The Kaiser's Holocaust

by Casper Erichsen

  The aspect of imperialism that perhaps most enthralled the European public during the last quarter of the nineteenth century was the discovery of strange tribes and exotic cultures. This was magnified enormously when it became possible for millions of Europeans to see these exotic races themselves. In the last years of the century, an age in which European cities vied with each other for status and entrepreneurs sought out new ways of entertaining vast captive urban audiences, individuals from the colonial world (and even the Arctic Circle) were brought to Europe to appear as living exhibits.

  Supposedly untouched by science and unburdened by culture, such peoples clearly occupied positions lower down the chain of being, but they were pure and unpolluted, in a way that held enormous appeal to the populations of industrial London, Paris and Berlin. In Germany they were known as the Naturvolk – the natural people – and were viewed as fragile specimens of races very possibly doomed to extinction in the not too distant future. Just as Europe’s ethnographers rushed to salvage the artefacts and record the cultures of the tribes unearthed by imperial expansion, the urban public clamoured to see representatives of the ‘dying races’.

  In Germany the people of the new Weltstädte (world cities) could encounter the Naturvolk in the popular Völkerschauen (people shows). Some took place in circuses or even zoos, others in the ever-popular panopticons (see-alls). Specialists like Carl Hagenbeck, who had made his fortune trapping and exporting exotic animals and is considered by many to be the father of the zoo, supplied living specimens of the exotic races to the panopticons. Human exhibits displayed in Germany in the late nineteenth century included people from Sudan, North America, the Pacific Islands, Somalia and Lapland. Today, when a stroll through most European or American cities involves encounters with members of most of the races of the earth, the appeal of the nineteenth-century Völkerschauen is difficult to understand, but in the racially monotone Europe of the nineteenth century they were a sensation.

  The more established Völkerschauen sought to maintain a semblance of respectability and distinguished themselves from the backstreet freak shows by evoking the legitimacy of science. Before German race scientists began to travel to the colonies themselves, the Völkerschauen offered them access to a steady stream of human subjects, to examine and measure. The proprietors of the Völkerschauen could then assure their audiences that their living exhibits had been authenticated by men of science. They could even claim that their shows, in some small way, were contributing to scientific progress.

  In the summer of 1896 an event took place that was to eclipse all the traditional German Völkerschauen and offer German race scientists an unprecedented opportunity to advance their studies. The Berlin Colonial Show was a joint venture between the government’s Colonial Department and the Colonial Society, whose patron was Kaiser Wilhelm’s close friend the Prince von Hohenlohe. With both royal patronage and state support, it was destined to be a spectacular affair, but what made it a true sensation was that more than one hundred colonial subjects from across the whole of the German colonial Empire were recruited for the event.4

  It was envisaged as a human zoo placed in the very heart of the empire. There, all the races over whom the Kaiser claimed dominion could be viewed in their natural and primitive state. The ‘exhibits’ were to be housed with a series of specially built and ethnologically authentic native villages within an enclosure in Berlin’s Treptow Park. According to an official report, the event ‘transplanted a piece of natural savagery and raw culture to the centre of a proud and glamorous metropolis, with its refined morals and fashion-conscious people’.5 It was both an official celebration of Germany’s new empire and a chance for the Berlin bourgeoisie to revel in the sheer excitement of their nation’s colonial adventure.

  The men of the German Colonial Department had other motives. They had deliberately encouraged the local administrations in the colonies to recruit from the ruling elites of each territory. They considered the Colonial Show an opportunity to demonstrate the might of Germany to the human exhibits. The British had done much the same thing in the 1880s, when they organised a tour of Britain for Cetshwayo, the exiled King of the Zulus, whose forces had defeated a British army at the battle of Isandlwana. British colonial officials had taken Cetshwayo to the Woolwich Arsenal to see guns being forged and to the seaports of southern England where the ships of the Royal Navy stretched out to sea for miles. For the same reasons, the leaders and future leaders of Germany’s potentially rebellious tribes were taken on specially arranged tours of Berlin, a city described by a visitor as one ‘massive barrack’ in which the air, said another, ‘stinks of [gun] powder’.

