The origins of colonial violence:
The perpetrator’s view
A study of colonial soldiers and their ego-documents in
German East Africa, 1890-1908
T.Q. Menger Amsterdam E-mail:
Student number: 10004230
Master thesis Research Master History Faculty of Humanities University of Amsterdam 23 June 2016 Supervisor: Dr. M.J. Föllmer Faculty of Humanities University of Amsterdam Second reader: Prof. Dr. E.A Buettner
Table of contents
Introduction 1
I. Historiography and source type 6
I.I Colonial violence 6
I.II German colonial violence 9
I.III Ego-documents 16
II. Individual perpetrators and their ego-documents 20
II.I General background 20
II.II Individual biographies 24
III. First encounters and smaller colonial campaigns. Remnants of discomfort and
restraint 41
III.I Initial discomfort 43
III.II Remnants of restraint 45
III.III Socialisation into colonial violence at home and in the colony 49
IV. Limitless violence: routinisation and brutalisation on bigger colonial
campaigns 59
IV.I Brutalisation in colonial wars 60
IV.II Specific instances of extreme violence: hunger war, violence by
auxiliaries or askaris and sexual violence 72
IV. III Conclusion 79
V. Motives reconsidered: racism, prestige, group dynamics and revenge 80
V.I Racism 80
V.II Prestige 84
V.III Group dynamics 86
V.IV Revenge 87
VI. Strategies of legitimisation: preservation of the upright personality, military
culture and developmental ideology 88
V.I Preservation of the upright personality 88
VI.II Military culture 91
VI.III Colonial development 104
VII. Colonial violence in East Africa and the continuities of German history 113
VII.I Cultural and biological racism 113
VII.II Genocidal impulses and fantasies 115
VII.III Anti-Semitism 118
VII.IV Personal continuities 120
Conclusion 124
Introduction
‘(…) zooming in and out from grand and large-scale questions to microanalysis, case studies of individuals or small groups and vice versa enables the historian to fulfil his craft and the ethic of the discipline by working close to primary sources’.1
‘Räuber, Mörder, Brandstifter, Saatenvernichter u. Sklavenhändler, der ich bin (…)’.2
- Hauptmann Rudolf von Hirsch in his diary after one month of bloody counter-insurgency operations against the indigenous Maji Maji Rebellion in German East Africa, 11 February 1906.
Rudolf von Hirsch was one of the several hundred German officers and non-commissioned officers who served in the German colony of East Africa.3 As the second quote demonstrates,
Hirsch and many of his fellow soldiers would become perpetrators of extreme violence and war crimes. The simple reason for this was that these crimes were often the norm in colonial wars of the fin de siècle. A lot of ink has been spilled trying to explain this escalation of violence in the colonial sphere, which stood in such contrast to the largely peaceful state of Europe in this time.
Inspired by the first quote, this thesis tries a new, largely neglected approach to explaining the origins of extreme violence in colonial wars, by looking at the individual perspectives of those lower-level European colonial soldiers who committed the violence. My main source material, therefore, will be the ego-documents of colonial perpetrators. Accordingly, this thesis will ask what the ego-documents of German colonial perpetrators in East Africa over the period 1890-1908 can tell us about the origins of extreme violence in colonial wars.
The ego-documents I will use are mostly private and unpublished (or at least unedited) ones. I will mostly shun the published ones, like the famous memoirs of Tom von Prince, 1 Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris and Jacques Revel, ‘Introduction: space and scale in transnational history’, Size
matters: scales and spaces in transnational and comparative history, special issue, International History Review
33 (2011) 573-584, here 577.
2 Rudolf von Hirsch, Deutsch-Ostafrika. Tagebuch des Hptm. von Hirsch Oktober 1905 bis März 1906, diary entry 11 February 1906, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv – Kriegsarchiv, Abteilung IV (BayHStA – IV), Nachlass Rudolf v.
Hirsch 9 (NL Hirsch 9), f. 94. The quotes in this thesis have generally been taken over unaltered; occasionally
however, capital letters or full stops have been added at the end or beginning of sentences for the sake of readability. Diary entries or letters which I indicate by two dates separated by a slash (like: 10/12 August 1894) have been started on the first indicated day and continued on the latter day; the quote is then to be found in the latter part.
3 Detailed numbers can be found in: Susanne Kuß, Deutsches Militär auf kolonialen Kriegsschauplätzen.
since they have nearly always been written for a certain audience and in order to conform to what the public expected of the ideal of the ‘Prussian officer’.4 As the reader will notice, I will
not avoid published ego-documents altogether, but my use of them will be cautious and relatively rare.
The sources consulted do not allow us to reconstruct every incident of violence in detail. They do allow us, however, to sketch in broad lines under which conditions violence developed and escalated and where it seemed to become limitless. Furthermore, they offer plentiful information on the importance of racism and colonial ideology in the thoughts of the perpetrators, views which could be used (or not) to legitimise extreme violence. What is more, they enable us to ascertain if any of the existing big, abstract theories on colonial violence hold up to empirical scrutiny on the individual level. And finally, one can also draw some cautious conclusions about the importance of social background. Since I approach these soldiers as perpetrators, I will regularly touch upon findings from perpetrator studies in other fields, mostly related to the Second World War (especially the work of Harald Welzer).
I see ‘German colonial soldiers’ as a distinct perpetrator group, apart from the European colonists but also from the indigenous soldiers (although officers were of course nearly always in close interaction with the latter). Some readers might ask whether one might actually treat German colonial soldiers as one group. Susanne Kuß, for instance, has rejected this homogenous view of the colonial troops, pointing to the significant differences in formation, motivation and action strategies, as well their allegiance to different military units. Kuß certainly has a point; if the ego-documents show us one thing, it is how different individuals often are from one another. Still, I believe we can search for common patterns (even if differentiating according to background, for example). The striking thing, after all, is that the colonial violence, regardless of its perpetrator, is very comparable everywhere, as is the willingness to use it. This makes it plausible that there should indeed be certain general patterns.
By a lucky incident, all the protagonists in this thesis shared one characteristic: they were all new to the colony. Consequently, this has also become a study of how these men coming straight from Germany were socialised into the extreme violence that marked the colonial world. How did they first react to these practices? What did they consider normal,
4 Michael Pesek, Koloniale Herrschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika: Expeditionen, Militär und Verwaltung seit 1880 (Frankfurt 2005) 299. Tom von Prince, who became a colonial hero because of his suppression of the Wahehe resistance in East Africa in the 1890s, published his memoirs in 1914: Tom von Prince, Gegen Araber und
what not? And from whom did they learn? These are tricky questions to answer, but they can tell us a lot about mentality and how violence escalated.
This work is made up of seven chapters. It starts with a longer review of the historiography. In this, I will argue that most works on extreme colonial violence offer abstract and structural explanations, while the individual perspective has largely been neglected. Subsequently, I will move on to the specific themes of the historiography of German colonial wars. I will conclude this chapter with a consideration of ego-documents as a historical source. Chapter two will then consist of an introduction of the protagonists of the different ego-documents that my thesis is based on, as crucial background information to the analyses that will follow. The third and fourth chapter touch upon violence itself – on how it is described, but also identifying specific processes of violent escalation. I will distinguish between smaller, brief colonial campaigns (chapter III) and bigger, longer and more dangerous ones (chapter IV). Chapter five will review the importance of some conventional explanations for extreme (colonial) violence. This is followed by a chapter on the individual justification of extreme violence. The thesis ends with a brief chapter on possible continuities with German military violence of the later twentieth century.
Before I move to chapter I however, a few words are in order about how it came about that German officers were active in East Africa in the first place.
