Why Germany Forgot Its Colonial Past

The street signs of this ordinary square in a Berlin suburb tell an important story. A story of remembering a genocide. It's not the first genocide you connect to the German past.

That is the industrial killing of 6 million Jews, Roma and Sinti in the Second World War. The Germans work very hard to keep this memory alive. But this is a story about a colonial atrocity that happened far away.

In modern day Namibia, you can find German named cities, German style houses, and beer brewed according to German purity laws. The fact that Germany even has a colonial past isn't that well known, even to Germans. What do you know about the colonial history of Germany?

in this 2019 poll on European perspectives of the colonial past. A third of the Germans said they just didn't know about their colonial history. But after years of protest from those that do remember what the Germans did in their country, this.

This is finally changing. Because just last year this place was renamed from Nachtigallplatz to Manga Bell Platz. From a colonial officer to a resistance fighter.

In this video I want to tell you about German colonial history, the genocide in Namibia, and how the focus of the German nation on the Holocaust obscured its colonial past. This is also a personal story for me. I've always been fascinated by street names.

And yes, that sounds a bit weird maybe, but the politics and history behind street names to me is really interesting. The people we honor with the street name, and when we think those people shouldn't be honored anymore, says a lot about how we look at history and how our view of history changes over time. So already three years ago, there were talks about changing the street.

And I came here to look at the story. And remember being really impressed by the soundtrack of this neighborhood. But before we talk about the politics of this street name change, and what it says about modern Germany, let's talk about German colonial history.

I'm standing on the Wilhelmstrasse and behind me on 19 May 1884 German Chancellor Bismarck sends a telegram that upsets everyone that knows him. It's a telegram to Lisbon for Gustav Nachtigall, the German commissioner for West Africa. He has to go to Togo, Cameroon and Namibia to hoist the German flag.

And this goes against everything that Bismarck had said about the wish to acquire colonies. The Germans were actually quite late to this whole colonization thing. At the same time that the British, the French, Spanish, Portuguese, the Dutch, were covering up whole parts of the world, Germany was just a patchwork of a thousand small states.

Some of these states did try to establish colonies. But they weren't really the biggest efforts and when Germany did get unified in 1871 the leader thought colonies were Expensive and a lot of trouble and he was also busy convincing the world that a united Germany had a place in Europe But a few things changed that thinking Germany is now building a navy, and his navy can protect potential colonies. At the same time, the public is gripped by a colonial fever.

A colonial fever. Everyone wants colonies. Because that's what you do when you're a real country.

You colonize other people. Right? And at the same time, thousands of people are leaving Germany every year.

Most of them go to the United States. But wouldn't it be better if these Germans were to go to some German territories overseas? So Bismarck sends his telegram and goes for Africa.

There's just one problem. The British, the French, Spanish, all these other European powers are also claiming this continent. And they even have Leopold, the king of the Belgians, who wants his own colony.

So it's really busy in Africa and we don't want problems, right? So Bismarck sets up this conference where all the past, present, and future colonial powers get together to talk about Africa, to carve it up, so everyone gets their own peace. I can finally use this atlas of world history that I bought, and obviously it has all these maps on colonialism.

Like it shows you how Africa looked before the Europeans came in and after, and it's a, it's a big difference. So you have Germany, Togo, Cameroon, German Southwest Africa. German East Africa, which is a typo here.

It says German West Africa, but that's really just not right. And, um, somewhere here in the Pacific, these islands and New Guinea. Man, I love this.

So this is great, right? Germany is the same as other colonial empires. They have some nice land.

There's good weather. They're building crops, making some money, exterminating the local populace. Wait, what?

Oh yeah, just like the other colonial empires. The German presence wasn't always as cultural as the street signs might suggest. There was resistance to their rule in China, East Africa, and here in German, Southwest Africa.

At first, the Germans under Theodor Leutwein are able to exploit a local rivalry. You have these two tribes, the Herero and the San, that are competing for lands, and sometimes fighting. When the German officials come, They establish connections with both these tribes.

They say they will respect their native customs. But it's the arrival of German settlers that upsets this delicate balance. They claim land, they push the locals to the interior, and they rape and kill them without any repercussion.

According to one settler, it's almost impossible to regard them as human beings. When the plague then decimates her real cattle, this pushes them to the brink. They revolt and target German landowners, lynching tens of them.

But they keep missionaries, women, and children alive. The German response doesn't make that distinction. They didn't take disputes with local tribesmen to world courts.

They used the Maxim gun. They sent 15, 000 troops to deal with this, and one very cruel leader, Lothar van Trouta. And he sees only military option.

There is no time for talking. He corners the herrero at the plateau Waterberg. The herrero are surrounded until they break out and are driven to the desert.

And what then happens is still chilling if you read it now. The commander, van Trotha, he signs something that's called a vernichtungsbefeel. Or in English, an extermination order.

And it reads like this. He tells them the herrero are no longer German subjects. That within the German borders, every herro with or without a gun, with or without kettle will be shot.

I will no longer accept women and children. I will drive them back to their people or I'll let them be shot at. These are my words to the Herro people, the great general of the mighty German Kaiser.

There are pictures to show what happens next. Thousands of these haro die in a desert. Starving without food or water.

