German Colonial Research Articles

Edmund Hardy and the Science of Religion

Edmund Hardy (1852–1904) was a Catholic priest, Indologist, and religious scholar who lived and worked during the period of the Kulturkampf struggle between the German Chancellor Bismarck and the Catholic church as well as early German colonialism. The lecture he gave under the title “Einleitung in die vergleichende Religionswissenschaft” (“Introduction to Comparative Religion”) at the German University of Freiburg in 1890 and his appointment as professor for “Vergleichende Religionswissenschaft und altindische Literatur” (“Comparative Religion and Ancient Indian Literature”") in 1894 at the Swiss University of Fribourg were key steps in establishing the discipline of Religionswissenschaft (Science of Religion) in the German-speaking world. The essay he wrote in 1898 entitles “Was ist Religionswissenschaft?” (“What is the Science of Religion?”) was perhaps his key statement of the nature of this discipline, which he defines as a strictly empirical Geisteswissenschaft and Kulturwissenschaft (Arts and Humanities). This essay was the first article to appear in the new journal Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, edited by the secondary school teacher Thomas Achelis (1850–1909). Hardy’s approach was methodologically based on historicism and on the early understanding of psychology according to Wilhelm Dilthey and Wilhelm Wundt. However, as similarly befell Joachim Wach’s empirical approach, Hardy’s methodological work was barely noticed during the long reign of the phenomenology of religion. This observation raises fundamental questions of how the history of our discipline has been constructed and, in particular, of what are considered “classics” in the study of religion.

German Colonialism in the Courtroom—Law, Reparation, and the Grammars of the Shoah

Abstract: In the quest to address the lingering consequences of colonialism and slavery, activists and human rights practitioners have increasingly utilized legal channels. This article focuses on the Ovaherero and Nama people's pursuit of reparations from Germany in hearings held in New York between 2017 and 2019. It explores the historical conditions for bringing such a case in the United States, arguing that the 1990s economy-focused Holocaust Restitution Movement is a crucial backdrop. The argument examines the implications of applying this 'thefticide' framework to a colonial genocide, suggesting that it provides both an opening and a foreclosure of reparatory possibility in the context of a colonial history where private property relations were first imposed in order to dispossess.

‘Practices of self’: Embodied memory work, performance art, and intersectional activism in Namibia

Cultural commemoration in the form of embodied memory was practiced in Namibia long before German colonial occupation in the 1880s and the War of Independence against South Africa from 1966 to 1989. In recent years, Namibian artists have been offering alternative forms of embodied memory transmission related to these histories. I argue that much of this work is inextricably linked to a new wave of decolonial activism in the country. These practices highlight questions related to history and memory and are a counterpoint to state-sanctioned memorialization. Some of the recurrent themes are efforts to work through traumatic legacies connected to German colonialism and apartheid, but also to intersectional violence tied to contemporary patriarchy and identity politics. In these settings, queer and feminist methodologies provide a departure point for this embodied memory work in an attempt to go beyond colonial and tribal legacies and nationalized identity politics.

German-speaking travelers of the XVIII-XIX centuries in the Crimea.

The annexation of Crimea to the Russian Empire in 1783 is one of the most significant dates in the history of the Russian state. The unexplored lands of the Russian Empire aroused great interest not only among its rulers, but also among a large number of foreigners, including German-speaking travelers. Among them were writers, scientists, geographers, naturalists, encyclopedists. Among the foreign researchers of the Crimean nature, not a few Germans were observed. Germans appeared in the Crimea as early as 1805. In Simferopol county they found such colonies as: Neizatz, Friedenthal, Rosenthal (Wirtenbergers), in Feodosia County – Heilbrunn, Sudak and Herzenberg. In the same year, the Swiss colony of Zurichtal appeared on the territory of the Crimean peninsula, and later, in 1811, another German colony, Kronental. The subject of the study are German-speaking travelers who visited the Crimea in the period XVIII-XIX. Despite numerous studies conducted in various periods, not only by domestic but also by foreign scientists, there are currently no historical and linguistic works of a German-speaking travelogue about the Crimea. The authors of the German - language travelogue about Crimea as informants can be divided into categories: a) chronology b) pragmatics. Due to the fact that Crimea has a unique and diverse nature, the region was often explored in the 18th and 19th century, not only by Russian researchers who had to expand Catherine II's knowledge about her state, but also by scientists of German origin. The region was explored by the Kippen family, Peter Simon Pallas, Moritz von Engelhart, Friedrich Parrott, Biberstein, and Karl Gablitz.

