Review of German Colonialsm

[Paul Mackin]

On 2/10/2012 10:59 AM, rich wrote:
> interesting article throughout
> rich
>
>
>   Gruesomeness is my policy
>

Leads one to speculate about the origins of gruesomeness.

If the Allied Powers had lost WWI, and with it their colonial 
possessions, the later exterminations to the East might have started 
farther to the West.

Territorial expansion, if thwarted abroad, has to find a way closer to 
home. And gruesomeness is part of it.

P


>     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 required)
>
>
>

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