The German presence there started in the mid-1880s, when the DOAG (a commercial enterprise led by the infamous German explorer Carl Peters) managed to get ‘imperial protection’ for its ‘possessions’, swathes of land it claimed it had acquired by treaty-making with local chiefs. Germans started moving into a very diverse country, which on the coast was marked by a highly developed, Swahili-speaking, Islamised culture, where Arabs, Arabised Africans and Indian merchants peopled the thriving cities, while the hinterland was characterised by a great amount of different African ethnic groups, which the coastal people pejoratively called ‘washenzi/shenzi’ (‘uncivilised savages’).5
The DOAG however proved woefully inadequate to the task given to it by the Kaiser. Not only did it fail to build a working administration, its officials treated the coastal population so disrespectfully that an uprising broke out in 1888, the so-called Araberaufstand. 5 Reinhard Klein-Arendt, ‘Ein Land wird gewaltsam in Besitz genommen. Die Kolonie Deutsch-Ostafrika’, in: Felicitas Becker and Jigal Beez eds., Der Maji-Maji-Krieg in Deutsch-Ostafrika 1905-1907 (Berlin 2005) 28-48, here28-30; Jigal Beez, ‘Karawanen und Kurzspeere. Die vorkoloniale Zeit im heutigen Südtansania‘, in: Ibidem, 17-27, here 22-23. The term ‘shenzi‘ was simply adopted by the Germans into the colonial discourse: Pesek,
The DOAG was quickly overrun and Bismarck, fearing a German loss of prestige, placed the famous African traveller and soldier Hermann Wissmann in charge of re-establishing control. Wissmann recruited an army of African mercenaries (mainly from the Sudan), staffed it with German officers and set off to crush the uprising. Shortly after he had accomplished this, the lands became officially part of the German Empire (1891) and the Wissmann troops, now called Schutztruppe, became the official military of the colony.6
The following ten years saw more or less uninterrupted warfare (though with ups and downs) as the Germans started pushing deeper into the hinterland, bringing more and more land under their control. Particularly bitter was the struggle against the Hehe people (1890-1898), who were militarily extremely well organised and fought off the Germans for years, before a policy of divide and rule and ruthless scorched-earth tactics finally defeated them.7
By 1902, the Germans believed the colony largely pacified and accelerated the exploitation of the land by introducing more taxes and often compulsory crop-planting of cotton and the like. The increasing coercion and destruction of traditional ways of life led to ever-mounting levels of discontent.8 This was capitalised upon by a mysterious prophet,
Kinjikitile, who preached that a special water (‘maji’) that he dispensed to everyone who undertook the pilgrimage to his place, would make the receiver invulnerable to German bullets. All Africans would then unite to drive out the German colonisers. The prophet’s message managed to unite a great number of otherwise hostile ethnic groups. Unnoticed by the German administration, an uprising was being meticulously prepared.9
It finally broke out on 20 July 1905 in the Matumbi Mountains, somewhat prematurely due to an unexpected event: four days earlier Kinjikitile himself had been arrested by a suspicious German official. The scale, level of coordination and rapid expansion of the uprising took the Germans completely by surprise. The insurgents attacked German-appointed Arab district officials (Akidas), Indian merchants, colonists, missionary and military stations. At its height, the insurgents controlled nearly the whole south-eastern half of the colony.10
6 Klein-Arendt, ‘Ein Land wird gewaltsam in Besitz genommen’, 31-32.
7 Ibidem, 33-35; Thomas Morlang, ‘>>Die Wahehe haben ihre Vernichtung gewollt.<< Der Krieg der
>>Kaiserlichen Schutztruppe<< gegen die Hehe in Deutsch-Ostafrika (1890-1898)’, in: Thoralf Klein and Frank Schumacher eds., Kolonialkriege: militärische Gewalt im Zeichen des Imperialismus (Hamburg 2006) 80-108. 8 Klein-Arendt, ‘Ein Land wird gewaltsam in Besitz genommen’, 45-48.
9 Jigal Beez, ‘Mit Wasser gegen Gewehre. Die Maji-Maji-Botschaft des Propheten Kinjikitile’, in: Becker and Beez eds., Der Maji-Maji-Krieg, 61-73, here 61-70.
10 Beez, ‘Mit Wasser gegen Gewehre’, 70. For some overviews over the war see: Detlef Bald, ‘Afrikanischer Kampf gegen koloniale Herrschaft: der Maji-Maji-Aufstand in Ostafrika’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 9 (1976) 23-50 and Felicitas Becker, ‘Von der Feldschlacht zum Guerillakrieg. Der Verlauf des Krieges und seine Schauplätze’, in: Beez and Becker eds., Der Maji-Maji-Krieg, 74-86.
The Schutztruppe initially lacked the means to react and could only take up essentially defensive positions. Warships at the coast landed a few detachments of sailors and some naval infantry, but bigger German expeditions started only months later, when new recruits for the Schutztruppe had arrived. In the beginning, the war saw several major battles, which ended with horrendous losses for the rebels, who then mostly switched to guerrilla warfare. The German reaction then was to ruthlessly deny support for the guerrilla by burning all crop fields and villages and confiscate or destroy all food stores, provoking a horrible famine which in the next years would cost tens of thousands of lives.11
In the first half of 1906, most resistance gradually collapsed, although the hunt for some prominent rebel leaders continued far longer; the last one was only killed in July 1908. In total, the colonial troops had lost 15 Europeans and probably over 1000 Africans during the war. On the side of the rebels and civilians, the numbers were much higher. Although there is some debate surrounding the numbers, estimates range up to 300.000 deaths, for the most part provoked by the ensuing famine.12
The staggering death toll and violence of the Maji Maji War underlines once again how extreme colonial wars generally were. How and why German colonial soldiers were able to engage in such extreme violence will now be examined in detail by looking at the writings of those who ‘were there’: the perpetrators themselves.
11 Bald, ‘Afrikanischer Kampf gegen koloniale Herrschaft’, 33-37; Becker ‘Von der Feldschlacht’, 79-83; Thomas Morlang, ‘“Ich habe die Sache satt hier, herzlich satt.“ Briefe des Kolonialoffiziers Rudolf von Hirsch aus Deutsch-Ostafrika 1905-1907’, Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 61 (2002) 489-521, here 490, 499.
12 Becker, ‘Von der Feldschlacht’, 85-86; Ludger Wimmelbücker, ‘Verbrannte Erde. Zu den
I. Historiography and source type
A project like this – that will be clear from the introduction – stands at the intersection of several historiographical fields, which I will present one by one on the following pages. I will argue that the explanations for colonial violence that have been advanced operate on a rather abstract, impersonal, structural level, in contrast to the focus on individual perpetrators that I have opted for. The historiographical part will be followed by some remarks on ego-documents as a source type.
