Herero

Gerhard Seyfried:
Herero
Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2003
603 S.
ISBN 3-8218-0873-X
Paperback edition: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004

The Herero material came to Seyfried's attention while he was travelling in Namibia for the Goethe-Institut. He spent several years researching the lives of indigenous people and Germans in the colonies. Seyfried's "Herero", a tale of German settlers and generals and rebellious Hereros on the African plains, is set against the background of one of the darkest chapters of Germany's colonial past.

Gerhard Seyfried's novel "Herero", published in the spring of 2003 attempts to rectify the injustices of the past. It portrays the first year of the war against the Hereros in the factual manner of a school radio programme. The title "Herero" is misleading as centre stage is taken not by the Hereros, but by the naive young cartographer Carl Ettmann. His sense of adventure leads him to South West Africa, unaware that the profession of map-making would contribute to the expropriation and destruction of the African people. He is inadvertently drawn into the events of the war. On behalf of the reader he condemns the racist and imperialistic attitudes of the military and wrestles in self-critical fashion with his own attitudes towards German colonialism.

Even so, where Seyfried by means of his narrative perspective portrays the views of the Herero chiefs Samuel Maharero and Zacharias Zeraua as well as those of the messenger Petrus, he gives the Africans their own voices: to those who collaborated with the Germans, to those who were trained by the Germans and used their knowledge against their colonisers, and to those who suffered under the exploitation and tried to free themselves from the colonial yoke. His portrayal of the expropriation, the deceit and the class bias exposes the myth of colonial development politics. Hannah Arendt's theory that the destruction of colonised peoples paved the way for the holocaust, are portrayed by means of General von Trotha's remarks and instructions. Because of his exceptionally cruel behaviour, von Trotha was recalled from South West Africa in November 1905.