Mute stones speak of Germany’s colonial crimes
BERLIN, Germany — Lying alongside tombstones at the Columbiadamm cemetery in Berlin’s Neukölln district sits the Herero stone, splashed in red paint, to symbolize the blood spilled by the Kaiser Franz Guard-Grenadier Regiment Nr. 2.
Put up in 1907, the stone commemorates the seven fallen soldiers who fought in the Kaiser’s army in German southwest Africa, in present-day Namibia. The untold story is more important: What the monument failed to acknowledge was the nearly 100,000 Africans who perished at the hands of the regiment.
During the 19th and early 20th century, Germany joined the scramble for Africa, eventually colonizing the lands that are now Togo, Cameroon, Burundi, Rwanda, Mainland Tanzania, and Namibia.
The campaign was especially cruel in Namibia, where Herero and Nama people were beaten, worked, and killed. Hundreds of skulls and preserved heads were sent back to Germany for racial studies to help prove false theories that said Black people were inferior to the White race. The Herero and Nama were driven to the Kalahari Desert, cut off from water holes and food supplies. Many died of dehydration and starvation. Months later, German officers gathered survivors into camps, where they performed slave labor and were subject to gruesome medical experiments.
Many historians see a direct line between the abuses in Africa and the better-known horrors of the Nazi era. “The German experience in Namibia,” wrote Benjamin Madley, an expert in colonialism at UCLA, was a “crucial precursor to Nazi colonialism and genocide.”
Addressing the genocide in Africa has long lagged behind Germany’s efforts on behalf of Holocaust victims.
“I think the German government, as all the other European governments and the US, are afraid of opening the floodgates,” said Karina Theurer, a Berlin-based lawyer specializing in international issues.
Especially in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing in 2020 at the hands of Minneapolis police, Germans have become more attentive to anti-Blackness in their own country. Activists are prodding them with attacks on the Herero stone. They have repeatedly vandalized and defaced the stone, in hopes of forcing Germany to come to terms with its colonial history and address its role in racial theories made popular by the Third Reich in the 1930s.
Most recently, in April 2023, the group “End Worship of Genocides” defaced the stone, dumping red paint over it, symbolizing the blood spilt by German hands. In black letters across the front, it reads, “No racist commemoration of Nazis and the perpetrators of genocide!”
The stone is a reddish brown granite boulder with a plaque reading “This stone honors heroes.” To appease protesters, the German government added a second plaque beneath the stone — in the shape of Namibia — in remembrance of the victims. However, the word genocide does not appear, and many activists think Germany’s efforts are insufficient.
“The stone honors killers,’’ said Urte Evert, director of the Spandau Citadel, a museum that houses now-discredited monuments and artwork. She dismisses the plaque as “a small footnote on the floor, under a massive stone that is still hurting people.”
Attending a recent conference at the Citadel, Michael Küppers-Adebisi, a poet and artist, says he views the stone as only one part of a larger denial of Germany’s colonial crimes.
“The Herero Stone is one small, singular entity in Berlin,’’ said Kuppers-Abebisi, who is one of the officers of Decolonize Berlin. “The suppression of the different kinds of knowledge systems is still ongoing.”
Küppers-Adebisi and Evert are currently working together on creating inclusive dialogues surrounding German memory culture at the Citadel. The museum holds some of the city’s most controversial monuments in its exhibits, including Adolf Hitler’s bronze horse statues and a huge head of Vladimir Lenin removed from a toppled statue after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. These statues are preserved in a Renaissance military structure that has seen the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, the Prussian Empire, and the Nazi regime. Evert says she would happily take the Herero stone as well, housing it in a place where it would be remembered but not celebrated.
Out of character for a museum director, she is supporting the activists who have defaced the stone. “It is not bad to be a little bit destructive and violent because it’s violence against a stone, not human beings,” Evert said.
Other initiatives are underway in Germany to address colonial crimes. In May 2021, the German government pledged to spend €1.1 billion ($1.3 billion) over 30 years for infrastructure and developmental aid in Namibia. Most recently, the Berlin government has worked on taking down street signs on and around Afrikanische Straße in the Wedding district that are named after colonial officers or now seem like racial slurs, replacing them with the names of anti-colonial activists and African nations. Evert praised the renaming of the streets, but said she was embarrassed that it took place only after 40 years of discussion.
“We Germans are just learning how to deal with our colonial history,’’ said Evert.
The German term Lebensraum — literally living space — is associated with the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, but it dates back to the colonization of Africa a half century earlier when Germany was eying settlements in Africa. Friedrich Ratzel, who coined the term, claimed that expansionism was necessary to keep production and commerce high.
