Kolonijalno osvajanje Namibije i politika sećanja u savremenom nemačkom romanu

Abstract

The view of the German colonial conquest and the ways of implementing colonial rule in the former German South-West Africa (now Namibia) will be analyzed in the doctoral dissertation Colonial conquest of Namibia and the politics of memory in the contemporary German novel. The research corpus consists of three novels written in German between 1978 and 2003 – Morenga (Morenga, 1978) by Uwe Timm, Silent Fires. A novel of the Herero people (Die schweigenden Feuer. Roman der Herero, 1994) by Giselher V. Hoffman and Herero (Herero, 2003) by Gerhard Seyfried. The focus of the selected novels is the literary reconstruction of the Germans and Herero/Nama conflict at Waterberg, Namibia, which is the event that represents the culmination point in the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. This conflict resulted in practically complete extermination of the indigenous people Herero, Nama, Damara, and San. German public speaks critically about this event a century later, recognizing publicly in 2021 that the genocide was committed against the up-mentioned people. Following the views of (post)colonial studies theorists and referring to the development and perspectives of the still young discipline of German (post)colonial study, this doctoral dissertation will try to indicate the literary contribution of confrontation to the German colonization practice and its manifested mechanisms on the soil of today's Namibia. The dissertation will also include the view of development of the racist thought in Germany from the beginning of imperial aspirations to African soil up to today time and will indicate the (im)possibility of achieving (post)colonial dialogue between Germany and Namibia. Since the selected novels for analysis are contemporary and the history within them is literally processed, the dissertation will also rely on historiographical theories metafiction and new historicism. The aim of the dissertation will be to present the state of (post)colonial German studies, its starting points and perspectives, as well as a presentation of current research results which lead to the establishment of a new memory culture of the German colonial past. Emphasizing the importance of dealing with the repressed German colonial past represents a shift from Eurocentrism to an attempt to "enlighten" Africa, which, as the research results of (post)colonial studies show, is still seen as “black” continent, as a construct perceived as an ideological counterbalance to the West and as a justification for both colonial and (post)- and neo-colonial ventures currents. By analyzing the contemporary German novel in which this part of the German colonial history is thematized, this doctoral dissertation is to search the images of Africa/Africans, depictions of colonial practices of crimes of genocidal character as defined points of the German national plan empire, as well as the discovery of the mechanisms that made the crimes possible and which relativized the guilt and responsibility of the Germans for that act.