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.
The Herero’s cattle were not only a source of sustenance, but also an economic commodity. Cattle were the currency of the south-west and the engine of the Herero economy: the commodity with which they bartered for horses, rifles, ammunition and many of the luxuries and necessities of daily life. The herds that the Herero ushered across the central plateau had been an enormous reservoir of wealth, which had permitted the Herero to remain independent of the Germans and their colonial economy. Under Samuel Maharero’s leadership the Herero had been forced into a series of compromising treaties with the Germans, and Governor Leutwein had managed to interfere egregiously in tribal affairs, but few Herero had submitted to working for the German administration or labouring on the farms of the white settlers. In late 1897, the unprecedented sight of Herero men and women doing precisely this sharply illustrated the enormity of their plight. In some of the worst-hit areas, Herero women went into service in the homes of settlers, while their men laboured for the Schutztruppe, helping to construct the network of forts and garrison houses the Germans were busy developing throughout the late 1890s.
Although many of the poorer Herero had no choice but to work for the Germans during the Rinderpest epidemic, most were able to return to their homes and their traditional ways of life as their herds began to recover. But the Rinderpest had given both the missionaries and the colonial authorities a tantalising glimpse of how the colony might be developed, if only the Herero could be induced to abandon their land altogether, sell off their cattle and become the labouring underclass of the whites. Moreover, the temporary poverty of the Herero permitted the Germans to alter the map of Hereroland permanently.
For centuries the Herero had owned their lands in common. Their chiefs had traditionally not considered their pastures a form of property that could be sold or bought. As the Rinderpest cut swathes through their herds, saddling the ruling elite with considerable debts, the chiefs were increasingly pressured by German traders to settle their accounts through the sale of land. Samuel Maharero had broken the taboo of selling land some years earlier, but the bulk of the land sold before the Rinderpest was south of Okahandja. Samuel had disposed of this land in the hope that the Germans who settled there would act as a buffer against the Witbooi, whose own territory lay to the south. The land sales conducted during the Rinderpest epidemic were of a different order. To pay their debts the chiefs sold tracts that were not only prime grazing land, but also in the heart of Hereroland. Although it was not apparent amid the turmoil and misery of the late 1890s, the sale of land was the most serious long-term consequence of the Rinderpest, as it allowed the Germans their first real foothold in Hereroland itself.
Although the amounts of land transferred to German ownership during the Rinderpest were relatively small, German ambition was great. Prevailing opinion, among both the settlers in Windhoek and the colonial societies in Berlin, considered the Rinderpest a unique opportunity for Germany to accelerate the settlement of German South-West Africa. Even Leutwein abandoned his caution and saw the Rinderpest as a chance to speed up the transfer of land from African to German hands.
However, the moment the epidemic subsided the Herero dashed the dreams of many settlers by abruptly ending the sale of their remaining cattle. Seeking to regenerate their herds, they rejected the offers of the traders, many of whom were in fact would-be settlers seeking to acquire enough livestock to establish a ranch. In their frustration the traders began to engage in unscrupulous practices: ludicrously exaggerating the value of their goods, demanding cattle in payment, and valuing the Herero and Nama’s livestock at about half their real worth. Officially Theodor Leutwein condemned such practices, but he did little to stop them, accepting that the long-term settlement of South-West Africa was predicated on the transfer of cattle to the whites.
The colonial authorities themselves grasped the opportunities presented by the impoverishment of the Herero to try to establish themselves as the arbitrators of land in the colony. In the years immediately following the epidemic, the prospect of eventually forcing the Herero off the land and into native reserves was discussed as a realistic future prospect.
By the end of the 1890s the position of the Germans in South-West Africa was undoubtedly stronger than it had been in 1896, the year of the Berlin Colonial Show. Not only had the settlers established their presence in Hereroland, the Schutztruppe guarding them had been enormously strengthened. Of the 780 whites reported as residents of Windhoek in the colonial census of 1896, six hundred were soldiers. The army had also expanded its network of fortresses and garrison stations, establishing outposts across Hereroland and the Nama territories in the south.
Although the accelerated pace of German colonial penetration during the 1890s caused flashes of excitement in the settler bars of Windhoek and the colonial societies of Berlin, when examined from a distance progress was modest. Not only did the Herero withstand the Rinderpest, typhus and malaria epidemics, and hold the line against further German encroachments on their land, they were also able to rebuild their herds and their wealth. At the dawn of the twentieth century Windhoek and the other white settlements were like base-camps from which the colonisation of the territory might theoretically be attempted at some future date. South-West Africa remained largely in the hands of the Africans. What was questionable in the year 1900 was not the resilience of the Africans in the face of colonial encroachment, but Germany’s long-term commitment to the task of forging a viable colony in the southern African deserts.
