Wednesday, 22 May 2024
5.00 pm – opening keynote
Joël Glasman (Universität Bayreuth), The Production of Indifference. Colonialism and the origins of European Apathy
6.00 pm - Dinner
Thursday, 23 May 2024
9.00 am – Welcome and introduction (Delphine Froment, Mathias Hack, Robert Heinze, Tobias Wagemann)
9.30 am – panel 1: The transimperial dimensions of German colonialism
chair : Christine de Gemeaux (Université de Tours)
Benedict Oldfield (Uppsala University), Indians and German colonialism in East Africa
Willeke Sandler (Loyola University Maryland), “The War was a great link”: Interwar Tanganyika as Transimperial Space
12.30 am – lunch break
2.00pm – panel 2: The agency of indigenous actors and German colonial rule
Chair: Antje Dietze (Universität Leipzig)
Sabine Hanke (Universität Tübingen), Feathers from paradise: Indigenous perspectives on hunting birds of paradise in German New Guinea, c. 1880s-1920s
Tiendjo Nouwezem (Université de Douala), Indigenous people in the process of urbanisation in Cameroon during the German period: the case of Douala
Kodzo Abotsi (Université de Lomé), Writing German colonial history in Togo based on the writings of the colonized: the case of petitions and newspaper articles (1902-1914)
Coffee break
5.00 pm – roundtable: German colonialism from both sides of the Rhine – Historical transfers, historiographical dialogue (participants: Nina Kleinöder, Christine de Gemeaux, Catherine Repussard and Matthew Fitzpatrick)
Chair: Jakob Vogel (Science Po, Paris)
7.00 pm – Dinner
Friday, 24 May 2024
9.30 am - panel 3: The chronological and geographical limits of the German empire
Chair: Nina Kleinöder (Otto-Friedrichs-Universität Bamberg)
Katherine Arnold (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München), Natural History Collecting as a Tool for Interpreting German Pre-Colonial Entanglements
Paul Csillag (European University Institute Florence), Crusade Romanticism – Friedrich III’s Orientreise as an indicator of imperial intentions
Clara Torrao Busin (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris), From a Line on the Map to a Border Corridor to the Front: Spatial and Social Impacts of Border Drawing in the Kionga region (Northern Mozambique)
12.30 am – lunch break
2.00 pm – panel 4: Economy and labour
Chair : Henry Kah (University of Buea)
Esther Jocelyne Tonye and Léopold Sédar Edong (Université de Douala et Université de Dschang), Heritage, memory, and German colonial history in Cameroon: between appropriation and rejection? The example of the German bridge over the Sanaga and the Njock railways tunnels in the collective memory of the Bassa people
Edith Nadège Tchuenmogne (Université de Dschang), German post-colonial period in the Southern Cameroons: the impact of the return of the Germans to economic life.
Tomas Bartoletti (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich), Colonial Beetles in German Samoa: Economic Entomology and the Ecological Crisis in the Coconut Plantations
Coffee break
4:00 pm – panel 5: Postcolonial Germany and postcolonial worlds
Chair: Jakob Vogel (Sciences Po, Paris)
Clémence Andreys (Université de Franche-Comté), Building a new culture of remembrance of German colonization: the works of museums and citizen groups
Jana Otto (Leibniz Universität Hannover), Exhibiting or Concealing the Colonial Past? – The Family Archive, Post-colonial Memory, and Material Culture in Germany
Derrick Dang (Université d’Ebolowa), Germany in the Cameroonian tourist space from 1896 to 1987. Construction of tourism infrastructure, tourist Germanophobia and promotion of the Cameroon destination
6:00 pm - ending keynote: Matthew P. Fitzpatrick (Flinders University) Liberal Imperialism in German Samoa: Exception, Exemplar or Empire as Usual?
7.00 pm – conference closed