干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

When German colonial officials and settlers arrived in the colony of Southwest Africa around the turn of the twentieth century, they were faced with dry, unknown, and often dangerous surroundings. This article provides an environmental perspective on the history of the German occupation of the colony. It highlights the widespread scarcity of water in the territory, which impacted and often impeded attempts to survey and develop the territory and to control its population. The article describes the halting and underfunded efforts of the German administration to create legible landscapes, and it pays particular attention to German warfare and violence in the Herero War of 1904. The genocidal scale of German atrocities in the war has by now been well documented, but the role of the Southwest African environment has not yet received the in-depth attention it deserves. German soldiers fighting in the arid and unexplored landscapes of the colony struggled with constant supply shortages and were plagued by disease. Suffering the dire conditions of desert warfare, the soldiers often referred to the environment as their main adversary and viewed their human enemies as part of the generally hostile surroundings. This mindset helped to produce a pervasive indifference to human suffering among the German soldiers and, ultimately, a de-humanization of the Hereros. The article’s focus on colonial landscapes and on German responses to their natural surroundings adds an environmental and place-specific perspective to the attempts at reconstructing the course of the German-Herero War.