As we see more and more countries declaring their independence and pulling out of the long shadow of colonialism - especially those once under \the British Empire - we often think about countries colonized by Spain, France and England. But there is one country that rarely comes to mind when we think about colonialism: Germany. On May 28, 2021, Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, held a press conference in Berlin to announce what was meant to be a momentous breakthrough in the country’s attempts to address its colonial past. After five years, German and Namibian negotiators had approved a “reconciliation agreement” over atrocities committed by Germans during the colonial period. “In light of Germany’s historic and moral responsibility,” he said, “we will ask Namibia and the descendants of the victims for forgiveness."
From the 1880s to 1919, Germany controlled what are now Togo, Burundi, Cameroon, Namibia, and Rwanda, among other African territories, as well as part of what is now Papua New Guinea and several islands in the western Pacific. Even by the standards of European colonialism, Germany’s actions in Namibia - then known as German Southwest Africa - stand out for their brutality. Between 1904 and 1908 German officials and soldiers killed thousands of people in a campaign of extermination widely acknowledged as the first genocide of the twentieth century.
Germany has long skirted accountability for its actions in Namibia and never formally recognized the killings as a genocide. But Maas’s announcement was meant to signal that Germany was finally living up to its historical responsibilities and included a promise that it would, “in a gesture of recognition of the immeasurable suffering exacted on the victims,” pay €1.1 billion ($1.2 billion) in aid allocated for reconstruction and development over the next 30 years.
In the weeks that followed, however, any goodwill resulting from the announcement crumbled. The main groups representing the descendants of the victims argued that they had been unfairly left out of the negotiations, partly because of Germany’s refusal to include anyone outside the government. Many also denounced the payment as inadequate compensation for such a horrific injustice, given that the amount was merely equivalent to the foreign aid Germany has given Namibia since 1989, and expressed outrage that the agreement omitted the word “reparations.”
At the time the territory was home to between 200,000 and 250,000 people, including approximately 80,000 members of the Herero ethnic group, who lived with large herds of cattle. Other groups included the Nama, Ovambo, Damara, San, and Baster. The territory’s fertile area was bordered on the west by the Namib Desert and the Atlantic Ocean, and on the northeast by the Omaheke, a nearly waterless expanse of desert that stretches into Botswana.
When German settlers and administrators arrived in the region, they deceived Africans into selling them large parcels of land, mistreated them, and humiliated their leaders. In some cases they also encouraged animosity among local groups. When the Africans fought back, Berlin sent more troops. In January 1904 a conflict between Herero and Germans escalated, leading the Herero to launch an offensive to retake their territory.
The conflict, known as the Herero and Nama War, became a pretext for widespread atrocities.
During the war the Germans established concentration camps meant to provide labor for German businesses, but conditions there were so horrific that few prisoners were able to work.
At a camp on Shark Island, a rocky, exposed outcropping on the Atlantic coast, prisoners were given barely any clothing, food, or shelter. Between September 1906 and March 1907, 1,032 of the camp’s 1,795 prisoners died. The exact number of victims of the genocide remains uncertain, but by the time the prisoners were allowed out of the camps in 1908 up to 110,000 had perished.
Following the genocide, the German authorities expropriated nearly all the Africans’ territory and forced them to join a “semi-free” labor market in which they had little choice but to work for German landowners.
Marriages between Africans and Germans were prohibited. Africans were also banned from walking on sidewalks and riding horses, and all Africans were required to greet passing Germans. In 1921 the Treaty of Versailles transferred the colony to South Africa, which later imposed the apartheid system on the territory.
Although the publication of Morenga, a best-selling anticolonial novel by Uwe Timm that was later adapted into a popular three-part miniseries, briefly pushed Southwest Africa into West German awareness, it remained overshadowed by the crimes of the Nazis and the postwar trauma of national division. Even after German reunification and Namibian independence from South Africa in 1990, many Germans remained only vaguely aware of the atrocities carried out in Southwest Africa, or they imagined that the German colonial project was more enlightened than those of Great Britain, France and Belgium.
That began to change in the early 2000s, largely thanks to pressure from native groups, who have little representation in Namibia’s post-independence government. And despite Namibia’s redistribution programs, a disproportionate amount of the land still belongs to a small white minority.
Meanwhile several academics began drawing attention to Germany’s colonial crimes. In a 2001 book, German Rule, African Subjects, seemingly the first in-depth book about the policies of German Southwest Africa, focus is given to attempts by German authorities to create a utopian “racial state” in the colony. Although the book is perhaps too detailed for a general readership, it was decisive in dispelling the “mist” of amnesia around German colonialism.
