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

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. In this volume, the author uses the propaganda posters, letters and speeches to reconstruct the nature and organization of a propaganda campaign conducted against a background of fractured international relations and turbulent internal politics in the early years of the Weimar Republic.