Reframing colonial amnesia: German colonialism and multilingual memory in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives

ABSTRACT

Cultural memory of German colonialism is too often described as overshadowed, absent, or forgotten, with references to factors such as the short period of German colonialism, its abrupt end, and the relative lack of postcolonial immigration to Germany. This article reframes established understandings of German colonial memory and colonial amnesia by engaging with representations of German colonialism in the anglophone novel Afterlives (2020) by Abdulrazak Gurnah. I argue that Afterlives provokes a rereading of German cultural memory of colonialism by demonstrating its transnational and multilingual entanglements. My reading of the novel specifically addresses the spatial, temporal, and textual layers of its representation of colonial memory and the roles that archives and intertextuality play in its rereading of the colonial past. In doing so, I illustrate how Gurnah’s text insists on the various layers, entanglements, and intertexts between German colonial memory and anglophone postcolonial texts.

KEYWORDS:

• Abdulrazak Gurnah
• Afterlives
• Black German studies
• colonial amnesia
• German colonialism

Introduction: Rereading German cultural memory of colonialism

an den tagen, an denen ich am optimistischsten bin, weiß ich, es geschieht sowieso: das erinnern [on the days on which I am most optimistic, I know it happens anyways: remembering]¹

The opening lines of Sharon Dodua Otoo’s poem “das erinnern” [remembering], written for the December 2022 renaming of two streets in Berlin’s “African Quarter” after Rudolf and Emily Duala Manga Bell and Cornelius Fredericks, respectively, offer a critical perspective on the colonial past in German cultural memory.² While scholarship and public discourse on German colonialism often begin with a framing that relies on comparisons with other European colonial empires, to which, when compared, German colonialism was “not nearly as bad,” was characterized by the “early loss” of the colonies after World War I, the “resulting lack of immediate postcolonial immigration,” ensuing absence of “a diasporic presence of formerly colonized peoples in Germany,” and whose memory is supposedly overshadowed by “the dominant role of National Socialism and the Holocaust,” Otoo’s poem insists on the acts of memory that endure within, and regardless of, the unique structures of German colonial history and postcolonial reckoning.³ Repeated throughout the poem, the phrase “happens anyways” acknowledges both the fallibility of memory, evident in claims of colonial amnesia, as well as its resiliency.⁴ The poem references the memory that is borne by people who carry histories “in den haaren” [in their hair] and “auf der haut” [on their skin], thereby highlighting the central role of Black people and People of Color in the embodied act, and in the labor, of the remembering that “happens anyways.”⁵ On the occasion of the street renaming, an act which critically intervenes in the collective (mis)remembering of the German colonial period by recalling acts of resistance in the former colonies, the poem rereads and rewrites colonialism and the cultural memory thereof as a “trans-national and transcultural ‘global’ process.”⁶

Drawing on the methodological approach of Otoo’s poem, which situates the memory of German colonialism within a transnational and transcultural framework, this article proposes to analyze representations of German colonialism and the memory thereof in the 2020 novel Afterlives by 2021 Nobel Prize laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. In reading what Birgit Neumann refers to as a “post-monolingual” anglophone novel within the framework of German cultural memory of colonialism, I recognize the transnational and multilingual entanglements of both German colonialism and Gurnah’s writing.⁷ Gurnah’s oeuvre, as Tina Steiner and Maria Olaussen acutely observe, illustrates the “inter-cultural” and “inter-linguistic” spaces of “Africa” and “Britain.”⁸ Yet recent scholarship has picked up on further transnational and multilingual entanglements of Gurnah’s novels, in particular with Germany. In taking Afterlives as a literary text relevant to discussions surrounding German colonial memory, I build on foundational work done by Dirk Göttsche on the German references in Gurnah’s novels as well as his recognition of foreign-language literature as a “diverse field of literary engagement with German colonial history that has so far received rather little attention.”⁹ Afterlives notably expands the “critical postcolonial memory of German colonialism” established in Gurnah’s 1994 novel Paradise through the character Yusuf, who escapes indentured servitude by joining the German colonial army in the final scene of the novel.¹⁰ The increasingly explicit engagement with German colonial history and German colonial agents in Afterlives only confirms the relevance of this anglophone postcolonial, African diasporic, and Black British text to German colonial memory discourses. My reading of Afterlives thus attends both to the need to consider transnational entanglements of German colonialism and their manifestations in foreign-language literatures as well as to center Black anglophone and African diasporic literature within literary discussions of postcolonial Germany, which too often reproduce exclusively white and Eurocentric perspectives.¹¹ Against this backdrop, I demonstrate how Afterlives reframes established understandings of colonial amnesia in its representation of German colonialism and the layers, entanglements, and intertexts which inform the memory thereof.

In the following section, I outline and reframe predominant conceptualizations of cultural memory of German colonialism as “colonial amnesia” before turning to Afterlives as an anglophone novel which provokes a rereading of German colonialism in East Africa and the frameworks in which it is remembered. I then begin my analysis of the novel by addressing the spatial, temporal, and textual dimensions of how colonial memory is represented in order to establish where, when, and how colonialism is remembered in Afterlives. This is followed by an analysis of the role of the archive as a site of remembering and rereading in the novel that illustrates the ambivalences of how colonial memory is recorded, forgotten, and uncovered. I then turn to instances of intertextuality with the German literary canon as further sites for rereading Germany’s colonial past, considering how these intertexts revise and further entangle the colonial past between anglophone and germanophone contexts. Finally, I conclude by linking the recognition of memory as continuous and resilient in Otoo’s “das erinnern” to the acts of remembering and (re)reading in Gurnah’s Afterlives.

