Entangled history and politics: Negotiating the past between Namibia and Germany

Abstract

The relationship between Namibia and Germany is marked by intense exchanges about the meaning and the consequences of the colonial wars of the early twentieth century in the erstwhile German colony. This engages various state and civil society actors including groups from across the political spectrum in Germany, whereas in Namibia the debate concerns the descendants of the victims on the one hand and German-speaking Namibians on the other.

The article explores this discursive situation and brings out a range of relationships and interactions to be understood as expressions of an entangled history that eschews attempts of appropriation on one side. The problems emerge most poignantly in terms of the still ongoing exchanges around the denial of genocide in 1904–8 which, given that the framework of the debate is predicated to considerable measure on German history, inevitably points to the Holocaust. A further strand of acting out and negotiating historical responsibility concerns the mode of apology and redress which remains a contended question. Not least, this involves an incoherent set of state and non-state actors on both sides. Here, the call for dialogue made particularly by Namibians raises the sensitive issues of intercultural communication.

Keywords:

• memory politics
• genocide and aftermath
• postcolonial debate on redress
• entangled history

The relationship between Namibia and Germany is a special one – not just in terms of a resolution of the German parliament, the Bundestag, saying so at Namibia's independence in 1990, but on account of a number of linkages, both historic and current. The way the relationship has evolved, in particular the festering issue of the genocide committed by the German colonial army in what was then called German South West Africa, a hundred years ago can tell us much about postcolonial relationships and related intercultural communication in the face of historic trauma and current conflict. Here we meet the construction and ownership of history, which in turn is related to competing claims of possessing some ‘truth’ or protesting against the supposed invasion of, say, ‘African’ history by outsiders.

I would like to explore how this connection between two countries finds expression in the frequently controversial ways of negotiating a past that, on account of sometimes acrimonious exchanges, does not appear quite as bygone as the elapse of a hundred years might suggest. Rather, my thesis is that discourses and debates around the past in both countries function mutually as sounding boards, throwing impulses and themes back and forth. We can see it as a specific case of ‘entangled history’ (Randeria 2002, 2006), relating social actors and public discourses within both the former colony and the former colonial power in an intricate web of repeated and ongoing interaction, which eventually includes also the reconstruction of such processes when historical conceptualisations compete with each other.1

In Namibia, the concerns voiced in this context remain pressing for many groups even today. From a German perspective, on the other hand, this intensity in Namibia is of particular relevance because the country today is largely lacking a postcolonial presence that might impact on the public mind. To substantiate this thesis, I shall first briefly recall the main relevant events and developments, while stressing their discursive importance both in Germany and in (much of) Namibia. This will be followed by a look at relevant memorial practices to be found more in Namibia than in Germany, giving the direct backdrop to current controversies and memory activities, centring on the genocide committed by the German Schutztruppe in Namibia in 1904–8. This warrants a closer look at the existing interrelationship which – among other things – I see importantly as a ‘connection in denialism’. A different, deeply ambivalent dimension of this relationship concerns what to many appeared as a turning point, namely the apology for the genocide offered by a German cabinet minister in 2004 and ensuing developments. While these cannot be exhausted here, they do demonstrate the problems encountered in dealing with a painful and entangled history, and especially the difficulties facing efforts to reach a mutual, necessarily intercultural understanding.

The point of reference: From public genocide to colonial amnesia

Within the fragmented mnemoscape2 of present-day Namibia one can discern certain key events, personages, dates and periods that form vital points of reference for various regions and communities (Kössler 2007). Quite clearly the period of reference in southern and central Namibia refers to the colonial wars of 1904–8. This is not by accident: the war occasioned sweeping changes in the power relations and socio-economic set-up of this region, more or less co-extensive with the ‘Police Zone’, the area of effective colonial occupation during German rule. The figures of casualties among African groups are still being contested in some quarters (see below). Yet it was not only the carnage as such that caused sweeping changes but also the systematic repression that followed and, above all, the wholesale expropriations of most African communities in the region. Indeed, in terms of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, not only ‘killing members of the group’ but also ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’3 fall under the definition of genocide.

In the Namibian case, this perspective dislodges much of the argument about body counts and victim numbers fielded against the idea that the German military committed genocide during the last months of 1904. The genocide was pursued first by sealing off the sandveld to prevent fugitive Ovaherero from returning from the waterless Omaheke steppe; then by warfare against Nama groups during the following years; lastly and in particular, by confining whole ethnic groups, after surrender, to concentration camps under conditions that proved fatal to a majority of inmates, while many were subjected to forced labour (Erichsen 2005; Krüger 1999, 126–37). Further, the Native Ordinances of 1907 decreed the wholesale expropriation of all Ovaherero and most Nama groups in the region. Expropriation of land was complemented by a ban on the possession of large stock, a rigorous pass system and compulsory labour. In this way, the indigenes in the Police Zone were stripped of any means of independent existence outside forced wage labour. The Ordinances also stipulated restrictions on Africans meeting in the open, and introduced tight ceilings for the numbers living in African settlements. All this, in the case of Ovaherero (especially the ban on large stock) impacted not only on the material but also on the symbolic level to prevent a resumption of communal life, let alone reconstruction of communal institutions. Over and above systematic mass murder, this particularly violent form of detribalisation therefore must be related to the concept of genocide contained in the Convention. By these means, the basis was laid for white settlement on African land now declared crown land and for the consummation of a colonial ‘society of privilege’ (Zimmerer 2001, 94 and throughout).

The consequences are still readily evident in central and southern Namibia today: a countryside almost devoid of visible settlements, ordered into neatly fenced-in farms. The apparent emptiness is due not only to an arid climate but to a radical reorganising of the spatial and socio-economic orders on the basis of genocide which, at the same time, laid the groundwork for a societal set-up that, some forty years later, was to evolve into apartheid.

From this perspective, the preoccupation with numbers in much of the recent debate, centring in particular on the consequences (or not) of General von Trotha's infamous ‘extermination proclamation’ (Lau 1995b, 43–6; on which Hillebrecht 2007, 80–4) actually is beside the point. Regardless of the extent and exact proportion of the large-scale loss of lives during the war and as a direct consequence of a ruthless military strategy, genocide was also perpetrated in the sense that the great majority of ethnic groups living in the later Police Zone were stripped of any means of carrying on their communal lives and thus of the possibility of survival as independent polities or even distinct social nexuses. Moreover, native policy in German South-West Africa was marked by a ‘basic continuity’ (Zimmerer 2001, 6), spanning the war period and pursuing strategic objectives defined prior to 1904. It is therefore extremely hard to deny, in the Namibian case, the intentionality which forms a central feature within the prevailing notion of genocide (Gellateley and Kiernan 2003).

However, it was not this more or less structural feature that caught the public eye in Germany, but quite explicitly the war itself and the extermination of those who had occupied the land before the arrival of the colonial power. As a recent study notes, the debate in the press was marked, early on, by ‘utmost openness and brutality’ (Sobich 2006, 101). In a lavishly styled two-volume publication, the General Staff revelled in the exploits of the German troops, closing with the words that, due to General von Trotha's measures, ‘the waterless Omaheke was to consummate what had been initiated by German arms, the annihilation of the Herero people’ (Kriegsgesch. Abt., 1906, 207). The publication also recorded Von Trotha's proclamation of April 1905 bluntly warning the Nama to surrender or meet the same fate as the Ovaherero (Kriegsgesch. Abt., 1907, 186). Again, the sense of this strategy was openly debated, not in humanistic but in clearly utilitarian terms. Thus, Paul Rohrbach, the settlement commissioner in German South-West Africa and a prominent liberal proponent of colonialism, noted with dismay the ‘unhappy principle of “annihilation” inherent in the conduct of the war’ (Rohrbach 1909, 177) and bemoaned this strategy, ‘indulg[ing] in the luxury first to mete out the punishment of dying from thirst to so many thousands natives, because once their tribal independence and their old property rights [were] disposed of, economic life was in need of them as labour power’ (Rohrbach 1907, 261). Thus, besides regretting the mass killings that had taken place, Rohrbach still took the destruction of communal life as an established, and salubrious, fact. Elsewhere, he noted the chances for settlement in southern Namibia once a clean slate had been made of the tribal property which the ‘Hottentots’ had ‘forfeited by their present rebellion’ (Rohrbach 1909, 206).

Of course, debate about what happened in the African colonies also took the form of more formal political controversy, in particular in the Reichstag, the parliament of the day. Here, the Social Democrats and the Centre Party representing Catholic petty bourgeoisie and workers, were at least potentially in the majority, and they castigated colonial excesses, if not colonialism as such. In particular August Bebel, the Social Democrat patriarch and parliamentary leader, dubbed the struggle of the Ovaherero as a ‘fight in despair’ immediately when the war had begun. This was precisely on account of their loss of ‘their former independence and freedom’, and Bebel likened this struggle to that of Arminius, styled at the time as a German national hero for his victory over the Romans in 9 AD. Referring to the execution of Ovaherero leaders he exclaimed: ‘But this is the world turned upside down. In truth, the Herero defend the country which has been theirs for centuries, which they view as their heritage given to them by the Gods, and which they are obliged to defend by employing all means at their disposal’ (Bebel 1904, 581, 584). Roughly a year later, Bebel lashed out at Von Trotha's conduct of the war likening it to that of ‘any butcher's henchman’, a ‘barbarous kind of war making’, unfit to lay claim to civilisation (Bebel 1905, 697).