I.I. Colonial violence
Unsurprisingly, the first historiographical field to produce research on colonial violence was military history. From early on histories appeared of selected colonial wars and colonial armies. This historiography concentrated on military tactics and the composition of colonial armies.13 Extreme colonial violence was explained mainly from this perspective: since it had
been difficult for colonial armies to distinguish between native civilians and combatants, these wars had automatically been wars against the whole population and therefore ‘total wars’.14
Another explanation that was often advanced was of a legal sort: since the Law of Nations was not held to be applicable to ‘uncivilised’ opponents, there existed few legal limits on colonial violence. For the rest, the treatment of the extreme violence of these wars remained rather descriptive. The main debate in the field lay elsewhere: whether or not there had existed opportunities for native resistance towards European incursion and which forms these had taken.15
Besides military history, postcolonial historiography has also taken on the subject of colonial violence. The postcolonial approach has been very important and has contributed many new insights into the nature of colonial violence.16 Nevertheless, it does not always
13 Concerning colonial wars in general, the volume by De Moor and Wesseling probably remains the standard work: Jaap de Moor and H.L. Wesseling eds., Imperialism and war: essays on colonial wars in Africa and Asia (Leiden 1989). Other important works on colonial wars and armies include: V.G. Kiernan, European empires
from conquest to collapse, 1815-1960 (Leicester 1982); Bruce Vandervort, Wars of imperial conquest in Africa, 1830-1914 (London and Bloomington, IN 1998); David Killingray and David E. Omissi eds., Guardians of empire: the armed forces of the colonial powers, c. 1700-1964 (Manchester and New York 1999) and Thoralf Klein and
Frank Schumacher eds., Kolonialkriege: Militärische Gewalt im Zeichen des Imperialismus (Hamburg 2006). 14 For instance in H.L. Wesseling: ‘Colonial wars: an introduction’, in: De Moor and Wesseling eds., Imperialism
and war, 1-5.
15 Vandervort, Wars of imperial conquest, 21-24.
16 For a good overview of the postcolonial approach, see Michael Mann, ‘Das Gewaltdispositiv des modernen Kolonialismus’, in: Mihran Dabag, Horst Gründer and Uwe-K. Ketelsen eds., Kolonialismus, Kolonialdiskurs und
seem suited to explain the massive and unrestrained violence of colonial wars, notwithstanding the fact that that violence was but an extreme on a continuum of violence that characterised colonial rule.17 This is firstly because postcolonialism has been less focused on
the violence of colonial warfare and more on the structural and pervasive character of everyday violence under colonial rule (in prisons and in the surveillance of society, for instance). Secondly, its attention has mostly been for the victims and less for the perpetrators of colonial violence.18
Another more recent approach, which also relates to postcolonialism, has been to look at colonial wars as a pre-history of the European totalitarian violence of the twentieth century. This perspective originated with Hannah Arendt, who in The Origins of Totalitarianism located the roots of totalitarian violence in the imperialism of European nation-states around the turn of the century. In the last fifteen years, Hannah Arendt’s work has experienced a revival with a group of scholars working around the topic of ‘colonial genocide’.19 This
revival has partly been the result of the exhaustion of the intentionalist and structuralist paradigms in Holocaust studies, which made genocide scholars look for ways to place the Holocaust in a broader, world-historical framework.20 Broadly, these historians have tried to
prove two things: firstly, that colonial mass violence did often constitute genocide (although this frequently entails broadening the strictly legal definition of ‘genocide’); secondly, that one can indeed identify a continuity between colonial violence and totalitarian violence (that is, mainly the Holocaust and Nazi mass murders). The ‘colonial genocide’ debate has been mainly an Anglo-Saxon one but it has been flanked by (and regularly overlaps with) a more German and similarly controversial debate about whether the genocidal war against the Herero and Nama people can be considered a specifically German predecessor of the Holocaust. I will treat this aspect separately later on when elaborating on the historiography of German colonial violence.
Genozid (München 2004) 111-135.
17 Dierk Walter, ‘Warum Kolonialkrieg?’, in: Klein and Schumacher eds., Kolonialkriege, 14-43, here 22-24. 18 A famous example is of course Ranajit Guha, who in his article ‘The prose of counter-insurgency’ discussed the difficulty of giving a voice to the colonial insurgents. In: Idem ed., Subaltern studies II: Writings on South
Asian history and society (Delhi etc. 1983) 1-42.
19 Sven Lindqvist’s ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ (New York 1996), although more a literary work, was an early stimulus to the debate. He was followed, among others, by Alison Palmer, Colonial genocide (Bathurst 1999) and A. Dirk Moses ed., Genocide and settler society: frontier violence and stolen indigenous children in
Australian history (New York 2005). Definitely the main work in the field is another volume by A. Dirk Moses
ed., Empire, colony, genocide: conquest, occupation and subaltern resistance in world history (New York and Oxford 2008), which also offers a good combination of the different themes and approaches in the field. 20 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Hannah Arendt, imperialisms and the Holocaust’, in: Volker Max Langbehn and Mohammed Salama eds., German colonialism: race, the Holocaust, and postwar Germany (New York 2011) 72-92, here 72.
As Arendt had already demonstrated before, these different ‘colonial genocide’ approaches have been especially fruitful in identifying the larger structural processes which help explain the escalation of violence in the colonial context. These include for instance the bureaucratization of violence, the emergence of ‘biopolitics’ or even the ‘crystallization of a global community and political economy of nation-states’ in the international state system.21
Some of these structural approaches will come back later in my thesis.
All of the above mentioned historiographies are important contributions and have their own merits. It might be clear, however, that these historiographies operate on a rather abstract, impersonal level. They are often about military strategy, legal frameworks or big structural changes. Few historians seem to have looked systematically at the individuals who perpetrated this violence. Apart from more biographical works about the early explorers (like Henry Morton Stanley)22 or some famous colonial generals (like Wolseley or Lyautey),23
much remains to be said about how lower level colonial perpetrators individually experienced, perceived, ordered and legitimised extreme violence.
As far as I could ascertain, the ego-documents of this group of men, especially their letters and diaries, have rarely been systematically explored and analysed as a corpus (often, they have been treated only as a complementary, secondary source). Works like Bertrand Taithe’s The killer trail: a colonial scandal in the heart of Africa are an exception.24 In this
work about the infamous Voulet-Chanoine Mission, a French expedition into Central Africa that provoked a public scandal because of its degeneration into untethered violence and military insubordination, the author explores the individual motives of the expedition leaders. He concludes that the outburst of violence was not the consequence of colonial officers grown insane but rather the outcome of the circumstances in which these expeditions operated and the expectations placed in them. Although one could argue that Taithe’s book is not a study of regular colonial soldiers nor a systematic study of ego-documents, it is still very stimulating in its connection of individual motives with situational constraints in the escalation of colonial violence.
21 ‘Bureaucratization of violence’ originates of course with Hannah Arendt, The origins of totalitarianism (new edition; Orlando etc. 1966 [New York 1951]). For a ‘biopolitical’ approach, see Dan Stone, ‘Biopower and modern genocide’, in: Moses ed., Empire, colony, genocide, 162-182. An explanation based on changes in the international state system around 1900 is attempted by Mark Levene, ‘Empires, native peoples, and genocide: arguing a case and doubtless muddying the water’, in: Ibidem, 183-204.
22 An important work on these (Victorian) explorers or ‘travellers’ is Laura E. Franey, Victorian travel writing
and imperial violence: British writing on Africa, 1855-1902 (Houndsmills etc. 2003), which also mentions many
of the biographical studies on the likes of Stanley, Burton and others.
23 The most recent being Halik Kochanski, Sir Garnet Wolseley: Victorian hero (London 1999) and Arnaud Teyssier, Lyautey: Le ciel et les sables sont grands (Paris 2004).
For the German colonies, a few studies of the lower-level colonial perpetrators have appeared in the last fifteen years. Certainly the most prominent among them is Dietlind Wünsche’s book on the war letters of German soldiers in China 1900-1901, during the crushing of the Boxer Uprising.25 I will deal with this work more extensively beneath. First,
we should take a closer look at the specific historiography of German colonial violence.