Notes – 6 ‘A Piece of Natural Savagery’
1. J. C. G. Röhl, From Bismarck to Hitler: Problems and Perspectives in History (London: Longmans, 1970), p. 61.
2. R. d’O. Butler, The Roots of National Socialism, 1783–1933 (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), p. 193.
3. Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis, A History of Berlin (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 228.
4. Graf von Schweinitz et al, Deutschland und seine Kolonien im Jahre 1896: Amtlicher Bericht ueber die Erste deutsche Kolonial-Ausstellung (Berlin: Verlag von Dietrich Reimer, 1897); G. Meinerke (ed.), Deutsche Kolonialzeitung: Organ der Deutschen Kollonialgesellschaft, Compendium, vol. 9 (Berlin: Verlag der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft, 1896); Felix von Luschan, Beitraege zur Voelkerkunde der deutschen Schutzgebiete: Erweiterte Sonderausgabe aus dem ‘Amtlichen Bericht ueber die erste deutsche Kolonial-Ausstellung’ in Treptow 1896 (Berlin: Verlag von Dietrich Reimer, 1897); J. Zeller, ‘Friedrich Maharero: Ein Herero in Berlin’, in U. Van der Heyde and J. Zeller, Kolonial metropole Berlin (Berlin: Berlin Edition, 2002), pp. 206–11.
5. Schweinitz, Deutschland und seine Kolonien, p. 25.
6. Luschan, Beitraege zur Voelkerkunde, p. 221.
7. Ibid.
8. A. Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 27.
9. Schweinitz, Deutschland und seine Kolonien, p. 63.
10. J. Gewald, Herero Heroes (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), p. 112; H. Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1986), pp. 88–119; N. Waterberg, Mossolow (Windhoek: John Meinert (Pty) Ltd, 1993).
King of the Huns
By the start of the twentieth century the old vision of colonialism, built on the notion of the ‘white man’s burden’ and a belief in t
he moral duty to spread the Gospel, had, in certain circles, come to be regarded as unscientific, sentimental and inexcusably old-fashioned. Although there had always been disagreement as to how far the dark races of the world might be ‘raised up’, most colonialists had agreed that as long as the ‘natives’ accepted their subordination passively, they had a critical role to play in the colonial project. This was a world view steeped in a form of eighteenth-century racial paternalism that had emerged from the latter stages of the great political struggle over transatlantic slavery. In opposing slavery the abolitionist movements had asserted that black Africans – and by implication all other natives races – were possessed of divine souls and were therefore both ‘men and brothers’.
A palpable shift away from these views had begun in the 1850s, and by the time Africa was subdivided among the powers of Europe in the 1880s the old racism was being severely challenged by a biological view of race. The clinical clarity of the new ‘biological racism’ was used to explain away as inevitable (and even desirable) genocidal episodes – such as the extermination of the Tasmanian Aboriginals by British colonists in the 1820s and 1830s – that only decades earlier had been considered lament able tragedies.
It was an event in Asia, rather than Africa, that most graphically demonstrated how deeply the notion of ‘racial war’ had seeped into the mindset of Wilhelmian Germany and the views of Kaiser Wilhelm II himself. In 1900 the Kaiser dispatched a force of German soldiers to China, as part of an eight-nation alliance whose mission was to put down the Boxer Rebellion. The vast majority of those killed by the rebels of the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fist – known to Europeans as the Boxers – were Chinese Christians. However, European newspapers focused on the violent deaths of a small number of Europeans. The German justification for joining the inter national coalition was that during the initial rebellion the German legation had been stormed and the envoy, Klemens von Ketterler, had been killed. The Kaiser interpreted von Ketterler’s death as a personal affront, and in one of his characteristic fits of rage demanded, ‘Peking must be razed to the ground.’1
On the morning of 27 July 1900 the German contingent of the international force was assembled in neat lines at the harbour side in Bremerhaven ready to embark for China. On a specially built podium the Kaiser, for once out of the reach of his minders and advisers, was free to speak his own mind. Possibly improvising or deviating from a prepared speech, Wilhelm issued a command to his troops which so shocked his advisers that they immediately arrested all reporters present and confiscated their notebooks. A lone correspondent, who had been sitting on a rooftop alongside his photographer, was able to slip away and report the Kaiser’s speech.
Wilhelm began by warning his soldiers of the brutality of the Boxer rebels, but then went on to instruct them to ignore all the standard conventions of warfare: ‘When you come before the enemy, let him be struck down; there will be no mercy, prisoners will not be taken. Just as the Huns one thousand years ago … made a name for themselves in which their greatness still resounds, so let the name of Germany be known in China in such a way that a Chinese will never dare even to look askance at a German.’2
When the German contingent under the command of Alfred von Waldersee (a close friend of the Kaiser) arrived in October 1900, the Chinese Empress Dowager had already been captured and a siege of the Forbidden City brought to an end. Undaunted and determined to grab the headlines, Waldersee organised a series of punitive expeditions. Although never seriously opposed, the Germans massacred thousands of innocent Chinese peasants. When the letters of soldiers serving in China were leaked to left-wing newspapers, the brutality of the German raids was reported in the German press. One soldier wrote to his family: ‘You cannot imagine what is going on here [in China] … everything that stands in our way is destroyed: men, women, children. Oh, how the women scream. But, the Kaiser’s orders were: no pardon will be granted. We have sworn to uphold our oath.’3
The reputation the German army acquired in China in 1900, and the Kaiser’s ridiculous speech at Bremerhaven, gave rise to the derogatory term ‘Hun’ for the Germans during World War I.