The parliamentary conflict came to a head when in late 1906 the imperial government used a procedural issue to resolve the Reichstag, claiming the majority had unpatriotically withheld the funds from the soldiers fighting for the fatherland in South-West Africa. The tactics of snap elections along with a reshuffle of German parliamentary politics was successful, reducing the number of Social Democrat deputies and forging a new broad alliance supporting the government of Count Bülow (Crothers 1941). This success was predicated, besides using features of the electoral system, on an unprecedented mobilisation of right-wing civil society organisations (Nipperdey 1998, 601; Sobich 2006; Wehler 1995, 1079–80). Still, Social Democrats also retorted with electoral propaganda strongly critical of t he war and its conduct (Short 2004). From the vantage point of today this attests to entangled history.

The ‘Hottentot Elections’ of 1907 were a turning point of German politics before World War I. In particular, the vociferous election campaign shows that the war and the genocide that were taking place in Namibia were in the centre of the public eye in early twentieth-century Germany. In contrast to other twentieth-century century genocides including the Holocaust, not only were no efforts made to hide what was happening but these crimes and atrocities were rather paraded as glorious exploits. Nor was this an ephemeral matter. From the beginning, a stream of literary treatments was coming forward, ranging from accounts of active soldiers or farmers’ wives to the works of renowned novelists such as Gustav Frenssen,4 whose Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest was translated into several languages; in Germany it became not only popular reading for youth but a set work at schools (Pakendorf 1987, 176). As the story of a young German marine participating in the war, the book conveys in particular the Manichaean view of the black brute bordering the animal on the one side, and the cultured and literate German on the other. At the same time, Frenssen argues the right to take the land away from Africans (and indigenes in general) to put it to use for European settlement, thus aggressively formulating the rationale of genocide by settlers (Brehl 2007, 185–190). The calibre of this book is underlined by the fact that lengthy quotations from it were used in the South African Blue Book as proof that Germany was unfit to be a colonising power (Silvester and Gewald 2003, 111–14). If that was methodologically unsound, it is still remarkable that for generations, German school children were taught from a text that recounted and glorified atrocities which, in the eyes of others, could back up a very serious indictment. This episode underlines how genocidal violence was communicated at that time in Germany on a mass scale, contributing towards race framing (Grosse 2005) and thus helping towards making brute force against other races appear legitimate.

Thus, along with images of strenuous pioneers, the idea of Namibia in the German public mind was shaped largely by the war and the aggressive ways in which it was communicated as a heroic feat – the last military victory that German nationalists could boast of, after defeat in World War I and the loss of the colonies, which was seen in those quarters as yet another humiliation for a deceived and betrayed nation. Arguably, therefore, colonial ideology was more widespread after Germany had become ‘a postcolonial nation in a still-colonial world’ (Klotz 2005, 141) than it had been during actual colonial occupation in Africa, East Asia and the Pacific (Pogge von Strandmann 2002).

This situation has been characterised as one of ‘phantom pain’ – suffering for lost ‘new German soil’ (neudeutsche Erd) and motivating an attitude of colonialism without colonies (Kreutzer 2007, 179). This approach was significant for the policy of the Weimar Republic particularly in relation to Namibia where the Reich tried to safeguard the ethnic identity of the remaining German settlers (Eberhardt 2007, 99–151). During the 1930s, a strong Nazi organisation struck roots among this group, complete with fantasies of a more or less imminent return to German rule (Eberhardt 2007, 243–399). Subsequently, phantom pain gave way in (West) Germany to a kind of ‘relief’ not to be implicated any more in the conflicts around independence and decolonisation, and to a delusion of not to having to deal with the reality of a postcolonial past, also in the present (Kreutzer 2007, 179).

Even the West German solidarity movement, when it took up the issues of apartheid and persistent colonialism during the 1970s and 1980s, did not make much of the issue of Germany's colonial past. The fact that one of the southern African liberation movements was fighting, in Namibia, within the context of a former German colony played no important role here: issues such as West Germany's involvement in NATO and complicity in the Portuguese wars in Africa, and in the apartheid regime in South Africa seemed much more pressing and important at that time (Kössler and Melber 2006, 105, 112–13, 116–17).

In this way, colonial amnesia was pervasive in post-World War II Germany, even though events and conflicts in former German colonies, including the liberation struggle in Namibia, were certainly perceived in some quarters. They did kindle controversy and also support and solidarity action. Yet in this, the specific, objectively postcolonial situation played only a marginal role. Criticism was directed rather against the policy of the West German government of continuing its support for German language schools in Namibia as well as maintaining, up to 1977, a consulate in Windhoek, regardless of the illegal occupation by South Africa (Brenke 1989, 117, 119–25). Still, there were forays into the problems of memory politics, such as attempts to change war memorials relating to the genocidal war in Namibia (Zeller 2000, 218), or colonial street names referring to personages such as Adolf Lüderitz (Litzba 1982) or Carl Peters.5 Even where allusions to a ‘shared history’ were present, the latter case was debated much more in terms of the immediate struggles in the present than the mediated presence of the struggles of the past (Round Table 1982). Those who vehemently supported the apartheid regime's occupation of Namibia and its plans for unilateral independence pointed much more to the danger of a supposed Soviet takeover than rehearsing the colonial past (see the documentation in Melber et al. 1984, 149–78). Again, such attitudes did not preclude active relations between a German city like Bremen and German-speaking associations in Namibia which applied for, and in most cases secured, financial support (Müller 1982, 146–8).

The situation was and remains quite different in Namibia. Here, the experience and memory of German colonialism cannot be marginalised, and for a sizable array of groups, the wars of 1904–8 still form a central reference for collective identity. Significantly, this applies for the posterity both of the colonised and the colonisers, albeit in clearly different ways.

Practices of memorialisation

In independent Namibia, the mnemoscape on a national scale remains fragmented (Kössler 2007), and memoralisation practices differ clearly between those that are state-sponsored and those that are not, and among the latter, between various groups that for the most part are ethnically defined. Among activities of the latter, annual celebrations or festivals are particularly important; they take their cue from key events related to the colonial wars, such as the battle of Ohamakari/Waterberg on 11 August 1904, or the day Hendrik Witbooi was killed in action on 29 October 1905. The anniversary of the burial of Samuel Maharero, who had been Herero Paramount Chief at the time of the war and died in exile in present-day Botswana on 25 August 1923 also refers to the war and its aftermath, which certainly includes the resilience of Ovaherero communities that on that occasion found its clearest early expression. While the best known of these recurrent events go back several decades, other communities have meanwhile taken up this impressive way of rehearsing the past, voicing current grievances and aspirations while at the same time, reproducing their own social nexus – in other words, enacting a ‘ceremonial renewal of the people’.6

This becomes quite clear in the case of the commemoration of the national hero Hendrik Witbooi at the anniversary of his death after being wounded fighting German colonial troops in 1905. The entire festival is spread over three days7 and comprises an entire pageant of different components, including church service and, in independent Namibia, performances by army detachments. One vital feature is conveying views on history by public readings but above all by re-enacting the horsemen's engagements, representing German soldiers along with Witbooi fighters. The dimension of national goals and unity is articulated in the designation as ‘Heroes Day’ since 1980 instead of Witbooi Fees and in features of reconciliation such as, in 1995, featuring a German-speaking deputy minister as the keynote speaker, or the performance of Nama songs by a predominantly white secondary-school choir. In this way, the occasion is clearly marked yet also transcended, not least to voice concerns of the community's leadership such as problems connected with land reform and the restitution of communal land.

In probably the best-known case, Herero Day in Okahandja, the ‘visit to the ancestors’ in the form of a colourful parade of oturupa (Truppenspielers), followed by a procession of women in traditional dress along the graves of chiefs and other important personages in the erstwhile ‘white’ part of the town, serves as a means not only of commemoration but also of asserting the rightful claim to these sites, against the backdrop of a prolonged struggle with the municipality around the preservation of and access to the graves during the 1920s (Kössler 2008; Krüger 1999, 274–82).