And when the sun also rise up, the Germans put them in concentration camps. In these places, like Shark Island in Lüderitz Bay, German soldiers decapitate bodies. They send the skulls back to Germany, trading them to scientists, museums and universities back home.

There they would be studied, all to prove the fiction of racial science, to show that the white race was the best of all. Back at home, here on the Wilhelmsstrasse, Cabinet officials are horrified to hear this. Not so much about the locals, but because it's a PR disaster.

They are afraid that other nations will see them as uncivilized. And they also understand that without any population, this whole colony is doomed. So they pressure Van Trotha and make him cancel his Vernichtungsbefehl.

But it's already too late. The figures are not completely clear. But from the 80, 000 herrero, about 80 percent die.

From the 20, 000 son, half die. This has been called the first genocide of the 20th century. But until recently, it wasn't really discussed in Germany at all.

And this is weird, because the Germans have made their national identity center around remembering past crimes. I'm here at the Holocaust Memorial, and this is the place where the Germans remember the killing of six million Jews during World War II. What's so strong about this monument is that once you're inside, it just gets silent.

The city is suddenly very far away, and you can only hear it. See the sky. You see that the stones are not straight.

They're crooked, and the floor also isn't straight. I can't think of any nation with a dark past. It has such a strong site of remembrance, like right in the middle of the city.

If you ask a German about their history. . .

Everyone will be able to tell you about the Holocaust. This has to do with a long word, Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. It sort of translates to coming to terms with the past.

This is a national policy. Here in Berlin, the Second World War and the Holocaust seem to be everywhere. In museums, in public memorials.

But I don't even have to go far, because here, just outside of my Airbnb, you can find these. . .

Monuments that show what kind of laws were in place to really make life hell for Jewish people. Like, here you have one from 1942, that Jews are not allowed to buy newspapers. Okay.

In 2015, the German president said There is no German identity. And it's not only words. Up to 2022, Germany has paid almost 82 billion euro in reparations for the Holocaust and the Second World War.

So if the German state and society is so invested in talking about the past, why was this colonial genocide neglected for so long? One reason is that the German colonial episode was relatively short. After the First World War, the Germans had to give up all their colonies.

So in total, it was about 40 years. And there were just not that many Germans living there. Take Namibia.

In 1903, There were about 4,700 Europeans that lived there. That's almost nothing compared to the 700, 000 in South Africa. But another reason has to do with that focus on the Second World War.

It's very clear what people remember if you hear what they learn in school. It's this huge shadow hanging over all of german history eclipsing other stories. It sometimes almost seems as if there is no history besides Nazi history.

So it has needed to be changed. Protests from outside of Germany to put this issue on the table. It's descendants of Herero and Nama that did this.

Many of my family members were held in concentration camps. Killed and even forced to peel off the skin from the skulls. It's a very painful history.

And they needed a political solution. They put this issue in the spotlights with protests and lawsuits, especially since 1990 when Namibia became independent. They wanted two things.

The first, that the German state acknowledges that these acts were actually genocide. And the second, to get back skulls and bones of their forebears. And they have succeeded.

In 2008, 2011, and 2018, the German government handed over Herrero and Nama remains. And in 2015, the German president acknowledged that these crimes were genocidal in nature. And from that point on, they started reparation talks with the Namibian government.

And activists also worked to uncover the colonial heritage in the streets of cities, like here in Berlin. Just this fall, the square was renamed. Let's begin right here in Berlin, where activists have been querying the German capital's colonial past.

There is a completely different understanding. We now know what these people actually did in the colonies, how many people they killed. And other streets followed as well.

Like last year this street was also renamed and a movie came out highlighting the atrocities in Sud. West Africa. So is this the end of everything?

Well, this moment should be seen not as a point behind the story, but more as a comma. Even though the German and Namibian governments reach agreement over 1. 1 billion stimulus package, this was actually not seen as reparations and were still .

They have been excluded in these stocks. And they have said, it cannot be about us, without us. And the UN agrees.

They say that the money shouldn't go to the Namibian government, it should be go to the descendants. And for the past few years, the Berlin government has been in conflict with a few residents about the renaming of another street, the Mohrenstrasse, which activists claim is a colonial caricature. So this story is far from finished.

There is no perfect way to deal with the past. Just as in other European countries, You know, it's not only the colonial history that Germany has to deal with, there's actually a thing that happened more recently, an event, that still shapes Germany to this day. I'm talking about the fall of the Berlin Wall.

This ended the DDR, the East German Dictatorial State. But in many ways, the DDR is actually very much alive. If you look at modern maps of Germany, this Cold War division is still very visible.

In the age of the population, where the jobs are. If people are vaccinated and people in the street also feel there's still a difference between people from the east and the west. I've visited Berlin many times.

I even lived there for half a year during my studies. But to be honest, the biggest things I knew about this history were the Stasi, the secret police, and the Berlin Wall. But the story is actually way more fascinating, from the differences between East and West Germany, to the crazy things the East German government did to appease their citizens.

Like, at one point, they imported one million American jeans, because, well, people were crazy for jeans. This is my most ambitious video. It is 30 minutes long, and even though it's not going to be on YouTube for another month, you can watch it right now on Nebula.

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