Review of German Colonialsm

[rich]

interesting article throughout
rich
Gruesomeness is my policy Richard J. Evans

   - German Colonialism: A Short History by Sebastian Conrad
   Cambridge, 233 pp, £17.99, November 2011, ISBN 978 1 107 40047 4

Dotted around the world, there are still a few reminders of the fact that,
between the 1880s and the First World War, Germany, like other major
European powers, possessed an overseas colonial empire. If you go to
Windhoek in Namibia, you can still pick up a copy of the *Allgemeine Zeitung
*, a newspaper which caters for the remaining German-speaking residents of
the town. If you fancy a trip to the Namibian seaside you can go to the
coastal town of Lüderitz, passing ruined railway stations with their names
still in Gothic letters, and spend time in Walfisch Bay enjoying the surf
and keeping an eye out for penguins. In Tanzania, you can stay in the
lakeside town of Wiedhafen. If you’re a businessman wanting to bulk buy
palm oil in Cameroon, the Woermann plantations are still the place to go.
In eastern Ghana, German-style buildings that once belonged to the colony
of Togo are now advertised as tourist attractions.

Similarly, in the Pacific you can sail round the Bismarck Archipelago and
visit Ritter Island (though there’s not much left: a volcanic eruption blew
most of it to bits in 1888). Further east, if you visit a bookshop in Samoa
you can pick up the works of the leading local poet, Momoe von Reiche. In
Chinese restaurants almost anywhere in the world you can order a
German-style Tsingtao beer, first produced in China in 1903 by the Germania
brewery in the German-run town of the same name (now transliterated as
Qingdao). In Qingdao itself, you may come across the imposing
Romanesque-revival edifice of St Michael’s Cathedral, which looks as if it
belongs in a city somewhere in north Germany a century or so ago, as, in a
sense, it does.


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n03/richard-j-evans/gruesomeness-is-my-policy(subscription
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