A historic site as literally contested terrain is even more in evidence in the Waterberg region, even though the precise spatial focus of commemorating the historic battle diverges, with the ‘German’ reading geared to the war cemetery at the foot of the majestic plateau while Ovaherero refer rather to the fountain of Ohamakari, which is situated at present on a private farm owned by a German speaker (Förster 2004, 168–70). In its original form, the German war cemetery underscored the eternal claim to the colony, with a central tablet stating, ‘Where a German man, fallen in faithful fulfilment of his duty to his fatherland lies buried, and where the German eagle has thrown his claws into – that land is German and shall remain German’ (quoted in Förster 2008, 211). This tablet had been removed after the South African occupation of the country in 1915, but the implied meaning of the site did not change in substance. This emerges clearly from the commemorative practice that was resumed after World War II, no longer with swastika banners as in the 1930s, to be sure, but still brandishing the black, white and red colours of imperial Germany, with paramilitary Boy Scout detachments playing a prominent part (Förster 2008, 210; 2004, 170), much as they had done at functions during the 1930s (Eberhardt 2007, 294f). Semantic shifts from ‘heroes cemetery’ and ‘victory celebration’ to ‘honouring the fallen soldiers’ and ‘commemorating the dead’, were harbingers of attempts to open up, with the creation in the 1960s of nine fictitious graves and a tablet commemorating the ‘faithful kaffir soldiers’. From 1978, Herero Paramount Chief Kuaima Riruako was invited to attend and the occasion was styled to symbolise an alliance of the ethnic groups of German speakers and Ovaherero in the context of the internal solution then sought for Namibia (Förster 2006, 156–64). This was revised again in 1984, when a placard honouring ‘Herero warriors’ was affixed to the cemetery wall by a ‘comradeship’ (Kameradschaft) of old soldiers and shortly afterwards, the ‘native graves’ were removed (Schmidt-Lauber 1998, 276), the inclusion of Ovaherero also in the commemoration ceremony being mainly motivated by the current ‘anti-SWAPO coalition’ (Rüdiger 1993, 35). The commemoration itself did not change in its basic content, including Boy Scout detachments and imperial flags (Förster 2008, 213; 2004, 170). Regardless of the claim to honour the Schutztruppe soldiers by the flag under which they fought (quoted by Rüdiger 1993, 34), in the semantic order of German politics these colours generally mark a basic refutation of republican Germany in favour of authoritarian, monarchist and revisionist and even (neo)Nazi sentiments.

This ties in with more general observations on the image of present day (West) Germany among Südwesters who, as far as they take a public stance, may largely be termed ‘backward looking’ (Rüdiger and Weiland 1992, 348). Not only is insistence on the salutary role of colonialism widespread, but so are complaints about alleged Western decay in Germany itself. Again, when in August 2003, President Sam Nujoma decreed the end of the activities of German speakers at the Waterberg, this was not merely a move against a group of unreformed and unrepentant adherents of colonial nostalgia. In his statement Nujoma linked these backward-looking activities to the current land issue and he further invoked the struggle of ‘our forefathers’. By this, Nujoma may have allowed a glimpse at his own agenda. While the Herero–German and Nama–German wars in particular had involved the northern communities in Namibia marginally at most (Schaller 2008), this seemed to ignore the specific situation the genocide had created in central and southern Namibia and thus it appeared, in the last analysis, rather particularistic (Melber 2005d, 112–3). The episode attests to both the intricacy of Namibian memory problems and to the fact that the ‘past’, even though seemingly a century distant, is in fact of very contemporary relevance. Inevitably this also implies that the past is put to political use by political parties as well as by claimants of various persuasions and legitimacies (Kössler 2007).

The Namibian connection in denialism

It is here in particular that remembrance of the Waterberg appears to function as something like a sounding board of sentiments going back and forth between specific groups both in Germany and among German-speaking Namibians. Förster (2004), 168–70) found strong sentiments about the exploits of German soldiers in 1904 among German tourists visiting the region and the battlefield. Still, battlefield tourists did not take into account the consequences the events had entailed for Africans (Förster 2006, 80). What mattered to them was savouring the supposedly authentic atmosphere and, if possible, picking up the odd ammunition shell from the ground. This conveys the impression not only of enthusiasm for the military, but also nostalgia for imperial glory. The latter, along with the mythical memory of the exertion of the settler pioneers, forms the core of what has been considered the ideology of Südwester nationalism (Rüdiger 1993, 14, 23, 35).

Another dimension of this attitude is the tendency to ‘relativise, play down and embellish historical events’ (Schmidt-Lauber 1998, 274). Apart from the claim to a separate identity as Südwester, this attitude still largely overlaps with an ideological stance that may broadly be considered as ‘German nationalist’ (deutschnational), bordering on Nazism. Such tendencies came to the fore when in 1987, ‘ethnically conscious (volksbewußte) Germans’ advertised in the daily Allgemeine Zeitung to honour Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess as the ‘last representative of a better Germany’, or when, two years later, a rather liberal-minded weekly trivialised the production of swastika-adorned buns and the celebration of Hitler's 100th birthday as mere foolishness and detrimental to the tourist industry (Schmidt-Lauber 1998, 279–80). Such attitudes are by no means a thing of the past. On the death of Simon Wiesenthal, the bilingual (English and German) weekly PLUS, distributed free of charge in supermarkets and the like, carried an advertisement slandering Wiesenthal as an ‘eyesore of humanity’.8 To be sure, this time there was an immediate outcry, not only by the German ambassador, writing in the Allgemeine Zeitung but also from the editors of this medium, which is of central importance to German speakers in Namibia; the majority of writers of letters to the editor chimed in. However, the editor of the weekly, Feddersen. a former editor of Allgemeine Zeitung, made only a nominal apology, rather ambiguously, as though a practical joke had gone somewhat astray, and musing that to deny to Hitler or Saddam Hussein the ‘right to live’ was just as bad as to deny it to Wiesenthal (PLUS, 2.10.2005). Exactly this kind of attitude was then taken up on right-wing websites from Germany that openly reproached the Allgemeine Zeitung for having deviated from upright national sentiment and bemoaned Feddersen's ‘moral weakness’ for having acceded to an apology at all. The article went on ironically to challenge the ambassador to ‘champion German interest the same way as he does Jewish interest’ and to doubt such a perspective on the grounds of the recent ‘increase of development aid for Namibia in terms of indemnity for the putting down of the Herero rising 1904.’9 In this way, the episode – apart from its unpalatable dressing and content – underscores two decisive points I want to make in this paper: a constant interplay between broadly like-minded circles in Namibia and in Germany, and a very ready reference to the genocide of 1904–8 as a persistent central topic, both of colonial history in Namibia and for memory of a colonial past, as far as such memory exists, in Germany.

For German-speaking Namibians, the ‘battle at the Waterberg’ is an object of ‘multifarious engagement’, typically directed to counteract the notion of ‘German war-related guilt’ (Schmidt-Lauber 1998, 273). Besides mustering a plethora of detailed information about troop movements, weaponry and geographical features of the region (Schneider–Waterberg 2005, 159–61), the thrust of this interest comes to the fore in particular in the way any clue is grabbed that could ‘scientifically’ refute the Schutztruppe's conduct of the war as genocide. This persistent concern surfaced once again on the occasion of the Bundestag debate on the issue in June 2007 when Allgemeine Zeitung (13.6.2007), in its headline, referred to ‘genocide’ only within apostrophes. Ample expression also appeared in its pages both in editorial material and in letters to the editor.

In purely academic terms, the polemically worded analysis of the German historian Christoph Marx stating that the conception of history implied in such utterings takes us back to the year 1830 is as valid as his view of the paper as basically provincial (Marx 2005, 143). One might add the lamentably poor German in which the paper is written, unless it simply reflects Südwester language. By itself, such a diagnosis would rather warrant ignoring the sustained denialism. But its interest stems from the linkages that emerge between denialist stands on the genocide of 1904–8 and that of the Holocaust, or more broadly between attitudes that call for an end or ‘final stroke’ of recalling the past as they have been articulated in (West) Germany continuously practically since 1945 (Frei 2005). Further, these epistemic communities exist in both Germany and Namibia and they extend from some academic quarters to extreme right-wing circles.

On an epistemic level, this consensus is marked by a naive historical realism, harking back to the days of Leopold von Ranke in claiming to relay the purely factual ‘as it actually has taken place (wie es denn wirklich gewesen ist)’ as one of the self-proclaimed lay historians put it (Schneider-Waterberg 2004). This conviction of being in possession of unassailable truth based exclusively on recounting factual detail is upheld also against objections which in early twenty-first century social science and historiography may sound almost trivial, namely that the writing of history or the rendering of social reality presupposes a loss of complexity because representing all facts and materials in full would, obviously, overtax human capacity (Gehlen 1986, 35–46; 62–73); further, that such processes are predicated upon the interest or ‘value ideas’ which lie at the basis of any intellectual undertaking since they provide its indispensable perspective. The insight that such perspective does not preclude objectivity or even the abstention from ‘value judgement’ has by now passed its centenary.10 Untainted by such sickly cast of thought, proponents of the pure fact approach, as one might term it, eagerly seize upon any wording of this simple, if sobering insight however provocative (Melber 2005c, 10) or even the mere statement that history writing is an interpretative (or hermeneutic) business (Kössler 2005b, 52–3). They conflate a clear statement of perspective, which can very well imply taking sides, with narrow partiality of analysis – an approach that in the case in question had explicitly been refuted (Zollmann 2007, 114–15 on Kössler 2005b, 77). Linked to this idea is a claim, as naïve as it is preposterous – that one can possess an objective truth by the mere ‘collection and publication of materials’ (Hofmann 2006a).

