The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich

by Elizabeth R. Baer

The first genocide of the twentieth century, though not well known, was committed by Germans between 1904–1907 in the country we know today as Namibia, where they exterminated thousands of Herero and Nama people and subjected the surviving indigenous men, women, and children to forced labor. The perception of Africans as subhuman—lacking any kind of civilization, history, or meaningful religion—and the resulting justification for the violence against them is what author Elizabeth R. Baer refers to as the “genocidal gaze,” an attitude that was later perpetuated by the Nazis. In The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich, Baer uses the trope of the gaze to trace linkages between the genocide of the Herero and Nama and that of the victims of the Holocaust. Significantly, Baer also considers the African gaze of resistance returned by the indigenous people and their leaders upon the German imperialists.

Baer explores the threads of shared ideology in the Herero and Nama genocide and the Holocaust—concepts such as racial hierarchies, lebensraum (living space), rassenschande (racial shame), and endlösung (final solution) that were deployed by German authorities in 1904 and again in the 1930s and 1940s to justify genocide. She also notes the use of shared methodology—concentration camps, death camps, intentional starvation, rape, indiscriminate killing of women and children—in both instances.

While previous scholars have made these links between the Herero and Nama genocide and that of the Holocaust, Baer’s book is the first to examine literary texts that demonstrate this connection. Texts under consideration include the archive of Nama revolutionary Hendrik Witbooi; a colonial novel by German Gustav Frenssen (1906), in which the genocidal gaze conveyed an acceptance of racial annihilation; and three post-Holocaust texts—by German Uwe Timm, Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, and installation artist William Kentridge of South Africa—that critique the genocidal gaze. Baer posits that writing and reading about the gaze is an act of mediation, a power dynamic that calls those who commit genocide to account for their crimes and discloses their malignant convictions. Careful reading of texts and attention to the narrative deployment of the genocidal gaze—or the resistance to it—establishes discursive similarities in books written both during colonialism and in the post-Holocaust era.

The Genocidal Gaze is an original and challenging discussion of such contemporary issues as colonial practices, the Nazi concentration camp state, European and African race relations, definitions of genocide, and postcolonial theory. Moreover, Baer demonstrates the power of literary and artistic works to condone, or even promote, genocide or to soundly condemn it. Her transnational analysis provides the groundwork for future studies of links between imperialism and genocide, links among genocides, and the devastating impact of the genocidal gaze.

Genres: Germany, History, Nonfiction

311 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 20, 2017

About the author

Elizabeth Baer is a Research Professor at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota. Baer holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Manhattanville College, a master’s degree in English from New York University, and a Ph.D. in English from Indiana University. Her scholarly work spans the fields of history, religion, pedagogy, literature, and women’s studies. Baer has lectured, traveled, and taught all over the world including courses in Germany, the Czech Republic, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Namibia. She has also garnered major awards including a Bush Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholar Award, a Pew Scholarship, and a fellowship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. A leitmotif of Professor Baer’s scholarship is the tenacity with which she investigates important and difficult issues such as sexual violence in the Holocaust and genocide in Rwanda. Her focus is social justice and the role of literary texts in achieving such justice.

Reviews

[B Sarv · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review of Genocidal Gaze by P. Neukirch and B. Sarv

In what is described as the first genocide in the 20th Century, the German army, in its colony known as German South West Africa (GSWA) wiped out two groups of people in an effort to open the territory there to German settlers. The genocide included two particular features which would later reappear in the Nazi Holocaust: 1) dehumanization of the victims and 2) transport to a death camp where people starved to death while being made to work as enslaved people as well. One of the worst atrocities was, after a defeat in battle, the Herero were forced to march into the desert where they died of hunger and thirst. . The author explains that 80% of the Herero people and 50% of the Nama people were killed in this genocide. What was then known as GSWA is now known as the country Namibia. To me this was reminiscent of the treatment of the Native Americans in instance after instance, from the Trail of Tears, to the slaughter of millions of buffalo, to the systematic breach of treaties and starvation in the reservations they were forced to live on.