Reframing colonial amnesia

The textual engagement with memories of German colonialism in Afterlives provokes a rereading of the predominant conceptualization of “colonial amnesia” in German cultural memory.¹² Constituent with the aforementioned framing of German colonialism as unique and limited in comparison to other nationally-defined European colonialisms, Germany is often described as having “suffered” from colonial amnesia since the post-World War II period.¹³ Historian Jürgen Zimmerer uses the term colonial amnesia to describe how “the knowledge about Germany’s colonial past had been forgotten, had been ignored,” noting that this is tied to the comparatively early end of German colonialism after World War I and the predominant focus on addressing the National Socialist past, which relegates colonial history “into the background.”¹⁴ Here, the relativizing framework of German colonialism coincides with an understanding of colonial amnesia, which is posited as a result of the historical and mnemonic entanglements between Germany’s colonial empire and the National Socialist period.¹⁵

Drawing on Reinhart Kößler and Henning Melber, Christiane Bürger and Sahra Rausch point out how the terminology of colonial amnesia refers less to the lack of knowledge about colonialism than to a lost or impaired “Erinnerungsfähigkeit” [ability to remember].¹⁶ Furthermore, they demonstrate how the medical vocabulary of colonial amnesia creates an understanding of Germany’s “forgetting” as passive and innocent, as a condition which must be treated.¹⁷ Even the terminology of “colonial aphasia,” used by Ann Laura Stoler in order to “emphasize both loss of access and active dissociation” in the failure to remember colonialism, instrumentalizes a medical vocabulary and, as Bürger and Rausch point out, remains vague when it comes to processes of public and collective memory.¹⁸ When considered within Aleida Assmann’s framework of cultural memory, the concept of colonial amnesia overlaps with passive cultural forgetting. Assmann defines passive forgetting as “non-intentional acts” whereby certain events or objects “fall out of the frames of attention, valuation, and use.”¹⁹ At the same time, Assmann describes cultural remembering as an institutional “precaution” against the commonplace process of forgetting, distinguishing between active and passive cultural remembering, associated with the institutions of the canon and archive, respectively.²⁰ In this way, the history and memory of German colonialism can be seen as kept separate from “narrative versions” of Germany’s past, which are circulated in the canon, andinstead as “preserved” in the archive, apparently forgotten, but capable of being recovered.²¹

And yet, an understanding of cultural memory formation which narrativizes “forgetting” as innocent and passive, describes Germany as “suffering,” and its ability to remember as “impaired,” decenters the role of agency, a factor underlined by the insistent “happens anyways” in Otoo’s poem.²² Relying on terms such as “amnesia” and its associated medical context narrativizes Germany as sick and disabled, suggesting both a victim role and disguising the origins of the lost or impaired ability to remember. This framework uneasily minimizes the agency with which individuals and societies perform the labor of remembering (and forgetting) Germany’s colonial past. In her study of postethnic, translocal European identity formation, Fatima El-Tayeb draws on Susan Suleiman’s notion of “reprehensible amnesia,” pointing out how the “construction and suppression” of Europe’s colonial past is an active process which continues to other non-white populations in contemporary Europe.²³ While Bürger and Rausch argue that the terminology of colonial amnesia is effectively used as an “erinnerungspolitische[s] Instrument” [tool of remembrance policy] in nationally-focused discussions on the cultural memory of Germany’s colonial past, they also acknowledge that colonial amnesia is dependent on Eurocentric perspectives.²⁴ This Eurocentric framework is enforced by the continual reproduction of knowledge about German colonialism as exclusively white knowledge.²⁵ This both fails to take into account collective memory of German colonialism in formerly colonized countries and thereby the transnational entanglements of German colonialism, as well as it fails to consider the knowledge and memory work of Black Germans and Germans of Color throughout the twentieth century and into the present.²⁶

Indeed, considering the perspectives of Black people and People of Color in Germany and in the former colonies allows for a reframing of “colonial amnesia.” Contributions emerging from long-standing Black German scholarly traditions and epistemologies resist the framework of amnesia by repeatedly establishing and exploring the continuities of colonial logics in German society; among them the 1986 collection of essays, conversations, testimonies, and poetry Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte, Grada Kilomba’s episodic Plantation Memories and its interrogation of Germany’s lasting coloniality, but also activist efforts from groups such as Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland, Berlin Postkolonial e.V., Savvy Contemporary, No Humboldt 21!, and Barzani.berlin that have been central to acknowledging Germany’s colonial past, as well as more recent scholarly works such as Natasha Kelly’s Afrokultur (2016) and the edited volumes re/visionen: Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland (2016) and Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland (2017).²⁷

In the final essay of Farbe bekennen, May Ayim critiques the structural failure in Germany to remember the connections between its colonial history and the history of Africans and Afro-Germans in Germany, drawing on the functions of “compartmentalization” and “suppression” to make visible hegemonic ways of dealing with Germany’s past.²⁸ In doing so, she highlights the agency inherent in maintaining cultural memory and thus holding citizens accountable, especially by noting the need and, thus far, failure, to “really come to terms with existing social structures.”²⁹ As El-Tayeb argues, the anthology creates “a counter-memory discourse” which “directly challeng[es] the amnesia erasing [Black German women’s] presence in the nation.”³⁰ Along these lines, scholars such as Kien Nghi Ha, Nicola Lauré al-Samarai, Lilia Youssefi, and Natasha Kelly have utilized the term “entinnern” [disremember] to center the agency with which individuals and societies decide to remember and forget.³¹ Ha writes of disremembering as an active resistance to acknowledging and addressing colonialism and its continuities in German society.³² For him, it is a “bewusste Amnesie” [conscious amnesia] that characterizes German cultural memory of colonialism.³³ Thinking with Ha, who argues that disremembering can only be interrupted through counter-narratives, I propose that Afterlives functions as a source of “imaginative counter-memory” which intervenes in the framework of colonial amnesia and argues for a rereading of the archives and canons which contain and constitute a transnational and multilingual German cultural memory of colonialism.³⁴