Much of this argument harks back to an intervention by the late Brigitte Lau, otherwise one of the proponents of anticolonial historiography in Namibia during the 1970s to 1990s. Her concern seemingly replicated by the publications of Eckl (see below) and more recently also of Zollmann, relates to Eurocentrism in the sense of the supposed misappropriation of Namibian history in the interests of German history. It is of course questionable how such misappropriation can happen, given the difficulty of finding ‘owners’ of history in the first place. More importantly such an approach, while predicated on a high anticolonialist profile (in Lau's case at any rate), misses important points of colonialism as a process, and hence of (post)colonial history. This concerns precisely the entanglement between very diverse social, cultural and political realities. In the classic cases, such realities are separated by oceans and long distances while being linked together by acts of violent conquest and persistent, grossly asymmetrical and racialised relations of domination regularly backed up by brute force. Very early on, the potential repercussions of the colonial relationship have been discerned by critics of imperia lism such as the insightful British liberal, John A. Hobson (1954), 146–47; chapter 2,1). Such mutual interaction, creating a shared history in the strict sense of the word, is in fact an inevitable result of the colonial encounter. To tear this connection apart – even in the mode of objecting to ‘Eurocentrism’ – is hardly a way to arrive at an adequate reconstruction of historical processes. Still, this does not preclude specific emphases and concerns – it is fully legitimate and even necessary to search for repercussions of the colonial experience, and of experience with colonial violence in particular, on German (or British, French or any other) society or the public mind in colonising countries. In the same way, one cannot understand what happened in Namibia (or in Togo or New Guinea and so on) without, for instance, knowledge of the kind of state apparatus the colonisers had in mind and strove for as their ideal. Moreover, such interaction is not a thing of the past, and those whose interventions are taken up today in quarters one suspects they may be reluctant to associate with, still have a duty to at least pause and reflect on the potential, if unintended consequences of their contributions – even if, in the case of Brigitte Lau at least, they clearly run counter to the intention of her life work.11

This discussion extends to an array of linkages between Germany and Namibia. One is the enraged response on a colonial traditionalist internet forum which is ostensibly focused on former colonies but is in fact closely connected to the German extreme right,12 when the left liberal daily Frankfurter Rundschau carried an article that pointed to the prevalent use by German school students of right-wing, traditionalist websites as sources of information on German colonialism (Geyer 2006). Contributors to the forum13 stressed, among other things, that the ‘best facts’ were to be had from ‘contemporary’ books – leaving open what use historical analysis might have at all. Others voiced interest in knowing ‘how and who [sic] was governor of Togo in 1908, which rank one's great-grandfather on the old photograph had or how the flag of the Jaluit Society looked like’. Related websites14 convey the view of focusing on the ‘last button on a litevka’ (besides achievements such as infrastructure and agriculture) but they studiously ‘leave unmentioned the African victims’ of German colonial rule (Geyer 2006). By displaying merry people, including an African and a Chinese boy, waving black-white-and-red flags and their top hats, the reality of colonialism is obscured and made banal.15 As if to preserve such cosy views of the past, a contribution in the internet forum warns of ‘German self-hate’ as the reason for dealing with colonial atrocities and genocide.

A recurrent ruse in this debate is to attribute the view that the Schutztruppe had committed genocide exclusively to Horst Drechsler (1966), who can then be conveniently shrugged off as a ‘SED historian’.16 This attitude was echoed by a Regensburg physics professor who lashed out in the Allgemeine Zeitung against ‘the Stalinist construct of genocide’ (Obermair 2006). Quite in keeping with this, in the above-quoted internet forum the West German historian Helmut Bley, author of a well-known and path-breaking study on German South-West Africa (Bley 1968, 1971, 1996) which was broadly contemporary with Drechsler (1966, 1980), is presented as ‘a proponent of the Drechslerian … point of view’. The strategy works by first confining the entire problem to the term genocide, and a ‘genocide thesis’ is then attributed exclusively to Drechsler. Drechsler's careful study, based on a wealth of archival material from the German colonial office, is then discounted because of a few quotes from Marx and Lenin – or damned by the guilt of contagion with the state he lived in and where (other than Bley) he could access his sources at the time.

This approach is not limited to outspoken rightists. In a somewhat opaquely titled article (‘Namibian history challenges its posterity’), much acclaimed in the community, the deputy editor of Allgemeine Zeitung assails Christoph Marx specifically for his intervention against revisionist historiography, and – while arguing the difference between rightists and hobby historians of various strands in Namibia – musters a whole range of authors in Germany who ‘do not converge in [Marx's] kraal’ (Hofmann 2006c). He conveniently ignores the fact that (in German historiography and social science at any rate) the debate moves within a totally different framework. Unnoticed by those who have fixed their eyes and minds upon denying the ‘genocide thesis’, a wide – and differentiated – consensus has emerged in the debate in Germany that the Schutztruppe had indeed committed genocide in 1904-8 in Namibia; controversy focuses on a quite different issue, namely the relationship, if any, between the genocide in Namibia and the Holocaust.17 Hofmann and others, eager to find allies, simply include authors like Birthe Kundrus into their ‘kraal’ – probably on the assumption that they are not of one mind with known proponents of the ‘genocide thesis’ such as Jürgen Zimmerer (2005a) or Henning Melber (2005b). By so doing they brush over a truly fundamental difference of concerns: with some vacillations, Kundrus (2006) certainly is critical of the very notion of genocide and she raises an array of methodological issues that are of great relevance to historiographic debate. These include doubts about the linkages seen in particular by Zimmerer between the wars of 1904–8 in Namibia and Nazi strategies in Eastern Europe during the early 1940s. All these concerns and statements are of course the very opposite of denialism. They acknowledge the horrors that have been perpetrated. It is characteristic for the discursive predisposition apparently prevalent in denialist quarters that every straw, however ill-fitted is taken up. If Kundrus critiques Zimmerer or Melber in connection with the genocide mainly on issues of categorisation, she must surely supply ammunition to one's own cause and her argument is turned into an empirical one. Would that the world were as simple as that!

It should be noted that this preoccupation with the denial of genocide in the Namibian case merges with denialism in relation to the Holocaust. This is seen in the pages of letters to the editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung (Friedrich 2006), or linked to the complaint that under the heading of Auschwitzlüge, publication of such views is outlawed in Germany, as in a contribution to the internet forum mentioned above. Again, this does not preclude a studied distance of other contributors to these Namibian–German exchanges who refuse to be confused with ‘extreme rightist historians such as Dr. Claus Nordbruch’ (Hofmann 2006c), a well-known extreme rightist, not only when it comes to the denial of genocide in Namibia. However, Nordbruch is given ample space in the Allgemeine Zeitung (Nordbruch 2004), and jocularly commented upon for his contributions to the Windhoek carnival by the very same author (Hofmann 2006b). Nordbruch must not be mistaken for a marginal maverick. Occasionally his publications have proved surprisingly effective. This was the case in particular when the German Foreign Office, under the aegis of Green Minister Joseph Fischer, effectively pressurised parliamentary committees to water down a resolution of the Bundestag on Namibia in 2004. Above all, they blocked any mention of the word ‘genocide’ in the final text of the motion, supposedly pointing to Nordbruch's insights as evidence that this rested on ‘factually very contested conclusions of individual historians’ (quoted in Melchers 2004). This puts the German Foreign Office under Green leadership into a direct connection with revisionist activities that clearly aim at denying both the genocide in Namibia and explicitly the Holocaust.18

If the ‘factual’ is marshalled against unwelcome insights, preoccupation with detail also knows its limits. Thus, a favourite argument to counter the ‘genocide thesis’ refers to the revocation of Von Trotha's genocidal proclamation by the Emperor in mid-December 1904 which supposedly is ‘suppressed by the genocide camp’ (Hofmann 2006d). This line of argument is in fact evidence that Drechsler has been bashed so hard for being a ‘communist’ that people believe they can then dispense with actually reading his book. In Drechsler (1980), 162–5), there is an extensive account, based on the sources, of the consultations in Berlin that resulted in the revocation. This account shows that the decision was based not on humanitarian principle but on purely pragmatic considerations. Thus, Chief of the Great General Staff, General von Schlieffen – best known for his strategic plan that informed Germany's attack on Belgium and France in 1914 – explicitly noted that ‘General von Trotha's intentions are commendable’, even though ‘he is powerless to carry them out’ (Drechsler 1980, 163). This underscores the presence of an intention to annihilate and, rather than the rampant body count, is constitutive for genocide. One may wonder who is treating evidence selectively.19

