German Colonial Amnesia and the Destruction of Gaza

AIMÉ CÉSAIRE states in his ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ that colonialism decivilises the coloniser, brutalises him, degrades him, “to awaken him to buried instinct, to covetous violence, race hatred, and moral relativism” as “universal regression”.

As Césaire observes: “The coloniser, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treat him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.”

Almost in parallel with Hannah Arendt’s ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, Césaire locates the roots of fascism in colonialism. 

For Arendt, colonialism as “laboratory of modernity” was the cradle of a mentality, which a few decades later culminated in the Holocaust.

As Pascal Grosse notes, “by focusing on the implications of European colonialism for Europe itself”, Arendt understood colonial regimes as the prototype of totalitarianism.

FROM OMAHEKE TO GAZA

Not by coincidence, Raphael Lemkin, who initiated the Genocide Convention, referred to the German empire’s extermination strategy in its colony South West Africa.

As suggested by Dirk Moses in his ‘Preface to Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History’, by “uncovering the colonial roots of the genocide concept itself”, one can “operationalise Raphael Lemkin’s original but ignored insight that genocides are intrinsically colonial and that they long precede the 20th century”.

While there is no direct route from Windhoek to Auschwitz, there is a trajectory linking the German colonial mindset to mass extinction by the Nazi regime.

A mindset which, to a certain extent, remains virulent in German society. It is alive – albeit in decline – in colonial amnesia.

As I document in ‘The Long Shadow of German Colonialism’, colonial mentality did not stop with the end of colonial rule. 

The onslaught on the people in Gaza evokes memories and analogies to forms of the first genocide of the 20th century in the German colony

Southwest Africa. Then, the Ovaherero retreated into the dry savannah of the Omaheke.

It was cordoned off by German soldiers, and an extermination order declared that no prisoners were to be taken.

Those seeking refuge were either shot or driven back into the Omaheke to die of hunger and thirst.

It seems that such forms of genocidal warfare are being repeated now. And Germany is complicit by taking the side of the perpetrators.

A line from ‘Death Fugue’ by Paul Celan (1920-1970), one of the most influential post-Holocaust German-Jewish poets born in the Romanian Bukovina region, comes to mind: “Death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue.”

This constellation triggered a confrontation between the former colonisers and the former colonised: Namibia supported South Africa’s claim against Israel in the International Court of Justice, while Germany announced itself to be a third party in defence of Israel 120 years after the beginning of the war in its colony, with no word in remembrance of that genocide.

This provoked a statement by the late president of Namibia, Hage Geingob: “The German government is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil… Germany cannot morally express commitment to the United Nations Convention against genocide, including atonement for the genocide in Namibia, whilst supporting the equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza.”

NEVER AGAIN MEANS NEVER AGAIN

The reference to “never again” in the dominant German discourse, an admonition by the survivors of Buchenwald, illustrates a perverted instrumentalisation of this obligation.

It justifies the destruction of Gaza and indiscriminate mass killings. This misguided obsession has its roots in the trauma of the Holocaust. It translates into the obfuscation that Germans have forfeited to criticise the state of Israel, equating its government with the Jewish people.

Germans have the audacity to denigrate those citizens in Israel and Jews in the diaspora, who are condemning the Israeli government’s policy and crimes as self-hating, antisemitic Jews.

In a tragically perverted form, this testifies that colonial asymmetries, including mass violence of a genocidal nature, remain an endorsed practice.

By elevating the Holocaust into a singularity, other genocides are degraded. The ranking claims that any comparison would apply relative terms to the Holocaust and is therefore in tendency antisemitic. This betrays logic as such an absolute statement can only be made based on comparisons.

Such a misguided notion of singularity downplays the trauma of other genocide victims. After all, for all those decimated by genocidal extermination strategies and their descendants, this is also singular.

That an estimated two-thirds to three-quarters of the Ovaherero and one-third to a half of the Nama did not survive the German onslaught is a unique trauma too. Disrespecting their experiences is not only morally despicable and dehumanising, but another form of white supremacy. There is no European master narrative which is entitled to negotiate and thereby denyany similar experiences in the history of other people. “Never again” should indeed mean “never again”.

COMPARISON CONTROVERSIES

Addressing Germany’s vice chancellor Robert HabeckIn a talk show broadcast on German television, Deborah Feldman insisted “that there is only one legitimate lesson from the Holocaust. 

And that is the absolute unconditional defence of human rights for all. These values lose their legitimacy when we apply them conditionally.”

And as Pankaj Mishra stressed, “if there is any bumper sticker lesson to be drawn from the Shoah, it is ‘Never Again for Anyone’”. Commenting on “comparison controversies”, Michael Rothberg demands that historical comparisons must be taken seriously. They should be

evaluated with what he calls an “ethics of comparison”.

This serves as a reminder that cultivating the singularity of the Holocaust risks including a singularity of German remorse – at the expense of all other victims of mass violence executed by Germans.

The selectivity we are confronted with while witnessing the intentional mass starvation of the Palestine civilian population as a war crime is the notorious conditionality of a white supremacist perspective, claiming the commanding heights in global asymmetric power relations since the days of colonialism and imperialism.

What Aimé Césaire has already categorically stated remains a challenge and task in the fight for humanity: “Away with racism! Away with colonialism! They smack too much of barbarism.”

– Henning Melber studied political science and sociology. He is extraordinary professor at the University of Pretoria and the University of the Free State, a senior research fellow with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London, and associated with the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala

– This article first appeared on africanarguments.com; it is part of a series of blog pieces published as part of its ‘War on Gaza as a Discourse on

Colonialism’ series