Spatial, temporal, and textual layers of German colonial memory

In contrast to the limited and Eurocentric framework perpetuated by the concept of colonial amnesia, the spatial, temporal, and textual layers of German colonial memory in Afterlives trace the entanglements of the memory of German colonialism from East Africa to Germany and beyond the colonial period into the post-World War II period. Spanning from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s and taking place in both former German East Africa (present-day Tanzania) and West Germany, Afterlives includes lived experiences of German colonialism as well as its memory after 1918. The narrative follows the lives of Khalifa, Afiya, Uncle Ilyas and Hamza (both askari), and later Hamza and Afiya’s son Ilyas, named after his uncle.³⁵ The focus on the various individual characters that is maintained throughout the novel facilitates acts of remembering German colonialism from the perspectives of the colonized. This memory is traced most closely through Hamza’s experiences of othering, racism, and violence during his time as a soldier with the German colonial army, which continue to haunt him in the years after the war. Through Hamza’s nightmares, the violence of German colonization is prolonged as even the supposedly innocuous aspects of the German colonial presence, such as the missionary, are affirmed as part of the pervasive violence and “terror.”³⁶ These hauntings transcend time so that the memories of German colonialism affect Hamza’s son Ilyas, who is visited by a spirit. Hamza worries this is “his trauma, […] an aftermath of something he had done during the war” or a result of naming his son after his lost Uncle Ilyas, which “established a connection between them” (254). The violence of German colonialism is thereby also displaced from Hamza and Afiya onto Ilyas, whose life and travels create new spatialities into which the memory of German colonialism enters. Thus, the novel narrates what both Göttsche and Esther Pujolràs-Noguer refer to as the “postmemory” of German colonialism to connect “the colonial past and the postcolonial present” through the character of Ilyas, who belongs to the “generation after,” again creating pathways through which the memory of German colonialism persists across space and time.³⁷

These memories further persist through a particular awareness for the historiography and textualization of German colonialism that is present throughout in instances of meta-commentary on the novel’s own act of recording and remembering German colonial encounters. Many of these instances come through the omniscient narrative perspective, which often gestures towards the ways European colonialism in Africa has been narrated from a Eurocentric, predominantly white, perspective. For instance, the first mention of the Germans is accompanied by references to “their congress” and “their maps” (5). Slightly later the narrator explains: “That was how that part of the world was at the time. Every bit of it belonged to Europeans, at least on a map: British East Africa, Deutsch-Ostafrika, Africa Oriental Portuguesa, Congo Belge” (87). Twice, the map appears as a tool of colonization, “a means of textualizing the spatial reality of the other, naming or […] renaming spaces in a symbolic and literal act of mastery and control.”³⁸ The listing of the names of the colonized regions in the colonizers’ respective languages emphasizes the ways in which these regions were/are claimed and remembered from the European perspective. Yet the novel resists these colonial logics and violent intrusions on the space of the narrative. It undermines the authority of the map’s knowledge with the comment “at least on the map” and acknowledges a history of the region both before and after colonization with the phrase “at that time” (87). This is taken further when the narrator observes about the fighting during World War I that

[l]ater these events would be turned into stories of absurd and nonchalant heroics, a sideshow to the great tragedies in Europe, but for those who lived through it, this was a time when their land was soaked in blood and littered with corpses. (91)

This reference anticipates the disremembering in the act of writing history that overlooks and ignores the impact on colonized peoples. It comments on the hegemonic framing of World War I, which is narrated primarily through the conflict in Europe and thereby denotes the colonial wars in Africa as less important, less “tragic.” Yet Afterlives corrects this hegemonic history by re-centering the experiences of those “who lived through it” (91), naming specific events such as the Maji Maji uprising (8) and the Battle of Mahiwa (91), and remembering colonialism as a violent encounter.

Furthermore, the German characters within the novel are particularly implicated in the white literary historiographies of colonialism. The pastor with whom Hamza stays while he is healing refers to hegemonic framings of German colonialism and memory when he states, speaking of East Africa,

it is a landscape where you know that nothing of any importance has ever happened […] a place of no significance whatsoever in the history of human achievement or endeavour. You could tear this page out of human history and it would not make a difference to anything. (127)

The pastor’s comments characterize the setting of the novel and the events it has recorded as insignificant, foreshadowing the impending neglect of German colonial history on the “page […] of human history” (127), and perhaps more specifically within German cultural memory. That the pastor, as the German colonizer, says this to Hamza, the colonized, underscores his active role in curating knowledge about German colonialism in East Africa. That one might “tear” the history of German colonialism out of human history also underlines the agency with which colonialism is forgotten, or disremembered, by the German colonizers upon return to Germany (127).

At the same time that texts and stories are shown to be a hegemonic means of forgetting, they are also explicitly shown to be a means of remembering in the novel. At one point, Hamza’s son Ilyas is described as writing stories in school which “featured monkeys, feral cats, encounters with strangers on country roads, a cruel German officer who ran berserk with a sword and even a story about a fifteen-hundred-year-old jinn who lived in the neighbourhood and visited a fourteen-year-old boy” (258). Hamza’s own violent experience with the sergeant as well as the spirit that haunts Ilyas are tucked between the topics of Ilyas’s imaginative stories, hinting at the possibility of literature to record and circulate lived experiences of colonialism and its aftermath, as Afterlives itself does. The importance of texts as archives and sources of memory is further emphasized by the end of the novel, when it is revealed that Uncle Ilyas died in a concentration camp in Germany (275). The second to last line of the novel reads:

The cause of Uncle Ilyas’s death is not recorded but from the memoir of an inmate who survived, it is known that the son of the black singer who voluntarily entered the camp to be with his father was shot trying to escape. (275)

While historical documents do not fully record the fate of Uncle Ilyas and his son, a memoir written by a Holocaust survivor remembers this detail with which the narrative can finally be resolved, effectively demonstrating the entanglement of colonial history with National Socialist history. These historiographic and textual references suggest a rereading of both German colonial history and National Socialist history with a greater attentiveness to the experiences of colonized populations and places, which, as the novel indicates, are missing from dominant historiographies and cultural memory of German colonialism.