The approach just outlined also resonates, however, with more explicitly academic writings. These are linked in particular to recent interventions of the Cologne-based Africanist Andreas Eckl. Eckl initiated this line of activity at a prominent spot when delivering a paper in the opening keynote panel session of the central scholarly conference in Namibia at the centenary of the events of 2004. The conference was strangely titled ‘Decontaminating the Namibian Past’, implying a strong tendency to dispose of the burdensome past once and for all (on which see Marx 2005, 156–7). Eckl's main thrust was directed against those ‘professional historians’ who advanced the ‘genocide thesis’ to serve their own career interests20 – an assertion that attests to a singularly myopic idea about the workings of the still largely conservative German historical guild or of German academia more generally. Instead of clinging to notions set forth by ‘external’ academics, Eckl called for taking into account ‘African’ viewpoints and more down-to-earth sources. It emerged that the ‘African’ voices he had in mind were mainly the ‘settler historians’ (Eckl) active in Namibia, pursuing their denialist project by amassing detailed information without actually tackling the long-established evidence in context (see especially Schneider-Waterberg 2005). In particular, Eckl singled out historians Jan-Bart Gewald and Jürgen Zimmerer for allegedly having manipulated sources to suit the ‘genocide thesis’. Yet he left open the kind of information that had been withheld, for example, by elision from source citations, which after all is standard practice in scholarly texts. Eckl's own contribution so far consists mainly in the edition of two diaries by German participants in the South-West African campaign of 1904–5, those of a field medical doctor and a lieutenant who was later to become chief of the Nazi Colonial Office (Eckl 2005). In his introduction to this volume, Eckl abstained from the usual practice and did not offer an editorial reflection, nor did he contextualise his sources or explain what they had to say on the genocide issue: instead he reiterated his attacks on Gewald and Zimmerer (see more extensively, Kössler 2005c). One important feature of Eckl's volume, continuing the preoccupation with sheer facticity21 and supposedly genuine materials, is his apparent belief, not substantiated in his introduction, that the field diaries could tell us about the strategy the commanding officers followed in Namibia but which was in fact decided upon in Berlin (Hillebrecht 2007, 84–7). Eckl as well as his acolytes have not found it necessary to reflect upon the basic question to be addressed at any source (or about any information): what it can tell us in its context. This failure in scholarly procedure may well be seen as indicative of their main preoccupation, to ‘disprove’ genocide.

In a recent review article, Jakob Zollmann commends Eckl for having broadened a ‘thinly exploited source base’ (Zollmann 2007, 121) – a recurrent claim that can only rest on a very selective reading of existing work. It ignores the extensive source base specifically of Drechsler (1980) and implies that Drechsler used no more than the South African Blue Book (Hillebrecht 2007, 86). The files of the colonial administration or Von Trotha's correspondence with his superiors which Drechsler has used can indeed tell us a lot about administrative design and also of military strategy and thus about their intentions. However, this cannot seriously be expected from diaries soldiers kept in the field. Zollmann (2007), 123) and others seem to suppose that ‘a far broader and inclusive usage of the available sources makes sense’, yet they eschew any reflection about what these sources can actually be expected to tell us. This uncritical approach is carried as far as insulting serious scholars. In reflecting on the source value of soldiers’ diaries, Gesine Krüger notes the difference between the ‘extent of the destruction which the army and thus also the soldiers had to account for’ and ‘the “subjective” side of the war’ concerning ‘the question whether individual soldiers were aware of what they were doing or what they considered their task to be’ (Krüger 1999, 71). Zollmann (2007), 123) takes the liberty of inferring from this that Krüger had been under ‘substantial pressure to justify her approach’, disregarding her painstaking effort to critique Brigitte Lau's stand on the genocide question while (as Hillebrecht notes) recognising ‘Lau's plea for a change of paradigm from colonial history to African history’.22 Zollmann's reasoning may reflect Brigitte Lau's impression of ‘group terror’ imposed by ‘West Germans on the Namibian discourse’.23 More importantly, however, his argument betrays a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of historical sources. After all, these do not convey objective facts in the sense that the more of them one throws on a heap the better: rather, they are reflections of specific social situations that need to be assessed. Verification of sources is a basic task of any serious historian.

A further corollary in distinguishing between the high command, the army and the individual soldier is the insight that ‘genocide does not need human killing machines to be effective: willing or even reluctant compliance is enough’ and therefore, ‘nobody has ever pictured “German soldiers” as collective “plotters” of genocide’. The plotters are to be sought among the ‘military and civil command’.24 Soldiers’ diaries, recording everyday events and feelings (including the negative ones of frustration and deprivation) cannot tell us any more about war plans than can the anguished testimonies by Ovaherero fleeing through the sandveld that have been transmitted orally over the decades (Alnaes 1989) – or indeed the rabid diatribes in soldiers’ letters quoted in the German press at the time and stating for instance, that ‘the Herero … must all be put down [müssen alle dran glauben]’ (quoted in Sobich 2006, 108).

In an intervention published in Swakopmund, Freiburg-based Africanist Till Philippe Koltermann actually sees merit in Eckl's neglecting to contextualise his edited sources. He argues that ‘the grown-up reader, conversant with the matter at hand, would be entrusted with interpreting in an unprejudiced way, responsible only to himself’ (Koltermann 2006, 33). One wonders what use there is for metre upon metre of books on hermeneutical methodology. On the other hand, Koltermann inadvertedly attests to the blinkered vision of the ‘autodidactic historians’ he seems to champion (Koltermann 2006, 25) by discussing works on the long-term trajectory and resilience of Herero society such as Krüger (1999) or Gewald (1999) exclusively in relation to the war of 1904–5 and the genocide issue. Again, this preoccupation with mustering proof against the acknowledgement of genocide is evident from Koltermann's insistence that the diaries edited by Eckl do not extol Von Trotha's strategy (although he even quotes approving references to ‘annihilation’ or ‘Herero mass killing’, Koltermann 2006, 37, 38), while he disregards, at the same time, the numerous letters by Von Trotha, or the ensuing debate in the Reichstag (Sobich 2006, 104). He is fixed on seeing the so-called Extermination Order as a ruse in psychological warfare, to bolster up the morale of the demoralised Schutztruppe. One wonders what the representatives of the Rhenish Missionary Society in Germany who were frantically lobbying the government to stop the carnage had to complain about, and indeed, what the intra-governmental debate was concerned with. When Koltermann bemoans the lack of additional sources, therefore, this amounts to a clear immunisation strategy since he disregards pertinent sources and facts that have been known at least since the works of Bley and Drechsler.

Despite its severe shortcomings as a scholarly work, Eckl's publication was eagerly seized upon in various quarters. Apparently it was used by one of the grand old men of German colonial historiography, Horst Gründer, to disparage Jürgen Zimmerer's work when the latter had claimed that a prime time TV series on the German colonies, along with an accompanying book (Graichen and Gründer 2005), had ‘reintegrate[d] colonialism as a positively valued epoch of national history’ (Zimmerer 2005b). In his rejoinder, Gründer alluded to allegedly dubious use of sources by Zimmerer, without giving details but clearly referring to Eckl. Gründer also joined the apologetic crowd by claiming that Von Trotha's proclamation had been revoked ‘when it became known in Berlin’, without mentioning the internal debate and the actual endorsement of Von Trotha's intentions by Von Schlieffen (Gründer 2005). Almost simultaneously, Gründer substantiated Zimmerer's charge when, in a public debate in Berlin about the Maji Maji war, he was pressed on the issue of genocide and went on record saying it was time to shed ‘whininess, larmoyency and the penitential robe’, since everywhere in history, modernisation also exacted social cost (Wegmann 2005). This boosted the idea that a major drive for re-evaluating colonialism was under way, clearly alluding to the ‘final stroke’ that would end critical engagement with state crimes of the past. Gründer thus also chimed in with initiatives in France to re-evaluate colonialism by pointing to its supposedly civilising effects.

Eckl's efforts were also gladly taken up by revisionist quarters in Namibia (Schneider-Waterberg 2005, 11–2). It is hard to imagine that Eckl did not concur with this effect, given the following clear statement: ‘Whoever speaks of a German genocide perpetrated by Von Trotha and the German Schutztruppe, commits a collective damnation which necessarily must provoke objection above all by the Namibia-Germans’ (Eckl 2005, 40). This is a clear reference to the discourse on ‘collective guilt’, fictitiously (Frei 2005) assigned to Germans at large in the wake of the Holocaust, and employed ever since by revisionist circles to divert from the real problem: that is not about ‘guilt’ but historic responsibility. Here one has to take into account particularly that up to now the German state pointedly claims to be the legal successor of both the Wilhelminian and the Third Reich.25 In any case, if Eckl and others object to being pictured as ‘reactionaries waving the German Imperial flag’ (Zollmann 2007, 124), they certainly have done little to prevent those who explicitly do so – or even refer to black-white-and-red in its other, still more despicable form – to enlist their support.

