Yeah right. Prior to the First World War, the German colonial empire was the third largest in the world, area-wise. It comprised present-day Namibia, Togo, Cameroun, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Samoa and several other countries.
Among the many sad outcomes of German colonialism were numerous massacres executed by German troops. Between 1904 and 1907 about 50-60,000 Herero and Nama were murdered in present-day Namibia and Togo, while 100,000 to 350,000 Africans were killed in present-day Tanzania.
Apart from the human and economic devastation in former colonial countries, German colonialism had numerous consequences: first, it is not by accident that in many people’s minds German equals ‘white’. In contrast to other colonial countries, there was no passport for people of both ‘white’ and ‘black’ descent. While the otherwise sacred German ius sanguinis – the idea that “Germanness” is passed on through blood – was usually the basis for citizenship, it was excluded in cases where one parent was ‘black’. Indirectly, this colonial law is still in force today: descendants of those colonized by Germany cannot obtain German citizenship.
The German Reich always aimed at fanning dispute among colonial populations – the logic was simple: if ‘they’ fight each other it will benefit the German regime. Oftentimes, this practice created allegedly delimited ethnic groups which are still combating each other today. Thus, the massacres carried out in Rwanda in 1994 by Hutus against up to one million Tutsis can without exaggeration be understood as a direct consequence of the German colonial policy of ethnicizing social groups.
To this day, the German state does not provide compensation for these colonial massacres. In 2003, Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer declined to apologize for the German massacres committed against Herero and Nama. One year later, an apology was finally offered. But according to a statement issued by the federal government in 2012, this event was no ‘genocide;’ this admission might have caused further demands for compensation.
Today, Germany is feverishly trying to recover pieces of “looted art” taken by the Allies during the Second World War. Yet at the same time, German museums are still crammed with countless unlabelled artefacts stolen from its colonies. Thus, even those exhibited items marked as ‘donations’ could in fact be looted art.