Rereading the archive: The labor of memory work

One particular setting in which this rereading of German colonialism might take place is the archive, which Assmann describes as “a space that is located on the border between forgetting and remembering.”³⁹ The liminality of the archive makes it a space of potential remembering, a space where cultural memory can be contested. The space of the archive plays a key role in the memory of German colonialism at the very end, when the novel’s spatial and temporal dimensions extend into 1960s Germany. Here, Ilyas travels to Germany on a scholarship from the West German government to study advanced broadcasting techniques in Bonn, the capital of West Germany. Entering the heart of the (West) German nation to uncover the fate of his uncle, Ilyas’s searching leads him to the archives. Highly symbolic, the space of the archive suggests that the memories and artifacts of colonialism in Germany are there, recorded in the national consciousness, waiting to be “interpreted” and “reclaim[ed],” at least by Ilyas, who is able to access them on his scholarship and who actively seeks them out.⁴⁰ Information about Uncle Ilyas and about German colonialism in East Africa is stored in numerous archives across West Germany, such as the “Lutheran archive for Bavaria in Nuremberg” (270), “the archives of the Reichskolonialbund in Koblenz” (272), “the Institute of Military History in Freiburg,” “the archives of the Colonial Association,” and “the Institute of Oriental Languages in Berlin” (273). The locating of these numerous archives within the text offers a critical intervention into the understanding of colonial amnesia in the postwar period, demonstrating that records of German military action in the former colonies, the work of colonial missionaries, and the period of colonial revisionism following World War I exist within the borders and boundaries of the German nation. At the same time, the listing of the archives explains how the memory of colonialism has been multiply displaced across the national space, “preserved in a state of latency,” to be carefully pieced together by Ilyas’s months of travel and research.⁴¹

Indeed, it is also Ilyas’s labor of memory work and his reading of the archives that intervenes into understandings of German cultural memory. In one instance, Ilyas’s supervisor for the broadcasting techniques program “frowned as Ilyas began to describe his project. ‘A war in Africa fifty years ago,’ he said. ‘Germany gets no rest from her wars’” (269). This somewhat defensive reaction is also notably marked by an understanding of Germany as a victim in the wars of the twentieth century, indicating how individuals resist the memory of the colonial past and thus enable “conscious amnesia” or “disremembering.”⁴² The phrasing “no rest” in particular underlines the labor that plays a role in processes and acts of remembering, a labor which Germany is shown to be suffering from and unwilling to undertake. Furthermore, the details the novel provides about Ilyas’s archival research argue for a rereading of the archives in which memories of German colonialism are stored. Locating information about the German colonial period in archives such as the Institute of Military History, which contains records of the German armed forces going back to 1871 and thus stores both the military histories and memories of German colonialism and of other periods more present in the nation’s cultural memory, such as National Socialism, Ilyas offers a new reading of the archive that takes into account German military histories that are preceded by and entangled with the National Socialist period. In naming and entering this archive to seek out the supposedly forgotten history of German colonialism, the text intervenes in what May Ayim notes as the narrow focus of National Socialist memory. Ayim references history books in particular for how they actively forget the “persecution and extermination” of other minority groups during the Holocaust and fail to look at the crimes of National Socialism “within the broader context of German history.”⁴³ Ilyas’s reading of the archives resists a “compartmentalization” of German history and reveals how Holocaust memories and the memories of German colonialism inform each other.⁴⁴

The layering of the memory of German colonialism in East Africa with the memory of National Socialism and the Holocaust is taken further by the novel’s denouement. The revelation that Uncle Ilyas died in Sachsenhausen alongside his son, Paul, who apparently followed him there brings the Holocaust and the legacies of German colonialism into the same frame, creating a multidirectional framework for the memory of German colonialism (275).⁴⁵ The fate of Uncle Ilyas remembers Black people who were persecuted under National Socialism and the embeddedness of colonial subjects in German history. The details Ilyas is able to find in the archives reveal a myriad of ambiguities and contradictions, such as the fact that Uncle Ilyas died in a concentration camp but was himself “marching with the Reichskolonialbund, a Nazi Party organization” (274) or that he was arrested for “defiling an Aryan woman. Not for marrying his wife!” (275) since the marriage, but not the affair, took place before the Nazi race laws were passed. These ambiguities resist a straightforward reading of Uncle Ilyas as a victim and instead highlight his agency. This is echoed by the last line of the novel, which reads: “So what we can know for sure, Ilyas told his parents, is that someone loved Uncle Ilyas enough to follow him to certain death in a concentration camp in order to keep him company” (275). A seemingly strange takeaway at first, Ilyas’s conclusion highlights Paul’s choice to be with his father and thus centralizes the role of family and affective relationships through which the novel’s remembering of German colonialism is narrated. Pujolràs-Noguer convincingly argues that Uncle Ilyas “becomes the irrefutable embodiment of the convergence of the Holocaust with colonialism.”⁴⁶ In this way the novel resists the framework of colonial amnesia, which sees German colonial history as having been relegated “into the background” in its contact with the memory of the Holocaust.⁴⁷ The history of National Socialism, itself entangled in processes of colonization in Eastern Europe, is rather a site for uncovering colonial legacies in Africa and the intertwinement of former colonial subjects into the nation space. The novel challenges a selective reading of the archive, highlighting it as a source of memory that must be reread and reconsidered.

Finally, not only the information Ilyas finds in the archives, but also the people he finds there, such as one archivist who himself was in East Africa, demonstrate both the continuity of colonial memory that persists in spite of its dismemberment across the various archives as well as the active process of disremembering in which the German characters are implicated. When Ilyas asks the question “Were you in Ostafrika?” the archivist responds with a curt “yes” before turning away, apparently ashamed of, as well as perhaps traumatized by, his involvement in colonization and its violence as well as foreshadowing the failure of this memory to be saved in the “canon” of German cultural memory (271–272).⁴⁸ Echoing the pastor’s foreshadowed neglect of German colonial history on the “page […] of human history” in German East Africa, the archivist’s reluctance to remember German colonialism in this passage connects instances of active disremembering from the former colony to the German nation (127). At the same time, the archivist himself exists as a bearer of colonial memory within the space of the archive, a space which is deeply intertwined with institutions of power.⁴⁹ This encounter both recognizes the active role German individuals and institutions have played in the failure to insert German colonialism in the working cultural memory and proposes to re-enter and reread the archives informing German cultural memory in order to recover this history, as Ilyas does.

