ABSTRACT
Following the interest of postcolonial scholarship in revealing the two-sidedness of colonialism, this chapter focuses on the intersection in Berlin, in order to reveal how entangled the European metropoles were with their ex-colonial counterparts. Berlin became the center of a soon-to-be world empire with the founding of the German Reich in 1871. Berlin was the seat for colonial societies and companies, as well as numerous colonial advocacy groups. The contrast between the remembrance of Germany’s imperialism and totalitarianism is most palpable in the surroundings of the Topography of Terror, an indoor/outdoor World War II (WWII) history museum dedicated to the acts of Nazi perpetrators, located in the centre of Berlin. The place of future memorialization of German colonialism in a memorial landscape that has ignored its existence remains a challenging and contentious one. By commenting on events overlooked in the other, the first set of complementary plaques, offer one alternative for this relationship between colonialism and WWII.
