The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  The colonial empire had a considerable hold over the national imagination - no doubt also motivated by a will to compensate for the traumatic loss of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. The popular French politician Léon Gambetta even seriously speculated about exchanging the regions for some French colonies. But what was the real importance of the colonies? Were they as crucial for the national economy as they were for national pride? Certainly not. For a start, France did not have a population surplus that could be made to settle the colonies, a major motivation for Britain and Germany, where it was hoped that if sufficient workers could be made to emigrate, the constant spectre of social unrest could be held at bay. With a population kept stable only by immigration into the Hexagone, a policy of settling foreign territories was meaningless for France. Economically, the French Congo was exploited almost as ruthlessly as the Free State next door, and there was exchange with Tunisia and Algeria (especially imports of cheap wine into France) and with Indochina, but nothing on the scale of Britain’s trade with her colonies.

  For Germany the possession of a colonial empire was simply a question of keeping up with the neighbours, an exercise in global power politics with no economic significance. Among the ruling classes the colonies were a source of considerable national pride, but even here enthusiasm for a German empire was far from unanimous. There was support from the conservatives, most importantly from the powerful Flottenverein (Fleet Association) pressing for a large navy and therefore also a more important international and colonial role, but the impeccably conservative Reich Chancellor Bismarck regarded the whole idea as a costly folly and did everything he could to prevent it, until political expediency made him a convert to the colonial idea in 1884. The socialists were split on the issue: the majority opposed it on humanitarian grounds, while a minority was in favour, hoping that it would help ‘civilize’ the natives and thus make them potential socialists themselves, and that the inevitable oppression in the colonies would hasten the world revolution.

  Despite the symbolic importance of the empire, it counted for little in political life. Walter Rathenau, then an industrialist trying to break into politics, won his spurs in 1907-8 by travelling to German South West Africa on a fact-finding mission. He made it clear, though, that the post of colonial secretary was not sufficiently interesting for him; he wanted an ‘important’ ministry. Baroness von Spitzemberg, that unfailing chronicler of the political elite at the Berlin court, wrote at length in her diary about the Russo-Japanese War, relations with the great powers, the meltdown of the Ottoman empire, and the Morocco crisis. The colonies are mentioned only in passing; the only sentence devoted to them between 1900 and her death in 1914 is one of exasperated criticism: ‘How wrong the German way of colonization is, which immediately introduces our bureaucracy and our authoritarianism ... the English leave much more individual freedom.’

  Among the populace at large the colonies had even less cultural presence. Greengrocers’ shops selling exotic fruit were called Kolonialwarenläden

  (Colonial Wares Stores) until far into the twentieth century, but there was almost no popular or middle-class cultural expression of the colonial pride the government sought to instil, and very few Germans had ever visited the colonies. Germany’s colonial power was praised in school books, but essays were set on European themes - Siegfried or Thucydides were much more likely to make a schoolboy sweat than exploits in German South West Africa. One example from 1900: the inventory of essay topics, books for the school library and practical exhibits received during one year by a Berlin secondary school contains no reference of any essay, map, book or specimen that was specifically colonial. The furthest afield these pupils were led was ancient Greece.

  By contrast with the French, very little serious German literature was devoted to colonial themes. There were successful novels about the empire, especially after the 1904 uprising. Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest (Peter Moor’s Journey to South West Africa) by the former priest Gustaf Frenssen (1863-1945) even became a runaway bestseller, with 200,000 copies sold before 1914. Despite the presence of colonial images in literature, other exotic locations were more popular with adventure writers, particularly Karl May, who created worlds of intrepid explorers, noble natives and cruel bandits for millions of young readers; his settings, however, were almost exclusively the Middle East and the American Wild West. Boys played with toy soldiers, but their leaden enemies were French or Russian or ‘Red Indians’, not African. Children were dressed in sailor suits, not khaki. The colonies were almost absent not only from their rooms, but from the drawing rooms as well. Very few people worked in the colonial administration or in army units abroad, and if contemporary novels and newspapers can be believed, the colonies were hardly ever the subject of conversation. If Germany had become a colonial empire, that fact had made little impression on public consciousness.

  Why was this so? Perhaps the notoriously unstable sense of national identity that had been modified yet again by the foundation of the empire in 1870 left little room for new definitions. Perhaps, also, the fact that most of Germany was landlocked and had historically been occupied fighting off invasions, rather than invading others, may have had something to do with it. Empires were for maritime nations such as Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal and France. Powers such as Austria-Hungary and Russia, whose access to the oceans was compromised by foreign-controlled Gibraltar and Suez for the former and by ice for the latter, made no serious attempts to establish a colonial empire.

  Economic reasons were never at the heart of Germany’s colonial policy, and the critics were right to point out that the colonies and the immense expansion of the German navy lost the country money and set it on a dangerous collision course with the overseas interests of Britain and France. The Kaiser was attached to the colonial idea for reasons of prestige. To be a major power, one simply had to have colonies - a perception which also led Italy to pour millions into the sands of Libya in search of national glory in 1911.