Rereading the canon: Intertextual revisions of German colonial memory

In addition to the archive, Afterlives takes the German literary canon as a further site for its rereading of Germany’s colonial past, and in doing so recognizes the transnational and multilingual entanglements of German colonialism and the memory thereof. Broadly speaking, intertextuality and multilingualism have been highly productive lenses through which Gurnah’s novels have been read, underscored by Steiner’s observation that “Gurnah’s oeuvre presents readers with a palimpsest of linguistic and cultural traces of considerable intricacy.”⁵⁰ Afterlives is primarily written in English with the occasional inclusion of words and phrases in Swahili and German. It contains intertextual and multilingual references to a variety of texts, including the Qur’an, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Gurnah’s Paradise, the canonical British poems “The Psalm of Life” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and “The Solitary Reaper” by William Wordsworth, references to Black German life writing, the eighteenth-century German playwright Friedrich Schiller’s (1759–1805) Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1798 [Muses’ Almanac for the Year 1798], and the nineteen-century German poet Heinrich Heine’s (1797–1856) Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland [On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany].⁵¹ In my reading of the novel’s relevance to German colonial memory, it is particularly the intertextual references to canonical German literature which I argue are in need of further exploration for how they inscribe Hamza into the same “textual community” as the German colonizers and thus approach the German literary canon from, as Gurnah himself has spoken about, “a different perspective” to “understand things that we didn’t understand” before.⁵²

Insofar as the intertextual references to Schiller and Heine point to canonical German authors who one could associate with an understanding of German high culture, they re-entangle colonial history with “Germanness” and re-route the act of remembering through multiple German-language texts and their associated contexts.⁵³ This re-entanglement has been mirrored in the recent invitation to Gurnah to give the 2023 “Schillerrede” at the German Literature Archive in Marbach. In his speech, Gurnah spoke about his first encounter with Schiller’s works in 1964 post-revolution Zanzibar, where teachers from the GDR established a library with canonical German texts, among them Schiller.⁵⁴ Gurnah notes though that Schiller was not his first encounter with the Germans, but rather the stories passed onto him from his mother’s uncle, who served as a carrier in the German colonial army.⁵⁵ His speech thus meditates on the multiple layers of German contact in East Africa, bringing Schiller and colonialism into the same frame. Schiller and Heine as explicit intertexts within Afterlives ask the reader to revisit an understanding of the canon of German literature and of “Germanistik als Nationalphilologie” [German Studies as a national philology], for which Schiller was instrumentalized and Heine was excised during the National Socialist period.⁵⁶ That the novel revisits both Schiller and Heine in its narrativization of the German colonial past uneasily confronts an understanding of Germany as “Land der Dichter und Denker” or as “Kulturnation” with the Germany who, as one character in the novel describes it, has “killed so many people that the country is littered with skulls and bones and the earth is soggy with blood” (41).⁵⁷ The reference to “Blut und Boden” [blood and earth], an ideology central to National Socialism’s justification for territorial expansion, substantiates a rereading of German cultural memory that acknowledges intersections between colonial history and National Socialism and troubles an understanding of Germany based purely on high culture and the literary canon.⁵⁸ Göttsche suggests the instances of intertextuality with the German literary canon in Afterlives “mark the – largely undeveloped – potential for cross-cultural friendship across the colonial power divide.”⁵⁹ Taking his reading one step further, I suggest that their inclusion in the novel revises the memory of German colonialism by again calling into question the canons that inform German cultural memory and how they are/have been (mis)read.

Preceding its engagement with the aforementioned German texts, Afterlives is particularly attentive to the German language. From the outset, Uncle Ilyas is introduced as someone who “speaks German as if it’s his native language” (21) and Hamza’s “linguistic prowess” (190) is admired and spoken about throughout the novel, especially as the narrative invests significant time in how the officer whom Hamza serves teaches him German (93). German is described as a “sophisticated language” (261) and is further celebrated as the language of canonical German literature through the officer, incidentally from Marbach (Schiller’s birthplace), frequently remarking that he will teach Hamza German so well that he will be able to read Schiller (78, 81). Moreover, the German language and intertexts are embedded in the asymmetrical power relations of colonialism. The repeated references to German language and literature are a means by which the German characters project their cultural superiority. Recurring mentions of Schiller coincide with the discourse of a supposed German “Zivilisierungsmission” [civilizing mission] in East Africa, an official reason for German colonization in the region, which also conveniently both justified and obscured the more violent, exploitative driving forces of colonization (65, 118). This is referenced in the novel by the German officer himself, who admits “We lied and killed for this empire and then called it our Zivilisierungsmission,” before leaving Hamza the Musen-Almanach so he can continue to practice his German (118). As Gurnah emphasizes in his “Schillerrede,” the officer’s bestowing of Schiller onto Hamza offers a reminder of the “more complicated reality” behind narratives of colonialism and the ambivalences and inner conflicts of individual characters, such as the officer, who is both cruel and sensitive, both committed to teaching Hamza the German language and the literature of Schiller and yet unable to conceive that he can truly understand them.⁶⁰ And still, the frequent remarks on Hamza’s ability to speak and read German contribute to a fetishization of the “sophisticated” German language (261), furthered by repeated references to the texts as precious, such as when the pastor comments on the Musen-Almanach “I thought the gift he left too valuable for a mere native” (128).

References to German language and literature are also a means by which German cultural superiority is subverted by the East African characters. The askari in the novel begin to ascribe themselves German qualities and thus mimic “Germanness” to a certain extent, taking on German names and using the German language (108). This is also explicitly evidenced by Uncle Ilyas’s admiration for the Germans which causes Khalifa to speculate “[m]aybe he had started to think of himself as a German” (199). Although the German colonizers in the text are at times “amuse[d]” (77) and “delighted” (78) by these performances, they foreclose the possibility of the colonized subjects becoming German through the claim that only a German can read Schiller with “true understanding” (129) and through the description of Hamza as an “ignorant reader” (255) of Heine. These remarks express an underlying discomfort with the idea of East African subjects reading and understanding German literature, capturing how the German colonizers have reproduced colonial subjects that are “almost the same, but not quite,” how there is a pervasive “uncertainty in [their] control of the behaviour of the colonized.”⁶¹ In this way, acts of reading and speaking German became a means for the East African characters to subvert colonial power. Within the larger postcolonial context of the novel, which as Anna Branach-Kallas observes, “reinvents the colonial past in response to the new demands of the present,”⁶² they trigger a reconsideration of who is actually the “ignorant reader” (255). Furthermore, they suggest a rereading of the German canon from the perspective of colonial subjects, probing the meanings that German literature takes on for non-Germans outside of Germany.

