2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 149were sometimes likened to ‘caged birds clamouring for freedom.’^214
Framing the issue in general terms, Maroger stated that the German
demand for a new division of the territories and riches of the world and
thus a revision of the Treaty of Versailles, responded ‘to a general concep-
tion of “non-satisfaction”, of “future destiny”, and of the rhythm of death
and re-birth, familiar to the German Lebensphilosophien’.^215
In the 1920s, the pre-war term Lebensraum emerged as a key ele-
ment in the political vocabulary of the right, it being invoked in order
to heap further infamy on the Treaty of Versailles: the treaty had ‘stolen
living-space from the German Volk’.^216 In 1926, Hans Grimm’s propa-
ganda novel Volk ohne Raum appeared. According to Peter Gay, its title
alone served to convey ‘a prevailing sense of claustrophobia, an anxiety
felt, and played upon by right-wing politicians, over “inadequate living
space” and the “encirclement” of Germany by its hostile, vengeful neigh-
bours.’^217 Shelley Bararnowski notes that Grimm, who was connected
to the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft) and the
German National People’s Party, sought to express:
through his characters Germany’s mission to settle its Volk overseas, par-
ticularly in Africa, and supplant Great Britain as the world’s dominant
imperial power. The acquisition and settlement of living space would allow
Germans to remake their social order. They would recover their spiritual
and cultural values and, by providing opportunity for its surplus popula-
tion, eliminate the class divisions that drew workers to socialism.^218(^214) Ibid. Gilbert Maroger attributed the comparison of Germany to a boiling cauldron to
Schacht. The depiction of Germans as caged birds he attributed to General Ritter Von Epp
in view of a speech Epp delivered at the Nuremberg Congress of 1934. See also Chalmers
Wright, Population and Peace, 58n.
(^215) Maroger, La question des matières Premières et les revendications coloniales, 39. See
also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 58n. Woodruff D. Smith, notes that the
term Lebensraum ‘was first used in its classic sense in the 1890s by the renowned Leipzig
University geographer Friedrich Ratzel. He adds that according to Ratzel, cultural group-
ings had to expand their living space as a matter of necessity: Ratzel argued that ‘like a plant,
a Volk had to grow and to expand its Lebensraum or die’ and that it is this imperative gives
rise to conquest of lands inhabited by less vital people. Woodruff D. Smith, ‘Friedrich Ratzel
and the Origins of Lebensraum,’ German Studies Review 3, no. 1 (1980): 51–68, 52–4.
(^216) Smith, ‘Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum,’ 55.
(^217) Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (London: Penguin Books, 1974),
83–4.
(^218) Baranowski, Nazi Empire, 152–53.