German Colonialism

Exhibition at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, from October 14, 2016 until May 14, 2017.

The Deutsches Historisches Museum is dealing for the first time with various aspects of German colonialism in an exhibition with more than 500 objects. Although the German Empire was one of the major European colonial powers, only in recent years has Germany‘s colonial past found its way into public consciousness to a significant degree. The exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum examines the colonial ideology, which was founded in the belief of a European superiority. The multifarious interconnections of power ranged from local alliances and the routine exercise of violence on up to the colonial war in Namibia, which developed into genocide. No less varied were the colonial encounters. African, Oceanian and German players pursued their own aims and worked out their own scope of action. The exhibition sheds light on the motives of the missionaries, officials, military personnel, settlers and merchants on the German side as well as the interests of the colonialized peoples. At the same time it questions the degree to which the perspectives of the colonialized peoples were taken into account in the historical tradition and whether this stands in contradiction to the enormous extent of the collections and archives that were gathered during the colonial period and which tended to support the conditions of power.

Such an explicit colonial consciousness continued on after 1919. The exhibition devotes no little room to this controversial memory of the colonial past, while artistic as well as civil societal perspectives give us insight into the present situation as to the attitude towards German colonialism in the countries that were affected as well as in Germany.

Content:

8

10 FOREWORD Ulrike Kretzschmar

12 A WORD TO OUR READERS Hans-Martin Hinz

ESSAYS

16 TRANS-IMPERIAL ORIENTATION AND KNOWLEDGE TRANSFERS

GERMAN COLONIALISM IN CONTEXT


33 WORLD ORDER AND RACIAL STRUGGLES Christian Geulen

42 RANGING FROM A SLAP TO GENOCIDE Marie Muschalek

50 'DO YOU WANT TO HELP THE HEATHEN CHILDREN?'

58 BETWEEN INTIMACY AND EXCLUSION Dörte Lerp

POST-COLONIAL PERSPECTIVES

67 RESISTANCE, FREEDOM, NATION-BUILDING Flower Manase Msuya

74 MONUMENTS AND WHAT ELSE? Werner Hillebrecht

84 NARRATIVES OF COLONIALISM, NATIONALISM AND THE SELF Patrice Nganang

92 RUINS, RELICS AND RESEARCH Ulrike Lindner Wazi Apoh

100 A KING IN THE SERVICE OF THE IMPERIAL PROCONSUL AND THE SUNKEN 'BODELSCHWINGH' Damien Rwegera

110 A PLACE IN THE SUN Yixu LU

118 BEFORE AND AFTER COLONIZATION Malama Meleisea and Penelope Schoeffel

128 EVENTS AND EVOCATION Rebekka Habermas; Gilbert Dotse Yigbe


138 THE FIRST GENOCIDE OF THE 20TH CENTURY Jürgen Zimmerer

146 TANGLED INTERACTIONS Andreas Eckert

154 PROBLEMATIC PROVENANCES Larissa Förster

EXHIBITION

165 GERMAN COLONIALISM IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

1.1 Background and Global Entanglements (16th-18th centuries)

1.2 Background and Global Entanglements (19th century)

1.3 The Berlin Africa Conference 1884-1885

COLONIAL WORLDVIEWS AND COLONIAL RULE

2.1 Kilimanjaro, Symbol of Land Seizure

2.2 Colonial Bases

2.3 Rule under Local Conditions

2.4 The Herero and Nama Genocide

2.5 Field Postcards

2.6 The Maji Maji War

2.7 Opposing Voices and Everyday Violence

NEGOTIATIONS IN COLONIAL DAILY LIFE

3.1 Ewe Christians between Württemberg and West Africa

3.2 Tropical Medicine and the Question of Labour

3.3 Voice Recordings of Prisoners of War

3.4 Feathered Fashion and the 'World of Big Game'

3.5 Contested Duala Trade Networks

3.6 'Folk Culture of Cotton' for Togo

205 DRAWING AND TRANSCENDING BOUNDARIES IN THE COLONIAL CONTEXT

4.1 Anthropological Categorizations of the Human

4.2 Strict Urban Planning in Tsingtao

4.3 'Mixed Marriages' and the 'Woman Question' in the Colonies

4.4 Ethnological Expositions and Colonial Exhibitions

4.5 Black Presence in the German Empire

4.6 Destination 'South Seas'

219 COLONIAL COLLECTIONS, COLONIAL GAZE

5.1 (Post-)colonial Entanglements in Collections

5.2 Artefacts between Colonies and Metropole

5.3 Gifts among Rulers

5.4 Cameroon Samples

5.5 Commodity Racism

5.6 Flights of Fancy in the Kaiser Panorama

235 COLONIALISM WITHOUT COLONIES (1919-1945)

6.1 World War One and the Askari Myth

6.2 Colonial Revisionism

6.3 Anti-colonial Resistance in the Weimar Republic

6.4 Colonial School for Women

6.5 The Colonial Movement in Nazi Germany

249 DECOLONIZATION AND DIVIDED REMEMBRANCE

7.1 Decolonization and the Cold War

7.2 Solidarity in East and West

7.3 Germany's New Black Movement

257 POST-COLONIAL PRESENT?

APPENDIX

262 BIBLIOGRAPHY

286 LENDERS

288 OBJECT DIRECTORY with picture credits

334 CREDITS EXHIBITION