Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies

This book treats a remarkable episode in the conquest and colonization of the Americas. In 1528, a southern German company, the Welsers, received permission to govern the Spanish colony of Venezuela. However, this merchant-colonial experiment failed, and by 1556, the Spanish Crown had taken back full control. Drawing from sixteenth-century accounts, such as the German narrative by Welser representative and governor Nikolaus Federmann and many other sources, the study presents a micro-history of the installation and eventual failure of this endeavour in racialized merchant capitalism and provides important information on the Welsers' dependence on the slave trade and enforced labour by Indigenous and African people. The book also sheds light on how this comparatively brief colonial involvement of German merchants was remembered and instrumentalized throughout the centuries to serve political and colonial aims in Germany and Spain well into the twentieth century. In addition to such European revisions, Giovanna Montenegro discusses South American responses to this troubled history. To these various aims, she utilizes an impressively broad range of sources in German and Spanish, including legal and financial contracts, maps, and early modern chronicles and poems as well as literary texts and other evidence documenting changing evaluations of this violent chapter in the history of colonization and slavery.

Part I (27–77) focuses on the economic and social background of the Welser family and company, which operated out of Augsburg and Nuremberg and was the main rival of the better-known Fugger merchant family. Significantly, both families bankrolled Charles V of Spain and his vision of the Spanish Habsburg empire with its expansive political and colonial activities in Europe, Africa, and South America. Having acquired capital through commodity trading and influence through extending credit to Charles V, the Welsers used their expanding wealth and clout to receive the privilege to govern Venezuela. The first part of the book is devoted to the economy and politics of this little-known German engagement in early colonialism. The Welsers' long-distance merchant capitalism, as [End Page 364] Montenegro makes clear, required significant investment of capital, in the hope of receiving significant returns from the extraction of resources and from the trade of commodities and of enslaved Indigenous and African people. The Welsers even secured a temporary monopoly on the trade of enslaved Africans, which had been held by Genoese merchants before them (58). The book also describes the violent inland expeditions of Welser agents to find gold and enslave Indigenous inhabitants. The Welsers never received full governing autonomy, and their short-lived governance of Venezuela was mired in conflicts with Spanish administrators due to their diverging approaches to seeking wealth, as the author lays out. These conflicts led to the downfall of the Welsers in Venezuela. A violent power struggle with a local Spaniard resulted in the gruesome execution of senior German representatives, Bartholomäus Welser VI and Philipp von Hutten, around 1546. The Welser company never regained power over the territory after this event.

Parts II (79–193) and III (195–260) deal with representations of the Welsers in Venezuela in narrative and cartographic sources of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and with the cultural memory of the Welser colony in Germany and Latin America from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The discussion and evaluation of the Spanish and Latin American sources provide revealing context on the mostly negative evaluation of the Welsers' colonial presence and record, and on efforts to work through this dark chapter of colonialism in postindependence Latin American fiction and drama. Equally, the chapter on early modern maps of Welser territory in Venezuela, which includes many helpful images and details of maps, allows for fascinating glimpses into the way cartographic representations stored treasured colonial knowledge. Among these, Montenegro discusses the so-called Welserkarte (116–31), a historical map of Venezuela as governed by the Welser, which was found among fragments in the archives of the Welsers' main competitors, the Fuggers (the Welser company records were lost after the bankruptcy of the firm in 1614). In addition, Montenegro's willingness to engage in serious archival work pays off in her discussion of the nostalgic commemoration of the Welser colony in genealogical material of the late seventeenth century, long after the loss of the colony and the company's bankruptcy (153–63).

Within the broad comparative and interdisciplinary tableau that this book presents, Montenegro's close reading of the sixteenth-century German account by Welser governor Nikolaus Federmann might be of special interest to Germanists (81–114; recently translated into English and introduced to an Englishlanguage audience by Peter Hess). On behalf of the Welser company, Federmann arrived in Venezuela in 1529 together with 150 men, including the first German miners (85). After his return to Germany, Federmann wrote an account of his inland expedition in Venezuela, the Indianische Historia, published in 1557, more than fifteen years after Federmann's early death. In her interpretation of Indianische Historia, Montenegro points out the text's insistence on the limitations and opportunities of translation and the challenges of interpreting across the diversity of Indigenous languages. Most important, Montenegro is able to show how Federmann utilizes declarations of friendship as well as the power of reciprocal gifts and promises as tactics to extract gold and Indigenous slaves on his inland [End Page 365] expedition of conquest within Venezuela. Montenegro's study also allows the reader to explore the gaps and positive colourings of Federmann's self-interested account, since its information can be checked and balanced by Spanish court proceedings against Federmann. As Montenegro shows, the Spanish proceedings paint a much more critical picture of Federmann's colonial excesses. For example, these sources indicate that Federmann participated in the sexual trafficking of Indigenous women and subjected them to forced labour and sexual violence. These troubling details were kept from the German readers of the Indianische Historia (105).

Perhaps equally relevant to German studies scholars is Montenegro's discussion of the memorialization of the "ghost" of Welser Venezuela as a "colonial ur-narrative" (205) to serve imperial Germany's colonial aspirations in the nineteenth century. Likewise, her account of how historians and novelists of the Nazi era depicted the Welser colony to foster an image of "Aryan conquistadors planting the seed of German nationhood on the American continent" (199) is enlightening. The study's "epilogue" about the beginning discussion on the continuous Welser memorialization (including street names) in Germany poses uncomfortable questions regarding the overdue Aufarbeitung of this dark chapter in German racialized merchant capitalism and colonialism (268–76).

The book has a very helpful index that aids the orientation within the rich material Montenegro presents. At times, one would have wished for better copy-editing. German names are occasionally misrepresented; most glaringly, sixteenth-century author Johann Fischart appears as Filchart (220 and 310). These small quibbles aside, this book is recommended to anyone interested in early modern German colonialism and comparative memory culture regarding German involvement in slavery and colonial crimes.