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A Global Perspective on the German History of Race: Iberian Roots and Colonial Entanglements

By Adrian Masters and Moritz Herrmann

Introduction: Project GloVib and the entangled history of German racial thought

Currently, the building at Ihnenstraße 22 in Berlin-Dahlem belongs to the Institute of Political Sciences at the Free University of Berlin. Until the end of the Second World War, however, it was a site associated with the most infamous of sciences: racial anthropology and eugenics. The institute, under the direction of anatomist and geneticist Eugen Fischer (see Fig. 1), researched questions such as inheritance and human hybridity, which were at the heart of the National Socialist agenda. For this purpose, members of the institute processed medical data as well as human remains that are still being discovered on the premises today. Additionally, they were directly involved in the regime’s politics of selection of those categorized as undesirable by acting, for example, as assessors in the regime’s genetic health courts. Today, Ihnestraße 22 features a memorial commemorating those who were victimized by racial categorization.

A man in a white lab coat sitting at a desk by a window holding a framed portrait.
Figure 1. Eugen Fischer posing with photos of “mixed race” individuals in his study at the Ihnestraße 22. Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin-Dahlem, III. Abt. Rep. 94 – Fischer, Eugen.

The purpose of Project GloVib at the University of Trier is to investigate the global history of racial categorization that produced Fischer and his science. Our point of departure is the thesis that racism and racial thinking in the German-speaking world should not be understood as autochthonous developments. Rather, the categories and practices of human differentiation emerged through the political, economic, and intellectual integration of the German territories into European—and especially Iberian—expansion. Through the global circulation of people and ideas, Iberian notions of natural hierarchies, “purity,” and “mixture” were introduced into the German-speaking world at an early stage. We investigate how this colonial prehistory shaped the later development of German colonialism and nationalism as well as key debates concerning biology and human nature. Our understanding is that Ihnestraße 22 should be seen as a site of entangled histories that extend beyond Germany and Europe. In doing so, the project brings to light a shared history linking Latin America, Germany, and the former German colonies. Additionally, GloVib translates its research into educational practice to foster critical reflection on racial categorization and its historical roots. The project team consists of project leader Dr. Adrian Masters, postdoctoral researcher Dr. Moritz Peter Herrmann, and doctoral students Lars Grimm and Stephanie Wegener.

Eugen Fischer’s “bastard studies” as a moment in a transatlantic dialogue on human difference

The entangled nature of racist thought is evident in Fischer himself. In his autobiography, Fischer describes how his view of “mixed race” individuals and his anthropological gaze were shaped by his experiences as a young ship’s doctor. His steamer traveled a classic colonial route from the Canary Islands to Brazil and Argentina, where Fischer would “study” “mulattos” in port taverns. But it was another voyage that would make his career: following an established pattern of understanding the former and present colonies as “laboratories of human difference,” Fischer traveled to the colony of German South West Africa. His aim was to reveal mechanisms of human heredity as well as to scientifically underpin the politics of racial segregation in the German colonial empire. In what is today Namibia, he selected as his special subjects the Rehoboth Basters. The Basters were a “mixed race” community from South Africa who, after repeated experiences of discrimination by whites, resettled in Rehoboth.

From his studies of the Basters, Fischer developed a genetic racial theory grounded in Mendelian heredity. This, he believed, could be put into action to “improve the race” of the Germans by avoiding “contamination” by “lesser races” and purging present “impurities”. And it was indeed employed for this ideological end—not in the colonies, as Germany lost all its colonial possessions after the First World War, but under National Socialism. Here, Fischer’s Mendelian racial theory became a core element for the elaboration and explanation of the Nuremberg Laws. More precisely, his theory allowed for a “genetic” definition of a “mixed-race” individual, which could be employed to, for example, define and exclude people as “half-Jews”. Fischer’s theory thus enabled the Nazis to transfer the practice of labeling people as “mixed race” from the colonial margins to central Europe.

However, this is only the surface of the multidirectional entanglements that GloVib explores. The Basters, whose measurements, genealogies, and history Fischer appropriated to construct a narrative of inheritance and natural inequality, were themselves the product of a transatlantic history of racialization and resistance. What distinguished the Rehoboth Basters from other colonized groups in the German colonial empire was that their community was grounded in centuries-old ideas of republicanism and citizenship, ubiquitous throughout the Spanish, Portuguese, and later Dutch Indo-Atlantic. By constituting themselves as a republic to gain the respect and recognition of colonial powers, they organized themselves similarly to other, earlier groups racialized as “Black” or “mixed race” in places such as Cabo Verde, Cuba, Panama, Colombia, and Haiti. It was their insistence on citizenship, which supposedly differentiated them from “savages,” that ultimately enabled Fischer to identify them as a model “mixed race” community. Fischer’s theory itself had a global trajectory that he could not have anticipated, defying simple teleological interpretations: while in Germany his thought became entangled with National Socialist eugenics, in Brazil the reception of his Mendelian race anthropology furthered the idea that Brazilians were irrevocably “mixed” and that any eugenic project based on racial purity was doomed to failure. This, in turn, paved the way for different understandings of race and human variation.

To add another layer, Fischer had not been the first to believe he could decipher humanity’s secret codes by looking to Latin America or Africa. In the 18th and 19th centuries, natural philosophers and scientists turned to the Indo-Atlantic world—especially Spanish and Portuguese societies—as “laboratories” for theories of human nature and race. German-speaking scholars such as Cornelius de Pauw, Immanuel Kant, Christoph Meiners, and Christoph Girtanner drew on Spanish accounts of complex racial hierarchies (see Fig. 2) and mixed categories in the Americas. Their attempts to systematize these observations ultimately failed. Nonetheless, these debates contributed to later forms of racial thinking and discrimination, including ideas about Indigenous peoples’ marginalization and forced assimilation through racial mixing, which had lasting and often destructive consequences in Latin America. Fischer and his genetic racial anthropology, therefore, only represent moments in a continuous, often violent and unequal dialogue between Germany and the wider Indo-Atlantic world.

