Dr. Ernst Gerhard Jacob: Kolonialpolitisches Quellenheft. Die deutsche Kolonialfrage 1918–1935 [Rezension]

Helene Lieser’s 1937 review of Ernst Gerhard Jacob’s Kolonialpolitisches Quellenheft concerns a source booklet on the German colonial question, 1918–1935. Its two-sentence assessment first reproduces the booklet’s declared political purpose:

Das Heft ist geschrieben „für den praktischen Gebrauch des Kolonialredners und Politikers, des Jugendführers und politischen Schulungsleiters, und zur Aufrüttelung eines jeden deutschen Volksgenossen, dessen Nationalehre noch immer mit einem furchtbaren Makel behaftet ist, weil man seinem Volk und Vaterland auf Grund einer schon längst widerlegten Lüge noch heute den eigenen Kolonialbesitz vorenthält“.

English translation: The booklet is written “for practical use by the colonial speaker and politician, the youth leader and political training director, and to rouse every German national whose national honour remains tainted by a terrible stain because his people and fatherland are still denied colonial possessions of their own on the basis of a lie long since refuted”.

This framing makes colonial recovery a matter of national honour and presents documentation as an instrument of political mobilization. Lieser then briefly commends the abundance of interesting material, without examining particular sources or testing the quoted claims. The review’s significance lies in this juxtaposition of an explicitly propagandistic purpose with a favourable, narrowly informational appraisal; it offers no developed independent argument about colonial policy.