I.II German colonial violence
The German colonies have long occupied a marginal place in the national historiography. This has changed since the beginning of the 1990s; since then, the field has developed immensely. The broadening of academic interest in German colonial history was due to several political and historiographical developments in the last decade of the twentieth century. Firstly, the Fall of the Berlin Wall and German Unification opened up many colonial archives in the former GDR to West-German historians. Secondly, the independence of Namibia in 1990 revived interest in its history as a German colony (1884-1915). Finally, this coincided with the belated introduction of postcolonialism as a historiographical current at German universities. This generated a host of postcolonial studies on topics like the press, propaganda, gender and African auxiliary soldiers.26
Colonial violence, however, is the theme which has arguably dominated the historiography on German colonialism. The reason for this, obviously, is the course of German history after the actual colonial period (1884-1918). Mainly, an important part of German historiography is still overshadowed by the National Socialist violence of the Second World War.27 As a result, it need not surprise us that already early on, links were being drawn
between German colonial violence and the violence of the Third Reich. Neither should it surprise us that the explanations for the colonial escalation of violence have therefore mainly been sought in a specifically German mentality or ideology.
The whole debate on German colonial violence has long been centred around this ‘continuity question’, the question whether there is indeed a continuity between the colonial violence of Imperial Germany and the Nazi violence in Eastern Europe from 1939 to 1945. 25 Dietlind Wünsche, Feldpostbriefe aus China. Wahrnehmungs- und Deutungsmuster deutscher Soldaten zur
Zeit des Boxeraufstandes 1900/1901 (Berlin 2008).
26 Susanne Kuß, Deutsches Militär auf kolonialen Kriegsschauplätzen. Eskalation von Gewalt zu Beginn des 20.
Jahrhunderts (Berlin 2010) 21-24; Volker Langbehn and Mohammed Salama, ‘Introduction‘, in: Idem eds., German colonialism, ix-xxi, here xv-xvi.
27 Bernd Martin, ‘Soldatische Radikalisierung und Massaker. Das deutsche Erste und Zweite Seebataillon im Einsatz im >>Boxerkrieg<< in China 1900‘, Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 69 (2010) 221-241, here 224-225.
The historian Susanne Kuß has identified several ‘waves’ in this debate. She identifies the first of three waves at the end of the 1960s, when a handful of studies about German South-West Africa (GSWA) appeared both in East- and South-West -Germany. These studies drew on Hannah Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism and saw in German colonial rule in GSWA a precursor to the totalitarianism of the Nazis.28
A second wave is discernible at the beginning of the 1990s. Coinciding with the opening of relevant East German archives and the independence of Namibia, the German colonial war against the Herero and Nama peoples in GSWA (a precursor state of Namibia) started taking centre stage in the debate; it would continue to do so right up to our age. At this point, the continuity question was less prominent; the main point of contention was whether or not the war could be classified as ‘genocide’.29
The question of continuity did however return with a vengeance during the third wave, which started in the early years of the new millennium. At its base was the postcolonial preoccupation with the interaction between colony and metropole, bringing up the question which repercussions colonial violence could have had in the German motherland. Increasingly, the genocidal violence and the racial apartheid of GSWA were being interpreted as precursors of the Holocaust, with German biological racist thought often seen as the main connecting element. The historian Jürgen Zimmerer led the way here, not only labelling the war against the Herero and Nama a genocide but also seeing colonial rule there as a forerunner of National Socialist racial policy.30 In the following years, a flurry of articles on
this ‘continuity thesis’, written by Zimmerer and others, appeared and kicked off an important debate.31
The debate also saw the increasing intervention of non-German historians. One of the most original and influential contributions certainly came from the American historian Isabel Hull with her book Absolute destruction: military culture and the practices of war in Imperial 28 Kuß, Deutsches Militär auf kolonialen Kriegsschauplätzen, 20-21.
29 Ibidem, 21.
30 Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Krieg, KZ und Völkermord in Südwestafrika. Der erste deutsche Genozid’, in: Idem and Joachim Zeller eds., Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Der Kolonialkrieg in Namibia (1904-1908) und die
Folgen (Berlin 2003) 45-63 ; idem, ‘Von Windhuk nach Warschau. Die rassische Privilegiengesellschaft in
Deutsch-Südwestafrika – ein Modell mit Zukunft?‘, in: Franz Becker ed., Rassenmischehen, Mischlinge,
Rassentrennung: zur Politik der Rasse im deutschen Kaiserreich (Stuttgart 2004) 97-123.
31 Among others: Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Die Geburt des “Ostlandes” aus dem Geiste des Kolonialismus. Ein postkolonialer Blick auf die NS-Eroberungs- und Vernichtungspolitik‘, Sozial. Geschichte. Zeitschrift für die
historische Analyse des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 1 (2004) 10-43; Idem, ‘Colonial genocide and the Holocaust.
Towards an archaeology of the Holocaust’, in: A. Dirk Moses ed., Genocide and settler society: frontier violence
and stolen indigenous children in Australian history (New York 2004) 49-76; Benjamin Madley, ‘From Africa to
Auschwitz: How German South-West Africa incubated ideas and methods adopted by developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe, European History Quarterly 35 (2005) 429-464.
Germany, in which she located the roots of the genocide in GSWA not in racist thought but in military culture. According to Hull, the German military had had a strong propensity towards ‘final solutions’, i.e. the total destruction of the enemy; a propensity that under certain circumstances could lead to the total annihilation of a whole people.32
The continuity thesis has attracted strong criticism from the beginning. Consequently, the arguments have been nuanced and modified. At the same time, new theses about possible continuities have popped up.33 Critics have pointed both back and forth in time: many have
stated that the interwar period was far more influential for the development of Nazi thought and practice than the colonial one, while a few have argued that we should pay more attention to the German experience with the Polish minority in the Prussian frontier zones at the end of the nineteenth century.34
Most contributions concerning the continuity thesis, both by proponents and by opponents, have two deficiencies: firstly, nearly all of them are exclusively about the case of German South-West Africa; secondly, they are often empirically weak.35 As Susanne Kuß
noted about the second wave of the debate, this wave barely generated any new research; instead, the discussion degenerated into some sort of ‘Glaubensfrage’ between competing historians.36 The same essentially goes for the critics of the continuity thesis; they too are
rarely interested in what actually happened on the ground in the colonies. Take for instance Shelley Baranowski, who in her critical article states that the interwar period has been far more influential in shaping Nazi thought than the colonial age.37 While this might well be a
valid argument, it does not venture into the question where colonial violence did come from
32 Isabel V. Hull, Absolute destruction: military culture and the practices of war in Imperial Germany (New York 2004).
33 An influential critical article was written by Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, ‘Hannah Arendt’s ghosts: reflections on the disputable path from Windhoek to Auschwitz’, Central European History 42 (2009) 279-300. In Germany Birthe Kundrus has been one of the most prominent critics. See, among others, her article ‘Kontinuitäten, Parallelen, Rezeptionen. Überlegungen zur “Kolonialisierung” des Nationalsozialismus’,
WerkstattGeschichte 43 (2006) 45-62. The volume German colonialism (see note 20) offers a good illustration of
the different ways in which the continuity thesis has been nuanced and modified some five years after its original formulation.
34 See for instance Shelley Baranowski, ‘Against “human diversity as such”. Lebensraum and genocide in the Third Reich’, in: Langbehn and Salama eds., German colonialism, 51-71, here 52, 57. For an example of looking further back in time see: Kristin Kopp, ‘Arguing the case for a colonial Poland’, in: ibidem, 146-163.
35 Ulrike Lindner, ‘German colonialism and the British neighbor in Africa before 1914: self-definition, lines of demarcation, and cooperation’, in: Langbehn and Salama eds., German colonialism,254-272, here 266 (endnote 7); Kuß, Deutsches Militär auf kolonialen Kriegsschauplätzen, 37-38; Tanja Bührer, Die kaiserliche Schutztruppe
für Deutsch-Ostafrika. Koloniale Sicherheitspolitik und transkulturelle Kriegführung 1885 bis 1918 (München
2011) 27-29.