  But as the ‘natives’ brought to Berlin were from the local elites, they also tended to be from the most Westernised sections of the colonial populations. They were often from families who had been in contact with Europeans for decades, who had skilfully exploited those contacts to establish their position. Most had long been exposed to the missionaries and some were devout Christians who wore European dress. Many of them had little to do with the indigenous cultures they were now expected to enact in Treptow Park. At least one group had to be shown how to construct the traditional huts they were to live in. Another, that included members of the dominant family from the Dula peoples of Cameroon, were utterly unwilling to perform any of the supposedly traditional ceremonies that the organisers assured them were essential aspects of their own culture. It was, however, the contingent from German South-West Africa who challenged official expectations most profoundly.

  Even before they had left the colony, a clash of wills between the German organisers and the South-West Africans had begun. The Herero and Witbooi Nama refused even to embark for Germany until a formal contract had been signed with Governor Theodor Leutwein. When they finally arrived at Hamburg, it was clear that the racial expectations of the German public and the proud independence of the South-West Africans were completely at odds. Most of the Herero and all of the Witbooi men wore European-style military uniforms, bandoliers and side arms. The Witbooi wore hats with the characteristic white bandanas. Those in civilian clothes wore European suits, revealing that they were just as ‘fashion-conscious’ as the people of Berlin. The women wore bodiced dresses with puffed sleeves and fashionable floral patterns. They were evidently not the ‘pieces of natural savagery’ described in the official report.

  Friedrich Maharero, the son of Samuel Maharero and grandson of Chief Tjamuaha, was particularly well attired, in a fashionable black felt blazer, crisp white shirt and colourful silk bowtie. Like the other Herero he was tall, young and strikingly handsome. Yet it was not merely the clothes of the South-West Africans that shocked the organisers: the decision to recruit only from the local elites meant that the ‘exhibits’ were educated and accustomed to being treated with respect. Petrus Jod, the nephew of Hendrik Witbooi, was a particularly profound challenge to German racial expectations: he was a schoolteacher who spoke eloquent High Dutch and carried a copy of the Bible at all times.

  When the Herero and Nama arrived in Berlin, officials demanded they abandon their Western clothes and dress in more ‘genuine’ attire. They were especially disturbed by the fact that the South-West Africans and many of the Cameroonian men wore trousers, which they believed would undermine the authenticity of the entire Colonial Show. When German ethnographers supplied them with ‘authentic’ African clothes, they refused to wear them. The devout Petrus Jod argued that it would be against his Christian beliefs to wear what he called ‘heathen clothing’. As the spread of the Gospels was one of the supposed achievements of German colonialism, none of the organisers could come up with an effective counter argument, so Petrus and the others remained in neat Victorian suits – including the trousers. Similarly, the Herero kept their hats and Boer-style military uniforms.

  Despite lacking in ‘authenticity’, the Herero and Witbooi were the high point of the exhibition when it opened. The official purpose of the show was to expose the unbridgeable gap b
etween savage and cultured peoples, but Friedrich Maharero, Petrus Jod and their colleagues seemed living proof of how successfully the chasm had been bridged. The gentlemen and ladies of Berlin, whose notions of what Africans looked like and how they might behave had been gleaned from the turgid prose of the explorers, peered intently across a barrier at human exhibits who wore identical suits, starched white shirts and fashionable summer dresses. These ‘savages’ sat peacefully reading their Bibles or stared back at them. Some members of the South-West African delegation, such as the Herero Josephat Kamatoto, could not only speak Dutch but were also fluent in German and could converse, across the fence, with the visitors who had come to marvel at the primitive habits of their African subjects.

  To the utter horror of the organisers, the dapper dress, good looks (and one presumes the conversational skills) of the young African men from the south-west began to attract attention from the women of Berlin. The twenty-two-year-old Friedrich Maharero, in particular, found himself the focus of much attention and began to flirt shamelessly. Worse still, the women flirted back. Years after the show, when Friedrich was back in South-West Africa, love letters from his Berlin admirers continued to arrive in the colony. They were intercepted and confiscated by the missionaries and Friedrich never received his fan mail.

