Peter Rohrbacher
Das Ringen um die Kolonialexpertise: Richard Thurnwalds Mitarbeit an Kolonialhandbüchern zu Afrika im Zweiten Weltkrieg.
cultura & psyché (2022) (Online)
ABSTRACT
Based on previously unused documents from six archives, this study provides the first detailed account of Thurnwald’s intensive collaboration on two colonial political handbooks on Africa in the period from 1940 to the end of 1944. The article builds on the five-phase model proposed by George Steinmetz in 2009. From an epistemological and methodological perspective, the article pursues an evidence-based source analysis that combines the approaches of historical anthropology with those of contemporary history for a specialised ethnological historiography. Divided into two sections, the first part shows how Thurnwald’s colonial anthropological approach was challenged in a fierce dispute with his colleague Hugo A. Bernatzik and eventually adopted by Diedrich Westermann. The second part focuses on a manuscript on Africa written by Thurnwald, which, according to his own account, comprised 400 pages, but was never published.