EVENT DETAILS

"Race War and Cultural Genocide in German Southwest Africa"

Jürgen Zimmerer
Professor, Universität Hamburg

Commentator: Bob Moeller
Professor, History
UC Irvine

Since the centenary of the beginning of the Herero and Nama genocide in 2004, a fierce debate has erupted about continuities between the first German genocide, the German war crimes during World War II, and the Holocaust. The discussion has concentrated on the similarities between racial warfare in Africa and Eastern Europe. However, this focus on war and genocide in the Omaheke desert and in African concentration camps has ignored the fact that the military genocide was part of a larger colonial project aimed at the establishment of a racial utopia based on cultural genocide. This lecture will present recent findings on the race war and put them into the wider context of cultural genocide.

The Thyssen Lecture Series is hosted by the History Department at UCI and IICAS at UC San Diego, and sponsored by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung Foundation.