36 Kuß, Deutsches Militär auf kolonialen Kriegsschauplätzen, 21. 37 Baranowski, ‘Against “human diversity as such”’, 51-71.
then, if it did not originate with some specifically German propensity towards destruction which would later culminate in Nazism.
However, the publication, in recent years, of a number of empirical case studies that are not any more exclusively focused on GSWA, seems to herald a historiographical turn. Beneath, I would like to discuss a number of these studies, focussing particularly on case studies that make use of ego-documents, since my own research will do so too.
One characteristic of these studies is that they have placed other German colonies in the picture. Probably, this is not only because of the generally increasing in interest in German colonial history, but also because the discussion surrounding GSWA seems to have reached a ‘dead end’.38 Additionally, the study of Germany’s other colonies offered the possibility to
examine the question of German colonial violence without immediately becoming enmeshed in the charged debate on genocide (a consideration which also partly informed my choice for German East Africa). These newer studies mainly seem to indicate that the ‘intentionalist explanation’39 (the assumption that there was some sort of inherent destructive intention in
German colonial warfare) does not hold up to closer scrutiny.
Naturally, case studies on other German colonies or colonial wars are older than the last five or six years.40 They appeared earlier, but tended to stay aloof from the bigger
argument about the nature of German colonial violence. One example is the article by Thomas Morlang on the letters of the colonial officer Hirsch and some other ego-documents from the 38 Kuß, Deutsches Militär auf kolonialen Kriegsschauplätzen, 38.
39 The term is from Bührer, Die kaiserliche Schutztruppe, 271.
40 For our case (German East Africa and the Maji Maji War) there even is a respectable amount of
historiography, although much of it is already several decades old. Its start is with the Tanzanian historians who began to write the nation’s history after it became independent in 1961. These foundational accounts include John Iliffe’s ‘The organization of the Maji Maji Rebellion’, Journal of African History 8 (1967) 495-512 and his A
modern history of Tanganyika (Cambridge 1979), as well as (together with G.C.K. Gwassa) Records of the Maji Maji Rising, part one (Dar es Salaam 1967). Simultaneously, some German historians wrote comprehensive
works on the political, economical and social history of the colony: Detlef Bald, Deutsch-Ostafrika 1900-1914.
Eine Studie über Verwaltung, Wirtschaft und Interessengruppen (Freiburg im Breisgau 1970) and Rainer Tetzlaff, Koloniale Entwicklung und Ausbeutung, Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte Deutsch-Ostafrikas 1885-1914 (Berlin
1970). The work of the 1960s and 1970s was however followed by a long void, which was only now and then punctured by publications like Juhani Koponen, Development for exploitation. German colonial policies in
mainland Tanzania, 1884-1914 (Helsinki and Hamburg 1995). Fairly late, the Tanzanian historiography has come
under criticism for being too preoccupied with postcolonial state-building and providing a national, statist narrative; regional studies like Jamie Monson’s article ‘Relocating Maji Maji in the politics of alliance and authority in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, 1870-1918’, Journal of African History 39 (1998) 1-26 have since contested the national narrative. Recently, interest in the topic seems to have grown again, with publications like Der Maji-Maji-Krieg in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1905-1907 (Berlin 2005), edited by Felicitas Becker and Jigal Beez, and the volume by Jamie Monson and James Giblin eds., Maji Maji: Lifting the fog of war (Leiden and Boston 2010). See the historiographical account in James Giblin and Jamie Monson, ‘Introduction’, in: Idem eds., Lifting the fog, 2-30, here 1-5; Bührer, Die kaiserliche Schutztruppe, 4-5 and Elijah Greenstein, ‘Making history: historical narratives of the Maji Maji’, Penn History Review 17 (2010) 60-77. I have chosen not to treat this historiography in detail since it is scarcely concerned with theorising German military violence.
Maji Maji War. Morlang mentions the extreme violence that is evident from the letters, but provides very little analysis of it.41 A second case is the aforementioned Feldpostbriefe aus China by Dietlind Wünsche. Although the escalation of violence during the war in China is one of the most important topics in that book, Wünsche does not position herself in the bigger debate either. One could say that her analysis occupies a middle ground: she does not speak of a specifically German destructive intention, but she identifies the German Herrenvolkmentalität as being one of the main causes of the extremely high level of violence and states in her conclusion that the suppression of the Boxer Uprising allows us to study the transition from the ‘Nationalstaatsdenken des 19. Jahrhunderts zum rassistischen Chauvinismus des 20. Jahrhunderts’.42 Thus, Wünsche basically remains within the dominant
cultural-ideological explanation.
Dominik Schaller therefore had a point in 2008 when he called for the study of situational factors in the escalation of colonial violence, to complement the ideological explanations which focussed on social Darwinism.43 It wouldn’t take too long for his call to be
heeded. The year 2010 saw the publication of Susanne Kuß’ Deutsches Militär auf kolonialen Kriegsschauplätzen: Eskalation von Gewalt zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, a book which charted a completely new direction in the evaluation of German colonial violence.
Kuß opts for a comparative approach in which she does not only examine the war in GSWA but also the two other major colonial wars of the German Empire, in China and in German East Africa. This allows her right from the start to reveal the weak point of the ‘intentionalist explanations’: if there was some inherent genocidal intention in the German forces, why did only the war in GSWA escalate into genocide?44 Right from the start, Kuß
therefore discards the theses of, among others, Zimmerer and Hull. According to her, only the specific circumstances of war in the colonies itself might explain why and how violence escalated.45
For this reason, Kuß develops the concept of the Kriegsschauplatz (theatre of war), which is made up of six factors: geophysical circumstances, cultural geography, indigenous actors, the actor group coming from outside the colony, external guidelines (political and financial conditions and expectations from the metropole) and friction (a military term 41 Thomas Morlang, ‘“Ich habe die Sache satt hier, herzlich satt.“ Briefe des Kolonialoffiziers Rudolf von Hirsch aus Deutsch-Ostafrika 1905-1907’, Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 61 (2002) 489-521.
42 Wünsche, Feldpostbriefe aus China, 228-232, 360.
43 Dominik J. Schaller, ‘From conquest to genocide: colonial rule in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa’, in: Moses ed., Empire, colony, genocide, 296-324.