While he is supposedly unable to truly understand Schiller, Hamza returns to the text repeatedly after the war and in one instance uses it to communicate his love for Afiya. To navigate the sensitive process of revealing his feelings without dishonoring her and thereby risking both of their reputations and his livelihood, he translates several lines of the poem “Das Geheimnis” [The Secret] by Schiller, a short poem printed in the Musen Almanach, upon Afiya’s request. The four lines of the German-language poem are printed above the four lines as translated into Swahili, so that the translation on the page very certainly subverts the racist attitudes of the German officers and pastor. The quoted lines of the poem read:

Sie konnte mir kein Wörtchen sagen,

Zu viele Lauscher waren wach,

Den Blick nur durft ich schüchtern fragen,

Und wohl verstand ich, was er sprach. (192)

[She could not speak one word to me,

There were too many listening;

I could only shyly question the look in her eyes,

And well understood what it meant.]⁶³

With the line “Und wohl verstand ich, was er sprach,” the word “understand” conspicuously reappears, referring in the poem of course to communication between lovers, yet within the larger context of the narrative’s attentiveness to German language, also to access to the German language and the power and agency with which Hamza appropriates it (192). As Brent Hayes Edwards notes, Gurnah “provocatively” withholds a full English translation of the poem.⁶⁴ Indeed, only the third and fourth lines of the stanza are translated into English within the novel as “My eye can see for certain / the language her eye is speaking,” alienating the readers not literate in German and/or Swahili from the meaning of the text while at the same time exposing a slight alteration to the wording in the partial English translation (192). Stefan Helgesson comments that, “the poem is presented here to the reader in three different versions, yet, considered from within the novel’s dominant regime of comprehension, remains hidden in plain sight.”⁶⁵ The partial exclusion of the English-language reader in this passage serves to further emphasize the traces German colonization has left behind in East Africa. It demonstrates both the multilingual entanglements of memories of colonialism in the former colonies and the relevance of an anglophone novel to discourses of German postcolonial memory.

Although Hamza is labeled the “ignorant reader” (255), his reading of Schiller actually suggests a critical rereading of the canon which informs German cultural memory, creating transnational and multilingual ties for “Das Geheimnis.” This act of rereading is furthered by Hamza’s engagement with Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland by Heine, which the pastor’s wife gives to him during his recovery and in which she writes her address in Germany, allowing Hamza to later contact her regarding the fate of Uncle Ilyas. The pastor is both shocked and excited when he discovers his wife has gifted Hamza the book, again highlighting the precious nature of the German text and its apparent precarity in East Africa, in the hands of the colonized subject. He asks Hamza how he is getting on with the text, to which Hamza, intentionally humbling himself so as not to provoke the pastor, briefly comments: “I was interested to learn that there was a time in Germany when men made the sign of the cross when they heard the nightingale sing. They took her for an agent of evil, as they did everything that gave pleasure” (254–255). This references an anecdote that Heine recalls only several pages into the first book of Zur Geschichte in order to point out “the horrifying character of an era which denounced everything sweet and charming as devilry.”⁶⁶ In response to Hamza, the pastor accuses him of being an “ignorant reader” who “can only understand the frivolous in Heine” (255). As opposed to Schiller’s short poem, Heine’s Zur Geschichte is a three-part essay written with the intention of informing the French about German intellectual and philosophical history, published in France in 1835 right before the publication of Heine’s works were banned by Prussia.⁶⁷ The text is highly concerned with the representation of history and the translation of German intellectual history to a foreign context.⁶⁸ That Hamza intentionally humbles himself before the pastor in their discussion obscures to some extent his true thoughts on the text, though his impression of this passage in particular references a certain fallibility of German culture, which has exerted itself as superior and logical in comparison to the cultures of the East Africans it has colonized. Considering how Zur Geschichte addresses, and intervenes in, the topic of writing history and of conceptualizing German thought and the German nation in its time, its role as an intertext re-entangles the novel with the processes of writing and contextualizing colonial history. Read alongside Gurnah’s own comments on the motif of reading and literacy as a means of resistance against oppressive systems such as colonialism and slavery, Afterlives resists the hegemonic writing of German history by re-entangling colonialism with German literature and cultural memory.⁶⁹

Embedded in the plot, the German-language intertexts of the novel re-route the acts of remembering German colonialism in East Africa through the German literary canon. While Hamza’s readings of Schiller and Heine bring an image of Germany as “Land der Dichter und Denker” to crisis, the very end of the novel suggests additional intertexts with Black German life writing from the twentieth century, which revise an understanding of the German literary canon and continue to entangle East Africa with Germany further into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In an interview at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2022, Gurnah has said that his inspiration for the character Uncle Ilyas was the life of Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed (also known as Bayume Mohamed Husen), who after serving as a child soldier in the German colonial army in East Africa during World War I, worked as a waiter on a Woermann Line steamship and made his way to Germany.⁷⁰ Along these lines, Göttsche has suggested that there are resonances in Afterlives with Black German life writing by figures such as Hans J. Massaquoi, Gert Schramm, and Theodor Michael Wonja as well as biographies such as Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst’s of Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed.⁷¹ These texts, which remember and record the legacies of German colonialism well into the twentieth-century and several of which were published during the twenty-first, are less well-known and not (yet) part of the German literary canon informing German cultural memory. The novel’s insertion of Black and East African perspectives on the German colonial past therefore suggests a rereading and a reconsideration of the German canon, a necessary, ongoing intervention into the understanding of German cultural memory of colonialism as colonial amnesia.

