Colonial Mentality

We begin our three-part series focus­ing on the con­ti­nu­ity of colo­nial men­tal­i­ty with a clas­sic ethno­graph­i­cal film from 1930. We do not want to accuse the direc­tors Gulla Pfef­fer and her cam­era­man Friedrich Dal­sheim, who shot their movie in a vil­lage in Togo, of having a Euro­cen­tric per­spec­tive, quite the oppo­site. MENSCHEN IM BUSCH (People in the Bush) is most likely the first German film about anoth­er cul­ture that con­sis­tent­ly assumes the per­spec­tive of the people being filmed. It is an odd fact, how­ev­er, that the film is intro­duced by Duke Adolf Friedrich zu Meck­len­burg, who was the gov­er­nor of the German colony of Togo (1912-1914). How did that happen? Adolf Friedrich became known for his early expe­di­tions to Africa between 1907 and 1911, which earned him an hon­orary mem­ber­ship in the Berlin Soci­ety of Anthro­pol­o­gy. After the First World War, he became the vice pres­i­dent of the German Colo­nial Soci­ety and was a member of the board of the German Kolo­nial­film GmbH, which was found­ed in 1917. We will dis­cuss how his intro­duc­tion with racist under­tones ended up in … read more