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Hamburg forces Germany to confront colonial legacy with forgotten genocide exhibition
Franz Ritter von Epp arrived in Africa as an ambitious young infantry officer in 1904. Over the next two years, he took part in a colonial campaign of racial extermination that left 100,000 Africans dead. Tens of thousands were driven into the desert to die of dehydration. Others died in concentration camps.
Almost thirty years later, as the Nazi governor of Bavaria, the same man would preside over the establishment of the first concentration camp in Germany at Dachau, and deportation of thousands of Jews to the death camps of the Holocaust.
Von Epp is just one of the figures explored in a new art exhibition opening in Hamburg on Monday which aims to shine a light on Germany’s forgotten genocide.
Thirty years before the Holocaust, between 1904 and 1908 German colonial troops in Africa attempted to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of what is now Namibia. It was the first genocide of the 20th century.
Many of the features that would later become synonymous with Nazi Germany were already there: concentration camps, race theory, twisted scientific experiments and mass slaughter.
But it is the genocide modern Germany would rather not talk about. While the country has confronted its historic responsibility for the Holocaust, for decades the genocide of the Herero and Nama was swept under the carpet.
Angela Merkel’s government finally recognised the killing as a genocide in 2016. But it has not formally apologised and has steadfastly refused to consider paying reparations.
Unser Afrika, or “Our Africa”, aims to change that. The exhibition is being hosted by the Hamburg regional government, in what some are seeing as a direct challenge to Mrs Merkel’s government over the issue.
Marc Erwin Babej, a 48-year-old German-American-Jewish art photographer, took a team of models to the genocide sites in Namibia to try to uncover what made German colonial troops try to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples.
The exhibition explores how the colonists wanted to build a German Utopia in Africa, without considering the Africans already living there.
Mr Babej’s mother and grandmother were both Holocaust survivors, and his own German-Jewish identity played a role, he says.
“As the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors I’m a descendant of the victims. But when it comes to the Herero and Nama genocide, as a German I’m a descendant of the perpetrators.”
The links between the African genocide and the Holocaust are often disturbing.
“Nazi policies of eastward expansion and Lebensraum bear a striking similarity to settler colonialism. In my understanding Nazi expansionism was a second German attempt to create a colonial empire, this time in the east,” says Prof Jürgen Zimmerer of Hamburg University, the foremost expert on the Herero genocide.
But Germany has been slow to recognise the enormity of what happened in Namibia.
“It was only in 2016 that the German government gave up its resistance to using the term genocide,” says Prof Zimmerer.
But things are beginning to change. Earlier this year, local councillors in Berlin agreed to renames streets in the city’s “African Quarter” named after German colonial figures.
More significantly, Germany is facing a class action lawsuit in New York brought by descendants of the genocide victims to force it to pay reparations. If the court decides in their favour, it could set a precedent for cases to be brought in the US against other former colonial powers for crimes committed by their forces — including the UK.