In 1884, leaders from Europe gathered in Berlin, then known as the grand imperial capital of the German Reich, to divvy up African territory in search of new land to grow their empires. While the history of British and French rule over African nations is frequently addressed, Germany had a large stake in the conversation as well. Shortly after that historic meeting, the emperor Otto Von Bismarck mobilized the German military to acquire African territory and settle on the land.
The occupation of Namibia also coincided with a growing fixation in Europe on the since-debunked theory of eugenics developed by English polymath Francis Galton, who contributed research on social Darwinism and scientific racism and coined the phrase “nature versus nurture.” European leaders were interested in his theories, encouraging their citizens to marry within their race to prevent tainting pure bloodlines. Eugenics had a large influence on German intellectuals, popularizing the false notion that Black communities are subordinate to the White race, a theory they used to justify colonial settlements.
The Prussian army veterans responsible for murders and massacres in Namibia were celebrated for decades after. Many joined Adolf Hitler’s inner circle and used their experience in Africa to construct concentration camps in WWII and devise medical experiments that took place inside. One of these veterans was German physician Eugen Fischer. In 1904, Fischer visited Namibia, testing several hundred skulls and heads of Herero and Nama people, to help bolster racial theories. According to Fischer, Black people were “primitive” and “animalistic” compared to the Aryan race. His textbook on racial hygiene went on to inspire Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which directly quoted Fischer to back up arguments for white supremacy.
Today, Namibians still deal with the repercussions of their colonial history perpetrated by the Second Reich of Germany. According to the Namibian Statistics Agency, approximately 70 percent of the land is owned by whites, putting indigenous Namibians at a systemic disadvantage.
Activist groups like Decolonize Berlin are promoting discussion in Germany about the legacy of colonization, alongside 21st-century issues such as job and housing discrimination against Black people. Activists have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to win citizenship rights for Black Africans with German ancestry. They’ve taken over the streets of Berlin in silent protests and have worked together with government officials to provide counter documentation to address alternate memories of German history.
But, in speaking up, they have often encountered resistance. “Nobody would talk to us, would touch us, or even want to be associated with us because we were so radical,” said Küppers-Adebisi. “But all that we did was portray the radicalness of the killings of the genocide.”
His current street mural project, at Berlin Global Village in Neukölln, in set to be complete by 2024. Artists worldwide submitted work anonymously, making visual their memories and concepts related to decolonization. The project will be accompanied by an education program on the topic of decolonization. The Berlin Senate department for culture and Europe and the German federal government are providing €750,000 ($841,006) each to make this initiative possible.
Daniel Benjamin, head of the American Academy in Berlin, notes that Germany has been widely praised for taking accountability for the Holocaust and giving reparations to survivors.
“We have a running conversation here about what America could learn from Germany about the culture of memory and reparations,’’ Benjamin said. “With Namibia, it is kind of challenging because it is so far in the past.”
Following the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by four Minnesota police officers, demonstrations spread, calling attention to anti-Blackness, police brutality, and systematic oppression. Protests spanned from France to the United Kingdom, Colombia, South Africa, Germany, and more.
“You could really feel it in Europe. There was more public awareness for the topic of systematic racism and for the complex repercussions of colonial crimes,” said Thuerer, the international lawyer.
Theurer is working with other lawyers on legal reparations for colonial crimes in Namibia. While getting government support has been a long journey, she is optimistic. “The push for reparations is gaining real momentum throughout the world. Both the governments and society will have to face that reality within the next 10 to 20 years,” she said. “There’s no space for ignorance and denial anymore.”
Decolonization activists have been working for decades, and are now being joined by unexpected guests — the descendants of problematic historical figures, who wish to address the weight of their family members’ crimes. At an art gallery in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, a third-great nephew of Otto von Bismarck, former chancellor of the German Reich, explores the implications of colonialism. In the competition for Africa, Bismarck used colonization to acquire the raw materials needed to drive German industrialization.
In an interview with the culture publication Exberliner, Von Bismarck said he was motivated by the violence behind colonization. “Our whole worldview and humanist ideas are based on extremely bloody expeditions: traveling somewhere on a ship full of armed men and researchers, collecting cultural goods, killing people, murdering living beings, then naming things after ourselves, like the Bismarck Sea.”
As an artist, Julius Von Bismarck says colonial history and memory culture “can only be righted by piecing themselves back together.”
Rebecca Fairweather is a political science student at UC Santa Barbara who works for UCSB TV and The Indy podcast at the Santa Barbara Independent newspaper. She is reporting from Berlin this summer as part of ieMedia’s “Berlin Beyond Borders” editorial team.