This book, however, was not intended as an historical account of the genocide. The main premise was that the author intended to demonstrate that Germany’s experience of committing genocide in GSWA of was a precursor of the Nazi Holocaust. In order to do this she used other works of non-fiction, fiction and art to reveal three perspectives: the African gaze, the Imperial gaze and the Genocidal gaze. She begins with writings of one of the leaders of Nama people, Hendrik Witbooi. He kept a diary at the time of the conflict between the Nama and Germany, prior to the genocide. She uses his perspective to illustrate the sophistication with which Witbooi regarded the Germans and how he observed a change from an imperialist to a genocidal approach by the Germans toward his people.

Next, she examines two German novels: one, written close to the time of the genocide and the other written after World War II and the Holocaust. The older novel is filled with racist ideas and statements about the Herero. In it the protagonist is clear about the Imperial gaze – supporting imperialism as a good thing in terms of his nation. He then shifts and supports the genocide being committed by the Germans. This position, called the Genocidal Gaze by the author, is then linked in a number of ways to the way the Nazis viewed their victims of the Holocaust. Essentially the Genocidal Gaze she identifies is the way in which the oppressor views the “other” in order to justify any act perpetrated to exterminate that other. This protagonist relates many horrific incidents in a way that makes it clear that he not only supports them but participates in them. The post-Holocaust novel also reveals the presence of the Genocidal Gaze in GSWA, but he then links it to the Holocaust. Unlike the earlier author, the author of the second novel indicts this perspective and the German genocidal gaze as criminal – which of course it was. It shows an evolution of perspective from the earlier willingness to be an active participant in the extermination of a people (genocidal gaze) to a society-wide critique of that same genocidal gaze.

The author looks at a unique piece of art. It is a combination of collages, animation and still photography in a presentation for an audience that lasts over 20 minutes. Like the second novel she examined, the artwork is a critique of the inhumanity of the genocidal gaze. The artist works from the perspective of a white South African who also opposed Apartheid and saw it for what it was. The artwork she analyzes was complex and it was at times difficult to follow the written descriptions of the piece. Nevertheless she is able to demonstrate how this artist analyzed the connection among the Herero and Nama genocide, the Holocaust and Apartheid.

Another novel, this time by an African author, is shown to relate the African perspective of the genocidal gaze. The novel, “Our Sister Killjoy” by Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, turns the view back to the European – or rather how the German genocidal gaze looks through African eyes. Baer says, “The critique Aidoo offers is this: the very people, white Europeans – who came to Africa with the avowed purpose of civilizing indigenous Africans in the nineteenth century, in fact demonstrated then, as well as half century later, that they were capable of the most heinous crimes against humanity and civilization.” In other words, the genocidal gaze does not fool anyone. The real absence of a civilized perspective was that which the Europeans did not have. Aidoo’s novel also identifies the reluctance of European people to deal with their history of heinous, uncivilized behavior. While it took decades for Germans to even begin to touch the facts of their genocide in Namibia, those Africans who were there had recognized what the German gaze was really about from the start, and they actively fought against it for survival. This reinforces the notion that, throughout the world, those who are the most oppressed and exploited are the people that see reality most clearly, and as you move up the hierarchy of the classes, people become less and less attached to this reality. Again, as the first example of German writing and “Our Sister Killjoy” show, one terrible aspect of the genocidal gaze is the complete inability of those viewing the world through that lens to truly see and understand their evil ways.