  The men behind the Berlin Colonial Show had been determined that the country’s leading race scientists should take a key role in the event. In 1896 racial science in Germany was dominated by physical anthropology. In Berlin, perhaps the most distinguished anthropologist was the Deputy Director of the Berlin Museum of Ethnography, Professor Felix von Luschan.

  Professor von Luschan was a leading proponent of the dubious anthropological ‘science’ of phrenology – the study of the human skull. Phrenology was widely believed to offer a means by which the characteristics and mental abilities of the individual could be determined by the examination and measurement of the external shape of their skull. Early phrenologists focused on criminals in an attempt to define the typical dimensions and appearance of the ‘criminal type’ – sometimes referred to as the ‘criminal race’. Von Luschan used similar measurements to determine the abilities and characteristics of whole races. His studies had led him to acquire one of Germany’s largest collections of human skulls.

  The Colonial Show brought to Berlin 103 members of the various races of the empire. It was such a rare opportunity to advance his work that von Luschan willingly made do with living specimens, and with the full cooperation of the organising committee he was given permission to conduct anthropological examinations upon the ‘exhibits’.

  Each morning the professor, accompanied by his wife and a gaggle of eager students, left industrial, urban Berlin and embarked upon a daily anthropological safari, amid the fake African villages clustered around the fishponds in Treptow Park. The progress of von Luschan’s urban safaris was not without obstacles, however. When working with living subjects, anthropologists and phrenologists measured various facial features ranging from the length of noses to the angles of the jaw line. For the subjects, these examinations were uncomfortable and degrading. Among the Africans and Pacific Islanders of the Colonial Show there was a palpable lack of enthusiasm and many outright refusals.

  For a man whose normal contact with non-Europeans involved taking measurements of their skeletons, it was a shock for von Luschan to come face to face with Africans who were very much alive and often completely unwilling to submit to his demands. Several of the ‘exhibits’ refused to allow von Luschan and his students to strip them of their clothes, measure their bodies or even photograph them in the supposedly traditional costumes they had refused to wear.

  The most disturbing aspect of his encounters with the human exhibits was that their demeanour, independence and level of education represented a profound challenge to the racial theories that underpinned the professor’s work. When he met the representatives of the Herero and Witbooi peoples, von Luschan was extremely agitated by the experience. Rather than question his racial presumptions, von Luschan dismissed these particular Herero and Witbooi as exceptions. He stated in the official report, produced to commemorate the Colonial Show, ‘I doubt that all Hereros make such a thoroughly distinguished impression and have such a gentleman-like appearance as those we have seen here in Treptow.’6 Only when he was permitted to examine Vitje Bank, a thirty-year-old Witbooi woman, was normal service restored for Felix von Luschan. Clearly recovered from his earlier shocks he described her as a bushman-like dwarf of ‘a not inconsiderable imbecility’.7

  Back in Treptow Park, the behaviour of the Africans continued to diverge from the expectations of the organisers. The show was a farce. By day the organisers struggled to maintain an air of authenticity, cajoling the human exhibits to occupy themselves making supposedly traditional handicrafts or preparing authentic food. But by night those same Africans sat by fires, drinking and singing the German folk songs they had learned as youths, and as the temperature dropped they slipped back into their warm European clothing.8 This scene of conviviality, hidden away in a closed park in the dead of night, was a far more accur ate reflection of the way many of the peoples of Germany’s empire lived than anything seen during opening hours. Yet each morning the European clothes and empty bottles were hidden away and, after von Luschan had negotiated for his callipers and slide rules to be fixed to a few more unwilling heads, the public were allowed back into the park, and the fantasy version of colonial life began once again.

