Redaktion ZDF: Guido Knopp
Director: Sebastian Dehnhardt
Camera: Johannes Imdahl
Production Management: Joerg Rudolf
Executive Producer: Nina Hetzer
Producer: Leopold Hoesch/ Sabastian Dehnhardt
Line Producer: POWER AND GLORY FILMS
Year: 2009
Southwest Africa
The play/documentary displays how soon after the founding of the German Empire in 1871, the old idea of emigration into their own colonies, resume and spread through colonial propagandist societies like the German Colonial Society (DKG).
In so called Southwest-Africa, these emigrants, missionaries, Schutztruppen-Soldiers and dealers, like Else and Gustav Sonnenberg, lived closely with their Herero employees.
These days there was a huge hierarchy between the Germans and their employees. They would instruct educate and punish them. Tidiness and good manners, punctuality and politeness, prayer and work, were their educational values. The Germans are brutal; they force the locals to sell their land and cattle or to make their wives submissive.
The controversy between the Germans and the Hereros culminates to the manslaughter at Waterberg, one of the biggest manslaughters ever on african grounds.
And we see that not all Germans are the same. Else Sonnenberg is different. She sees the Hereros as individuals and judges them according to her own experience. She helps them where she can (e.g. the young Penaani Zaire) and understands their fears that the Germans taking everything from them.
There is a review of recent interviews with the descendents of the historical figures, for example the grandchildren of Voigts or the descendent of Penaani Zaire.
East Africa
The play/documentary “German East Africa” tells a similar story. Here too, the sly occupation of part of Africa by German adventurers and gamblers with subsequently little enthusiasm, but the more consistent policy implementation carried out by political actors of the kingdom in the play and documentary scenes, is presented.
This part of the three-pieced series about the German colonies, tells mainly of the difficult relationship between the locals and the German colonialist, which was dominated by violence right from the beginning.
Even after becoming a colony the first Germans who occupied the land (mainly Protection-forces) – including Magdalena and Tom von Prince - did not do it any different, resentment and resistance from the native population grew.
East Africa remained a German colony until the First World War. After the First World War the Englanders succeeded in driving the Germans out of East Africa after long costly battles (especially against Lettow-Vorbeck). Tom von Prince died during this war, whose personal fate highlights this documentary.
East Africa becomes an English colony and the Germans, as the ending of the film presents the example of the widow Magdelena von Prince, are deported.