Linguistic Recognitions of Identity: Germany’s Pre-WWI East African History

Abstract

At the Nuremburg trials Hermann Goring, a leading member of the Nazi party, made reference to influences in his early childhood. The son of Dr. Heinrich Goring who in 1885 had been appointed by Bismarck to establish the German colony of South-West Africa, he was influenced by his father’s certainty that what Hitler later called the "colonial peoples†were destined to fall prey to the stronger nations; those who refused to accept their subservient status would cease to exist. Goring connected the Third Reich atrocities of which he stood accused, and the pre-WWI excesses of Germany as well as of the colonial powers who now accused him. Goring’s claims were not taken seriously by the Nuremberg court. Yet subsequent research suggests that the connection he put forward is valid; pre-WWI images determined the philosophies and policies of all European nations. As past injustices shape the present, so images which enter the collective unconscious endure until identified and de-constructed. This paper seeks to identify, translate and linguistically deconstruct some dominant images apparent in works originating in the former German East Africa. How do images present in literary and political documents such as Deutsch-Ostafrika. Wirtschaftliche Studien (1906) by Hermann Paasche, Vice-Chancellor of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Reichstag, reflect Western understandings of Africa? What is the significance of these images when subjected to Afrocentric understandings of history?