The Visual Archive of Colonialism: Germany and Namibia

Julia Hell and George Steinmetz

Colonial memories and images occupy a paradoxical place in Germany. This is due in part to the peculiarities of German colonial history, but it also reflects another aspect of German exceptionalism — the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust. In recent years German colonialism in Southwest Africa (Namibia) has been widely discussed, especially with respect to the attempted extermination of the Ovaherero people in 1904. For reasons explored in this article, these discussions of Germany’s involvement in Southwest Africa have created new and unexpected discursive connections that are reshaping colonial memories in both Germany and Namibia. One possible outcome could be a belated decolonization of the landscape of colonial memory in both countries.

Postwar Germany was long preoccupied with its National Socialist prehistory; the German colonial past has only started to come into focus more recently.1 The years 2004 – 5 saw numerous commemorative events around the centenary of the 1904 German genocide of the Namibian Ovaherero people and the completion of the controversial Berlin Holocaust Memorial. On one level this is mere coincidence. At the same time, there is an increasing entanglement of these two central political topics. But little research has been done on the visual archive of German colonialism, in contrast to the extensive studies made of the public circulation of Holocaust photographs and images.2 The present essay is a first attempt to trace the role of colonial images in Germany in relationship to Namibia. More specifically this essay examines the relationship between discussions about the legacy of the Holocaust and discussions of the legacy of colonialism, including its iconic legacy — both in Germany, and more surprisingly, in Namibia.

Germany’s Peculiar Relationship to European Colonialism

For centuries, Germans participated in overseas colonialism in fleeting and indirect ways. Brandenburg-Prussia briefly established a slave trading fort, Großfriedrichsburg, on the West African Gold Coast in 1683 but sold it to the Netherlands West Indies Company in 1721. Individual Germans sailed with Russian vessels of imperial exploration in the Pacific or enlisted with the Dutch East Indies Company. German missionaries worked in the colonies of other European powers: Cape Colony, Hong Kong, India. The first official German overseas colonial endeavor did not occur until 1879, when Germany signed a “friendship treaty” with Samoa that initiated a twenty-year period of informal influence in those islands by consuls from Britain, Germany, and the United States. The conventional date marking the onset of the formal German empire is April 24, 1884, when Germany declared Southwest Africa a protectorate. During the next sixteen years, this empire expanded to encompass parts of West and East Africa, Polynesia, Micronesia, and New Guinea, as well as the Jiaozhou colony centered on Qingdao (Tsingtao) and its hinterland in the Chinese Shandong peninsula. The Germans lost their overseas empire in World War I, and in 1920 the former German and Ottoman colonial territories were distributed to the war’s victors under the League of Nations’ mandate system.

This thirty-year endeavor had profound aftereffects on the peoples in Africa and Oceania for whom Germany was the first colonial ruler. However, in post –World War I Germany, only a small number of revanchists, mainly former colonial officials and military officers, actively cultivated the memory of the lost colonies. New colonial monuments were erected and a number of northern German cities named streets after the lost colonies. Colonial films began to appear, such as Ohm Krüger, a 1941 release about the Boer struggle against the British in South Africa (see fig. 1).3 In the same year, the Nazis permitted the Kolonialpolitsches Amt (Office for Colonial Policy) to expand and to begin drawing up plans for a German reconquest of the lost territories. But in February 1943, after the defeat at Stalingrad, Hitler shut down that office, putting a final end to any dreams of a renewed overseas empire.

After 1945, positive memories of Germany’s overseas colonies were kept alive mainly by small militarist groups in West Germany and by descendents of German settlers in the former colonies (especially Namibia). In East Germany, colonial-imperialist agitation was suppressed and monuments were dismantled. In West Germany, “only those colonial signs were removed that stemmed from the Nazi period,”4 and a few new monuments glorifying German colonialism were actually installed. Public historical discussion focused on Nazism, Communism, and the Holocaust; for most people the colonial past receded into a dimly remembered past. The anticolonial conflicts that played such a powerful role in France during the 1950s and 1960s were experienced by most Germans only at a distant remove.

