A few years ago, an American historian decided to visit the askari memorial in Hamburg. He took a fast train from Paris just to see it and arrived in Hamburg on a rainy day, half worried that, given the political climate, the memorial might disappear from public view before he got there. Designed by von Ruckteschell in 1938, the askari memorial is composed of two large terra-cotta bas-reliefs, about seven feet high; they were installed on either side of the gates of the von Lettow-Vorbeck Kaserne (military barracks) a few months before Hitler invaded Poland.
The left-hand bas-relief shows four carriers bearing bundles on their heads led by an askari NCO; the right-hand bas-relief shows a detachment of four askaris, each bearing their old Jagerbuch 71 rifles, led by a German officer. As originally installed, the bas-reliefs seemed to be marching toward each other, as if to a rendezvous in the bush. An inscription in Gothic lettering on the pedestal reads only SCHUTZTRUPPE, 1914–1918—DEUTSCH-OST-AFRIKA. The bas-reliefs are done in that heavy art-deco-meets-medieval-wood-carving style popular in Germany in the long gray years after World War One. They’re well rendered and quite impressive. Von Ruckteschell was a good artist, equally competent in both sculpture and painting, perhaps unjustly neglected today.
The bas-reliefs remained where they had been placed on either side of the gates until 1992 when, in a spasm of historical revisionism, it was decided that von Lettow had been a racist and a brutal colonialist and that the era of German rule in East Africa should not be remembered with a statue of any kind, if at all. The Kaserne, which had been named for him after World War Two, was shut down and the memorial bas-reliefs moved to a forlorn spot inside the gates called Tanzania Park and the gates were themselves closed with a chain and padlocked. At the same time they changed the names of certain streets in several German cities that had been named in honor of von Lettow.
In Tanzania Park, the askari memorial keeps company with other disgraced monuments, most notably a statue of von Wissmann, which had been pulled down with ropes by rampaging students from its place in a public park in Hamburg in 1967; a bust of Lothar von Trotha, author of the infamous Schrecklichkeit; and a stele honoring the dead of Germany’s colonial wars. Even sequestered as they are inside the Kaserne, and viewed only by special permission, these statues and memorials are accompanied with explanatory plaques in English, German, and Swahili that function like the warning labels on packs of cigarettes—lest they corrupt the viewer with their unalloyed colonialist and martial spirit. The warning label posted beside von Ruckteschell’s askari memorial reads in part:
These terra-cotta reliefs recall the campaign of the German colonial troops under General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck during the First World War in the colony of German East Africa. The campaign was conducted between 1914 and 1918, with about half a million people, most of them African civilians, killed directly and indirectly by acts of war. It was viewed as an example of German “heroism” in the years following 1918.
The reliefs were set up in order to cultivate the popular legend of the loyalty of African soldiers to the German colonial army, and to legitimize the call for the return of the former German colonies.
Etc.
The American historian had a difficult time seeing the monuments. He chased around Hamburg for a while in the rain—it rains a lot in Germany—took a couple of trams, found a receptionist at the Rathaus, the city hall, who sent him to a Christian Democratic Party official, who then referred him to an architect who belonged to the citizens’ group that had been debating what should be done with the monuments. The architect had been given the keys to the gates of the Kaserne and hence control over Tanzania Park. The historian explained that he had come all the way from Paris and that he didn’t have much time, that he had to be back to work in the morning.
The architect took pity on the historian’s somewhat absurd quest and invited him over for tea. They waited in the architect’s exquisitely neat apartment for the rain to end—it was raining heavily now, and the historian was treated to an impromptu lecture on the undeniable horrors of colonialism in general and the horrors of the First World War in Africa in particular:
The death toll of the war in Africa can never be accurately tabulated, the architect said. No one kept count of the carriers who died, not the Germans or the English—but all told, including the combatants of both sides, it was probably somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000, though no one could say for sure. In any case, big numbers like this got bandied about by the architect, though he admitted they probably included all those who died from tropical diseases and the flu, which the Europeans had brought to Africa unwittingly. Von Lettow was primarily responsible for all the deaths, the architect continued, because he insisted on prosecuting the war when he should have surrendered—which is exactly what the British said in 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1918.
Of course, von Lettow got blamed for many things by many different people after the war. He got blamed by the British for refusing to admit they would win; he got blamed by the Spartacists for being an imperial stooge; he got blamed by the Reichswehr generals for opposing the Republic; he got blamed by Hitler for not being a Nazi. He got blamed for the deaths of askaris and German soldiers and African carriers by historians as yet unborn, and also for the death of any native who died from the flu or starvation when their fields were stripped clean of yams by the invading Schutztruppe.
There is, no doubt, a lot of justice in these accusations. War is a terrible thing best avoided by reasonable people. Approximately 80,000 men died, for example, in one day at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and about 1,200,000 over the course of the battle. But war is also a human constant; there are likely to be more wars soon. Given this sad certainty—and given von Lettow’s level of expertise: for example, that he was an artist of logistics, strategy, tactics, artillery barrages, Maxim guns, maneuvers, and the handling of troops in impossible terrain; and given von Lettow’s contempt for everything in life that was nasty, gaudy, and irresolute—in the next war you would probably want him there. You would want him on your side.
—
At last the rain stopped.
Though it was nearly dusk, the American historian and the German architect got into the latter’s stylish and impeccably preserved 1967 NSU Ro80 and drove over to see the askari memorial. The padlock, rusty by now, took a little time to open but finally fell away, and the chains were removed, the gates thrust back with a metallic scrape. The historian and the architect entered and wandered around the dripping grounds of the Kaserne a bit before they found the forlorn statuary garden called Tanzania Park.
Von Ruckteschell’s forbidden monument, set into concrete supports, stood in the middle of a weedy patch of brown, untended grass. Nobody had been there in a long time. The historian took out his camera but suddenly couldn’t take a picture. The tall, dark terra-cotta figures of the askaris and carriers and their lone German officer, marching toward each other in an imaginary Africa long ago, gleamed in the day’s last light.