Germany's Colonial Pasts

Marching in Step

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 [First Page] [189], (1) Lines: 0 to 17 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [189], (1) robert gordon and dennis mahoney Marching in Step German Youth and Colonial Cinema “While the mode of imperialism as a policy is economic, its historical energy is profoundly cultural,” writes Bill Ashcroft.1 One of the most powerful means forinjectingculturalenergyintoimperialpoliciesconsistsoffantasiesencouraged and embellished by institutions such as the cinema or organizations such as youth groups. One of Susanne Zantop’s major legacies is her wonderful – one is tempted to say, masterful – book Colonial Fantasies, in which she examines the German colonial imagination on precolonial terrain. 2 In this essay we explore a particular cinematic manifestation of such fantasies, one drawn from the German postcolonial presence in Africa after 1919. 3 We investigate Karl Mohri’s Deutsches Land in Afrika (German land in Africa), a seventy-minute portrayal of a film expedition to the former German colonies of Tanganyika and South-West Africa. Released in 1939, it was also available in a shorter version as Der Traum von den verlorenen Kolonien (The dream of the lost colonies). Both versions of the film, together with their supplementary materials – a study pamphlet by Walther Günther and a picture book illustrated by Mohri himself–lobbiedforthereturnofGermany’scoloniessoeffectivelythatMohri returned to southern Africa in order to make a sequel. However, the outbreak of the Second World War and Mohri’s subsequent internment in South Africa intervened.4 Our analysis of Mohri’s film concentrates on two mutually reinforcing issues : the depiction of the former colonies and the film’s historical context as both relate to Mohri’s representation of organized youth groups. A distinguishing characteristic of Mohri’s hardbound and silver-screen adventures is their obsessive fascination with German youth, whose mere presence on African soil ostensibly guarantees their eventual incorporation into the newly expanding German Empire under National Socialism. In Mohri’s words, “Whether young lady, or teenager, or little rascal, German is written all over their faces. And when one has come in close contact with this youth in SouthWest , then one knows: it will never be lost to the Reich.”5 This theme runs 189 gordon and mahoney 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 [190], (2) Lines: 17 to ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [190], (2) throughout many other films of the period, yet recent scholarship on German activities in their former colony, the Mandated Territory of South-West Africa, largelyignoressuchyouthmovements,andlocalaccountscelebratingtheGerman contribution to Namibia also typically overlook this phenomenon. The Pfadfinder (Pathfinders), the German equivalent of the Boy Scout movement, served as a substitute for illegal Nazi youth groups in South-West Africa during the 1930s. The German youth movement is unique in this context, for it was the only organization to be banned by the Mandate administration not once but twice, in 1934 and 1939. 6 It is one of the oddities of Namibian history that the South African authorities felt more threatened by the emergence of a well-organizedyouthmovementthanbyindigenousrevoltorevenbrigandage. The copious literature on Namibian colonial resistance ignores German resistance to what Germans themselves perceived to be colonialism. Mohri’s film thus represents more than a relic of the interwar period; a close ethnographic reading of it provides visual clues to the manufacture and distribution of what Pierre Bourdieu terms “cultural capital” – those cultural and linguistic competencies that would either physically or symbolically threaten the South African colonial authorities administering the Mandate. To understand Deutsches Land in Afrika and its representation of cultural capital, we first provide an analysis of the film and its supplementary materials and then locate the film within the context of the sociomaterial conditions in Namibia. In so doing we aim to show how this film served as a link between colony and homeland, thereby reinforcing local German-settler symbolic capital. In other words the engineering of the visual can both underwrite the (German) imperialist enterprise and undermine the (British and South African) colonial one. The Construction of an Imaginary Africa In order to finance his expedition, Mohri sold the film footage to the National Socialist Propaganda...