Germans’ war massacres in Namib tackled in movie
Berlin – Long overshadowed by World War II and the Holocaust, a colonial-era genocide committed by Germany in Namibia has been brought to the big screen, shining a light on the country’s neglected crimes.
Lars Kraume’s Measures of Men tells the story of a German ethnologist who travels to what was German South West Africa in the early 1900s to study the country’s indigenous peoples and harvest their skulls.
The film was released in German cinemas last month and has also been the subject of special screenings, including in schools and the Bundestag lower house of parliament.
“The colonial era was long repressed by Germany, which lost all its colonies in 1919,” Kraume, 50, said.
“This film is a contribution to making Germans aware of their responsibilities,” he said.
Germany is well-known for its efforts to remember and atone for the atrocities committed during World War II.
Children are taught about the Holocaust in schools, a memorial to the murdered Jews occupies a prominent place in Berlin and countless films and documentaries have been made about the Nazis.
But only one other film, Morenga by German director Egon Guenther, based on the novel of the same name by Uwe Timm, has been made in Germany about the country’s role in Namibia.
Though smaller than those of France and Britain, Germany’s colonial empire encompassed parts of several African coun
tries, including present-day Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Namibia and Cameroon.
In Namibia, Germany was responsible for mass killings of indigenous Herero and Nama people that many historians refer to as the first genocide of the 20th century.
Over the past 20 years, Germany has been gradually starting to talk more about the massacre, in which at least 60 000 Herero and 10 000 Nama were killed between 1904 and 1908.
Germany has returned skulls and other human remains to Namibia
that it had sent to Berlin during the period for “scientific” experiments. And in May 2021, the country officially acknowledged that it had committed genocide in Namibia.
“Since the centenary of the genocide in 2004, historians and activists have done a lot of work on the subject,” said Joel Glasman, a professor of African history at the University of Bayreuth.
In Measures of Men, an ethnologist from Berlin, Alexander Hoffmann (Leonard Scheicher), is sent to Namibia to conduct experiments on the population and
collect their bones for research.
At the beginning of the film, Hoffmann believes no race is superior to any other. But he is ambitious and ends up going along with the prevailing scientific wisdom – which went on to pave the way for the Nazis’ racist ideology.
Israel Kaunatjike, a Herero rights activist based in Berlin, said Measures of Men had “moved me deeply”.
“It motivated me to continue to fight for our cause,” said the 76 year old, who was a resistance fighter when Namibia was still under SA control. –