German Colonial-Era Monuments and the Conceptualization of Space

Magdalena Tonia Füllenbach

In recent years, German colonial-era monuments have increasingly become the subject of public debates and academic research. Until now, they have been examined primarily in terms of their historical significance, with the impact or relevance of their aesthetic qualities being largely neglected. However, a closer look at their visual vocabulary and their relationship to their urban or landscaped environments shows how closely the political messages of the monuments were linked to their compositions and design. For especially during the early period of German colonialism, imagery from the “Wilhelmine monument mania” was adopted and transferred to new colonial spaces and contexts. In some cases, this led to semantic shifts within established memorial genres. In other cases, new types of monuments were developed whose visual and spatial concepts were specifically tailored to colonial themes and contexts. The aim of the project is to investigate these factors and their underlying processes of negotiation. Using case studies, the work focuses on German colonial monuments erected in the former German colonies on the African continent and in Germany. The project analyses the memorial structures not only with regard to iconography, but also in relation to their pictorial formulas and spatial concepts – since the rhetoric they use to convey political messages is grounded in the formal qualities of the monuments and their aesthetic qualities. An analysis of these characteristics also forms an indispensable basis for current debates on possible approaches to German colonial monuments, and for identifying aspects that should be taken into account during future artistic interactions.