Yet during the entire modern era, Germany — or, at least, parts of what eventually became Germany — participated in Europe’s economic and ideological relation to the dominated periphery. Raw materials and precious metals from the global South flooded into the German-speaking lands. Produce stores were known as Colonialwarengeschäfte, or colonial wares shops, even until recently. Some northern Germans participated in the Atlantic slave trade.5 Racist images and tropes generated in colonial contact zones circulated in Germany and throughout Europe (see figures 2 – 3). Accounts of imperial voyages of exploration were translated quickly into German during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. German race scientists and later eugenicists and anthropologists participated in international scientific networks. These pan-European colonial ideologies took on specific accents in different linguistic and national contexts, of course. But the brevity of Germany’s direct participation in overseas colonialism did not mean that Germany was any less steeped in colonial mentalities than were Britain or France. Indeed, the manner in which Germany was inserted into European domination of Africa, Asia, and the Americas has actually impeded criticism of colonial ways of thinking and acting.6 The caesura between the end of the German colonial era and the onset of European anticolonialism is partly responsible for the fact that colonial-racist images and tropes remain so widespread and commonsensical in Germany. Germany did not have a resident population from its former colonies that could serve as the local bearer of anticolonialism or postcolonial criticism. In contrast to Jean-Paul Sartre and Pierre Bourdieu in France or W. E. B. DuBois in the United States, postwar German intellectuals were not drawn into the criticism of colonialism.7

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Notes

Thanks to Johannes von Moltke for helping us with the research into the November 2004 von Trotha – Maherero meeting.

1. For a discussion of the ways in which the formerly divided country’s Nazi past was thematized anew after 1989, see Julia Hell and Johannes von Moltke, “Unification Effects: Imaginary Landscapes of the Berlin Republic,” in “The Cultural Logics of the Berlin Republic,” ed. Julia Hell and Johannes von Moltke, special issue, Germanic Review 80, no.1 (2005): 74 – 95.
2. There is no colonial-studies equivalent to Habbo Knoch’s Die Tat als Bild: Fotografien des Holocaust in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur (The Act as Image: Photographs of the Holocaust in Germany’s Culture of Memory) (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001), which explores the circulation of Holocaust photographs in postwar Germany’s culture of memory — from the confrontational strategy of the Allies at the end of the war to the deliberate withholding of concentration camp images in recent practices. On this topic, see also Cornelia Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung: Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998).
3. See Sabine Hake, “Mapping the Native Body: On Africa and the Colonial Film in the Third Reich,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacies, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 178 – 84.
4. Winfried Speitkamp, “Kolonialherrschaft und Denkmal: Afrikanische und deutsche Erinnerungskultur im Konflikt,” in Architektur und Erinnerung, ed. Wolfram Martini (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 185. According to Joachim Zeller, two colonial monuments that had been dismantled by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) have been reinstalled since 1990 (Kolonialdenkmäler und Geschichtsbewußtsein [Frankfurt am Main: IKO, 2000], 59).
5. See Branntwein, Bibeln und Bananen: Der deutsche Kolonialismus in Afrika; Eine Spurensuche, ed. Heiko Möhle (Hamburg: Verlag libertäre Assoziation, 1999), 11–18; and Catharina Lüden, Sklavenfahrt: Mit Seeleuten aus Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, und Lübeck im 18. Jahrhundert (Heide: Westholsteinische Verlagsanstalt Boyens, 1983).
6. How else can we explain that German neo-Nazis’ preferred epithet for dark-skinned foreigners is Kanak, a term originally designating an indigenous people from French New Caledonia? The term Kanak (or Kanack) was subsequently embraced by German hip-hop musicians and Turkish-German writers; see Feridun Zaimoglu, Kanak Sprak: 24 Misstöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rotbuch Verlag, 1995). The best study on the circulation of images of Africans in early modern Germany is Peter Martin’s Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren (Hamburg: Junius, 1993)
7. On Bourdieu’s less familiar critical analyses of French colonialism in Algeria, see Loïc Wacquant, “Following Bourdieu into the Field,” Ethnography 5 (2004): 387 – 414.