Colonial Genocide: The Herero and Nama War (1904–8) in German South West Africa and Its Significance

Contextualising colonial violence: Causality, continuity and the Holocaust

“…Although the Sonderweg is generally considered an obsolete perspective (Winkler, 2006), which is no longer applies to German history, it re‐emerged around the turn of the millennium as a ‘colonial Sonderweg ’ with the surge of new literature on German colonialism, particularly concerning GSWA (Fitzpatrick, 2008). Some of the most proponent advocates for the colonial Sonderweg, such as Jürgen Zimmerer have advocated a ‘From Windhuk to Auschwitz’ narrative (rather than the original Sonderweg 's ‘From Bismarck to Hitler’ narrative) where parallels, continuity or even causality to the Holocaust have been claimed (Zimmerer, 2005, 2011). For some, the genocide of the Herero and Nama constituted the first ‘break’ with taboo, which further rationalised and allowed for mass exterminations that culminated in the Holocaust (Erichsen & Olusoga, 2010; Madley, 2005; Sarkin, 2010).…”

The Trophy and The Appeal: Colonial Photography and the Ghosts of Witnessing in German Southwest Africa

“…A shadowy mass of threatening Hereros approach in the distance. 58 The lack of white women in the colony, much less the lack of violence against white women in the colony, necessitated caricature over photographic documentation. The fictional, savage, and predatory African men are in stark contrast to the often-chained or starving, very human African men in the colonial albums.…”

Archive of Darkness: William Kentridge'sBlack Box/Chambre Noire

“…For instance, German diplomatic demands that Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide have instigated retorts from the Turkish government demanding German acknowledgment of the Herero genocide (Zimmerer 2016). Genocides committed in the Age of Empire are subject to political negotiations between successor nation-states that may favor national "forgetting," but historians working on the Herero genocide have established that Namibian and German pasts are intricately entangled and acknowledge that its commemoration, too, is interdependent (Kössler 2008(Kössler :314, 2015Zimmerer 2008;Eckert 2016; see the bibliography in for more extensive discussion in German). To demonstrate such entanglement of history and memory, the archival documentation required is of course not to be found in a single archive.…”