In describing some of the atrocities committed, Baer states, “While there are some scholars who maintain that the near extinction of these two groups in Namibia does not qualify as genocide, the general agreement among historians is that the German massacre of the Ovaherero in 1904 is widely recognized as the first genocide of the 20th century.” It made me think of two things. One was how unreal it is to me that someone can look at the extermination of two entire groups of people and decide that it is appropriate to parse the definition of genocide. The second thing that occurred to me was a thought from “The Girl Who Smiles Beads” by Clementine Wamariya. As I said in a review of her book: “Ms. Wamariya captured the essence of so many problems facing the world when she said this about genocide: “The word genocide cannot help the civilians. It can only help the politician sitting in the UN discussing with all the other politicians in suits, “How are we going to fix this problem?””.” Similarly, Dr. Baer repeatedly mentions how the remaining Nama and Herero were used as “forced labor” and making the distinction that they were not enslaved people because they were not owned by anyone. I chaffed significantly at her parsing this definition and while it might be nice for academics to play at this type of hair splitting I doubt that the victims would have acquiesced to the idea that they were forced laborers and not enslaved. Even though I stand by this critique of the author I recognize that she may have been making such an effort because late in her text she said, “These events are linked by attitudes toward racial/racist hierarchies that the Apartheid government reconfigured as whites/Indians/colored/blacks. Other links include support of totalitarian ideologies; relocation of peoples according to race and ethnicity; large scale murder of those deemed genetically inferior; use of concentration camps and military tactics to confine people; institution of laws that defined citizenship, those who could receive an education and who could vote and the delusion of Aryan supremacy.” The events about which she makes this observation could be connected in so many ways to the events in American history.


Dr. Baer explained that during the genocide of the Herero and Nama, “Images of Hereoro and Nama skulls were sent home to Germany as postcards.” This was another means with which the Germans dehumanized their victims and normalized that dehumanization. When I read this I was immediately reminded of the reign of terror in the Southern United States during the era of intensified numbers of lynchings post-Reconstruction. It was common practice for the perpetrators of the lynchings to be photographed with the victims. These horrific images were sometimes made into post cards and souvenirs. As referenced above, this was not the only time while I was reading this book that the connection between the genocide of the Nama and Herero and the United States came through.

Related to this connection I again quote Dr. Baer: “It can be argued the policies and ideology of Apartheid owed much to the Nazis.” In my marginalia I say, “which in turn owed much to the native genocide in US and segregation terrorism post-Civil War.” From the time I read Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s “The Red Record,” which gives an account of numerous post-Civil War lynchings, Elliot Jaspin’s, “Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America” and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s, “An Indigenous People’s History of the United States” I became aware of the connections between Apartheid, the Nazi Holocaust and America’s role in creating the framework for those infamies. I think it would have been fair for Dr. Baer to make this connection.

According to the author, the German novelist who critiqued the genocidal gaze showed his, “unwillingness to create a fictional African mind set emerges from respect and his reluctance to imagine that for which he has so little knowledge.” That novelist, when commenting on his own work said, “What is permissible to the playfully ingenious author of Robinson Crusoe – fiction masking as chronicle – is not permitted to those who touch on the destruction of six million souls, on the extermination of their millennial civilization of Europe….a writer must not toy with the facts of a genocide.” This was particularly interesting as it demonstrated that a critiquing of the genocidal gaze could be possible in art and fiction, but that it should be done in a way that respects the victims in a very deep and meaningful way by not making light of what transpired.

My principal critique of this book is its accessibility to the ordinary reader. Certainly that was not her purpose in writing the book. She was writing a book that other academics in her field could use as a way of analyzing genocide. I had to look up several words and although I am no genius I have a decent vocabulary. The fact that I kept running to the dictionary was an indication that this book wouldn’t have been accessible to many. My problem with that is two-fold: 1) she could have gotten the same ideas across with the same level of conciseness and clarity without the vocabulary exercise and 2) this subject is so important that it should be accessible to the average reader. It kept my interest but it did not provide the depth of history that I think people need to really understand the horrors of the first genocide of the 20th century, its relationship to American history and the thread of genocides that followed it.

[Pres. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book sorely needed, given the lack of discussion regarding German atrocities in GSWA. But, it does become redundant and a bit droning.