That mist has lifted further in the past decade. In 2016 German Historical Museum in Berlin, the largest and most important museum of German history, hosted the country’s first major exhibition about its colonial period. The repeatedly delayed completion of Humboldt Forum - a museum housing ethnological artifacts in a reconstruction of the Hohenzollerns’ Berlin palace - has also focused attention on German colonial history. While protests against racial inequality grew abroad and in Germany, activists and scholars argued that the forum’s leaders had not done enough to investigate the provenance of many of its artifacts. As a result there have been genuine shifts in cultural policy. Last summer Germany signed a groundbreaking agreement with Nigeria to repatriate all its Benin Bronzes, sculptures looted by British troops in 1897 that were later sold or donated to a number of European and American museums. The crimes of the colonial era became “a blank spot in the memory culture."
In late 2021 the new German government led by Olaf Scholz of the center-left Social Democrats promised to “drive forward the investigation of colonial history” and to push for reconciliation with Namibia.
That will not be easy.
Namibia’s government has backtracked on its plans to ratify the reconciliation agreement and has called for it to be renegotiated, and the German government has thus far rejected calls to reopen discussions, which could open Germany to similar claims from Greece and Italy, which are requesting compensation for crimes committed during World War II. It would also bolster the legal cases of other former colonies against European powers and potentially usher in a new wave of lawsuits.
Journalists and historians have been arguing about this in the German media ever since. The debate is reminiscent of the Historikerstreit, or “historians’ dispute,” of the 1980s, which erupted after the historian Ernst Nolte argued that Germany did not bear an exceptional burden of guilt for the Holocaust, since mass killing had occurred before - particularly in the Soviet Union - and was not historically unique. Numerous scholars disagreed, arguing that such comparisons downplayed German responsibility and that the Holocaust should be seen as a singular historical event. This view ultimately became a cornerstone of the German approach to memory culture.
One scholar argued that the genocide was not a rehearsal for the Holocaust or that the two are equivalent in scale or motivation. But he argues that by examining parallels between them, one can arrive at a more accurate view of the forces driving German and global history.
For German history, the genocide in Southwest Africa is meaningful in two ways. On one hand, it showed the existence of genocidal fantasies of violence (and the actions that followed) in the German military and German administration as early as the start of the twentieth century, and on the other, it popularized this violence, thereby contributing to its legitimization.
In the 1920s and 1930s German Southwest Africa was romanticized in public memorials, school curricula, films, and books, including a popular genre known as “colonial literature.”
If a singular event can occur only once, there is no need to worry about it happening again.
Some have argued that proponents of the comparative view misrepresent the ideological nature of the Holocaust and ignore the particular history of anti-Semitism in Europe.
At other times the debate has invoked straw man arguments, with some commentators falsely claiming that postcolonial scholars want to equate the Holocaust with colonial crimes. Occasionally it has become a proxy for a battle over the adoption of progressive American views about racial justice.
The new Historikerstreit has emerged out of a confluence of factors - the debate over reparations, the pushback against the Humboldt Forum, and, more broadly, the rise in Germany of a globalized sense of history, in which debates about slavery in the United States and colonialism in the UK, for instance, are often transposed onto local experiences. But it has also coincided with a debate about German identity and how to reconcile Germany’s postwar self-image, largely centered on atonement and guilt for the Holocaust, with its modern status as a country defined by immigration.
In the past ten years the proportion of German residents who are immigrants or have immigrant parents has risen from approximately 19 percent to 27 percent. Many of these new arrivals come from countries that were previously colonized by European powers. Activists have pushed for German identity to be broadened to accommodate immigrants from Africa or the Middle East, for instance, arguing that their greatest historical trauma is colonialism, not World War II.
German memory culture should not change to accommodate these new arrivals, because immigrants have been the source of a new wave of violence against Jews. It is true that anti-Semitism is a problem among some immigrant communities, in particular those from the Middle East, but official statistics suggest that most anti-Semitic attacks in Germany are carried out by members of the far right. Clearly the existing approach to German memory culture - and its resistance to drawing connections between the Holocaust and colonialism - has not been infallible either.
The debate has often operated under the assumption that memory is zero-sum and that a greater acknowledgment of colonial crimes will devalue the historical importance of the Holocaust.
Such an approach also allows for a more coherent narrative of German history - one in which the Third Reich is viewed not as an anomalous malignancy but rather as a convergence of events that include colonialism. To reexamine the connections among the Third Reich, the genocide and other colonial crimes is to throw a more critical light on a broader arc of German history. It means understanding that colonialism had long-term consequences not only for the colonized but also for the colonizers.
The path to self-knowledge and harmony, in other words, must lead through a shared sense of shame.
Berlin’s only memorial to the victims of the genocide is located in a cemetery near Tempelhof, an airport turned park at the southeast edge of the city center and remains unknown to most Berliners. In an overgrown corner of the site, visitors can find a granite stone from 1907 with an inscription commemorating seven German soldiers who “voluntarily fought in the campaigns of Southwest Africa and died heroes’ deaths.” In 2009, thanks to pressure from activists, a black plaque was installed below that inscription to honor the “victims of German colonial rule in Namibia.”
It does not include the word “genocide,” but at the bottom it bears a quote from Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian philosopher and educational reformer: “Only a person who knows the past has a future."
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