Three figures in historical clothing with one holding a child and another raising a hand, a small flag with text in the upper right corner.
Figure 2. Images like this Mexican “cuadro de casta” depicting genealogical crosses were discussed by German philosophers in the late 18th century. Here, a Spaniard holds the ‘mestizo’ child he sired with an Indigenous partner. “De español y mestiza, castizo,” Museo de América, Madrid. Photograph: Gonzalo Cases Ortega. Inventario 1981/11/01. Ca. 17511800. With permission.

International conference on deprovincializing German racism

“Germany was never outside the world it racialized” underscores Stefan Rinke, professor of Latin American history at the Freie Universität Berlin. Likewise, Latin America’s history has always been closely linked with that of the German-speaking world. This German–Latin American entanglement formed the premise of Rinke’s keynote at the international conference “Deprovincializing German Racism: Exploring and Teaching Latin American and Global Entanglements, 1500–Present,” organized by Project GloVib and hosted by the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin from 25 to 27 February 2026.

The conference examined how ideas of race in Latin America and German-speaking regions emerged through long histories of trans-imperial exchange, migration, and circulating intellectual traditions, rather than within separate national frameworks. Participants emphasized the mutual shaping of racial ideologies across and beyond these regions—from early modern colonial entanglements through Enlightenment science and nation-building projects to modern scientific and political practices—challenging provincialist notions of isolated or exceptional development. Recognizing racism as a global, entangled phenomenon that should be studied from a variety of perspectives, the participants had backgrounds in Europe, Latin- and North America, as well as in South- and Southeast Asia.

Other keynote speakers included Prof. Dr. Robert Bernasconi (Penn State University, USA), who spoke on Herder and Hegel’s racialized visions of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and Prof. Dr. Max-Sebastián Hering Torres (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), who reflected on the methodological implications of studying race in the long term.

A central theme of the conference was how these interconnected histories of race continue to matter today, both in scholarship and in public debates about racism, colonialism, and education. Discussions also focused on how to communicate this shared and complex past beyond academia, particularly through museums, schools, and anti-racist pedagogy, highlighting both the persistence of discriminatory narratives in educational materials and the need for more globally informed, critical approaches to teaching history.

Controversial questions included how experiences of violent racialization can be addressed in the classroom without reproducing the degradation of victims, and how the interpretation of racial discourse relates to analyses of structural racism. Finally, Prof. Dr. Amilcar Araujo Pereira (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) encouraged participants to consider that a global history of racism must also include a global history of anti-racism. The visit to the memorial at Ihnestraße 22, guided by Dr. Manuela Bauche, reminded participants that the global struggle against racism is not only a question of academic reflection, but also of material necessity. Viewed through the perspective of the conference it also became clear that Ihnestraße 22 is not merely a site of German history. Rather, it is a place where global histories of colonialism, nationalism, and racial classification converged, facilitating their translation into violent political practice. The memorial that stands there today thus reminds us not only of the victims of National Socialism, but also of the long and entangled histories of racial thought that connected Germany to the wider colonial world.


About the Authors

Dr. Adrian Masters is a historian of the early modern Spanish Empire and Principal Investigator of the Nachwuchsforschungsgruppe GloVib (Globale Verflechtungen und rassische Kategorisierungen: Die iberischen Wurzeln des deutschen Rassendenkens, 16.–20. Jh., University of Trier). He is the author of numerous articles, including in Renaissance Quarterly and Past and Present, and of the books We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World and The Radical Spanish Empire, the latter with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra.He has also completed a second book manuscript on religious toleration in Spanish Manila. His previous scholarship explores, among other topics, how the petitions of ordinary subjects contributed to the construction of the Spanish Empire “from the bottom up,” shaping legal constructs of human difference and equality. In his current project, Bastard Enlightenment, Adrian Masters investigates how perceptions of these colonial debates shaped the racial theories of key figures of the German Enlightenment, including Kant, Blumenbach, Meiners, and Girtanner.

Dr. Moritz Peter Herrmann holds an Erstes Staatsexamen LaG in History and German Language and Literature from Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz. In 2023 he earned his Ph.D. in modern history, also from JGU Mainz, with a thesis on the memory of the Quilombo dos Palmares, an early modern resistance to plantation slavery in colonial Brazil. His first book, the fruit of this dissertation, is entitled Die Erinnerung der Hydra – Das Quilombo von Palmares in Geschichte und Gedächtnis (The Memory of the Hydra: The Quilombo of Palmares in History and Memory; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). His research interests encompass topics such as slavery, racism, and anti-racism, colonialism, culture and politics of memory, labour and social movements. Currently, Moritz Herrmann holds a position as a postdoctoral researcher at Trier University, where he is a contributor to the GloVib project, which explores the global and Ibero-American entanglements of racial discourse in Germany. His ongoing research project focuses on the Rehoboth Basters in present-day Namibia and their role in shaping the global discourse on miscegenation during the early 20th century through their interactions with the German colonial government. He is the author of multiple articles and chapters in German, English, and Portuguese, and has received support from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the DAAD, and the Hansen Foundation.


Citation: Adrian Masters and Moritz Herrmann, A Global Perspective on the German History of Race: Iberian Roots and Colonial Entanglements, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 04.06.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/65951

 

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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (June 4, 2026). A Global Perspective on the German History of Race: Iberian Roots and Colonial Entanglements. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved June 15, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/16c49


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