Racial warfare in German women’s colonial memoirs

ABSTRACT

The colonial memoirs of German women reflected and often overtly supported the structurally racist assumptions that naturalized German rule in Africa and the Pacific. When it came to describing the reasons for colonial uprisings and wars, however, few focused on broad notions of ‘racial warfare’, foregrounding instead the primacy of the battle for political independence and territorial sovereignty. Via a study of the memoirs of Magdalene von Prince, Margarete von Eckenbrecher and Frieda Zieschank, Fitzpatrick’s article questions the applicability of the flattening descriptor ‘racial warfare’ when describing colonial wars, and demonstrates that German women offered a clear sense that the line of demarcation between wartime allies and enemies often mapped poorly on to racial divides.

KEYWORDS:

• colonial memoirs
• colonial violence
• German colonialism
• German Empire
• German racism
• women’s history

Notes

1 As per Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London and New York: Verso 2016). For a recent survey of the complexities of race and its function in European colonialism, see Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, ‘Race’, in Kirsten McKenzie (ed.), A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Age of Empire (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic 2019), 175–96.

2 See, for example, Susanne Kuss, German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence, trans. from the German by Andrew Smith (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press 2017); Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press 2005); Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller (eds), Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen (Berlin: Ch Links 2003); Florian Hoffmann, Okkupation und Militärverwaltung in Kamerun: Etablierung und Institutionalisierung des kolonialen Gewaltmonopols (Göttingen: Cuvillier 2007); and Tanja Bührer, Der Kaiserliche Schutztruppe für Deutsch-Ostafrika: Koloniale Sicherheitspolitik und transkulturelle Kriegführung 1885 bis 1918 (Munich: Oldenbourg 2011).

3 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Land, labor, and difference: elementary structures of race’, American Historical Review, vol. 106, no. 3, 2001, 866–905 (867).

4 Marie Muschalek, Violence as Usual: Policing and the Colonial State in German Southwest Africa (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press 2019), 7.

5 Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Annihilation in Africa: the “race war” in German Southwest Africa (1904–1908) and its significance for a global history of genocide’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute (Washington D.C.), no. 37, 2005, 51–7 (52).

6 See, for example, Matthias Häußler, ‘From destruction to extermination: genocidal escalation in Germany’s war against the Herero, 1904’, Journal of Namibian Studies, no. 10, 2011, 55–81.

7 Elizabeth R. Baer, The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press 2017), 74.

8 Susie Protschky, ‘Review: Race, class, and gender: debates over the character of social hierarchies in the Netherlands Indies, circa 1600–1942’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, vol. 167, no. 4, 2011, 543–56 (555).

9 Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press 2014), 4, 10–11.

10 Christine Winter, ‘Changing frames: identity and citizenship of New Guineans of German heritage during the interwar years’, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 47, no. 3, 2012, 347–67 (347).

11 Wolfe, Traces of History, 2.

12 Katharina von Hammerstein, Barbara Kosta and Julie Shoults (eds), Women Writing War: From German Colonialism through World War I (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter 2018).

13 A. Dirk Moses, ‘The German catechism’, Geschichte der Gegenwart, 23 May 2021, available at https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/the-german-catechism (viewed 20 February 2024); for the real-time discussion surrounding Moses’s thesis, see ‘The catechism debate’, New Fascism Syllabus, 21 August 2021, available at http://newfascismsyllabus.com/news-and-announcements/the-catechism-debate (viewed 12 February 2024); and Serdar Gunes, ‘Memory debates: Erinnerungskultur, Holocaust, Historikerstreit, (Post-)colonialism—Artikelsammlung’, Serdar Gunes’ Blog: All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 4 June 2021, available at https://serdargunes.wordpress.com/2021/06/04/a-debate-german-catechism-holocaust-and-post-colonialism (viewed 20 February 2024).

14 Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press 2002), 13, also 140–61. Bart Luttikhuis, ‘Beyond race: constructions of “Europeanness” in late-colonial legal practice in the Dutch East Indies’, European Review of History, vol. 20, no. 4, 2013, 539–58; Iris Clever and Willemijn Ruberg, ‘Beyond cultural history? The material turn, praxiography, and body history’, Humanities, vol. 3, no. 4, 2014, 546–66; Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, ‘The Samoan women’s revolt: race, intermarriage and imperial hierarchy in German Samoa’, German History, vol. 35, no. 2, 2017, 206–28. For an earlier, race-centred account, see Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press 1995), 49–54.

15 Loredana Polezzi, ‘The mirror and the map: Italian women writing the colonial space’, Italian Studies, vol. 61, no. 2, 2006, 191–205.

16 Rochus Schmidt, Geschichte des Araberaufstandes in Ost-Afrika: Seine Entstehung, seine Niederwerfung und seine Folgung (Frankfurt an der Oder: Trowitzsch & Sohn 1892), [ii]. Translations from the German, unless otherwise stated, are by the author.

