He also made extensive use of Settlement Commissioner Rohrbach’s writings, as well as many photographs documenting the killings, concentration camps and punishments used by the colonists. But the most remarkable aspect of the report was the emphasis O’Reilly put on gathering legally sworn statements from as many survivors and eyewitnesses as he could find. It remains a document of exceptional importance and power for anyone who wants to know what the experience of genocide in a colonial context means – for the victims, the survivors and the perpetrators.fn1
The publication in September 1918 of the ‘Blue Book’, as it became known – on account of the British Foreign Office’s blue cover – caused a sensation around the world, and contributed strongly to the Allied decision to strip Germany of all its colonies, as well as the general toughness of the peace terms negotiated at Versailles. President Wilson of the US expressed the views of many, saying that one of the most distressing revelations about Germany’s conduct was the ‘intolerable burdens and injustices [put] upon the helpless people of some of the colonies’ and that Germany’s priorities had been ‘their extermination rather than their development’. South-West Africa from 1919 onwards became a mandate under the control of the Union of South Africa (which proved to be another deeply unjust regime for the indigenous peoples). Namibia did not gain its independence until 1990 – the last country in Africa to become a sovereign state.
The fate of the ‘Blue Book’ in the twentieth century is a fascinating example of two phenomena. Firstly, the power of history to tell truths, and in the process, deeply disturb those who have committed crimes against humanity, or those who are the beneficiaries of such crimes. It also demonstrates the way that ‘difficult histories’ can be forgotten. And this is not only a passive process of memory fade (perhaps aided by subconscious desires to be free of disturbing knowledge) – amnesia can also be extremely organised, often by states or regimes who would prefer the past to be forgotten.
Any hopes the surviving Herero and Nama may have had that the new powers in South-West Africa might have been more sympathetic to them than their old masters were dashed in 1921, when all the land appropriated by the kaiser in 1905 and 1907 was redesignated ‘Crown Lands of South-West Africa’. The policy of reservations for the natives was revived, and the Herero and Nama were given less than 2 per cent of the land. Not content with having 98 per cent of the territory, including all the best farmland, the white population of the country now demanded that its history also be ‘cleaned up’. In July 1926, a German settler and diamond entrepreneur, August Stauch, proposed in the newly formed Legislative Assembly that all copies of the ‘Blue Book’ should be destroyed. It had created ‘stigma’ for the German population, it was simply ‘war propaganda’. The proposal was passed, and in 1927 all copies of the ‘Blue Book’ were recalled from libraries and government offices across South-West Africa and South Africa and burned. The editor of the main newspaper in Windhoek welcomed the destruction, saying that the white nations could now ‘go forward together unhampered by the suspicion and rancour of the past’. In South-West Africa, Heinrich Heine’s famous reflection that ‘where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings too’ was reversed – most of the Herero and Nama had long been exterminated by the time they got round to burning the evidence.1
On 10 May 1933, the Nazis began their notorious book-burning campaign at Opernplatz in Berlin. As Goebbels addressed the students on that night, telling them, ‘You do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past,’2 I wonder whether anybody in that crowd knew that six years earlier, the Germans and South Africans had started burning books in Windhoek, destroying the history they didn’t want to live with, imposing a Silence of the Fathers that wouldn’t be broken for almost fifty years. The charred paper fragments of the ‘Blue Book’ falling back down to earth on that day in 1927, the earth where so many thousands of unmarked graves lay silently, as the settlers of Windhoek went about their business once again, unburdened by the past.
PART THREE
* * *
The Violence of My Country
‘If there is anything we must change it is the past. To look back and see another map.’3
Anne Michaels
7
A Question from Günter Grass
Genocidal thinking does not come out of a clear blue sky. It is the result of many years of accreted prejudice, narratives and accepted violence. As we’ve seen, creating ‘habits of thought’ which are passed down, almost unconsciously, in the DNA from one generation to the next. Germany, France and the United States have been the main focus of this section, but how is it even possible to begin to honestly describe Britain’s past, and its devastating impact on the rest of the world? How do we start to look at almost 500 years of extreme, and state-sanctioned, violence? Perhaps I am too close to this subject to be able to see it with any kind of objectivity, maybe I cannot see the wood for the proverbial trees, because I have grown up, indeed been entirely formed, within this forest.
George Steiner once wrote of the paradox that it was a younger, post-war generation who were able to create some of the most profound responses to the Holocaust in art and literature, rather than the generation who had suffered directly. Also, some of these ‘young contemporary poets, novelists and playwrights’ were not Jewish themselves. Yet it was these younger people, he wrote in 1967, ‘who have done the most to counter the general inclination to forget the death camps’. I do take his point – that a distance from the direct experience can sometimes help to shape remarkable and clear-sighted responses; and, conversely, that you can be so close to an event that you are unable to focus clearly. As he puts it: ‘Perhaps it is only those who had no part in the events who can focus on them rationally and imaginatively; to those who experienced the thing, it has lost the hard edges of possibility, it has stepped outside the real.’
In a similar way, maybe it is only people from outside our own cultures who can truly see the aspects of our societies that are invisible to us, because we have internalised them. I came across these words from Günter Grass some years ago, and they have been etched in my mind ever since:
I sometimes wonder how young people grow up in Britain and know so little about the long history of crimes during the colonial period. In England it’s a completely taboo subject.fn1
I had asked myself this question for many years, but it was very powerful to hear these thoughts expressed by Grass. I experienced more than the simple truth of the statement when I first encountered it. Rather, the words acted with a kind of moral force, because they were written by a German writer who had spent most of his adult life attempting to make sense of the insanity of Nazism that had destroyed so many in his own generation and others. That is also why Sebald’s lecture on the firebombing of German cities and the Allied targeting of civilians holds so much power – these are men who spent most of their lives, with dogged persistence, looking at the responsibility of their country and their fellow citizens for what had happened between 1933 and 1945. And here are both of these writers, clearly perplexed and troubled, at how we in Britain have given so little of our energies to confronting our own, perhaps equally shameful, history. And also implicit within Grass’s question is the knowledge that nowadays children cannot grow up in Germany without learning a huge amount about Hitler, the years of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. So, how is it possible for us in Britain to grow up so ignorant of the barbarisms of our empire?