What amounts to an apologetic, denialist thrust is carried forward especially by Zollmann (2007, 112–20) by the further ruse of conflating very diverse arguments. Among them are connection of the statement that genocide took place in Namibia in 1904–8, however mediated, to the Holocaust (Kössler 2005a) and the idea of a ‘causal chain’ on a supposedly straight path from ‘Windhoek to Auschwitz’ (as assailed by Kundrus 2004 and 2005). This particular argument is bogus anyway, since nobody has claimed such a straight causal connection. In the hands of denialists, such conflation serves in the end to negate the genocide and the Holocaust along with it. However, by constantly railing against this purely fictitious ‘equation’ of the genocide in Namibia with the Holocaust (also Kundrus 2004), one seems to gain an argumentative edge, which allows for further sloppy reading, for example when Zollmann blames the present author for ‘stressing structural parallels between German colonialism and National Socialism’ (Zollmann 2007, 111), where the argument had in fact been for further research into discursive breaks occasioned by the broad publicity of the genocide in Germany in 1904–7, as a part of the rise of German radical nationalism (Kössler 2005a; Eley 1978, 1986, 1990). A similar line of thought, more predicated on the haphazard manner in which the Nazis arrived at their final solution has been suggested in an early critique (one of the finest) of Lau's article (Dedering 1993, 83). Unwillingness or inability to see the difference between such arguments attests to a myopic fixation that can no longer be addressed in scholarly argument but would instead form a subject of analysis as a social fact.

As a further back-up to his claim that the entire concern about genocide was a sort of foreign, ‘Eurocentric’ imposition, Eckl asserted that this term was of ‘no use whatsoever for Namibian historiography’ (Eckl 2005, 16). He thus links up with the Africanist concern that was at the source of Brigitte Lau's intervention in 1989 (Lau 1995b, 39f, on which Hillebrecht 2007, 75–9). At the time of the conference that Eckl addressed, he could have seen people wearing T-shirts or cars adorned with posters in the streets of Windhoek, all referring to the genocide. One might even say that such reference was incorporated into the collective identity of large groups of the Herero community at that time. The mass turnout at the memorial events in 2004, and especially for the central one at Ohamakari on 14 August 2004, plus later developments attest to this concern. The same can be said of the rousing speech by leading Herero intellectual Zedekia Ngavirue on that occasion to a crowd persevering in the moonlight after a long and exciting day. It would be hard to deny ‘Dr Zed's’ claim to being a Namibian historian, and that he has addressed both the interrelationship between fierce African resistance against colonialism and the ‘reign of terror’ particularly of Von Trotha (Ngavirue 1997, 115–24). Another instance is Peter Katjavivi's brief account of the ‘1904–7 war of resistance’ (1988: 8–11). One proponent of Eckl's position inadvertently cites the prominent Swapo politician Theo-Ben Gurirab and Herero Paramount Chief Kuaima Riruako (Zollmann 2007, 117). While they may not consider themselves historians (although they may well lay claim to an essentialist grasp of ‘history’), they certainly represent relevant perspectives and sentiments in Namibian society. These points just prove again the truism that in Namibia as anywhere else – and among Namibians maybe more than some others – history is a contested terrain.

At the same time, the modalities in which history is articulated are also outflows and expressions of both of the divisions persisting in Namibian society and of the great disparity in various groups’ capacities to make their voices heard. German speakers, as a particularly affluent and well-organised, tightly knit group, are at a clear advantage here (Kössler 2005b, 65–8). It is their concerns that Eckl is primarily advocating, when he calls on ‘academic historiography’ to ‘create a precondition for reconciliation and mutual respect’ rather than to deepen ‘the rifts between the current posterity of the colonists and the colonised of yore’. Apparently such respect, in Eckl's view, has to address first and foremost the quest for ‘the location of one's own self … which is constitutive for the historiography of German-speaking Namibians’ and thus help further the ‘overcoming (Bewältigung) of the consequences of colonialism today and the creation of “normal” relationships between the various population groups in contemporary Namibia’ (Kössler 2005b, 41). Far from a quest for objectivity, Eckl's aim apparently is to let bygones be bygones if the facts appear too offensive to one of the groups involved; this is how he would restore ‘normality’. Any observer in Namibia or reader of its press can see, the opposite is actually the case. As mentioned, the violent colonial past is present in people's minds, and reconciliation cannot be reached by decreed silence, least of all when such decrees emanate from the position of the perpetrators.26

Commemoration and half an apology

The quest of Ovaherero, but increasingly of other groups as well, to claim adequate recognition for the mass crimes visited upon their ancestors and still present in their minds, forms a constant point of reference for revisionists. This has triggered another, quite different dynamic of interaction between memory practice and related politics both in Namibia and Germany. Here one must note the obvious asymmetry in public interest these matters command in both countries. There can be little doubt that Germany remains persistently more important to Namibia than Namibia to Germany. As shown regularly by the coverage in both countries of major events concerning their relationship: What makes headlines in Namibia, sometimes for several days, may hardly even be mentioned in the German press.

An important reason for this, besides the purely numerical proportions of 2 against 80 million, is the fact that there is next to no postcolonial presence in Germany today. Rather, awareness of Germany as a postcolonial society, in the limited ways in which such awareness exists, hinges on the activities of mostly locally active, nationally networked civil society initiatives27 and (in the case of southern Africa) on those of the surviving organisations of the broad anti-apartheid movement.28 Nevertheless, the centenary year of 2004 saw considerable activity (Zeller 2005a) which also made a limited impact on formal politics. The main effect was that the Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development attended the commemoration at Ohamakari on August 14 and in an emotional speech offered an apology in terms of the Lords Prayer.29 This move was unexpected given official German government policy then30 and it made a big impression in Namibia and arguably marked a turning point in the official German policy at least in verbally conceding the fact of genocide. Yet later developments reveal a much more ambivalent picture.

Minister Wieczorek-Zeul's intervention may be seen as a point of no return after decades when successive (West) German governments of various parties were carefully skirting the issue and in particular the word ‘genocide’ about the colonial war in Namibia. She courageously broke that spell. However, it later transpired that there was little plan or strategy behind her courageous act. Surprisingly, there also seemed to be little awareness of the consequences of admitting responsibility for such a mass crime against humanity. Still, it soon emerged that the minister did not see a need for compensation or reparation after such an apology. This demand had been at the centre of the campaign of at least one important group of Ovaherero headed by Paramount Chief Kuaima Riruako who claims to represent the vast majority; and the law suit filed by this group against the German state and a number of companies in the US contributed greatly to such publicity as the issue could muster. In this way, the issue of reparations had been closely connected to that of apology for quite some time (Böhlke-Itzen 2004).

It was therefore an indication of a quite unilateral approach when the Minister attended the opening session of a conference in Bremen in November 2004 where a large Herero delegation was present, and announced her own plan that day in the local newspaper for a reconciliation initiative, complete with the incumbent mayor of Bremen (a German federal state) as the intended chairman (Weser-Kurier, 19.11.2004). One Omuherero present commented that it would be up to those asking for forgiveness or offering an apology to listen in the first place and not prescribe follow-up procedure.31 This is evidently the traditional Herero way of reconciliation, based on reaching an agreement about the compensation required for the transgression (Hinz and Patemann 2006). Further German government actions and specifically Wieczorek-Zeul's role was also marked by a unilateral approach. In May 2005 when the minister, together with Namibian Bishop Zephania Kameeta, was given a prize for her reconciliation work, she elaborated on her reconciliation initiative and announced that _20 million would be disbursed over a period of 10 years to support the communities in Namibia that had suffered from ‘what today is rightly termed genocide’.32 Besides the obvious discrepancy between this sum and the _2 billion demanded in the court cases against the German government and private firms, one main objection by a number of Herero spokespersons was again that the announcement had been made without due consultation with the various stakeholders (see, for example, The Namibian, 27.5.2005). In late 2005 the initiative reached an impasse, stuck between countervailing interests of the Namibian government and regional communities, and with inept handling on the German side (Zeller 2005b). During 2006 a modicum of consultation – evaluated in very diverse ways by various stakeholders – was set into motion in Namibia with the participation of Deputy Prime Minister Libertine Amathila. After an agreement had been signed, a tender was published for a consulting firm actually administering the programme, once again stirring concern as to whether this could satisfy the needs and concerns of the affected communities.

Parallel to this long drawn-out process, there was a new departure connected to the realignment of German party politics, particularly on the left, after the federal elections in September 2005. The new Left Party which was eventually founded formally in June 2007, already formed a parliamentary faction after the elections. Together with some individual and civil society actors, the Left deputy Hüseyin Aydin began preparations for a parliamentary initiative for a formal apology for the genocide, along with an adequate process of compensation. Aydin also travelled to Namibia and spoke at Herero Day in Okahandja in 2006, besides meeting a number of politicians and traditional leaders. In his statement, Aydin noted that ‘the Federal Republic of Germany, as the legal successor of the Imperial Reich, has not lived up to her responsibility towards the surviving victims of the genocide and their posterity’. In his view, former initiatives such as Bundestag resolutions of 1990 and 2004 had skirted the issue of genocide and were therefore inadequate. Wieczorek-Zeul's ‘brave speech’ at Ohamakari had not been followed up by adequate political action. Thus, Aydin saw the lawsuit filed by the Herero People's Reparations Corporation as beneficial in alerting the German public.33

Aydin's motion, launched within the framework of the Left parliamentary party, took more than another eight months to reach the floor of the Bundestag. This is also indicative of the difficult processes that were involved in reaching a consensus even within that group. One of the topics of in-depth discussion seems to have concerned old-standing loyalties to Swapo (the South-West African People's Organisation, styled Swapo Party since independence) who, while in exile, had received sustained support in East Germany. The apparent divergence of the initiative with the stance taken by the Swapo government at the time seems to have troubled some old stalwarts.34 Meanwhile, however, the political situation in Namibia began to change, arguably impressed by Aydin's visit which was broadly reported in the Namibian media.

