A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...

Foucauldian collection of knowledge as the state sought to regulate and control its restive
inhabitants through the accumulation of cultural and social knowledge. 104 The
development of German information also worked to control the native population in
explicit ways, like the regular reports on the dispositions of native tribes sent from the
colonial administration to Berlin. 105
More specifically, the German government and universities attempted to
determine an African cultural episteme through anthropological research, which
expanded exponentially after 1890. For example, Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität’s
Seminar for Oriental Languages was founded in 1887 in a desire to acquire tools to better
understand languages like Swahili, Turkish, Arabic and later Herero, Nama, Duala, and
Gujarati. 106 Native speakers were brought to Berlin to teach the students, who were
mostly colonial administrators, Schutztruppe officers, missionaries and traders. Through
this deterritorialization of population, language and culture, Berlin became an
internationally-recognized centre for the study of African cultures and languages. 107
This ethnographic research had another side, revealed principally after the revolts
of 1904-1905. Following the wars, government-sponsored research into phrenology and
racial eugenics by the “geneticist” Eugen Fischer of the Pathologisches Institut and
Rudolf Virchow of the Königlichen Museen für Volkerkunde und Naturkunde was
carried out upon more than a thousand Herero prisoners’ corpses from the Shark Island
concentration camp. 108 Most hideously, this research was in turn used to justify German
expansion on the African continent as Virchow could prove the superiority of German
culture through his studies. The evil uses of German research on the colonial “other” are
important to remember when discussing the reciprocal inter-mixing of cultural symbols
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