  The highlight of each day for the Berlin audiences (though clearly not for the ‘exhibits’) was the cultural performance. The exhibition organisers noted with pride that ‘whenever dance routines were carried out by the blacks, the ring of spectators grew massively, so that the officials had difficulties keeping order’.9 The South-West African delegation refused to take part in the cultural performances, just as they had refused to abandon their clothes or submit to anatomical examinations. The best the organisers were able to achieve was to persuade them to pose grudgingly in front of their makeshift village.

  Had he attended the Berlin Colonial Show, Theodor Leutwein would not have been surprised by the refusal of Friedrich Maharero and his colleagues to submit to the demands of their German hosts. Leutwein’s long-term strategy was rooted in his firm appreciation of their strident independence. Yet in the autumn of 1896, as the mock African villages in Treptow Park were dismantled and the Nama and Herero delegations steamed home, a plague was sweeping south across their continent. The pestilence was the first in a series of calamities to befall the Herero (and, to a lesser extent, the Nama), which allowed the Germans to slowly undermine the defiant independence of the Africans that had so impressed the Berlin crowds.

  Rinderpest was the term the Boers had given to a highly infectious virus that was fatal to cattle. The British called the disease ‘Steppe Muraine’ or, more literally, ‘cattle plague’. The most deadly strains of the Rinderpest are capable of entirely wiping out infected herds. The virus first arrived in Africa in the late 1880s, possibly carried by Indian cattle imported into Eritrea by the Italian colonialists. By the mid-1890s it had become a continental pandemic. First, the horn of Africa was devastated, then, as the pestilence swept down through Eastern and Central Africa, the Masai of Kenya suffered catastrophic losses. In 1895 reports from German East Africa indicated that some herds had been reduced to only 10 percent of their original number. Across Africa the missionaries evoked fiery passages from the Old Testament to explain the apocalypse. Some warned their congregations that the pestilence was the work of a wrathful God, angered by their continued devotion to heathen practices.

  Throughout 1896 the Rinderpest inched its way towards the borders of South-West Africa, and in April 1897 news reached Windhoek of the first infections within the colony.10 The Herero, owners of the largest herds, had the most to lose. There are no precise figures, but the German Commissioner for Settlement later estimated that half of the entire Herero herd, perhaps thirty thousand cattle, p
erished within the first six months. By the end of the epidemic the missionaries were reporting that some Herero communities had lost 95 percent of their livestock. The scene on the central plateau in the last months of 1897 was apocalyptical. Thousands of putrefying animal corpses were littered across the landscape. Unable to gather enough wood to build pyres, the Herero attempted to bury the carcasses. In some places the internment of such a vast number of decaying animal bodies led to the contamination of ground water and the poisoning of the precious wells.

  With only a fraction of their animals still alive, thousands of ordinary Herero were suddenly destitute. As committed pastoralists they had few crops to fall back on and little experience of agriculture. Their traditional diet was based almost entirely upon milk and meat, and very quickly they began to suffer from malnutrition. In desperation whole communities were forced to abandon their settlements and ancestral lands. While still reeling from the calamity of the Rinderpest, the Herero were visited by a series of subsequent plagues. In the spring and summer of 1898 epidemics of both typhoid fever and malaria swept through their territories. Thousands who had been weakened by the effects of malnutrition now succumbed. The same year their lands were devastated by a plague of locusts that consumed the crops the Herero had desperately planted in the hope of sustaining themselves while their herds slowly recovered. The plague of locusts was followed by a severe drought that withered the remaining crops and killed off yet more of their cattle.

  The first indication of how the calamities of the late 1890s were to change the relationship between the Herero and the Germans was the arrival of thousands of impoverished Herero at the European settlements and the mission stations, places they had until now avoided. In the immediate aftermath of the Rinderpest, the missionaries reported a sharp rise in conversions as traumatised Herero abandoned their culture, along with their homes. Huddled around the mission stations, they appealed to the charity of the German missionaries and called for the protection of a new god. Others, who believed their land to be cursed, took the last of their cattle and crossed into the British territory of Bechuanaland in search of new pastures and a chance to rebuild their stocks of cattle.