Skandal in Togo. Ein Kapitel deutscher Kolonialherrschaft

Intimacy, comradeship and everyday police violence: the rape of Sophie M. in German South West Africa in 1910

“…The rape of Sophie Meritz had nothing spectacular to it. No political scandal, no public outrage accompanied it (Habermas 2016;Schmidt 2014). It was also not deployed as a direct means of coercing her or her family into hard labour (Hunt 2008;Mertens 2016), nor was it used as a weapon of war.…”

“…What her particular testimony reveals is the broad spectrum of possible sexual relations that occurred between colonizers and colonizedranging from consensual sex, through concubinage and prostitution, to rapein this case condensed in one single statement. Despite evidential difficulties, scholarship has firmly established by now that sexual relationships between white men and indigenous women were the norm, not the exception, within the German colonies (Brockmeyer 2021;Habermas 2016;Hartmann 2003) and elsewhere. 4 Yet, at the turn of the twentieth century, these relationships, in particular the so-called Mischehen (mixed marriages), came increasingly under scrutiny from multiple sides (notably missionaries, doctors, scientists and colonial officials), for they threatened notions of racial order and public health, as well as Christian, bourgeois morality (Aitken 2007: 95-145;El-Tayeb 2005;Kundrus 2014;Lindner 2009;Walther 2015;Wildenthal 2001: 79-130).…”

Geschlecht als Erfahrung

“…The notion of gender that is predominantly used in the social sciences, for example, has its origin in the analysis of bourgeois-capitalist societies; it is thus a core instance of knowledge hegemonies and the related problem of the translatability of experience. Postcolonial feminists and theorists have dismantled gender as a colonial category of knowledge accordingly (Lugones , 2008Patil 2017); among other things, they have revealed the constitutive function of bourgeois notions of femininity, motherhood, and domesticity for the self-affirmation of Europeans as civilized people (Comaroff/Comaroff 2002;Dietrich 2007;Habermas 2016). Researching experiences of gender is therefore not unproblematic.…”