Matter and Memory

Abstract This three-part essay first introduces Berlin’s anticolonial, Black feminist poetics through the work of May Ayim and Audre Lorde, whose poems “Blues in Black-and-White” and “East Berlin 1989” were written shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in response to racial attacks in a “reunited” Germany. Part I explores how these poetics and politics have influenced ongoing efforts to engage with the memory of German colonialism, xenophobia, and memorialization in public spaces. Part II moves the reader into close studies of two contemporary performance works by Afro-diasporic artists in Berlin who build on the Black feminist poetics explored in Part I. The first, Wayward Dust by Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, was an invited performance at the Deutsches Technikmuseum in August 2020. The second, untitled performance, by the group Black Art Action Berlin (BAAB), was uninvited, and took place in Berlin’s Humboldt Forum in October 2021. In Part III, the author discusses how these performance artists in Berlin have responded to institutional pledges to “decolonize” museums, by inverting expectations of Black performance and white spectatorship in this space. The author argues that they are important interventions for this contemporary moment of institutional reckoning that challenge expectations of Black labor and white leisure in the museum, and that they should be understood within the context of an ongoing creative struggle developed in transnational Black feminist praxis.

The Policy of the German Colonial Administration in African Colonies

The article explores the colonial policy pursued by the German Empire in the African colonies. Africa was the region where the largest and most importan colonies for Germany were located. The author sets himself the task not only to analyze the organization of the colonial authorities in various regions of Africa, but also to consider the main actions of the administrations and their role in the entire colonial policy of the German Empire. Based on the analysis of the memoirs of German governors and field commanders, as well as the involvement of published documents, the process of establishing German power in the African colonies is analyzed. In the article, the author also provides a description of each of the German colonies to form an idea about them. The author gives a description of the colonies, the relationship between them and the metropolis. Since all the colonies existed for the export of raw materials to the mother country, the economic goals in each colony are also considered. The German guard troops, whose importance for maintaining power and security in the region is beyond doubt, are shown as the part of the “system” of the colonial administration. The article provides information not only about their functions, but also about the membership, command and structure. In addition, the article considers such aspects of colonial administrations as taxation, the abolition of slavery and Christian missions, which were the most important part of the entire colonial policy of the German empire.

GERMAN COLONIALISM IN EAST AFRICA AND ITS AFTERMATH IN ABDULRAZAK GURNAH'S NOVELS PARADISE AND AFTERLIVES AND IN CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LITERATURE

ABSTRACTBritish author and literary scholar Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in Zanzibar in 1948 and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, makes significant contributions to the memory and critique of German colonialism in East Africa and its aftermath both in Tanzania and in Germany. This study examines Gurnah's novels Paradise (1994) and Afterlives (2020) for their representation of German imperial rule and its impact on Swahili society and culture and its place in the Indian Ocean universe, World War I in East Africa, the fate of askari soldiers in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and the memory and postmemory of German colonialism through to the 1960s. Gurnah's literary modelling of African experiences and memories of German colonialism is discussed in Anglo‐German comparative perspective with reference to postcolonial memory discourses in contemporary German literature, including Afro‐German life‐writing.

„I Die, but I Thank You…!“ Leipzig Mission at Akeri 1896, Squeezed between Its African Addressees and German Colonial Military

The following case study clarifies how these three different functions of mission are discursively entangled with one another. Mission as a bridge-builder (between people, cultures, and religions of different origin), as a traitor (cooperating with corrupt colonial and imperial powers), and as a victim (finding misery and death on the mission field). Each of these three terms (bridge-builder, traitor, victim) is, to an extent, applicable to the events that took place during the night of 19–20 October 1896 in Akeri on the slopes of Mount Meru (former German East Africa, today Tanzania). Using the concept of entanglement history, I will analyze the death of two young German missionaries of the Lutheran Leipzig Mission, “caught in the crossfire” between the African community to be outreached and the German colonial military. We will see how various symbolic systems collide in the year 1896 at Akeri. The systems are represented by: (1) German Lutheran missions activities; (2) A German colonial and military expedition; and (3) The resistance of African Maasai societies’ leadership. “Akeri 1896” (I will continue to refer to this event specifically as “Akeri 1896” throughout the article) had become in the following 100 years a complex entanglement of metaphoric meanings. The same event can be a placeholder for victory, for defeat, for disaster, for martyrdom, for Christ-centredness (of the missionaries in their own perception), as well as for evil-centredness (the Africans in their perception of the Western foreigners).

Features of demographic development of the German colonies of St. Petersburg province in the first half of the XIX century.