In 1900 Kaiser Wilhelm clearly had little difficulty envisaging the conflict in China as a racial war in which the normal rules of war did not apply. Five years later, writing to US President Theodore Roosevelt, Wilhelm revealed his deep conviction that a Darwinian confrontation between Europeans and the Chinese race was inevitable: ‘I foresee in the future a fight for life and death between the “White” and the Yellow for their sheer existence. The sooner therefore the Nations belonging to the “White Race” understand this and join in common defence against the coming danger, the better.’4
Wilhelm was not alone in allowing these sorts of overarching racial suppositions to influence his world view. Before World War I the German General Staff had begun to use the term ‘yellow peril’ in its official publications on China and Germany’s small colonial possessions there. The term was also applied to the Japanese, a people whose rulers were extremely pro-German and whose political structures and sense of racial mission had been partly inspired by the example of Wilhelmian Germany. Wilhelm still despised them.
In expressing his views on the people of Asia to President Roosevelt in 1905, the Kaiser was preaching to the converted. Between 1889 and 1896, before he took office, Theodore Roosevelt had written an epic, four-volume history of the American frontier. The Winning of the West was, at the time, considered a major contribution to American history. Roosevelt argued that wars between the lower races and the white race, although characterised by extremes of violence, were ultimately necessary:
The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori, – in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. The consequences of struggles for territory between civilized nations seem small by comparison. Looked at from the standpoint of the ages, it is of little moment whether Lorraine is part of Germany or of France, whether the northern Adriatic cities pay homage to Austrian Kaiser or Italian King; but it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.5
Theodore Roosevelt, like his friend the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, believed that the wars of the frontier had been part of a grand historical process that had created the American character. By the very act of becoming frontier people, the whites of America had evolved into a stronger, more virile and resourceful people. The American character, so different from that of Europeans, Roosevelt and Turner claimed, was essentially a product of the frontier, and the new freedoms it afforded those who settled there. Far from the constraints of authority and the taming influences of bourgeoisie society, life on the western edge of white dominion had created a race of rugged individualists. They were naturally distrustful of government, quick to violence and adapted in innumerable ways to an untrammelled life amid wide-open spaces.
Although the age of the American frontier had, by the 1890s, effectively come to an end, its myth still exerted enormous influence over the German imagination, in part thanks to German popular fiction.6 The most successful author of German ‘Western’ novels was Karl May. May had been writing since the mid-1870s, but it was in the 1890s that his books began to attract a mass audience. Karl May, like his most of his readers, had never set foot on the American frontier, yet in a series of hugely popular pulp novels he portrayed an American frontier populated by German ‘Westmen’ who found within themselves an innate predisposition for life on the frontier. May’s most successful hero, ‘Old Shatterhand’, although of average build and height and with no experience of the outd
oor life, quickly became a master of the frontier and more than a match for the ‘Yankees’, the perpetual villains in May’s books. May portrayed the American ‘West’ almost as if it were a German colony. His characters drink German beer and sing traditional German folk songs around their campfires.
Karl May’s Western novels reflected and perhaps contributed to a growing fascination with notions of national and racial expansion and the frontier. May achieved what the colonial societies had been struggling to do since the 1870s, by convincing millions of ordinary Germans that they were naturally a frontier people.7
In seeing the answers to Germany’s problems – both demographic and spiritual – as lying on the colonial frontier, May was not a lone voice. With the American experience as their example, a swathe of the nation’s philosophers, geographers and politicians, along with the Völkisch mystics, promoted their firm belief not only that Germany’s colonies could save the Volk Ohne Raum from the misery of the industrial cities, but that the colonial frontier might become a new arena in which the German spirit could undergo a revitalisation, in terms similar to those which they believed had forged the rugged character of white America.
Some of the most important of these ideas appeared in the writing of a now forgotten figure, Friedrich Ratzel. As a young journalist in the 1870s, Ratzel had travelled extensively around the United States writing articles for the Kölnische Zeitung. At that point in his career Ratzel had been particularly impressed by America’s burgeoning cities and had managed to avoid romanticising life on the frontier, as so many later writers were prone to do. After returning to Germany he embarked on an academic career, and this led him to reassess the importance of the frontier in the development of culture.8
The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism Page 12