Even though the Left Party in Germany is far from wielding an effective direct influence on official policy, this was the first time that an elected German office-holder had come out squarely not only in acknowledgement of the genocide, but for reparations or compensation of some kind as a necessary consequence. Further, it now seemed the Bundestag would at least debate the issue, even though at the time of writing, chances remain slim that the motion will be adopted. This development in Germany may have contributed to some movement within the ruling party in Namibia. A further thrust probably came from the renewal of demands by the Ovaherero/Ovambanderu Council for Dialogue on the 1904 Genocide, a group that in contradistinction to Riruako's Genocide Trust tends to side more with SWAPO. Still, immediately before the tabling of a motion in the Namibian National Assembly to support the demand for apology and reparations, the whole campaign, especially from Riruako's side seemed somewhat in limbo, having lost the first momentum it had gained largely from the string of events in 2004 (Matundu-Tjiparuro 2006). To the surprise of many, during the debate of Riruako's motion in the National Assembly, Swapo's Secretary-General Ngarikutuke Tjiriange came out in support and argued: ‘This is a right of the Namibian people and Government recognises it as such and on the other side it is a wrong the German people and (their) Government are expected to accept and admit’. Tjiriange also said that ‘we should demand from the German government – in this case [it] is very simple: reparation for the 1904–1906 Herero Genocide’ (The Namibian, 29.9.2006). As the government-financed Windhoek paper noted, ‘Although Tjiriange claimed [to spe ak] on a personal level, it was the first time that a senior member of the ruling party had expressed himself so strongly on the issue’ and stressed that all Namibians were concerned, not just one ethnic group (New Era, 2.10.2006). The motion was carried unanimously by the National Assembly with its overwhelming Swapo majority (The Namibian, 27.10.2006).

At the level of public pronouncements at least, this was a sea change. It in turn gave additional momentum to the endeavours of Aydin and others in the Left Party, as became apparent in a public seminar held in Berlin in preparation for the motion in mid-October.35

It is precisely in these variegated endeavours that problems of a different calibre have come to the fore, connected with conceptualising the genocide as well as Namibian history and avenues for reconciliation. First, what happened in Namibia in 1904–8 was not just one confrontation resulting in genocide committed by the colonial power, but rather a series of interlinked wars with changing actors, at any rate on the side of the colonised. This involved the Bondelswarts rising in late 1903 that according to some readings provided strategic opportunities for Ovaherero in January 1904 by tying down most of the colonial army on the southern fringe of the country. Again, many large Nama groups, while fulfilling their treaty obligation to render military service until after the Ohamakari battle, started their own campaigns in early October 1904 (Kriegsgesch. Abt. 1907, 186). They were the target of Von Trotha's second proclamation of April 1905. Members of all these groups underwent ‘murder by deliberate neglect’ in the concentration camps (Zimmerer 2008, 60). Quite a few were deported to other German colonies. After the official close of the war, they all were subject to the Native Ordinances.

As has been mentioned, resilience and redefinition of communal life referred, in various forms, to these catastrophic experiences. Remaking the Ovaherero nexuses entailed having to consolidate their translocal identification as ‘Herero’ but this was much less the case among Nama.36 The Damara, prodded by the South African authorities, actually constituted themselves as a ‘people’ only after 1945.37 The San, affected by virtual manhunts in the late 1910s (Gordon 1992, 77–85), have hardly any organisational expression of a common identity. Here we must recall that apart from their very diverse historical trajectories, groups and communities articulate concerns to very unequal degrees. Thus, while divided among themselves over party allegiance as well as the issue of legitimacy of the paramountcy, Ovaherero were still in a better position than other groups to move into joint action. True, their initiatives during the 1990s to approach German authorities were rebuffed on the visits of the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, and then the German President, Roman Herzog: but these moves, as well as the turn to legal action as a consequence of these experiences, may also be seen in this light. Again, particularly during the centennial commemorations in 2004, there was a clear tendency to compete for a monopoly of victim status by the Ovaherero, denying that other groups also suffered genocide (Melber 2005a).

Yet other groups have begun organising themselves, following the commemorations and possibly also the high profile claimed by some Ovaherero, together with the ongoing debate on reconciliation and reparations. In early 2005, the Damara Cultural and Heritage Forum was formed to rectify the marginal position of Damara as well as others and the pre-eminence of Ovaherero during the commemoration in the preceding year, pointing to the disappearance of more than 17,000 people between 1904 and 1907. Thus, Chief Gaseb stated: ‘We want the dialogue to be a national event. It must not be limited to the Herero people only. People in the North and South must also reveal their part in the war. They have a history’ (The Namibian, 26.1.2005). The president of the group, Rosa Namises, explained: ‘The genocide made us to lose our humanity, it alienated us from our culture, where today our younger generation are completely new people with a modern mindset and culture’ (New Era, 15.4. 2005). The call for reparations was again raised at the Damara Day in November 2006.38 Earlier in October 2006, representatives of nine Nama traditional authorities met in Windhoek and issued a statement calling for recognition of the genocide committed against their people during the Nama–German war, for a ‘meaningful dialogue’ with the German government and for decisive action by the Namibian government to identify human bones that had been found near Lüderitz in late 2006 and that are likely to belong to victims of the concentration camp on Shark Island in the harbour of the southern town (The Namibian, 19.10.2006). This was followed up by a large memorial ceremony to mark the centenary of the death of Chief Cornelius Frederick as one of the thousands of victims on Shark Island.39 Such initiatives may also be related to a more outspoken stance on the fate of the Nama during the colonial wars (Jacobs 2006), and efforts to move toward more unity among Nama and southern leaders (New Era, 24.4.2007).

Arguably, these new developments in Namibia40 were helped along by the public change of mind of the ruling party in Namibia, as expressed by passing the parliamentary motion tabled by Riruako. In turn, the change of the official line of the Namibian government then helped to back up the proponents of the motion for apology and reparation within the Left Party faction in the Bundestag. Thus, the motion notes that ‘neither in legal nor in moral terms, genocide gets time-barred’ and calls for ‘the opening of a dialogue on material redress’. It welcomes the resolution of the Namibian National Assembly and suggests that the Bundestag take up this appeal. To live up to ‘historical responsibility’, it calls on the German government to notify their Namibian counterparts of the readiness of the German side to enter into ‘open dialogue … involving the concerned ethnic groups’, and to enlist German companies who profited from forced labour and expropriations in Namibia to contribute towards indemnification. Further, the creation of a memorial foundation is proposed, to pay for a youth exchange and to disseminate knowledge about German colonialism in Namibia. The motion was finally tabled and given a first reading on 13 June, 2007. For the first time, the issue of genocide – studiously avoided in former debates and resolutions – was discussed by the German parliament in plenary session. Predictably, attendance was low, and coverage by the national press was next to nonexistent. Still, in clear difference from a debate almost three years earlier, the parliamentarians of the Grand Coalition did name the genocide as genocide, and the speaker for the Social Democrats even mentioned the resolution of the Namibian National Assembly. In this way, there was a change of atmosphere, even though no change of policy could be expected from the further parliamentary process.

Much more remarkable things happened on the Namibian side, besides the predictably broad press coverage. Herero Paramount Kuaima Riruako who had come to Berlin for the occasion, held a press conference jointly with the Namibian Ambassador Peter Katjavivi who stated that ‘Namibia welcomed that the matter is being discussed at the heart of German democracy’. However, he ‘observed that because of the importance of the subject matter, it might have been more beneficial if the motion was brought before the Bundestag on an all-party basis’. Katjavivi argued further ‘that because of Namibia's colonial history, the genocide is a matter that affects everybody and touches all the Namibian people’. He added ‘that it was the duty of the Namibian government to help facilitate a process that contributes to reconciliation and harmony firstly among the Namibians themselves, and secondly with its partners such as the Federal Republic of Germany’ (New Era, 15.6.2007). In the Allgemeine Zeitung the current editor welcomed the debate, expressing his thinly veiled expectation that the motion would be thrown out and linked this perspective to the hope that once Germany had taken a ‘clear stance on the whole complex of issues’ this would set the course for the future and put a final end to the debate (Fischer 2007). In this way, the ‘final stroke’ motive was again brought to the fore: and this time, the writer at least was frank in displaying little concern for Namibians to be left by themselves to debate their history. Since there are other forces at work both in Namibia and Germany, and given the recent dynamics in Namibia, it seems unlikely that his wish will be fulfilled.