The purpose of the study is to present the features of the demographic development of the "distant" colonies that were formed in the 1810s. The object of the study is the German colonies of the St. Petersburg province. The subject of the study is the demographic processes that took place in the first half of the XIX century in the "distant" colonies, namely: Izvarskaya, Strelninskaya, Kronstadt, Oranienbaum, Peterhof, Kipenskaya. The data from the revision fairy tales of the first half of the XIX century were used for the analysis. The results of the study have practical significance and novelty. They can be used by historians, demographers and sociologists for a deeper study of the processes of colonization in Russia. The results of this study allow us to better understand the demographic changes that took place in the German colonies, as well as their impact on the development of society as a whole. This can be useful for understanding the historical context and the formation of national identity. The analysis of the materials allowed us to draw conclusions about the change in the population in the German colonies due to natural growth, their gender and age composition, as well as the average population of families. The results of the study indicate the active development of German colonies in the St. Petersburg province in the first half of the XIX century. Based on the results of this study, it is possible to draw conclusions about the significant role of the German colonies in the formation of the social and cultural component of the St. Petersburg province at that time. This information may be useful for further research and preservation of the historical heritage of this region.

Remembering the Herero-Nama Genocide in Namibia

Remembering the Herero-Nama Genocide in Namibia

German Colonies of St. Petersburg Province

Russia of the 18th – 19th centuries faced a crucial challenge of sparsely populated suburbs consolidation through their economic development. Acute shortage of work force to be involved for transformation of Novorossiya, the steppes of the North Caucasus and the Middle Volga region, Siberia and some other regions into the centers of commodity agriculture and industrial production, forced the authorities to turn to the use of European experience and place a bet on foreign colonization. Central Europe, devastated by the Seven-Year War, brought to life tens of thousands of potential colonists, who answered the call of Empress Catherine the Great to move to the unoccupied lands of the Russian Empire. Since 1765, the first colonies (Novo-Saratovka, Srednaya Rogatka, Yamburg and Izhora colonies) were formed near St. Petersburg. Investigation of the history of these settlements in the imperial period is extremely poor in modern historiography. The article examines the initial period of their existence (1765 – 1800s). It took about 30 years for German colonists to adapt to new living conditions. Some colonies (Srednaya Rogatka) became centers of commodity production of agricultural products (potatoes, etc.), sold in the capital-city market, at the beginning of the 19th century already. Experiments on the advanced multi-field system implementation, initiated by Semyon Dzhunkovsky, opened the way to increase productivity and income of the colonists. The new crop rotation system spurted into popularity not only in the colonies, but in the neighboring settlements of Russian peasants as well. The article is intended for specialists engaged in the study of agrarian development, ethnic minorities of Russia in the imperial period.

ПАНГЕРМАНСКАЯ АГИТАЦИЯ И КИТАЙ: О ЗАДАЧАХ ГЕРМАНСКОЙКОЛОНИАЛЬНОЙ ПОЛИТИКИ В КИТАЕ В КОНЦЕ XIX–НАЧАЛЕ ХХ ВЕКА

The article analyzes Pan-German propaganda regarding German colonial policy in China (late 19th – early 20th centuries) and describes German-Chinese diplomatic relations in the context of the establishment of the German colonial presence in Kiautschou, as well as the role and significance of the Pan-German League in forming imperial colonial discourse. Key points concern the development of public opinion in Germany regarding colonial policy with the participation of the Pan-German League. The ideas of living space, racial superiority and imperial power, actively developed in the second half of the 19th century, were reworked into the ideology of social radical nationalist associations of the Wilhelmine era, which were systematized in the context of Pan-Germanism. The German colony at Kiautschou was to become a “Musterkolonie”, reflecting the intention of the German elite to compete with the existing colonial empires and avoid fighting, unlike previously, with the local native populations of Africa and Asia, as well as with the governments of economically and politically underdeveloped countries. Pan-German colonial propaganda, oriented, among other things, to this task, nevertheless had as its goal the formation of public opinion within the Reich. The solution to this problem, given the high publication activity within the country (the publication of Alldeutsche Blatter and the purchase of mass periodicals), was due to strategic goals related to direct influence on the Reich government. In the context of Pan-Germanism, the structurization of the previously isolated colonial movement took place, which, thanks to the efforts of the Pan-German League, became one of the leading factors of public opinion.

Being World Power and Economic Utility: The Economic History of Germany’s African Colonies

As a late colonial power, Germany was seeking to conquer territories in Africa and Oceania in the last third of the 19th century. The two major purposes for founding colonies were 1) to reduce the immigration of Germans to America; and 2) to represent the young German nation state as a mature power, which can compete with the United Kingdom (called simply England in the historical sources) and with the despised Western neighbour France. The most important lobby and pressure group of German colonial aims was the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft), a group of widely respected intellectuals, influential businessmen and politicians. After the accession on the throne of Emperor Wilhelm II, the colonial lobby became more influential, and the process of colonial expansion was accelerated. Nevertheless, there was an Achilles’ heel in this policy: gaining territories did not seem to be profitable in the short term. Thus, theorists and propagandists of colonization, such as Paul Rohrbach, published papers about possible measures that could have made the colonies financially fruitful territories. This thought remained vivid in the National Socialist era as well: Germany’s right to have colonies was explained on the base of the need for raw materials and the overpopulation of the German fatherland. This study has been written for the purpose to summarize the colonial economic policy of the German Kaiserreich and to briefly explain the economic plans of National Socialist German state regarding Germany’s former colonies in Africa.