44 Kuß, Deutsches Militär auf kolonialen Kriegsschauplätzen, 30-31. 45 Ibidem, 9, 25-30.
indicating the discrepancy between military planning and reality).46 Kuß is especially
interested in landscape and geography as explanatory factors. The author holds that differences in cultural geography can explain why only the war in GSWA degenerated into genocide: while war violence in China and East Africa could, in absence of a visible enemy, still be directed towards objects of culture (Kulturgüter) like villages or crops, these objects were sparse in the South-West African combat zone; inevitably, the violence was turned against the population itself, ushering in genocide.47
In the same year as Kuß’ book, there also appeared an article by Bernd Martin on the German war in China: ‘Soldatische Radikalisierung und Massaker. Das deutsche Erste und Zweite Seebataillon im Einsatz im >>Boxerkrieg<< in China 1900’. Although not evidently influenced by Kuß (a summary reference at the end of the article seems to indicate that Martin did not have the chance any more to engage thoroughly with her book), the article also attempts to complement the explanation of German colonial violence with situational factors. Martin himself points mainly to the physical burden imposed on the soldiers by the long and extremely hurried marches to Beijing and the apocalyptical scenes of looting and violence that they witnessed when arriving in the city (other foreign expeditionary corps had taken the city a few days earlier).48
The year after witnessed the appearance of a second comprehensive study of German colonial violence that broke with the conventional explanations. This was the dissertation by Tanja Bührer, Die Kaiserliche Schutztruppe für Deutsch-Ostafrika. Koloniale Sicherheitspolitik und transkulturelle Kriegführung 1885 bis 1918. On the basis of the history of the colonial troops in German East Africa, Bührer presents a thorough analysis of colonial violence. Like Kuß, she categorically rejects the ‘intentional’ explanation and advances an even more controversial thesis: she holds that the escalation of violence in the colony was mainly the result of an adaptation to indigenous norms of violence. She doubts whether one can even speak of German colonial violence and she herself speaks of ‘Africanisation of violence’.49
On the basis of empirical research, Kuß, Martin and Bührer all point to situational factors. A new trend thus seems to be emerging. Possibly, these explanatory models have been neglected for so long because those who advance them risk being accused of wanting to exonerate colonial violence (something Bührer explicitly denies) or of disregarding the 46 Ibidem, 32-34.
47 Ibidem, 267-271.
48 Martin, ‘Soldatische Radikalisierung’, 229-232.
importance of German racist ideologies – a grave reproach given the later course of German history. It might not be coincidental that both Kuß and Bührer are to a certain extent ‘outsiders’. Both are connected to an institution of military history, a discipline which has largely kept away from the continuity thesis debate. Additionally, Tanja Bührer is not of German but of Swiss nationality (she obtained her doctorate in Bern) and thus largely schooled outside the German academic quarrels, which might be another reason for her innovative and daring approach.
The reception of the abovementioned case studies, which was not marked by significant controversy, seems to indicate that a historiographical turn is indeed emerging. Although the case studies explicitly engage with the previous historiography and basically refute it, there has as yet not been a noticeable counter-attack. The books by Kuß and Bührer did receive predominantly positive reviews, even though Bührer’s phrase of ‘Africanisation of violence’ is sometimes criticised as exaggerated.50 However, a big outcry has not materialised.
A second sign that such a turn in history-writing might be imminent is the fact that the debate on the continuity thesis seems to have become more empirical in itself recently: it has moved away from bigger theses on direct lines of continuity with National Socialist violence and towards a more careful consideration of aspects in which German colonialism could indeed be marked as more extreme than other European colonialisms.51 Possibly, we might speak of a
classical case of progress in historical understanding, although the upcoming years will prove if the new trend does indeed consolidate.
Certainly, my own research subscribes to this new, more empirical turn, by closely studying the ego-documents of colonial perpetrators on the ground. Since this has not really been done before, my first step is to fill a lacuna. Only when having distilled what these documents actually tell us will I turn to a prudent consideration of possible continuities. Before we start our study, we should however speak of one more aspect: the methodology and historiography of ego-documents.
I.III Ego-documents
50 For appraisals of Kuß’ book see for instance the review by David Motadel in Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History 40 (2012) 525-527 and the one by Winfried Speitkamp in Historische Zeitschrift 294
(2012) 811-812. For Bührer, see among others Thomas Morlang in Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 72 (2013) 145-147, Winfried Speitkamp in Historische Zeitschrift 295 (2012) 541-542 and Susanne Kuß in Francia 40 (2013), online at http://www.recensio.net/rezensionen/zeitschriften/francia-recensio/2013-3/19-20- jahrhundert-histoire-contemporaine/die-kaiserliche-schutztruppe-fuer-deutsch-ostafrika/@@generate-pdf-recension?language=de, consulted 26 January 2016.
51 A fine example of this trend is the article by Ulrike Lindner in the volume by Langbehn and Salama (see above, note 35).
What are ego-documents? The term was coined by the Dutch historian Jacques Presser in 1958, who later defined them as ‘those documents in which an ego deliberately or accidentally discloses or hides itself...’.52 Since then, there has been some debate on which
documents constitute ego-documents and which ones do not. In a narrower sense, the category would include letters, diaries, autobiographies, travelogues, memoirs or interviews. One could however also include all the documents that inform us about how a human being provides information on himself, whether voluntary (letters, autobiographical texts) or conditioned by other circumstances (which could include such documents as interrogations of witnesses or suspects by courts and state authorities or even tax declarations).53 Some historians have
criticised that an ‘I’ can even be present in bureaucratic documents, even if it is veiled by official language.54 I would therefore stick with the definition by Winfried Schulze (also
adopted by Wünsche), which defines ego-documents as texts that provide us with information on the voluntary or enforced self-perception of a person, illuminate individual human behaviour and reflect his or her experiences and expectations.55 Nevertheless, I have chosen to
base my thesis mostly on autobiographical material in the narrower sense, that is, diaries and letters and a few memoirs, although I will also include, for instance, an official source.
When coining his term, Presser did not have the best timing. Given their assumed subjectivity, ego-documents had long been seen as ‘unreliable’ sources; at the height of the sociologically inspired historiography they were thought to barely deserve a place in history-writing at all. This argument was first countered by historians who performed analyses of great amounts of ego-documents, thus trying to avoid the charge that the study of one or two such documents can never be representative. Unsurprisingly, this generated the criticism that they often overlooked the subtleties of the different ego-documents studied. With the advent of the history of mentalities in the 1970s and micro-history in the 1980s the terms of the debate changed: within that last current, ego-documents were actually deliberately used to depict the worldview of one individual only. More recently, following the arrival of the linguistic turn, the place of ego-documents in historiography has changed again: not their content and representativeness, but their structure and function itself have come under 52 Jacques Presser, ‘Clio kijkt door het sleutelgat’, in: Idem ed., Uit het werk van J. Presser (Amsterdam 1969) 283-295, here 286.
53 Wünsche, Feldpostbriefe aus China, 21.
54 Marijke van Faassen, ‘Het dagboek: een bron als alle andere?’, Theoretische geschiedenis 18 (1991) 3-17, here 5.
scrutiny, with questions being posed relating to themes such as the ‘shaping of the self’, among others.56
As mentioned before, my selection of ego-documents for this research consists mainly of diaries and letters. I will briefly discuss their specifics now, starting with the first one. People often start writing diaries during especially moving times (in our case, this was nearly always when the officers left Germany to travel to the colony to serve).57 One of its main
functions therefore is to record – be it for the author himself or for his family.58 Although this
might seem strange, a large part of this is often devoted to describing daily life and soldiers’ dwellings; according to Wünsche, this is because it helps these men to establish new routines and (in letters especially) because it creates closeness to their audience at home, by speaking of things which are still recognisable to them.59 The depiction of violence is often quite
marginal in these ego-documents – something which goes for the documents I studied but also for other ones, like diaries of participants of the 1904-1907 war in GSWA.60
Some scholars have also interpreted diary-writing as a ‘self-disciplinary project’: an attempt to construct a better selfhood, articulated by taking up and adapting public discourses (seeing in this adaptation a process of exerting agency).61 We will encounter an example of
this in chapter VI, when we see how Rudolf von Hirsch in his diary took up the Wilhelmine militarist discourse to still fashion himself as a ‘good soldier’.It has indeed been noted that in German society in the twentieth century, there existed a strong tradition of propagating diary-writing as an aid to the development of self-awareness.62 Finally, diaries also serve an
important self-justifying and therapeutic function.63
56 Rudolf Dekker, ‘Jacques Presser’s heritage: Egodocuments in the study of history’, Memoria y civilización 5 (2002) 13-37, here 19-31.