Even if the parliamentary process reaches fruition at some stage, possibly in actually bringing together a joint motion by the factions as suggested by Katjavivi as well as hinted at by some speakers in th e Bundestag, the quest for a formal dialogue remains a difficult one. Not least, it would have to solve a lot of tricky questions to do with the role of non-state actors within the framework of inter-governmental negotiations. After all, this will only mean that the preconditions for the actual exchange of views would at last be in place.

The kind of barriers to be overcome emerged at a function at the Goethe Centre in Windhoek in November 2006 when the speaker, a Omuherero expert on Herero culture, before beginning her talk registered her dismay at what she called the latest insult from Germany: after many years of campaigning, citizens in Munich had at last secured a decision by the city council to change the name of the local Von Trotha Street to ‘Herero Street’ (The Namibian, 9.10.2006). The speaker's chagrin hinged on the disrespect she saw in the fact that in Otjiherero the new street name should properly be Ovaherero Street, referring to the plural form denoting people. The predominantly German-speaking audience was surprised or irritated. My later discussions, mainly with Nama-speaking friends, added to my own surprise. They all agreed that this form of renaming had been wrong, and to resolve possible linguistic problems with the correct prefix in Otjiherero, thought that such a question should properly be referred to the elders.

Note on contributor

Reinhart Kössler is an adjunct professor of sociology at the University of Münster and works at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, Freiburg, Germany. His main interests are in the sociology and theory of development, social theory, culture and the politics of work, ethnicity and memory politics, the latter two focused largely on southern Africa. Recent books include Understanding change: Methods, methodologies and metaphors (ed. with Andreas Wimmer 2006) and In search of survival and dignity: Two traditional communities in southern Namibia under South African rule (2005/6). His email address is [email protected].

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the AEGIS European Conference on African Studies, ‘African alternatives: Initiative and creativity beyond current constraints’ 11-14 July 2007 in Leiden, The Netherlands. I would like to thank Heiko Wegmann for a critical reading as well as two anonymous reviewers for JCAS for their helpful comments. This contribution forms part of a larger research undertaking within the composite research and capacity building project ‘Reconciliation and social conflict in the aftermath of large-scale violence in Southern Africa: The cases of Angola and Namibia’ which is based at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, Freiburg and funded by the Programme Knowledge for Tomorrow of the VW Foundation.

Notes

1. As set forth in concepts linked to ‘weak constructivism’, the reconstruction of historical processes does not imply that this is a totally voluntaristic intellectual endeavour, independent of actual facticity. However, as will become clear in the text, facts cannot be represented without interpretation.

2. On this term, see Kössler (2007).

3. http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/convention/text.htm, Art. 2, (a) and (c) (6.6.07); with specific reference to Namibia, see also Krüger (1999, 67–8).

4. The book is still available for local and tourist consumption in Namibia: Frenssen (2002).

5. See www.koloniale-spuren.de.

6. Krüger (1999, 216); see also Kössler (2006a, 247–54; 2008).

7. The festival did not take place in 2006 but has been resumed in 2007.

8. PLUS, 23.9.2005, documented on: www.de.altermedia.info/general/%20der-makel-der-woche-politische-korrektheid-am-ende-der-welt-300905_3768.html (1 July 2007) and www.at.nntp2http.com/gesellschaft/politik/2005/09/e0a5fdb56e5370bba87d138de115c613.html; significantly, both the advertisement and the ensuing ‘apology’ are not available on the journal's website www.namibiaplus.com/. Thanks to Joachim Zeller, Berlin for support.

9. www.de.altermedia.info/general/knallt-das-monstrum-auf-die-titelseite-streit-um-einen-nachruf-in-afrika-290905_3766.html; also www.de.altermedia.info/general/der-makel-dieser-woche-politische-korrektheit-am-ende-der-welt-300905_3768; www.wno.org/newpages/his26b.html.

10. See Weber 1904, 180–1. I lack the space here to spell out my own position, except to say that I have doubts about a neat division along Weber's lines but see him as a good guide towards clarity about what one is doing in particular situations. The subject matter treated here makes a neat separation particularly difficult, since the debate is charged, not only with emotion, but with strong and historically grounded normative convictions (‘value ideas’) that inform emotions, as they do scholarly endeavour.

11. Significantly, none of the adherents of her article on ‘Uncertain Certainties’ – which is more or less cannibalised on right-wing German websites that clearly expose their ulterior motives (Hillebrecht 2007, 73) – has bothered to deal with the opening piece of the slim volume, her scathing refutation of the apologetic view, epitomised by the revered settler patriarch Heinrich Vedder, that German rule brought order to a supposedly chaotic country (Lau 1995a).

12. On which see Böhlke-Itzen and Zeller (2006).

13. www.forumromanum.de/member/forum/forum.php?action=std_show&entryid=1096528025&USER=user_21216&threadid=2&onsearch=1.

14. www.deutsche-schutzgebiete.de; http://www.traditionsverband.de; http://www.jaduland.de/kolonien.

15. www.deutsche-schutzgebiete.de/deutsche-kolonien.htm. (This website, catering to a wide range of interests in Wilhelminian nostalgia, would warrant a separate analysis.)

16. SED – Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, ruling party of the German Democratic Republic.

17. See Kössler (2005a), Kundrus (2005) and Zollmann (2007), in his criticism of recent interventions, significantly leaves out this later contribution by Kundrus, relying solely on Kundrus (2004).

18. cf. www.nordbruch.org/englisch.html.

19. Note that earlier denialist literature on which current interventions, and especially Lau's, are largely based (see Hillebrecht 2007, 84–8) simply claims that ‘Berlin’ had refused ‘consent’ to the ‘doubtlessly unedifying Trotha proclamation’ (Sudholt 1975, 190, based on an item in a Windhoek newspaper!), or that it was ‘never realized’ (Poewe 1985, 66). Both rely on an undocumented talk of Sudholt with an eyewitness Dr Carl Frey (Sudholt 1975, 189) to play down the meaning of the proclamation as a device of ‘psychological warfare’. On this complex, see also Dedering (1993, 83–6).

20. Eckl 2004; similar sentiments can be found in the internet forum quoted above.

21. The German quip of Faktenhuberei applies.

22. Hillebrecht (2007, 75). Hillebrecht has assembled the citations: Krüger (1999, 12–15, 67, 71–72, 129–130).

23. Hillebrecht (2007, 74), quoting a private letter.

24. Hillebrecht (2007, 76, 89); this insight dovetails with lines of research on the Holocaust pursued for some time, see the paradigmatic study by Browning (1992) and more generally, on the banality of large-scale violence, see Foster et al. (2005); such lines of thought also subvert any ‘collective guilt’ argument, see below.

25. Obviously this also refers to a further dimension in the predicament of Südwesters defining themselves vis-à-vis (present-day) Germany.

26. Of course, people today are neither victims nor perpetrators in any strict sense, which is one reason why ‘collective guilt’ is not a valid proposition. However, people do relate to the positions of victims and perpetrators, also in the sense that they carry trauma on the one hand and responsibility on the other.

27. At present, such initiatives are active for instance in Berlin, Cologne, Freiburg, Göttingen, Hamburg and Hanover.

28. Such as Informationsstelle Südliches Afrika (ISSA) e.V., Bonn and Koordination Südliches Afrika (KOSA), Bielefeld.

29. cf. www.inwent.org/E+Z/content/archive-eng/10-2004/stud_art3.html

30. For detailed background, see Kössler 2006b.

31. Uazuvara Katjivena, personal observation, at the occasion; the newspaper article apparently did not come to the attention of the Namibians present at the time.

32. Speech by Minister Wieczorek-Zeul, www.bmz.de/de/presse/reden/ministerin/rede20050524.html; in the ensuing drawn-out process, the period was reduced to five years.

33. Hüseyin Aydin, MdB, Rede am Herero-Tag in Okahandja (Namibia), 27 August 2006, as disseminated via email; see also New Era (Windhoek) 31.8.2006; also The Namibian, 1.9.2006.

34. Personal observation, Seminar ‘Deutsche Kolonialverbrechen: Wie kann Wiedergutmachung für die Herero und Nama aussehen?’, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Berlin 13–14 October 2006, on which see: www.freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/Rez-Linke-Seminar-Namibia2006.htm.

35. See note 34.

36. A similar observation is made, for the ‘wars of resistance’, by Ngavirue 1997, 121–4.

37. See inter alia materials on the National Archives of Namibia: Box LOM 3/2/12: N1/15/5 District Administration. Conferences Part I: 1-1-45 to 17-1949.

38. Personal observation, Okombahe 10.11.2006.

39. New Era, 19.2.2007; the claim that Cornelius Frederick was beheaded and his head brought to Germany, reported in these newspaper articles, does not stand up to historical scrutiny (email communication, Casper Erichsen, 20.2.2007), although this did happen quite frequently in other cases.

40. The instances mentioned should be seen as typifying an ongoing process, so I am not attempting to update the text which relates mainly to the position of mid-2007.