German Colonial Guerilla Warfare in German East Africa and the “China Matter” at the First World War

Robert Gaudi's book about the German guerilla warfare in East Africa led by General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck is a monography of military history in cultural historical approach.

An Overview of the Former German Colonial Hospitals and their Integration into Contemporary Health Infrastructures in the Chinese Qingdao Area

An Overview of the Former German Colonial Hospitals and their Integration into Contemporary Health Infrastructures in the Chinese Qingdao Area

Repression against educational workers and clergymen in German colonies of Azerbaijan in 1920-1930

Repression against educational workers and clergymen in German colonies of Azerbaijan in 1920-1930

“Dangerous Liaisons”: Whiteness and Private Relations between German Colonial Officials and Indigenous Women in German Togo and Their Political Consequences

The article addresses the topic of intimate relationships between colonial officials and indigenous women in German Togo (1884–1914), which occurred in the ideological context stimulated by Cultural Darwinism, and the issue of socio-political consequences of such relations, both in the colony and in the homeland. In its analytical part, I draw on the conceptual distinction between “whiteness” and “blackness” – understood as biological phenotypes – as well as between “whiteness” and “Whiteness” – the latter term denoting a sociocultural system in which people of white complexion are more likely to experience privilege and preferential treatment in comparison with their darkskinned counterparts. The fact that “Whiteness” has been historically “porous” and Western imageries about Africans “flexible” – ranging from brutal racism to romanticization – presented numerous possibilities for certain individuals to “become white” by “acting White”, including the sphere of intimate relationships. In the context of the dominant Darwinian discourse – namely, the perceived threat of racial “degeneration” – the mixed marriages and their offspring became politicized in Germany, and a series of – largely ineffective – legal measures were taken to impose a stricter metropolitan control over the conduct of German colonial officials.

History of the Central Volta region (Ghana) 1870-1914: european merchants, christian missions and features of colonial German government

The article is dedicated to the history of the central part of the Volta (Ghana) of the second half of the 19th-early 20th centuries: the trading operations of European entrepreneurs, Christian missions, and the peculiarities of colonial rule. The trade in slaves, cotton, ivory, palm oil and other goods made a significant contribution to the economy of the Volta basin. On the one hand, Europeans perceived it as a territory with valuable resources, and saw the potential in it for economic development and transformation into an economically self-sufficient and profitable zone under colonial rule; on the other hand, it is possible that Europeans used the routes through the central part of the Volta region only to get to the most important slave markets in the Slave Trade Era. From the middle of the XIX century the territory of modern Eastern Ghana was under the influence of various European countries (Denmark, Great Britain, France) and then the colonial governments (Germany, Great Britain). However, it was the German colonial rule (although relatively short) and most importantly the activities of the Bremen Mission largely determined the historical trajectory of the central part of the Volta region in the pre-colonial and colonial periods. The author's own results of research also point to a more "utilitarian" attitude to Avatime under the British regime (in the perception of the Avatime themselves) compared to the attitude of the Bremen missionaries acting "for a good cause" and laying the foundations of the school system and professional education.

German Colonists on River Milky Waters of Taurida Province in First Third of 19th Century

The information from the materials of the General Land Survey of the Russian Empire in the first third of the 19th century about the German colonies based on the territory of the Melitopol district of the Tauride province is analyzed in the article. The relevance of the study is due to the great interest in the resettlement policy pursued by the Russian Empire in this region at the end of the 18th — the first third of the 19th centuries, as well as in the processes of settlement and development of new territories and the participation of foreign colonists in them. The novelty of the study lies in the involvement of previously unused “Economic notes on the plans of the General survey, field notes of land surveyors and controversial cases” as sources on the history of German colonists. Based on them, the author studies the features of the economic structure of the settlements of German colonists, the structure of their land. Particular attention is paid to the dispute between the Mennonites and the Dukhobors about the boundaries of possessions, during which the true location of the Molochnaya River bed was clarified. The consideration of the case shows that disputes over the boundaries of land plots were of a fundamental nature and reached the highest authorities. Until the 1830s, there were still unresolved issues related to land management and surveying of the German-speaking colonies.

The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries, by Anna Maria Busse Berger

<i>The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries</i>, by Anna Maria Busse Berger