  Imperialist culture and orientalist imagination are not the same. The latter was a significant part of European culture around 1900. Its function, though, was not so much to represent imperialism, as to provide an escape from the dizzying speed of modern life. The Orient was projected as being everything the Occident was not. Men lusted after the supposed sexual freedom symbolized by the ‘ethnographic’ photos of nude African girls (as well as the occasional boy) and their descriptions in literature - sensual, naive, but vibrating with energy and endowed with lips like ripe fruits, just like Loti’s beloved Aziyadé - promised pleasures that bourgeois marriages rarely offered; indeed, the popular repertoire of images such as the strong but animalistic negro, the all-enduring Asian and the sexually potent Arab with his harems and endlessly available women symbolized the very life force which many thought was dying in the West. The fascination with the Orient was also a fascination with a sensual world of ‘natural’ and strong emotions, of an erotic paradise untouched by the withering hand of the Church, or the perversion of the big city.

  There was another strong attraction to the world of Orientalism. Its sense of timelessness, the mirages of deserts, of tropical forests and remote plateaus (which, as Conan Doyle imagined, might harbour entire prehistoric worlds of dinosaurs and dragons), and of ancient cities in which ancestral customs governed the lives of fatalistic inhabitants, was the very antithesis to the driven, technological lives that modern cities forced on their own denizens. Even opium and hashish, the drugs imported from this enticing world, promised the sweet embrace of forgetfulness and a few moments of bliss outside of time and space. If speed was the poison of modernity, the Orient was its antidote.

  One of the artists who felt this connection was the great Russian poet and novelist Andrei Bely. The protagonist of his novel Petersburg, Nikolai Apollonovich, the son of a rationalist senior civil servant whose greatest ambition it is to transverse the Nevsky Prospect ‘at maximum speed’ every day in his carriage, has
opted out of the hectic life of modernity at a young age. Having abandoned his studies he now rises late, wears a dressing gown from Bukhara (in Uzbekistan, Russian Central Asia), a little skull cap and Persian slippers and has transformed his salon into an Orientalist stage set:

  the Bukhara dressing gown was continued by a stool in dark brown tones; it was embellished by intarsia made of fine strips of ebony and mother of pearl; the dressing gown was continued by the negro shield manufactured of the thick leather of a rhino killed at some point and by the rusty Sudan arrow ... and finally the dressing gown was continued by the colourful leopard fur, stretched out at their feet with gaping mouth; on the stool were arranged a dark blue water pipe and a three-legged incense burner in the form of a crescent; but the most amazing object was a colourful cage in which small green parrots fluttered their wings every now and then.

  Beautiful, proud, and

  bristling with virile force:

  Ludwig Deutsch’s Nubian

  Guard, a fine specimen of

  Orientalist art.

  As in Loti’s house in France, all continents, all Orientalist tropes are jumbled together in this room, a cell of resistance against the tyranny of modernity. The Orientalist imagination thrived on these fantasies, even if the realities of life away from industrial civilization bore no resemblance to these scenarios of sweltering seduction. Important to politicians as symbols of power and prestige (but certainly not as sources of profit), the colonies also mattered because they carried the promise of a different life.

  This gap between perception and the reality of the colonial empires is most cruelly striking in the case of the Belgian Congo. As they marvelled at tribal masks and newly built museums, the Belgians could read in the newspapers about the good that was done in Africa in the name of the country’s mission civilisatrice. The reality behind this carefully maintained screen, however, was not only horrifying, its secret balance sheets tilt the whole wicked operation towards the grotesque. Hugely profitable for the short while during which Leopold effectively held a world monopoly on the rubber trade, the Congo Free State made the King an immensely rich man, but the business of murder on a gigantic scale also created its overheads. The Belgian historian Jean Stengers has estimated that up to 1908 the Congo yielded a profit of some 60 million francs to Leopold, with a further 24 million after the handover to Belgium. Administration, defence and transport, however, cost King and country some 210 million altogether, a net loss of 126 million francs.

  If the human cost of Leopold’s regime was unspeakable, it is not inestimable. Without accurate population statistics, it is impossible to determine exactly how many people were murdered in the Congo Free State, but a mosaic of sources has given historians a good idea of scale. According to the change in population patterns, the reports and estimate of missionaries about the people in their areas, and recent historical analyses it is probable that between 1885 and 1908 more than 10 million people (more than those killed during the First World War) were either murdered directly by Leopold’s henchmen, or died as a consequence of famine and disease as they were prevented from cultivating crops or attending to their animals, driven out of their homes, or left to starve in hostage camps or in the jungle.

  Even with its unprecedented ruthlessness, the exploitation of the Belgian Congo was profitable only for a few short years. If Leopold managed to make a killing - in both senses of the word - out of his colony it was simply because he pocketed the profits directly and passed on both his debts and the bulk of the administrative cost to his country, in return for which he graced streets from Brussels to Bruges with ostentatious and self-aggrandizing building projects. Leopold had murdered in the Congo and stolen from the Belgians, to whom he left a landscape gratefully commemorating a great monarch. Many of the statues are still standing today.