17 See, for example, Theodor Leutwein, Elf Jahre Gouverneur in Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn 1906); Carl Peters, Die Gründung von Deutsch-Ostafrika: Kolonialpolitische Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen (Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke & Sohn 1906); Rochus Schimdt, Aus Kolonialer Frühzeit (Berlin: Safari-Verlag 1922); Albert Hahl, Gouverneursjahre in Neuguinea (Berlin: Frundsberg 1937); Rudolf Asmis, Kalamba Na M’putu (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn 1942); and Otto Riedel, Der Kampf um Deutsch-Samoa: Erinnerungen eines Hamburger Kaufmanns (Berlin: Deutscher 1938).

18 Exceptions, of course, do exist, such as the frequently politically engaged memoir of Elisabeth von Heyking, Tagebücher aus vier Weltteilen, 1886–1904 (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang 1926).

19 Magdalene von Prince, Eine deutsche Frau im Innern Deutsch-Ostafrikas: Elf Jahre nach Tagebuchblättern erzählt (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn 1908), 1.

20 Rebecca Steinitz, Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2011), 2, 4, 6.

21 Ibid., 6–9.

22 Polezzi, ‘The mirror and the map’, 204.

23 Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press 2001), 152.

24 Katharina von Hammerstein, ‘“Who owns Hereroland?” Diverse women’s perspectives on violence in the German-Herero colonial war’, in Hammerstein, Kosta and Shoults (eds), Women Writing War, 27–56 (30–1).

25 Margarete von Eckenbrecher, Was Afrika mir gab und nahm: Erlebnisse einer deutschen Ansiedlerfrau in Südwestafrika (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn 1907), v.

26 Prince, Eine deutsche Frau im Innern Deutsch-Ostafrikas, v–vi.

27 Frieda Zieschank, Ein Jahrzehnt in Samoa, 1906–1916 (Leipzig: E. Haberland 1918), 157–60.

28 Katharina Gerstenberger, Truth to Tell: German Women’s Autobiographies and Turn-of-the-Century Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2000), 94, also 71.

29 Hammerstein, ‘“Who owns Hereroland?”’, 51.

30 Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 152–3.

31 Marcia Klotz, ‘White Women and the Dark Continent: Gender and Sexuality in German Colonial Discourse from the Sentimental Novel to the Fascist Film’, Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1994, 89.

32 Ada Cramer, Weiß oder Schwarz? Lehr- und Leidensjahre eines Farmers im Südwest Lichte des Rassenhasses (Berlin: Kolonial-Verlag 1913), x.

33 Ada Cramer, quoted in English in Helmut Bley, Namibia under German Rule (Hamburg: Lit 1996), 258. See also Cramer, Weiß oder Schwarz?, 70–9.

34 The same was true of German rule over European subjects such as Poles. See Jawad Daheur, ‘“They handle Negroes just like us”: German colonialism in Cameroon in the eyes of the Poles (1885–1914)’, European Review, vol. 26, no. 3, 2018, 492–502.

35 Hammerstein, ‘“Who owns Hereroland?”’, 43.

36 For a discussion of a memoir highlighting close intercommunal relations, see Cindy Patey Brewer, ‘Christian love and other weapons: the domestic heroine of the multiracial colonial mission “family” as an antiwar icon in Hedwig Irle’s Mission Memoirs’, in Hammerstein, Kosta and Shoults (eds), Women Writing War, 57–78 (60).

37 As Michelle Moyd has made clear, the terms ‘loyalty’ and ‘disloyalty’ were crude, German-centred designations that hid the broad range of possible reactions to colonial structures and obscured the agency and social position of those who saw mutually beneficial possibilities in electing to fight with the Germans by presenting them as one-dimensional ‘heroes of the German colonial cause without taking into account their lived experiences and histories’: Moyd, Violent Intermediaries, 209, also 5.

38 Contra Hammerstein, ‘“Who owns Hereroland?”’, 42–3.

39 On the war, see David Pizzo, ‘To Devour the Land of Mkwawa’: Colonial Violence and the German-Hehe War in East Africa, c. 1884–1914 (Saarbrücken: Lambert 2010).

40 Prince, Eine deutsche Frau im Innern Deutsch-Ostafrikas, 49–50.

41 Ibid., 50.

42 Ibid., 59–60.

43 Ibid., 61.

44 Ibid., 63–4.

45 Bettina Brockmeyer, ‘Interpreting an execution in German East Africa: race, gender, and memory’, in Ulrike Lindner and Dörte Lerp, New Perspectives on the History of Gender and Empire: Comparative and Global Approaches (New York: Bloomsbury 2018), 87–114.

