As many contributors to this volume note, Germany became a colonial power at a relatively late stage, acquiring overseas territories only in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. As if mirroring this historical situation, academic study of German colonialism and its postcolonial condition has tended to lag behind similar intellectual currents in Anglophone scholarship, but the past decade or so has seen intense debate about the history and legacy of German colonialism, a debate to which the present volume is a welcome contribution. In fourteen illustrated chapters, the book presents a wide range of perspectives on the visual culture of the colonial and postcolonial periods, covering advertising, picture postcards, collectors’ cards, dance, satirical cartoons, building manuals, cinema, cartography, photomontage, television, and media actionism.

This list gives an immediate sense of one of the main attractions of the volume, namely the sheer variety of visual material under consideration. Far from being an end in itself, this variety is central to the implicit cumulative argument of the volume: taken together, the chapters powerfully demonstrate the extensive degree to which the colonial enterprise and its legitimating ideologies of racial superiority and progress were normalised by the visual ephemera of late Imperial society. It also explores the afterlife of colonialism in Weimar culture, Nazi propaganda, and contemporary television entertainment.

Another major merit of this collection is the fact that all the contributors are aware of the big picture, and effectively situate the study of specific objects and cultural practices within a broad historical or discursive frame. To give just two examples: Brett van Hoesen’s work on the photomontages of Hannah Höch and László Moholy-Nagy also involves a re-thinking of dominant accounts of the historical avant-garde. And Astrid Kusser’s chapter uses a history of the Cake-Walk to reconsider transatlantic cultural transfer and accounts of ›Africanism‹ in the development of Western social dance. Time and again, the reader is made aware of how ostensibly peripheral cultural phenomena are inseparably tied to wider questions of colonial history and ideology.

Introducing a collection like this is no easy task, and Langbehn opts for compendiousness over coherence, giving a wide-ranging survey of various approaches to visual culture, visuality around 1900, visual anthropology, and visual metaphors in philosophy, and tying all these into questions of colonialism. The only key term about which he remains silent is memory, but he has this in common with most of his contributors; the book doesn’t quite do what it says on the tin. Langbehn’s most interesting comments pertain to historians’ use of visual sources. Following W. J. T. Mitchell, Langbehn argues that visual studies is by definition interdisciplinary, and he views historians’ traditional iconophobia as a tactic designed to bolster history’s identity as a discipline. History, he argues, has ›lacked a methodology for analyzing images‹ (p. 11). He does not set out a methodology, and neither do his contributors, but the volume does raise some interesting methodological questions.

One of Langbehn’s concerns with conventional historiography, for example, is that consideration of visual material is subordinated to the text-based reconstruction and explanation of events. German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory is clearly intended to address this methodological deficiency, and some contributions (to which I will return) manage this very well. But the book also shows how difficult it is to move away from existing paradigms. Thomas Schwarz’s chapter ›Colonial Disgust‹, for example, discusses dust jackets of colonial novels that thematise the simultaneous attraction and repulsion exerted by African women on white male colonisers. The material is arresting and is subjected to acute visual analysis, but that analysis does little more than corroborate insights gleaned from anthropology and wider discourses of miscegenation. The danger of this approach is that visual material functions merely as confirmation of what we already know about colonialism.

A distinct but related problem concerns artistic form and its relevance to historical analysis. Almost all of the contributions to this volume centre their readings on content analysis, which becomes particularly noticeable in the chapters devoted to cinema. There is hardly any consideration of visual rhetoric, and neither chapter on cinema includes a film still. The focus is largely on plot, action, and character. Similar comments could be made about Oliver Simons’s cartographic reading of Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum, which says nothing about the narratological aspects of spatial representation in narrative prose. I say this not to diminish Simons’s achievement, which is highly impressive in its marshalling of historical and cartographic sources in order to elucidate the way in which maps could be directly instrumentalised for political ends (thereby throwing new light on the cartographic discourse of Grimm’s novel). It is, rather, to note that the methodological problems that Langbehn identifies in his introduction are more involved and less tractable than might seem to be the case.

The most interesting contributions from a methodological point of view are those that take images as their starting point. David Ciarlo’s essay, for example, foregrounds the power of advertising imagery to generate visions of empire whose purposes were commercial and whose development was a result not of actual economic relations between metropolis and colony, or of existing conventions of representation, but of ›advertising’s own internal evolution‹ (p. 38). This implies a polygenetic view of colonial visual culture. Itohan Osayimwese’s chapter ›Demystifying Colonial Settlement: Building Manuals for Colonial Settlers, 1904–1930‹ argues that such manuals are the missing link between the colonial fantasies promulgated in fiction and the realities of colonial settlement, and shows how plans and elevations of ›ideal‹ buildings encode specific conceptions of colonial space, individualism, and the status of German identity with respect to indigenous cultures.

All contributions to this volume are well-written (notwithstanding the occasional rash of Germanisms and punctuation errors that good copy-editing would have removed), and even if they do not uniformly respond to the highly ambitious methodological agenda set out in the introduction, they are nevertheless richly rewarding. German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory is a decidedly worthwhile volume, which deserves to be more widely read than its £80 price-tag will allow.