  Neither Edmund D. Morel nor Roger Casement was to have monuments erected in his name, and neither died a peaceful death. Morel, one of the ‘few people whom I could deeply admire’, according to the philosopher Bertrand Russell, fought for pacifism and was almost universally vilified by the press. Finally he was incarcerated in Pentonville Prison, where he was held in solitary confinement and made to sew mailbags during the day in total silence in 1917. When he was released he was physically broken, but continued working, eventually becoming an MP in Britain’s first Labour government.

  ‘The best thing was the

  Congo’, Roger Casement,

  hero and traitor.

  Knighted in recognition of his services, Sir Roger Casement became increasingly involved in Irish nationalism. He travelled to the United States to collect funds from Irish-Americans for the purchase of black market firearms to be used in an anti-British insurrection and then took a steamer from New York to Germany to make an offer to the Kaiser’s government: in exchange for support for Irish independence, Casement proposed forming a brigade of Irish freedom fighters from prisoners of war held by Germany, a unit that would battle on the Germans’ side. On his return to Ireland he was arrested and brought to London, where he was held in the Tower.

  Friends and supporters swiftly organized a campaign for Casement’s defence; among those giving money or writing appeals for clemency were the United States Negro Fellowship League and the writers Arthur Conan Doyle and George Bernard Shaw. After the trial and the guilty verdict against Casement, all efforts to commute his death sentence into life imprisonment were quickly and discreetly scotched by the police, who made sure that influential figures in Parliament and in London’s clubland were shown the incriminating (and often very explicit) entries about homosexual encounters in Casement’s diaries, which had been found during house searches following his arrest. Treason, it seems, was a grave offence, but to be a homosexual was unforgivable. The appeals for clemency were rejected.

  Sir Roger Casement was hanged in Pentonville Prison (in which Morel would serve his sentence only a year later) on the morning of 3 August 1916. A few days before his execution he wrote to a friend: ‘I have made awful mistakes, and did heaps of things wrong and failed at much - but ... the best thing was the Congo.’

  6

  1905: In All Fury

  —The storm! Soon will break the storm!

  The bold storm finch proudly flies between the

  lightning and the frothing anger of the sea;

  now screams the prophet of victory:

  Let the storm burst forth in all fury!

  - Maksim Gorky, The Song of the Storm Finch

  On the morning of Sunday 9 January 1905, one of those clear, mild winter days on which St Petersburg looks at her most serene, Sergei Yulevich Witte, a tall man of fifty-five years, got out of bed and stepped to the window of his grand apartment to look out onto the boulevard. ‘I ... saw a crowd of workers, intelligenty, women, and children marching along Kamenno-Ostrovskii Prospekt, carrying church banners, pictures and flags,’ he wrote. ‘As soon as this crowd, or, rather, procession, passed by, I went to my balcony, from which I could see Troitskii Bridge, toward which they were marching. I got to the balcony just in time to hear shots, a few of which whizzed close by. One of these killed a porter at nearby Tsarskoe Selo Lycée. Then came a series of salvoes. Within ten minutes a large crowd came running back, some of them carrying dead and wounded, among them children.’

  The people who had assembled for the procession, countless masses, perhaps a hundred thousand strong, had been in a festive mood and dressed in their Sunday best as they set out to the Winter Palace to see their Little Father, the Tsar. They were singing religious hymns. Some had fasted and prayed the night before. Others, less optimistically, had written farewell letters and even made their wills. This day was going to be important in the history of Russia, an unprecedented act of love and loyalty: a people asking its sovereign directly to hear them in their need. They had prepared a petition to give to their Tsar. ‘We workers and residents of the city of St Petersburg ... have come to Thee, Sire, to seek justice and protection,’ the document read. ‘We hav
e become beggars; we are oppressed and burdened by labour beyond our strength; we are humiliated; we are regarded, not as human beings, but as slaves who must endure their bitter fate in silence …’ The Tsar, these workers thought, had no idea of their hardship. He must be told, and then he would set about punishing the capitalists, the bureaucrats, and all oppressors of the Russian people. They would go as adoring people to ‘cry out their sorrows on his shoulder’, carrying with them their holy icons and their hopes. ‘Save Thy People, O Lord,’ they sang, their breath forming steam in the cool air. People on the roadside crossed themselves; the church bells tolled.

  The different columns converging on the Winter Palace were soon faced with roadblocks on all major thoroughfares: at Mytninskaya, on the Neva Embankment (close to where Witte stood watching); on Vasilevskii Island. When the main procession reached the magnificent beaten copper façade of the Narva Gate, built to commemorate Napoleon’s defeat, a squadron of mounted Life Guard Grenadiers charged the crowd with sabres drawn and retreated again. An infantry regiment was taking aim beside a small bridge on the left. There was a moment of silence after the first confusion. The demonstrators joined hands and sang louder. They were massed around an orthodox priest in his long cassock, a young, charismatic man. Then the bugle sounded, the signal to fire. A police officer shouted: ‘What are you doing? How can you shoot at a holy pilgrimage holding the portrait of the Tsar?’ He was one of the first to fall. All around the priest his companions collapsed under the hail of bullets. Icons and banners clattered into the dirty snow. Then the crowd fled.