The most righteous of all wars is a war with savages … American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori – in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid the foundation for the future greatness of a mighty people … it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black and aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.1
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Back in Germany in the 1890s such blatantly racist thinking is warmly accepted, colonial fever is at its height, and the ‘German Western’ novels and stories of Karl May are reaching a vast audience. May portrays German settlers on the American frontier, battling against the savages, and rediscovering their essential Volkisch roots as a colonial people. And his representation of migrant Germans escaping the cramped, industrial lives in their homeland, and finding their true spirit, is lapped up by millions of readers. Many stories are published in a magazine aimed at boys, Der Gute Kamerad (‘The Good Comrade’), which gains a huge readership between 1887 and 1897, sales peaking at this time when Hitler is an eight-year-old boy and an avid Karl May reader. Ten years later, millions more children read Gustav Frenssen’s Peter Moor’s Fahrt nacht Südwest (‘Peter Moor’s Adventures in South-West Africa’, published in 1908), an account of the Herero and Nama genocides from the perspective of a teenage boy.fn5 Through his ‘gripping adventures’ Peter comes to realise that the indigenous peoples are barbaric and deserve the extermination that befalls them.
But more influential even than Karl May and Gustav Frenssen was the book Volk ohne Raum (‘People without Space’) by Hans Grimm, published in 1926, an epic tale of a German ‘everyman’ figure, Cornelius Freibott, who ends up settling in German South-West Africa in 1907 (no mention is made of the massacres that have just occurred, nor the concentration camps). He has finally found his elusive living space, room to breathe – the place where Germans can realise who they are as a people. He returns to Germany in the early 1920s to find problems, primarily the Jews, who he now realises are not part of the ‘German tribe’. This book sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and the phrase ‘Volk ohne Raum’ became a Nazi rallying cry. In an age before television it is almost impossible to overstate the cultural impact of books like these; they essentially programmed the minds of entire generations of young Germans, creating the most fertile possible conditions for Nazism to then take root.
Into this cultural context steps a geographer, Friedrich Ratzel, who now creates an extraordinarily potent and dangerous academic frame to bring all these disparate colonial impulses together. Influenced by Darwin’s studies of animal adaptation and evolution, Ratzel applies (or rather misapplies) Darwin’s theories to human migration and ‘the struggle for existence’. He believes that the colonisation of the world by the white race and the destruction of indigenous peoples is all part of this struggle, and that the drive to migration is a key factor in human evolution – based on the need for people to continually expand the amount of space they occupy.
In 1897 Ratzel publishes his book Politische Geographie, and his new theory of Lebensraum (‘living space’) comes into the world, a concept that would achieve genocidal force within a decade in South-West Africa, and within fifty years all across Europe. The idea rapidly gains popular currency, fuelling the push for colonisation at the end of the nineteenth century, and acting like a toxic seed germinating in the body politic of the Reich over the next decades. In all likelihood, a little boy in Linz would have come across the idea for the first time at school; certainly, twenty years later, in 1924, we know that Hitler was reading Ratzel’s book in Landsberg prison, when he was writing Mein Kampf – and Lebensraum then forms a central tenet in the evolution of beliefs driving the National Socialist movement.
Ratzel is also one of the founders of the German Colonial Society in 1887, and he becomes a prominent advocate of German South-West Africa becoming an applied experiment in Lebensraum, with the German settlers and farmers acting as the principal agents of this colonisation. Any native peoples, or ‘inferior races’ as he terms them, who attempt to stop this natural development should be met with overwhelming force. And just like Leutwein, he looks to the examples of British, European and American colonisations in Tasmania, southern Brazil and North America that had been so successful in rapidly displacing indigenous peoples. As Olusoga and Erichsen note, ‘these wars, that Ratzel viewed as models for future colonialism, were wars of extermination; some were genocides’.
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As the nineteenth century ends, despite all the cattle plagues, typhus and malaria epidemics, and the continual attempted encroachments of the German colonists and settlers, South-West Africa still remains primarily in the hands of the Herero and Nama. The Germans are largely restricted to their garrison towns like Windhoek, and the surrounding areas, and even then, the vast majority of the population are soldiers – 600 out of the 780 Europeans living in the town are military personnel in 1896. Although they now had a toehold in the country, this does not satisfy the ambitions of Governor Leutwein or his superiors back in Berlin.
Having already been inspired by the example of the British Empire’s ‘divide and rule’ strategy, Leutwein now looks towards America for ideas on the next stage of colonisation. Two factors had been critical in America’s frontier settlement – the development of railwaysfn6 and the creation of native reserves. So important does the governor believe these to be that in 1897 he travels back to Berlin and makes a direct appeal to the Reichstag for funds to help start the building of the railways. Five years later, in 1902, the first line – between Windhoek and the fast-growing port at Swakopmund – is completed, and the next year, a second line, linking the port to copper mines near Otavi, is begun, all of this also resulting in substantial losses of grazing land for the Herero. Also in 1903, Leutwein agrees to a policy of native reserves, and two are established – at Otjimbingwe for the Herero, and Rietmont for the Nama.
By 1903, although many cattle had been sold to the settlers, only 10 per cent of farmland formerly owned by the indigenous populations had been ‘legally’ transferred to German ownership at this point. It should be understood that Leutwein’s colonial policy, however harsh, was informed by his background in law and diplomacy, and so he could state, with remarkably open cynicism: ‘However ruthless one’s colonial policy, it is necessary to give one’s actions a semblance of legality.’fn7
To make matters worse from the colonists’ perspective, the Herero and Nama had never been wealthier. Their cattle herds were increasing again after the plagues, and, as prices were rising, their stock had never been more valuable. Resentment was running high, especially among the settlers around Windhoek, who saw, correctly, that the Africans still retained much of the power in the colony. The gulf between this reality, and the perception of natives as ‘savages’, not really humans at all, became too much to bear for many colonists. A missionary writing at this time says that ‘the average German looks down upon the natives as being about on the same level as the higher primates (“baboon” being their favourite term for the natives), and treats them like animals’. In 1900, a group of German settlers wrote to the Colonial Department in Berlin expressing their views and the strategy needed in South-West Africa: