Imperial Germany was a latecomer in the European race for colonies and the scramble for Africa. But catching up, land grab between 1884 and 1900 elevated the German empire in the league of colonial empires at the time. Southwest Africa, Cameroon and Togo were in 1884 euphemistically proclaimed possessions under German protection, followed by East Africa in 1886, and a wide range of South Sea islands by the end of the 19th century. The lease of the Chinese Bay of Jiaozhou/Kiautschou was added to the “collection” in 1899.

“Deutschland über alles”

German involvement in the Chinese Boxer War at the turn of the century disclosed the dominant mindset and signalled Germany’s ambition to play a leading role among the imperial powers. It was conducted with uninhibited brutality, and found its expression in the infamous and racist Hunnenrede (Hun speech) by Emperor Wilhelm II when addressing soldiers despatched to China on 27 July 1900 at Bremerhaven:

“Should you encounter the enemy, he will be defeated! No quarter will be given! Prisoners will not be taken! Whoever falls into your hands is forfeited. … may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German.”

This set the tune for numerous subsequent “punitive expeditions” against indigenous people who resisted German “protection”. As figures suggest, during the whole colonial period of 30 years from 1884 to the start of World War 1 in 1914, the number of Germans in the colonies at any given time remained – even at the peak periods when soldiers were deployed – less than 50,000. But far more than a million colonised people paid with their lives in the direct forms of warfare conducted in the territories. Corporal punishment and executions, sexual abuse and forced labour were the order of the day. The Nilpferdpeitsche (hippopotamus whip) was widely associated with German rule in the West African territories.

A scorched earth policy in East Africa and genocide in Southwest Africa were just the tip of the iceberg of a “civilising mission”. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, referred in his writings to the case of Southwest Africa as an early example. Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism that German colonialism and an anthropology obsessed with Aryan superiority “from Darwin to Hitler” were the cradle of a mindset, culminating a few decades later in the Holocaust.

With World War 1 the German colonial empire collapsed. The Treaty of Versailles allocated the territories as mandates to the Allied states in 1919, thereby partly redistributing the colonial cake. The African colonies were transferred to the British crown (which delegated Southwest Africa to South Africa), France, and Belgium, with a tiny part of East Africa also going to Portugal. The Pacific islands were distributed to Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Perceived as humiliation, this did not bring an end to German colonial ambitions, but rather reinforced the desire and demands for empire. Colonial propaganda flourished during the Weimar Republic. It took new turns during the Nazi regime, when the slogan “Heim ins Reich” (back home to the empire) shifted from the demand to return the colonies towards eying Lebensraum (living space) increasingly in Eastern Europe.

Fighting colonial amnesia

While the foregoing underlines the lasting impact of the colonial era, many in Germany still tend to downplay the thirty years of overseas empire as a negligible historical episode, bordering on the harmless. For more than a century since the notorious Berlin Conference of 1884/85, marking Germany’s entry into the club of colonising states, this era largely remained a matter of colonial-apologetic romanticism, if not “forgotten”. More recently, the legacies of German colonial rule – not least for Germany itself – have become a matter of growing interest. In December 2021, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Green Party (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and the Liberal Party (FDP) formed the government. Its coalition agreement declared, under the heading “Colonial Legacy”, the intent to reappraise German colonial history with special reference to the restitution of objects from colonial contexts. It also promised to develop a concept for a place for learning about and remembering colonialism. The coalition wanted to put an end to existing continuities with the colonial past and to initiate independent academic studies reappraising colonialism.

And yet, as my monograph The Long Shadow of German Colonialism documents, such solid, competent, and independent scholarly work reappraising German colonialism already exists, almost in abundance. Literature on manifold aspects of German colonialism has flourished since the late 1990s in both English and German by scholars from a variety of disciplines. One therefore wonders if this declared intention is a sign of ignorance or simply reflects the blindness of official policy and policymakers, thereby confirming the absence of any awareness of what is already known of this past, what David Andress diagnosed for the UK, France, and the US as Cultural Dementia:

“…the layering of mythology around history is not something that can be simply and uncontroversially pulled back by the application of expertise. The West’s current relationship to the past is … an actively constructed, jealously guarded toxic refusal to engage with facts that are well-known but emotionally and politically inconvenient.”

Such “loss of memory” has been at the heart of national identity formation since the birth of the so-called nation-state. As Ernest Renan already observed in a lecture at the Sorbonne on 11 March 1882:

“Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation and it is for this reason that the progress of historical studies often poses a threat to nationality. Historical inquiry, in effect, throws light on the violent acts that have taken place at the origin of every political formation.”

But while dementia seems irreversible, colonial amnesia is not. Continued awareness campaigns have left their marks in the former empires. In Germany, there are noticeable signposts towards a “decolonial turn”. It has made inroads in the public sphere, whether this has to do with the bilateral German-Namibian negotiations over the genocide in South West Africa, the controversial Humboldt Forum, or the restitution of human remains and looted cultural artefacts.

Author’s new book, available from Hurst

The beginning of a turnaround in dealing with colonial crimes, however, is met with determined resistance by colonial-apologetic and revisionist parts of society, spearheaded by the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). More recently, the German obsession with a declared Staatsräson (state reason) as unconditional solidarity with the Israeli government and its genocidal war in Gaza brought colonial amnesia back into daily politics.

Relentless efforts by local postcolonial initiatives, including a growing role by Afro Germans campaigning for the renaming of public spaces and questioning other forms of colonial memory, racism, and discrimination, have nevertheless made lasting inroads in everyday life. These, as well as the lines of defence by colonial apologetics, are included in my book, which spans from the first German involvements in the slave trade up to the current battles over the power of definition.

Ovaherero and Nama demonstrations in Berlin to protest against the Humboldt Forum. (Photo credit: Joachim Zeller)

After all, amnesia does not mean that the topic of colonialism is or has been absent from the public sphere. Rather, it means, that the dominant discourse ignores existing counter-knowledge or applies some degree of immunisation against its revelations. These are available as sources and can be accessed by anyone. Such knowledge, therefore, is not expunged from “storage memory” but rather kept away from “functional memory”, as Aleida Assmann pointed out in Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Summarising numerous critical explorations into German colonial history and its lasting trajectories since then, disclosing amnesia, denialism, and revisionism in the current responses to postcolonial initiatives in scholarly and civil society spheres, The Long Shadow of German Colonialism offers further insights concerning the challenges, and contestations relating to the subject.