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Abstract
The Pan-German Leagues push for colonial expansion was based on two ideas: race and space. These concepts emerge as the critical ideological values linking German ethnic superiority with Lebensraum to support a new greater German empire that stretched across Europe and Africa. In turn, these values of race and space, as articulated in the Pan-German Leagues weekly journal, the Alldeutsche Bltter, found expression in a discourse of radical nationalism. The Pan-German League was committed to a racially and ethnically exclusive German Volk, which could only be acheived through the conquest of neighboring European territories and colonial lands, especially in Africa. A racial vision of true Germans was thus ideologically combined with a vision of a global spatial reordering.