ABSTRACT
The dream of many Germans to administer overseas colonies did not end at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Memoirs, autobiographies and novels, many aimed at the education of a future generation of colonizers, continued to advocate a German presence in Africa. A great number of memoirs from the colonial era were re-published or published for the first time after 1919. As the legacy of the First World War became clear and National Socialism took an ever firmer hold in Germany, there was a reawakening of interest in colonial literature, especially in memoirs of successful life in the colonies. Gustav Frenssen’s Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest , for example, was first published in 1906 and claimed to be an edited account of a German soldier’s experience in the Herero war in German South West Africa (SWA). It was republished, with a nationalist-propagandistic introduction during the National Socialist era, and it is now studied at the University of Namibia in Windhoek as an example of colonialist propaganda. Magazines and collections of adventure stories aimed at a youth readership were particularly popular between the world wars, such as the magazine Jambo , which first appeared in 1924 as the organ of the German Colonial Youth Movement, the Koloniale Jugendbewegung . 1 The first-hand memoirs of early settlers in SWA, particularly those portraying the German experience of the Herero-Nama uprising, are popular, increasingly so, perhaps, with present-day German-speaking Namibians and German tourists, and are republished by houses such as Glanz & Gloria Verlag in Windhoek. Such memoirs include Gottreich Mehnert’s Kriegsgeschichten aus Südwestafrika , first published in 1930 and re-released in 2006.
