Imperial Projections: Screening the German Colonies by Wolfgang Fuhrmann (review)

The German colonial empire did not last very long in the 20^th century compared against the British empire (which effectively ended in 1918). The British empire has seen several recent studies involving the subject of colonial cinema including James Burns, Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1895–1940 (2014) and Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe, eds., Empire and Film, (2011). There also exists the useful website “Colonial Film—Moving Images of the British Empire” (www.colonialfilm.org.uk), which contains some 6,000 visual records going back to the 1890s. The German empire simply was not around when a mature cinema developed after World War I. But its brief existence did coincide with the origins and early years of cinema from the 1890s to 1918. There were few works in German and almost none in English that offer a scholarly treatment of the beginning of cinema in the German colonies before 1918 until Wolfgang Fuhrmann’s pioneering study of the relationship of colonial cinema to German popular culture and how it fit into the larger vision of German colonialism. What makes the work even more significant is that most of the visual material Fuhrmann references no longer exists so he had to carefully piece together the content of the films under discussion by examining newspaper accounts, official summations, and audience reaction. Such diligence has produced the definitive work on colonial cinema and early film culture in Germany which, Fuhrmann argues, are inseparable.

Fuhrmann has organized his book into five parts and fourteen chapters. Parts One and Two discuss colonial cinema in the context of the German variety theatre and the DKG (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft—German Colonial Society), the principle organization for the promotion of the German colonies. The DKG was convinced of the superiority of film in promoting the colonies. DKG lecture halls were the preferred venue for colonial films until 1909, when the growth of film distribution led to colonial films appearing in local theatres. Part Three uses the case study of Karl Weule to show how colonial cinema could make ethnographic material of indigenous people available to both colonial administrators and the German Public, many of whom watched less for the science than for the bare-breasted African women. Part Four examines colonial films in public cinemas. Here cinema owners had to address a varied audience. This led to less ethnographic films and more overtly racist travelogues such as Die Wilden beim Eisenbahn (The Savages Constructing Railway (1907). While most films were racist, the films on hunting big game in Africa did take an unexpected turn. As Fuhrmann muses, “Were the films made for the enthusiastic hunter and adventurer or were they propaganda for the emerging wildlife protection movement?” (20). Parts Four and Five shift the focus from non-fiction films to feature length fiction films. As both cinema and cinema-goers became more sophisticated, with “cinema palaces” replacing the early temporary venues, DEUKO (Deutsche Kolonial-Filmgesellschaft—German Colonial Film Company) had to appeal to a broader audience . So it went with, melodramatic racist colonial potboilers that allowed the audience to identify with the white hero or the suffering and passionate heroine. Most of these films were made in Germany, not in the colonies. With the outbreak of World War I these films became part of the larger German war propaganda effort by attempting to create an ideological bond between the colonies and the German homeland. During and after the war the same genre of colonial films attempted to project a very positive and revisionist image of the German overseas empire to counter the allies’ propaganda claims that the Germans had mismanaged and abused their subject peoples. Fuhrmann also looks at some contemporary films set in Germany’s colonial past such as Wustenrose (2000), which contains the same Eurocentric and Orientalist features found in the earlier films, leading him to conclude that “German media still need a history lesson” (274).

The author makes it clear that he is focusing on colonial cinema from the perspective of...