Heart of Dunkelheit: Germany's other genocide.

• Author: Hockenos, Paul
• Position: Germany's Genocide of the Herero: Kaiser Wilhelm II, His General, His Settlers, His Soldiers; The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism - Book review

Germany's Genocide of the Herero: Kaiser Wilhelm II, His General, His Settlers, His Soldiers

by Jeremy Sarkin

James Currey, 264 pp.

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The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism

by David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen

Faber and Faber, 400 pp.

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By the time the German emperor Wilhelm II ascended the throne in the summer of 1888, it was clear that Germany had arrived late to the Great Game of European Imperialism. England, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and Belgium had long laid claim to hefty chunks of Asia, South America, the Mideast, and parts of Africa, but Germany's holdings were mostly limited to small commercial colonies in Africa and Asia founded by private German traders. Kaiser Wilhelm, alternatively insecure and belligerent, pushed to expand these holdings and acquire others, desperate to be on par with his colonial peers. Moreover, Germany aspired to export the Fatherland beyond cramped central Europe. Every year large numbers of its booming population were emigrating to the Americas, where they became lost to Germany forever. Some lightly colonized lands in southwest Africa, in particular, were seen as insular locations perfect for nurturing a kind of New Germany, one that preserved the volkisch ethos that was rapidly disappearing in a modernizing, industrial Europe. Germany could then also rely upon these colonies for raw materials, export markets, and military manpower in times of war.

For this vision to succeed, vast tracts of free land were required to lure Germanic emigrants to the rough African countryside and the trials of pioneer life. The primary obstacle was that ancestral people like the Herero and Nama tribes already lived on the choicest land, many of them on a great, arable plateau with plentiful fresh water and surrounded by the boundless Namib and Kalahari deserts.

Too little has been written about this period in German history; there is, however, a growing literature--in German and English--on Germany's mass murder of the Herero and Nama peoples in southwestern Africa between 1904 and 1907. South African legal scholar 3eremy Sarkin presents a compelling case against Germany and in favor of reparations for today's Hereto (for whom he acts as legal counsel) in his book Germany's Genocide of the Herero. Another new contribution is The Kaiser's Holocaust, by Anglo-Nigerian author David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, a Danish-born historian living in Africa. Both these titles make much the same argument, in line with current scholarship, namely, that the German empire's onslaught against these tribespeople clearly constitutes genocide, and that many of its elements--like supremacist racial theories, the quest for Lebensraum, Social Darwinism, and even the use of concentration camps--reemerged later in the Nazi Reich.

German authorities in Africa during the 1880s displayed no particular knack for colonial governance. Indeed, the handful of German settlers there--as well as powerful nationalistic lobbies back home--kicked up a storm, demanding...