Shooting for the Empire. A Cultural and Social History of Shooting Associations in Imperial Germany

This project centers on shooting associations (Schützenvereine) in Imperial Germany and its colonies as arenas of bourgeois sociability and expressions of popular militarism. Far from being just venues for disengaged fun without political and social commitment, shooting associations played a major role in nineteenth and twentieth century Germany in consolidating the social fabric, influencing, and shaping political discourse, and setting a code of behavior to which citizenry might conform.

In this project I investigate shooting associations’ social, cultural, and political functions in the metropolitan as well as colonial contexts to highlight how much they contributed not only to creating community belonging and consolidating a sense of identity but also to generating new legal regimes based on the use of weapons among civilians. In looking at both homeland and colonies, I aim to enrich and diversify our knowledge and understanding of popular militarism, sociability, and the monopoly of violence in the global Kaiserreich.