Germany's Colonial Pasts

Race, Gender, and Sexuality in German Southwest Africa

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 [63], (3) Lines: 16 to 29 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [63], (3) sara lennox Race, Gender, and Sexuality in German Southwest Africa Hans Grimm’s Südafrikanische Novellen In the introduction to Das Deutsche Südwester Buch (The German Southwest African book), Hans Grimm constructed his own narrative of German Southwest Africa’s history from the days of its earliest German settlement to the time of the book’s publication in 1929.1 Bitter about the loss of the German colonies and the hardships endured since 1914 by Germans remaining there, Grimm recalls the period before 1914 as something of a colonial golden age: “In few new countries, in perhaps not a single other one, was so much productive work carried out in six short years – work that gives rather than takes, work that creates possibilities – as was the case in German Southwest from 1908 to 1914” (28). To Grimm, as to many other colonial enthusiasts, German Southwest Africa provided Germans inhibited by the strictures of their European homeland a new locale where they could realize their German potential, for it was to such energetic, not enervated, Germans that the colony appealed: “It attracted people who left their cramped conditions to seek a new German land and who were prepared to work hard, not for a peaceful old age in the old homeland, but so that their children could get ahead in a new German world” (10). Portraying the colony as a settlement area where, in Woodruff Smith’s words, “the traditional virtues of German culture could flourish in a setting of small-unit agriculture,” Grimm eulogizes the prosperous, solid, and aesthetically pleasing German homes of hardworking German families that filled the colony in the years before the Great War: “From 1907 on, farmhouses sprang up everywhere, not as elsewhere built out of corrugated tin and wood, not mud huts built any which way, but wherever and as soon as it was possible, out of solid stone and with hard work and care and love, often with an astonishing sense of beauty, so that in that sunny distant place far away the man and his wife and the children they had or hoped for could own a real home that they could proudly love, and of course flowers and trees grew around the lonely farmyards” (29).2 Looking back on that era, Grimm recalls something of an 63 lennox 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 [64], (4) Lines: 29 to ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [64], (4) agrarian land of milk and honey: “It was truly a wonderful time, it was a time inwhicheveryoneinthatbrightcountrycouldbelievethatthegoodfairywould surely stop by some happy morning, since she was journeying through the whole land” (30). However, the texts that Grimm wrote about German Southwest Africa during that alleged heyday tell a different story, and it is the two texts from Grimm’sSüdafrikanischeNovellen(SouthAfricannovellas,1913)addressingconditions in German Southwest Africa, “Dina” and “Wie Grete aufhörte, ein Kind zu sein” (How Grete stopped being a child), that I examine in this essay .3 Marcia Klotz observes about Grimm’s work in general: “[I]t is hard to find any textual support for [the] assertion that Grimm presents colonial life as utopian. Instead, the reader of his colonial oeuvre is confronted with a seemingly endless procession of hard-luck stories, often ending in the tragic, meaningless death of the protagonist, whose courage and hard work prove insuf ficient when confronted with the harsh challenges of the frontier.”4 Grimm scholars such as Klotz and Peter Horn have advanced more or less Freudian analyses of the dilemmas of those protagonists, torn between their longing for an absolute pre-Oedipal freedom beyond the law and their obligation to uphold European standards, a struggle that is played out through their sexual relations with black and white women.5 Though I find such arguments altogether convincing, in this essay I advance a somewhat different reading. My examination of the novellas is premised upon Ann Laura Stoler’s Foucauldian postulation that hegemony in colonial – and probably all...