57 Wünsche, Feldpostbriefe aus China, 22.
58 The diary of Rudolf von Hirsch, for example, often explicitly addresses his parents. For instance: Rudolf von Hirsch, Deutsch-Ostafrika. Tagebuch des Hptm. von Hirsch Oktober 1905 bis März 1906, diary entry 16 October 1905, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv – Kriegsarchiv, Abteilung IV (BayHStA – IV), Nachlass Rudolf v. Hirsch 9 (NL
Hirsch 9), f. 40.
59 Wünsche, Feldpostbriefe aus China, 266-268. This is a staple in all ego-documents. It is probably most conspicuous with Rudolf Ganßer, who managed in one diary entry to include a meticulous list of all the items in his room in Dar es Salaam, not only listing every single piece of furniture but also not failing to mention that the room furthermore included 1 water jug, 1 water bottle, 1 towel, 1 towel stand, 1 bowl for washing, 1 bowl for his tooth brush, 1 water bucket, 1 chamber pot, 1 water glass and 1 broom, among others. Rudolf Ganßer, diary entry 9 December 1896, in: Heinrich Dauber ed., “Nicht als Abentheurer bin ich hierhergekommen…“ : 100
Jahre Entwicklungs-“Hilfe“: Tagebücher und Briefe aus Deutsch-Ostafrika 1896-1902 (Frankfurt 1991) 57-58.
60 Gesine Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung und Geschichtsbewußtsein: Realität, Deutung und Verarbeitung des
deutschen Kolonialkriegs in Namibia 1904 bis 1907 (Göttingen 1999) 99.
61 Aaron William Moore, Writing war: Soldiers record the Japanese Empire (Cambridge MA 2013) 11-17. 62 Dekker, ‘Jacques Presser’s heritage’, 35.
Letters mostly have the same functions, especially the element of ‘Etablierung der Heimat’ (Wünsche) by portraying daily life. The most important function however, is to sustain the contact with the family and the familiar world at home. This is shown by the frequent appeals to relatives for more letters.64 Besides, letters seemingly offer their writer the
chance of confirming his own views of himself and of the reality around him, by communicating these views to an outside audience.65
Ego-documents, of course, are not an unproblematic source. Firstly (and this goes especially for letters), the communication situation impacts on what can be told and what cannot. Understandably, soldiers will quite often shield the addressed, like for example their parents or sister, from especially disturbing news. It is also probable that they will frequently be silent about their own misdeeds or taboo topics like sexuality.
Secondly, ego-documents often reveal that the human mind is never as rational and coherent as we would like it to be. Not infrequently, we stumble upon strong contradictions in one and the same diary. According to Gesine Krüger, this contradictoriness should even be seen as a structural part of these diaries.66 To make matters worse, there often exists a gap
between people’s thoughts and people’s actions.67 Nevertheless, these problems do not mean
we can’t deduce any meaningful conclusions at all from the sources. To start with, it is often relatively easy to discern which one of the contradictory positions predominantly guides the writer. Additionally, contradictions can in themselves be significant in that they often reveal tensions and uncertainties of the actors.
Thirdly, there is the problem of reliability, which for so long discredited ego-documents in many historians’ eyes. Certainly, it is virtually impossible in our case to verify whether the authors truthfully depict events and their own role in it. Also, omissions and inconsistencies are very difficult to spot for the historian. Although certainly a hindrance, this seems to me less of a problem for my research than one might expect. In the end, this thesis is not about an exact description or quantification of incidents of violence. What is far more crucial is what the perpetrators themselves experienced as important, how they legitimised extreme violence, and their relation to ideology and other patterns of thought which might explain the escalation of violence in the colonial world.
64 For instance: letter Harald Pfeiffer to his brother Walter 15 February 1900, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg (BA-MA), Korrespondenzen mit seinen Eltern Rudolf und Rosa Pfeiffer Bd. 1: 2. Nov. 1899 – 10. Okt.
1901 (Korrespondenzen Bd. 1), N 85/1, f. 74.
65 Wünsche, Feldpostbriefe aus China, 28, 245.
66 Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung und Geschichtsbewußtsein, 77-78. 67 Wünsche, Feldpostbriefe aus China, 17.
Finally, ego-documents from the colonial sphere have sometimes been discarded by scholars as being part of the ‘colonial discourse’. They are then lumped together with other genres like colonial handbooks, ethnographic texts or historical works, in which the authors confidently pose as ‘experts’ on Africa, while in reality only taking part in the project of confirming and re-confirming an already existing, distorted Western ‘knowledge’ of Africa. As Krüger has argued however, this criticism is too far-fetched. By comparing an unpublished diary, a published letter, an edited Erlebnisbericht and a poem, she convincingly shows how one can notice a progressive aestheticisation of the war experience and the construction of a heroic colonial warrior type, themes which are not or barely present in the unpublished diaries.68
I therefore think that the primary sources consulted for this thesis are indeed useful and I agree with Wünsche that they offer us the opportunity to give ‘an approximately authentic image of the subjective reality of the writer in a certain life-historical phase’. This is due to the temporal proximity to the events, which makes that the mood of the author is often still very clearly discernible in his writings. The ego-documents are thus a ‘relatively unfiltered’ representation of their writers’ ‘state of conscience’ and are testimonies of individual experiences, which have become communicable through the process of writing them down.69
II. Individual perpetrators and their ego-documents
In this chapter, I will devote some attention to the authors of the diaries and letter collections most used in this thesis. Where they can be reconstructed, the class background, regional origin and some of the more personal character traits of seven officers and one
non-commissioned officer will be briefly described. Naturally all of these factors were also very influential in determining soldiers’ behaviour, besides more general factors like ideology or organisational belonging. Some attention will also be paid to the men’s attitude towards Africans and to their nationalism. Furthermore, where important the specific characteristics of
68 Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung und Geschichtsbewußtsein, 78-80. The ego-documents I consulted confirm Krüger’s findings. Of the diary entries or letters written without significant temporal distance to the events and lacking any intention of publication, none figure unambiguously aestheticising and heroicising sentences like the one found with Theodor von Hassel, who wrote only in 1929 and with the intention of publication: ‘Zwei brave Soldaten, Feldwebel Faupel und Aimer mit 10 Askaris waren hier den Heldentod im einsamen Busch fern der Heimat für Deutschlands Sache gefallen. Ehre diesen Braven!’. See: Theodor von Hassel, ‘Der Militärbezirk Mahenge im Aufstand 1905. Niedergeschrieben in Mahenge im Jahre 1929’, in: [Friedrich von Hassel ed.], Ein Tagebuch aus Deutsch-Ostafrika. Von Theodor von Hassel [Geretsried 1977] 1-68, here 24.
the different ego-documents will be treated. First however, some general remarks about this group of men are in order (more will follow in the next chapters).
II.I General background
Of the men portrayed below, seven were officers and one was a non-commissioned officer (NCO). This is a first important given to keep in mind: this study is mostly about German colonial officers. The findings of this thesis can thus not be unproblematically generalised for all German soldiers; officers’ backgrounds and outlooks often differed considerably from ordinary privates or NCOs, as the case of Josef Weinberger (see below) will already demonstrate.
As stated before, all of the individuals portrayed below were new to the colony of German East Africa when they started their diary or letters (or at least the parts of it that have been kept in the archives). Nearly all of them were thus new to the phenomenon of colonial war. Only Rudolf von Hirsch and Phillip Correck had participated in a colonial war before, as both had been in China during the crushing of the Boxer Uprising. It remains unclear however how much they actually experienced of the warfare there (see below).