Conclusion

The possible intertextual links between Gurnah’s anglophone novel and Black German life writing call attention to the diverse ways in which the German colonial past has been and continues to be textualized and remembered. Sharon Dodua Otoo’s poem “das erinnern” with which I began this article underscores these plural acts of memory that persist in spite of hegemonic narratives which hinge on an understanding of German colonialism as limited and of its memory as having been forgotten. The poem subverts a singular, dominant understanding of German cultural memory, juxtaposing the lowercase “das erinnern” with an uppercase “Erinnern” and thereby makes space for rereading, rewriting, and re-remembering.⁷² Uppercase “Erinnern” acknowledges how in narratives of German colonialism euphemisms like “explorers” and “protectorates” disguise the violence of colonialism and how hegemonic narratives embedded in cultural canons and traditions continue this misrepresentation.⁷³ At the same time, lowercase “erinnern” refers to the burdensome task of intervening in these narratives, as is done in part by Gurnah’s novel, which demonstrates the memory that “happens anyways.”⁷⁴ Indeed, my analysis has illustrated how the novel represents the memory of German colonialism as existent, enduring, and entangled with transnational geographies and multilingual canons. Gurnah’s novel layers acts of remembering and disremembering, of rewriting Germany’s past between East Africa and Germany both during and after the colonial period. It offers a rereading of the archives informing German cultural memory and portrays colonial memory as embedded within dominant cultural narratives of National Socialism and the Holocaust or of Germany as “Kulturnation.” It also creates a pathway to the acts of remembering and intervention in critical Black German texts such as Farbe bekennen and “das erinnern,” pluralizing the act of remembering in order to revise the narrative of a national colonial amnesia.

In offering new ways of understanding the afterlives of German colonialism across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the novel opens up thinking about what anglophone postcolonial literature can do in the German context and testifies to the need to find the language, tools, and spaces to remember. As opposed to approaches that center factors such as the short period of German colonialism, the “early loss” of the colonies after World War I and the “resulting lack of immediate postcolonial immigration,” Gurnah’s novel centers the violent and personal realities of German colonialism and its legacies as well as the nuances and ambiguities of cultural contact driven by colonial encounters.⁷⁵ It welcomes further exploration of German colonialism and the memories thereof within a transnational, multilingual framework and demonstrates resonances of German colonialism in Black and African diasporic anglophone literature. Its detailed recording of colonial history and violence in East Africa, its implication of German characters in acts of (dis)remembering, and its invocation of a national German literary canon put the memories of colonialism in dialogue with a framework of such memory as forgotten and disremembered. In short, the novel remembers, “ob die anderen es wahrhaben wollen oder nicht” [whether the others want to accept it or not].⁷⁶

Acknowledgements

This study is part of a dissertation in progress in the Department of Philology at the University of Münster. I would like to thank the co-editors of this special issue for their generous guidance and feedback throughout the editing process as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. In addition, I am grateful to the colleagues and friends who read and discussed earlier versions of this article and whose thoughts helped shape the final draft. Special thanks to Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Eva Tanita Kraaz, Alisa Preusser, and Peri Sipahi.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rita Maricocchi

Rita Maricocchi is a researcher and lecturer at the Chair of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies at the University of Münster, where she is completing a PhD thesis on representations of German colonial memory in contemporary anglophone and multilingual texts.

Notes

1 Otoo, “das erinnern” (my translation).

2 On 2 December 2022, “Nachtigalplatz” (named after Gustav Nachtigal, former commissioner for the German empire in West Africa) was renamed “Manga Bell Platz” in honor of Rudolf and Emily Duala Mangal Bell, king and queen of Douala in Cameroon who resisted German colonialism. Rudolf Duala Manga Bell was executed by German authorities in 1914. “Lüderitzstrasse” (named after Adolf Lüderitz, a Bremen tradesman and colonialist) was renamed “Cornelius Fredericksstrasse” in honor of Cornelius Fredericks, a resistance fighter for the Nama people in former German Southwest Africa. Fredericks died in a concentration camp on Shark Island in 1907, see Connolly, “Campaigners celebrate.”

3 Bremer, Die drei, 9 (my translation); Göttsche, “Memory and Critique,” 251; Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox, and Zantop, eds., The Imperialist Imagination, 4; Göttsche, Remembering Africa, 11. See also Lora Wildenthal’s explanation of “the stubbornly non-postcolonial postcolonial German identity” “Notes on the History,” 147. Hannah Bremer’s comic Die drei, die als Koloniegründer bekannt sind aber nicht dafür gefeiert werden sollten reflects on popular discourses of German colonialism and uses the phrase “gar nicht so schlimm” [not nearly as bad] to represent how Germany is often problematically compared to other former colonial powers. The term “postcolonial” is used here and throughout the article to refer to a mode of reading and thinking which makes explicit the knowledge and structures that were produced by the system of colonialism in the past and how the effects of this system are still present in contemporary settings, see Kelly, Afrokultur, 80. This usage of the term allows for temporal complexity, in that the “post” does not mean after the colonial period, but rather signifies the critical engagement with the effects and continuities of colonialism, see Hall, “When was ‘the post-colonial’?,” 299.

4 See, for example, Jürgen Zimmerer’s discussion of colonial amnesia “Academy Cologne: Jürgen Zimmerer,” 00:24–00:30.

5 Otoo, “das erinnern” (my translation).

6 Hall, “When was ‘the post-colonial’?,” 299.

7 Neumann, “Post-monolingual Anglophone Novels,” 95. Neumann describes “post-monlingual anglophone novels” as those which “thriv[e] at the porous boundaries between languages and perform […] multiple exchanges between them,” 95.

8 Steiner and Olaussen, “Introduction,” 2.

9 Göttsche, “German Colonialism and Zanzibari-German Entanglements,” 53; see also Göttsche, “German Colonialism in East Africa.” In particular, Dirk Göttsche has undertaken comparative research into the German references in Gurnah’s novels Paradise (1994), Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001), and Afterlives (2020), arguing for “the unique contribution that Gurnah is making to discourses about postcolonial migration and to the literary memory and critique of German and Austrian colonialism and their legacies.” “German Colonialism and Zanzibari-German Entanglements,” 54.

10 Göttsche, “German Colonialism in East Africa,” 270; Gurnah, Paradise, 247. For analyses of Paradise see Berman, “Yusuf’s Choice”; Mustafa, “Swahili Histories”; Hodapp, “Imagining Unmediated.”

