The ‘Kamerun album’ that kickstarted Colonial Neighbours. Credit: Colonial Neighbours.

At least 300,000 people died at the
hands of German colonizers during its empire. These art projects are
uncovering colonial histories to understand racism in Germany today.



“It started with an album, called
the Kamerun album, it was given to him by the Grandmother of his
wife, they found it in the attic.”

Lynhan Balatbat works for Colonial
Neighbours , a
Berlin-based art project that collects objects and stories related to
Germany’s controversial colonial past. Lynhan is referring to the
travel journal of a colonial soldier who was based in German
Cameroon. Each photo from the journal provides an unsettling insight
into the world that this soldier saw and took part in colonizing.

Finding this album began a journey
into the homes of many other families in Germany. Colonial
Neighbours is run by Savvy
Contemporary, a Berlin art space initiated by Bonaventure
Ndikung, whose relative the album belonged to. The project’s
endeavour is to bring Germany’s imperial past into the open by making
people think about how it affects their daily lives and how it has
lived on in the present. 


As Lynhan says: “I think it’s a very
good way to try to build an alternative narrative. When you
accumulate different stories from different people you give this room
for exchange and through that you create a kind of counter-memory.“


Grassroots projects like Colonial
Neighbours link the struggle to end the active silencing of colonial
history to the struggle against racism in Germany today. If more
people were aware of Germany’s colonial history, they argue,
perhaps they would be aware of the structural processes of racial
othering and alienation that continue in both Germany and its
relationship to the ‘outside’ of Europe. 


“What are we doing today?”, Lyn
says,  “What were the mechanisms that allowed for the
alienation of someone else and the ability to say that Germany and
Europe had the right to claim: ‘this is ours“.





Keeping secrets


In 1904 in Namibia, the land
of the Herero and Nama was expropriated and thousands were
rounded up and placed in concentration camps. At least 100,000 people
were murdered. 

Perhaps you have never heard of German
colonialism; it is less commonly spoken about than other
colonialisms. 
The most common reasoning for this is that Germany lost
its colonies too early for them to be of any significance (by 1918).
It is often argued that the empire was short lived, and that it
detracts attention from the crimes of the Second World War to discuss
it.

Yet this narrative ignores the deep
effects that the German empire had on the histories of the places
that it colonized, and the extent to which Germany was caught up in
racist fantasies just as all European countries were, and still to a
certain extent are.


After the Berlin
conference and the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in 1884, Germany
took colonies in East Africa, South West Africa, and North West
Africa. It had protectorates all over the Pacific Ocean, and
territory in China’s Kiatschou bay for 99 years.

At least 300,000 people died at the
hands of German colonizers. In Tanzania in 1905, the
‘Maji Maji’ rebellion against German rule led to retaliation
by German colonists and the enforced starvation of approximately
200,000 people from various different ethnic groups.  


The descendants of white German
settlers who took over Herero and Nama land are still in Namibia, and
they continue to own this land, which is 70% of the most productive
agricultural land in Namibia. Colonial rule influenced Germany long
after the territories were lost.
While certainly not equivalent,
there are for example numerous links between German colonial rule and
the Nazis.

One example is German scientist Eugen
Fischer, who undertook medical experiments in Herero concentration
camps. He went on to train Nazi scientists and to write Principles
of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene,
which was hugely influential for Nazi eugenic policy. Fischer also
brought 300 Herero skulls back to Berlin with him. 
Only 40 of those
skulls have been returned.

We are used to seeing the racist
crimes of the Second World War as a peculiarly German aberration in
an otherwise general triumph of European civilization. 
By calling
attention to German colonialism, that story is de-exceptionalized. 
We
see the extent to which German legacies of race have been bound up
with the colonial legacies of Western Europe as a whole.

The German colonial empire 1884-1918

Telling secrets

In many major German cities, such as
Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Münich, Leipzig, and Frankfurt, grassroots
projects that attempt to inform citizens of that city about their
colonial pasts such as Colonial Neighbours are becoming more and more
prominent. Berlin
and
Hamburg ‘Postkolonial’, for example, conduct different tours
of the city that help attendees to understand the relationship
between locations in Germany
and colonialism. Wherever you
go in Germany, such traces of an actively silenced history exist.


In Berlin, for example, a number of
street names in the city are named after German colonizers. Just
recently on 9 March 2016, “Decolonize
Mitte” (Central Berlin) came one step closer in the attempt to
change
street names that embody a racist and racializing past.
“Lüderitzstraße”, named after Adolf Lüderitz, the founder of
imperial Germany’s first colony, may finally be changed along with
some other street names in the city’s ‘African quarter’.


The government, too, is getting closer
to acknowledging the massacre of the Herero and Nama as a ‘genocide’.
While the UN has been calling this a genocide since as far back as
1948, the German government has never officially recognized it as
such. Last year, the president
of the German parliament argued that Germany should
recognize
the massacre as a genocide. 
It has not yet done so.


Germany is no stranger to reparations,
having given large sums of money to descendants of the Jewish victims
of the Holocaust. Yet is has not been forthcoming on the question of
reparations for its colonial crimes. This does not mean that it has
not been demanded. 
Such reparative transformation is being argued for
by the direct descendants of the Herero and Nama. In 2001, the Herero
Reparations Committee took the German government and a series of
companies to court in the US. They lost the case, but the fight for
reparation continues.


The future 

It has become something of a cliché
to say that colonialism in Europe has been ‘silenced’,
‘repressed’, or ‘forgotten.” Yet such metaphors ignore a
fundamentally important element to the equation: silencing is a
process. 

Every single European country that had
colonies has invested energy into the process of silencing and
forgetting the scale of
criminality that was
involved in colonialism. 
They
know that to acknowledge the scale of the crimes committed would
involve enormous compensation claims. 


Yet as with any attempt to keep a
secret, these processes are always stalled, there has always been
resistance, and right now there is resistance in Germany and in its
former colonies to the process of forgetting its colonial period. 

In today’s political climate, in
which Western Europe continues to propagate the myth of itself as
more civilized, more liberal, more tolerant, such resistance is an
important avenue of political hope.


Open Democracy