Overall, we can thus follow in the ego-documents the process of socialisation of these Germans coming from the metropole into the extremely high levels of violence characteristic of colonial wars. We can also try to determine, although incompletely, where ideas of colonial violence originated. Finally, applying these findings to the continuity debate, we could ask whether ideas of colonial violence did ‘boomerang’ back to the metropole from the colonial sphere or whether they had already been present in the minds of the soldiers who came to the colonies.
I think there are three factors which all shaped these men, albeit to different degrees: European racism, social background and regional origin, and militarism. While I will treat the last factor only in chapter VI, it is now time to briefly examine the three others.
When it comes to the prevalence of racism, it is important to keep in mind that this was ubiquitous in Europe at that age. It was part of generally accepted knowledge and was even taught in schools.70 Concerning Africans, the ‘consensus view’ was that they were at
70 As one officer of the German expeditionary corps in China remarked: ‘Wer will es unseren Soldaten, die ja systematisch schon in den Schulen dahin erzogen worden sind, ihre Rasse für weit höher stehend zu halten als sämtliche anderen des Erdballs – was ich im übrigen auch hiermit nicht bestreiten will – was will er ihnen verdenken, daß sie das Auge eines der ihrigen für weit wertvoller halten als die Augen von 100 Chinesen?’. Quoted in: Wünsche, Feldpostbriefe aus China, 272-273.
least culturally unsophisticated humans, who were regarded from a Eurocentric viewpoint.71
The image of Africans was highly determined by stereotypes, something which is also evident with the authors of my consulted ego-documents. Harald von Pfeiffer, for instance, repeated the common stereotype of Africans’ ‘natural wildness’ when his company of askaris got involved in a brawl.72 Other stereotypes which he reproduced include for example the savage
and uninhibited eating manners of the African, also commonly stated by Theodor von Hassel.73 A more dangerous stereotype was the conviction that Africans would only listen to
harshness and would see any clemency as weakness. According to Isabel Hull, this stereotype was simply universal among German officers and policy-makers.74
Susanne Kuß has found that although the existing images of Africans could be instrumentalised by leaders to legitimise a war against the native population, there had never been a massive and longer-term ideological indoctrination of colonial soldiers.75 This is
probably one of the reasons for the very different degrees of racism among the men treated beneath.
While all men held at least some racist views, they also have in common that they could oscillate between an open, unprejudiced view on Africans and a simple repetition of racist stereotypes. Von Hassel was generally characterised by the first view, but was still able from time to time to utter crude prejudices.76 On the other side of the spectrum, the heavily
racist Wilhelm Wolfrum could also occasionally be positive and unprejudiced about
Africans.77 This ambivalence is not only a general characteristic of racism, it is also based on
the collision between a preconceived, ethnographic view and concrete experiences.78
71 Eberhardt Kettlitz, Afrikanische Soldaten aus deutscher Sicht seit 1871: Stereotype, Vorurteile, Feindbilder
und Rassismus (Frankfurt am Main 2007) 70.
72 Letter Harald Pfeiffer to his parents (Hauptmann Rudolf Pfeiffer and Rosa Pfeiffer, née von Poser) 26 November 1899, BA-MA, Korrespondenzen Bd. 1, N 85/1, f. 15-16.
73 Letter Pfeiffer to parents 5 August 1901, ibidem, f. 302-304; Theodor von Hassel, ‘Ein Tagebuch aus Deutsch-Ostafrika’, in: [Friedrich von Hassel ed.], Ein Tagebuch aus Deutsch-Ostafrika. Von Theodor von Hassel
[Geretsried 1977] 1-125, here 7-8, 105.
74 Hull, Absolute destruction, 175-176. Hull’s assertion is confirmed, among others, by the answers of navy officers to a query sent out by the highest-ranking officer of the East African station, where the stereotype in question was repeated over and over. See the different letters in BA-MA, Äußerungen der Det.-Führer über
Entstehung des Aufstandes in Deutsch-Ost-Afrika (Äußerungen), RM 121/I 460.
75 Kuß, Deutsches Militär auf kolonialen Kriegsschauplätzen, 216-217.
76 For an example of such a stereotype uttered by Von Hassel, see note 73. For other examples, see pages 53-54 in the same book.
77 For instance: letter Wilhelm Wolfrum to his mother, written during the boat passage to German East Africa and letter Wolfrum to his mother 31 March 1890, in: Wilhelm Wolfrum, Walter Bormann ed., Briefe und
Tagebuchblätter aus Ostafrika (Munich 1893) 12-13, 20.
This makes that, in general, the individual perception of Africans was a little more differentiated than I expected. Unsurprisingly, the most positive views were generally uttered on the askaris, i.e. the soldiers that the officers themselves drilled and commanded on a daily basis. With them the shared experience of the extreme situation of war might even have blurred the clear cultural demarcations between coloniser and colonised, as Kuß
presupposes.79 Still, these statements could go surprisingly far. Pfeiffer, even before having
experienced any warfare, judged his ‘Sudanese’ and ‘Zulu’ askaris better soldiers than German fusiliers, while Hirsch stated that he placed absolute trust in his ‘Sudanese’ askaris.80
Correck, on the other hand, remained scornful about ‘his’ askaris, which he described as ‘lauter Ausschussware’.81
Apart from the askaris, the more positive view could sometimes also be applied to the African population in general. Hassel, for example, was quite respectful and seldom
contemptuous about Africans. This attitude was often combined with a paternalist view of the population as ‘children’.82 Again, on the opposite side, there were men like Hirsch, who was
mostly scornful about the ‘Halbaffen’, as he twice denominated the inhabitants of the African continent.83 Often however, we can see how soldiers differentiated according to different
ethnicities, probably following an already pre-set colonial pattern which was closely linked to colonial ideas about ‘martial races’. Especially the Hehe people (or Wahehe) were judged in a conspicuously positive way. Pfeiffer for instance admired their ‘herrlichen Wuchs u.
Haltung’, which he compared to ancient Greek statues.84 Given their long-time resistance to
German conquest, the Wahehe were generally known as a martial people.85
It must however be noted that positive remarks on groups like the Wahehe were frequently (though not always) limited to their physical appearance, something that has also been noted by Gesine Krüger concerning some soldiers’ diaries from GSWA.86 Still, these
79 Kuß, Deutsches Militär auf kolonialen Kriegsschauplätzen, 18.
80 Letter Pfeiffer to parents 18 November 1899, BA-MA, Korrespondenzen Bd. 1, N 85/1, f. 5; Hirsch, Tagebuch, diary entry 16 October 1905, BayHStA – IV, NL Hirsch 9, f. 51.
81 Philipp Correck, Ausreise nach Deutsch-Ostafrika, diary entry 19 February 1906, BayHStA – IV,
Handschriftensammlung 908 (HS 908).
82 Hassel, ‘Ein Tagebuch’, 53 speaks of ‘einfache Menschenkinder’, while Pfeiffer talks about ‘meine Natur Kinder’: letter Pfeiffer to mother 2 July 1900, BA-MA, Korrespondenzen Bd. 1, N 85/1, f. 154.
83 Hirsch, Tagebuch, diary entry undated [24 December 1905] and 1 January 1906, BayHStA – IV, NL Hirsch 9, f. 47 and f. 66.
84 Letter Pfeiffer to parents 5 March 1900 (erroneously dated 5 February 1900), BA-MA, Korrespondenzen Bd.
1, N 85/1, f. 91.
85 On ‘martial races’ in general, see: David Killingray, ‘Guardians of empire’, in: Idem and David Omissi eds.,
Guardians of empire: The armed forces of the colonial powers c. 1700-1964 (Manchester and New York 1999)
1-24, here 14-16.
