German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence by Susanne Kuss (review)

Ten years ago, the doyen of German historians, Hans-Ulrich Wehler counted the short colonial era as negligible for German history. Historians like Isabell Hull and Jürgen Zimmerer countered with the thesis that the roots of Auschwitz can also be found in the Omaheke desert of Southwestern Africa. This theory, known as the continuity thesis, has aroused much academic and public attention in Germany. Susanne Kuss's book can be seen as a contribution to this debate. In contrast to Hull, Kuss is rather skeptical regarding the institutional roots of a particular German colonial violence. She also contradicts Zimmerer's continuity thesis: Even during the era of the Empire's colonial wars, there was hardly a continuity between the different colonial wars, notwithstanding the emergence of a colonial culture of warfare or violence. Rather, her argument goes, colonial violence was rooted in the circumstances, and the mental and psychological mindset of the soldiers and officers.

The first three chapters give a short overview over the book's three case studies: the Boxer rebellion in China, the Herero-Nama War in German Southwest Africa, and the Maji-Maji War in German East Africa. All three campaigns were fought in the first decade of the twentieth century, and all saw the involvement of a substantial number of German marine soldiers sent from Germany, which illustrates how tough the situation had been for the Empire. Although China and Southwestern African saw some pitched battles, the more important and lasting part had been a counter-insurgency campaign against militias. German troops went into all three campaigns unprepared. The German Empire was a colonial empire that often tended to forget that it had colonies overseas. When the Empire had to react to crises abroad, German military planners could not fall back on developed infrastructures, well-planned strategies, reliable tactics, and trained troops. Officers and soldiers alike were learning by doing, and (mostly) forgetting the lessons won. The book indeed tries hard to find traces of a learning process, but to little avail. The failures in the campaigns produced some memoranda, but not a reform.

It was the Empire's unpreparedness that was a major reason for the excessive violence in all the three campaigns. The lack of food supplies led to a greater dependence on local resources and therefore to a greater readiness or even necessity to plunder. Military failures paved the way for a mood of revenge and desperate measures to achieve a total victory. A lack of experience in the contact with non-European culture was a fertile ground for racial stereotype and a civilizing paranoia. There was much guessing among German officials about what would constitute a total victory or the "total destruction" of the enemy. It could mean anything from genocide to unconditional surrender. The book describes this debate as an almost inward-looking one, where German officers were mingling their prejudices about a vaguely defined "African" or "Chinese" way of war with their often-frustrating experiences in pursuing an elusive enemy. Unfortunately, the author goes not much beyond this self-centered discourse.

And this is the greatest weakness of the book. It is too much concerned what happened in the metropole and has little understanding for the African side or Chinese situation for that matter. For a book that answers the question of how colonial violence emerged from battlefields and expeditions or from the mental or psychological conditions of German officers, it contains very few concrete examples. Neither the perpetrators nor the victims are traced in a sufficient way. The German soldier or officer remains in the vague opacity of a collective that is formed by metropolitan institutions and ideologies. Not to speak of Africans or Chinese, be they on the side of the perpetrators or victims. In all three campaigns, African or Chinese people played some part. Colonial violence never was an exclusively European affair, but a melting pot of different cultures of violence, as Michelle...