The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich by Elizabeth R. Baer (review)

A book has clearly done much to provoke thought when a reader wishes it were double or triple in length so that its author might further explore a number of relevant themes. Elizabeth R. Baer's The Genocidal Gaze: From Southwest Africa to the Third Reich is one such book. It raises many tantalizing, important questions, but leaves many more unaddressed and unasked. The book is part of a growing academic literature linking German colonialism in Southwest Africa, and more specifically, the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples, to the Nazi Holocaust. Baer connects the two atrocities through the shared "genocidal gaze" of the German perpetrators, defined as a set of "racist attitudes" to racial others that were "passed from generation to generation," giving "license to exterminate" from 1904 to 1908 and again between 1939 and 1945 (3). To examine this gaze, Baer investigates literary and artistic works rather than archival sources. The texts she has chosen were created during the German colonial occupation of Southwest Africa in the early twentieth century or decades after the Holocaust; all either embody the genocidal gaze or challenge and critique it.

Chapter 1 focuses on the incredibly rich archive of Hendrik Witbooi, a Nama revolutionary. Witbooi resisted the dehumanizing gaze of the German colonial authorities in his personal papers and correspondence with them just as he defied them militarily. Baer's decision to "recover" a voice of the "gazed-upon" is commendable (13, 17). In a book spanning "German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich," one might expect to listen to the voices of Jews who likewise resisted the genocidal gaze at the time of their persecution, but Witbooi's words stand alone for the victims.

Chapter 2 turns to Gustav Frenssen's novel Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest (1908), which Baer suggests was a crucial "instrument for transmitting" the German colonizers' racist attitude to Africans (61). This fictionalized biography of a soldier celebrates the efforts and heroism of the German troops in their brutal exploitation and suppression of the indigenous peoples. Frenssen actually mentions the Herero and Nama themselves "very little," Baer admits, but the Nazis found much to admire in it nonetheless (52). They reprinted the novel several times between 1933 and 1944. Here, then, is solid evidence of a link between imperial and Nazi attitudes toward others, be they Africans or Jews. Again, one might expect a parallel treatment of a text that narrates or fictionalizes Germans' experiences in the East during the Holocaust, which likewise would have transmitted the genocidal gaze from the periphery to the metropole. Baer's commentary on soldiers' letters and photographs from the eastern front or the correspondence of women sent to "Germanize" the occupied lands would have been most welcome.

The book leaps across the years 1918–1945 entirely and next examines post-Holocaust texts and art. Chapter 3 focuses on two novels by Uwe Timm. Morenga (1978) centers on Gottschalk, a German military veterinarian, who witnesses the Herero uprising. Timm foreshadows the later Nazi genocide by referencing "a key Nazi henchman," death camps, and eugenics at various points (90). Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003), Timm's fictionalized memoir of his brother's time on the eastern front as a member of the Waffen SS, is a scathing indictment, Baer argues, of the genocidal gaze. Yet how is Timm, writing not as a victim resisting that gaze but as a German, decades after the Holocaust, suddenly able to critique it? The transmission from generation to generation has obviously been halted or interrupted. How? Where did the genocidal gaze "go" after 1945? Was it so utterly discredited by unconditional surrender, Allied occupation, and forced denazification that it disappeared after decades of presence? One wishes Baer had addressed this subject.

Chapter 4 examines "Black Box," a complex and fascinating 2005 art installation by William Kentridge that "interrogates German guilt" by way of...