Early color photos from German colonies: deserted dream destinations

Wide country, bright blue sky, dignified architecture, lush nature - in the more than 100-year-old color photographs, the German colonies seem like dream destinations. In 1910, the pictures were published in the two-volume showpiece of a Berlin publishing house. Even today, they are often taken to illustrate distant places.

It has long been known that the colonies were not as radiant as the publication intended to tell. But how did this postcard idyll come about, and why? How did one succeed in fooling the viewer into a world that never existed?

The color photos from a distance seemed to arouse more enthusiasm for the colonies in Germany. By the end of the 19th century, Europe's powers had been competing for new colonial territories and, above all, the entire continent of Africa among themselves. The German Reich also sought a "place in the sun", in Africa as well as in Asia and in the South Seas. And so from 1884 the black-white-red imperial flag blew over German Southwest Africa, today's Namibia, as well as Togo, Cameroon and German East Africa, which today is spread over the states of Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and Mozambique.

A first class trip

The colorful pictures from the German "protected areas", as the violently occupied territories were called euphemistic, found a large audience in the German Empire. The Cologne historian Jens Jäger tracked down the photographer: Bruno Marquardt, Eduard Kiewning and Robert Lohmeyer. He found what he was looking for in Lohmeyer's descendants. For this left behind records in which he from his travels - 1907/08 to Togo and Cameroon, 1909 to South West Africa and East Africa - reported.

Lohmeyer was a PhD in photochemistry when he left Hamburg for Togo with the "Edea". "Pork chop, scrambled eggs with sardines, young cheese, coffee, tea" was on the ship in the morning on November 29, 1907. "After breakfast, I explain the three-color print to two gentlemen, then we get our weapons out and pop us with our Brownings . "

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The 28-year-old portrayed the passage as an adventure: "Waves go over deck, II class passengers can not even get out, even in their cabins the water is coming in. We only get a few spills up here every now and then." Lohmeyer traveled first class, a privileged person among the privileged, who sold their boredom with drinking games. "To celebrate the day, a barrel of beer is pierced."

Three-color photography as a welcome PR

Lohmeyer came from a wealthy family, he was the son of a well-known writer and expert in a new process that made it possible to print colored pictures in books. It was invented in Germany: In 1903, photo pioneer Adolf Miethe had presented his camera for the "three-color photography", a true world first. Lohmeyer learned from him.

Intoxicated by the success of the first printed color photographs from Germany, the Berlin International World Publisher now sends photographers to the colonies. When the publisher surprisingly failed, the former Schutztruppe officer Kurd Schwabe realized the project with the Verlagsanstalt für Farbenphotographie Weller & Hüttich.

The colonies were at that time in Germany controversial. In the dispute over the budget and the continuation of the war in the "protected areas", the parliament was dissolved and re-elected in early 1907. The Maji Maji uprising in German East Africa and the upheavals of the Herero and Nama in the southwest were just brutally crushed when Lohmeyer traveled to Africa.

THE MIRROR

Race for Africa: The Colonies 1914

In Togo on December 20, 1907, he moved into a room with a "wide comfortable mosquito bed" in a "beautiful house" with a large veranda, all "fine piko!". For his mission he could be sure of the support of the colonial authorities. In February 1908, Lohmeyer traveled to Cameroon on horseback, while his 20 or so local assistants were running: "Most were not very well on the station, I needed four new vehicles (two I had sent away because they had bad feet and two had run away, without pay, because they were afraid to go further in. Saved twelve marks.) Finally at 10 o'clock I got the guys. "

Because of the exhausting tour in great heat Lohmeyer donated his exhausted companions tobacco - "now they are all happy again". But his forbearance was limited: "I had to wait for the rest of the guys, let go of their saddles, and now, riding back and forth, drive some encouragement strokes with the cachicot (hippopotamus whip) Appearance works wonders. "

Cheerful - and also ground racist

Lohmeyer's lively reports convey the impression of a clever man who knew how to take on new situations, historian Jäger reads. "But he also had that attitude of a white well-to-do European who feels superior per se, pervaded by a fundamentally racist attitude: As a typically Wilhelmine educated citizen - national, Protestant, colonial-enthusiastic - he was convinced of the superiority of the 'whites' over everyone else. "

The excursions in the "bush" remained the exception. Lohmeyer preferred to take the railway. It was easier, cheaper, without a carrier. He reached well-developed places. And made pictures as one expected of him: European-style buildings, churches, schools, hospitals, beautiful avenues, harbors, railway bridges. His photographs were dominated by architecture and infrastructure, order and cleanliness. A colonial dream with huge Gründerzeit villas and park-like tamed nature, "practically the better Germany", says Jäger. A bit of exoticism - and lots of space.

Noteworthy: people were missing almost completely. This was also due to the technology, because a color image needed successively three shots with different filters. Who did not stop for so long, was not visible later.

Jäger describes the message conveyed by Lohmeyer's pictures quite deliberately: "It corresponds to the idea in the Empire that the colonial areas are actually deserted or at least the people who live there do not do anything with this land." Because part of the justification for the subjugation was the claim that the locals should be taken by the hand. The few shots of them seem downright picturesque: they sit alone or in small groups in front of their huts.

There is nothing to be seen of the drudgery on plantations or even the camps with herero pinned. Nothing about war or tropical diseases, which is why hardly a German wanted to Africa. The hope of the colonial movement that people emigrated instead of going to the US never came true.

The colored pictures, on the other hand, were welcome PR. They gave the impression of a peaceful colonial order.

"I could not think anything sadder"

The discrepancy between a photographed idyll and reality shows Lohmeyer's entry to Swakopmund in what was then German South-West Africa: "I must confess what sadder things can not be imagined - an endless sandy desert with houses, not a tree or shrub," noted he on March 14, 1909. Almost the whole city consists of small shingled corrugated iron houses; "I could not think of anything more embarrassing than living permanently on the coast."

The photo he brought from there, bright yellow and blue, gives the whole thing something pleasantly warm.

How well the pictures worked showed their market success. The heavy "splendor issue" with gold cutting cost a good 200 marks, the slightly smaller "national edition" half as much. The "popular edition" with fewer pictures was available for just 3.50 marks. Until the First World War, the turnover is likely to have reached around one million marks, estimates historian hunter due to the publisher's information at the Colonial Office.

And although Germany had to give up its colonies after the First World War, the work appeared in 1924/25 new - as "Anniversary edition of the 40th anniversary of the beginning of German colonial history." In the Weimar Republic formed a colonial revisionist movement. Their representatives, says Jäger, had been convinced that it was a mistake to take away their colonies from the Germans, after all they had done it at least as well as the British or the French. "And you did not just have that in black and white - but even better: in color."