46 Prince, Eine deutsche Frau im Innern Deutsch-Ostafrikas, 68.

47 Ibid., 75.

48 Ibid., 76.

49 Ibid., 156–7.

50 Ibid., 167.

51 Ibid., 179.

52 Ibid., 179–83.

53 For the course of the war, see Häußler, ‘From destruction to extermination’; and Jürgen Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner: Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia (Münster: Lit 2002), 31–55.

54 Hammerstein, ‘“Who owns Hereroland?”’, 42 (emphasis in original).

55 Eckenbrecher, Was Afrika mir gab und nahm, 183–4.

56 Ibid., 186–7.

57 Ibid., 188–9. Published in 1907, it is hard to assess which parts of Eckenbrecher’s account are a post-war insertion.

58 Ibid., 193, also 192 and 196.

59 Ibid., 199.

60 Ibid. For a discussion of Hedwig Irle’s memoir stressing close relations between German missionaries and the Herero, see Brewer, ‘Christian love and other weapons’.

61 Eckenbrecher, Was Afrika mir gab und nahm, 202, also 2002–1.

62 Samuel Kariko, quoted in Jeremy Silvester and Jan-Bart Gewald, Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia: An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book (Leiden: Brill 2003), 95. See also Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923 (Oxford: James Currey 1999), 199, 222–3.

63 On the history of Herero oppression of the Damara, see Dag Heinrichsen, ‘“Damara” labour recruitment to the Cape Colony and marginalisation and hegemony in late 19th century central Namibia’, Journal of Namibian Studies vol. 3, 2008, 63–82 (76–8); and Oswin Köhler with Günter Wagner, A Study of Omaruru District (South West Africa) (Pretoria: Government Printer 1959), 33–6.

64 Eckenbrecher, Was Afrika mir gab und nahm, 194–6. The steady flow of these messages urging Cornelius Goreseb to defect to the Herero are also described in Silvester and Gewald, Words Cannot Be Found, 84; and Köhler with Wagner, A Study of Omaruru District, 36.

65 Eckenbrecher, Was Afrika mir gab und nahm, 214.

66 Ibid., 215, 224.

67 Köhler with Wagner, A Study of Omaruru District, 35.

68 Häußler, ‘From destruction to extermination’.

69 On the course of the First World War in the Pacific, see Hermann Joseph Hiery, The Neglected War: The German South Pacific and the Influence of World War I (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press 1995).

70 Zieschank, Ein Jahrzehnt in Samoa, 107–12.

71 Fitzpatrick, ‘The Samoan women’s revolt’. For Michaelis’s own account of the incident, see Carl Eduard Michaelis, Wozu hat Deutschland eigentlich Kolonien? Wie es einem Deutschen in einer deutschen Kolonie erging (Berlin: G. Meinecke 1911).

72 Zieschank, Ein Jahrzehnt in Samoa, 111–12.

73 Fitzpatrick, ‘The Samoan women’s revolt’.

74 Zieschank, Ein Jahrzehnt in Samoa, 117–8.

75 Ibid., 120.

76 Ibid., 121.

77 Ibid., 126–7.

78 Ibid., 128–9.

79 Ibid., 130–2.

80 Ibid., 134–5.

81 Hiery, The Neglected War, 158.

82 See also Sandra Barkhof, ‘The New Zealand occupation of German Samoa during the First World War, 1914–18’, in Stefan Manz, Panikos Panayi and Matthew Stibbe (eds), Internment during the First World War: A Mass Global Phenomenon (London and New York: Routledge 2019), 205–26 (210).

83 Zieschank, Ein Jahrzehnt in Samoa, 138–9.

84 Ibid., 140.

85 Ibid., 142.

86 Ibid., 144–5.

87 Ibid., 145–6. Sandra Barkhof has dismissed accounts like Zieschank’s as a standard example of ‘anecdotes perpetrating the myth of “native loyalty”’, without explaining the broader context of Tamasese’s intervention. See Sandra Barkhof, ‘“My war experiences in Samoa”: pro-colonialism in First World War memoirs and eyewitness accounts’, in Angela K. Smith and Sandra Barkhof (eds), War, Experience and Memory in Global Cultures since 1914 (London and New York: Routledge 2018), 213–35 (222).

88 Zieschank, Ein Jahrzehnt in Samoa, 112.

89 Ibid., 145–55.

90 Ibid., 154–6, 158.

91 Wolfe, Traces of History, 28.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew P. Fitzpatrick

Matthew P. Fitzpatrick is Professor of International History at Flinders University, Australia. He is the author of three books dealing with the history of the German Empire, most recently The Kaiser and the Colonies: Monarchy in the Age of Empire (2022). He has been a Humboldt Fellow at the Westphalian Wilhelms-University Münster and a past winner of the Chester Penn Higby Prize. Email: [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6642-2319