggressive propaganda war broke out - heightened by an explosion of vicious racist propaganda against the use of non- European colonial troops by France in the border area. These troops, the so-called Schwarze Schmach or 'Black humiliation' raised questions of race and the Other in a Germany which was to be torn apart by racial anger in the decades to come. Here, in the first English-language book on the subject, Peter Collar uses the propaganda posters, letters and speeches to reconstruct the nature and organisation of a propaganda campaign conducted against a background of fractured international relations and turbulent internal politics in the early years of the Weimar Republic. This will be essential reading for students and scholars of Weimar Germany and those interested in Race and Politics in the early 20th Century.

Reviews

'Peter Collar's book is an important contribution to the growing literature on the German Schwarze Schmach propaganda campaign against French colonial troops used as an occupation force in the 1920s in the Rhineland and the Palatinate. Whereas most of the recent scholarship has focused on the cultural aspects and racist discourses of this campaign, thus neglecting the underlying political interests and agencies,Collar is the first historian to anchor the campaign and its themes within the constitutional framework of the early Weimar Republic and to give a face to those men and women who were behind the campaign. Peter Collar thus has turned the research about the Schwarze Schmach campaign on its head.' Eckard Michels, Reader in German History, Birkbeck College, University of London

Author Bio

Peter Collar holds a PhD in German History from Birkbeck College, University of London.