11 Regarding the need to consider foreign-language literatures for relevance to German postcolonial writing, see Berman, Göttsche, and Schüller, “Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte,” 333. Regarding the need to center Black and African diasporic literature within literary discussions of German postcolonialism, see Germanist Sara Lennox’s observation that “[i]n the strictest sense of the term, Germany is not rich in postcolonial literature.” “Postcolonial writing in Germany,” 620. She proposes instead a broader conception of postcolonial literature in Germany, which would go beyond “writing in German by authors from countries Germany formerly colonized” to include writing in German by authors from countries colonized by other European nations, 621.

12 According to Bürger and Rausch, the characterization of absent or lacking memories of colonialism in German cultural memory as “amnesia” began to be frequently used around 2004, coinciding with the one-hundred-year anniversary and increasingly public recognition of genocide of the OvaHerero and Nama in present-day Namibia, a key date for German reckoning with the colonial past. “Ein ‘vergessener’ Völkermord?,” 269. Similarly, Schilling traces the use of the term to both Kößler’s chapter “Kolonialherrschaft – auch eine deutsche Vergangenheit,” published in 2005 and Wildenthal’s essay “Notes on a History,” published in 2003. Postcolonial Germany, 9. It should be noted that some scholars of German postcolonial studies have pushed back against the premise of colonial amnesia and demonstrated the material existence of memory of German colonialism in both public and private discourses in the post-World War II period. See, for example, Schilling, Postcolonial Germany; Albrecht, Europa and “(Post-) Colonial Amnesia.”

13 Zimmerer, “Academy Cologne: Jürgen Zimmerer,” 00:13.

14 Ibid., 00:24–00:30; Ibid., 1:39–1:41. Zimmerer has also noted how colonial amnesia has changed over time, writing, for example, that colonial amnesia seems to be fading, see “Kolonialismus,” 9 and has become “koloniale […] Ignoranz oder Apologie” [colonial ignorance or apologia] “Erinnerungskultur.”

15 For research into the historical and mnemonic entanglements of German colonialism and the Holocaust, see Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism; Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory; Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz?

16 Bürger and Rausch, “Ein ‘vergessener’ Völkermord?,” 270–271.

17 Ibid., 272.

18 Ibid., 271; Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia,” 125. Stoler has notably reformulated colonial amnesia as “colonial aphasia,” to signify “a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things,” 125.

19 Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” 98.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., 103.

22 Otoo, “das erinnern” (my translation).

23 El-Tayeb, European Others, xxv; Suleiman, Crises of Memory, 271.

24 Bürger and Rausch, “Ein ‘vergessener’ Völkermord?” 272; 289.

25 For the consistent white reproduction of knowledge see Kelly, Afrokultur, 159. For the Eurocentric and nationally-focused aspects of colonial amnesia, see Bürger and Rausch, “Ein ‘vergessener’ Völkermord?” 272.

26 It should be noted that the reference to “Black Germans” encompasses a diverse group of individuals and communities with varying relationships to the African continent. Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse, and Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faris identify three different groups of Black migrants to Germany in their chapter “Blacks, Germans, and the Politics of Imperial Imagination, 1920–1960,” namely African migrants to Germany during the colonial period between 1885–1918, French colonial troops in the occupation of the Rhineland following World War I, and African American soldiers in Germany during and after World War II. In doing so, the authors acknowledge the multiplicity of experiences and heritages within the Black German community. Looking at Black German identity beyond 1960 would also need to include labor migration from African countries such as Mozambique and Angola to the GDR (see, for example, Schenck, Remembering African Labor), the migration of students from African countries such as Cameroon, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, and Zambia to the GDR (see, for example, Pugach, African Students), and could draw on anthologies such as Farbe bekennen or Schwarz wird großgeschrieben, which bring together voices with various backgrounds that identify as Afro-German or Black German.

27 For more on Black German scholarly and activist contributions to the engagement with Germany's colonial past, see Florvil, Mobilizing Black Germany, 6 and Brusius, “Introduction,” 3.

28 Ayim/Opitz, Oguntoye, and Schultz, Showing Our Colors, 135. Often cited as a key text in the development of postcolonial thought in the German context yet not always engaged with closely, the anthology Showing Our Colors is at once an early postcolonial work which understands modern Germany as being shaped by colonialism as much as it as an example of German colonialism being collectively remembered by a small community of Black German women, several of whose fathers immigrated from the former German colony Cameroon to Germany. For references to Showing Our Colors as a key text in German postcolonial thought, see, for example, Kelly Afrokultur, 11; Gutiérrez Rodríguez, “Repräsentation, Subalternität,” 18; Göttsche, “German Colonialism and Zanzibari-German Entanglements,” 52.

29 Ayim/Opitz, Oguntoye, and Schultz, Showing Our Colors, 135. This coincides with more recent critiques of German memory culture, which link the disavowal of Europe’s colonial past, and thus concealment of historical continuities to the (mis)recognition of Black people and People of Color as migrants, which both others Black and PoC Germans and reproduces a restrictive white notion of “Germannness.” El-Tayeb, European Others, xxi–xxii. This restrictive notion of “Germanness” can be traced back to German colonial regulations which made a legal connection between “German” and “white.” El-Tayeb, “Dangerous Liaisons,” 43.

30 El-Tayeb, European Others, 49.

31 Ha, “Macht(t)raum(a) Berlin,” 105; Lauré al-Samarai, “Inspirited Topography,” 118; Youssefi, “Zwischen Erinnerung und Entinnerung,” 44–46; Kelly, Afrokultur, 159–173. The translation of “entinnern”/“Entinnerung” as “disremembering” draws on Jonathan Bach’s article “Colonial Pasts in Germany’s Present,” 68.

32 Ha, “Macht(t)raum(a) Berlin,” 105.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.; My use of “imaginative counter-memory” borrows Birgit Neumann's formulation from “Literary Representation,” 339.

35 As there are two characters named Ilyas in the text, the older Ilyas (brother of Afiya) will be referred to throughout the article as Uncle Ilyas to distinguish him from the younger Ilyas (son of Afiya and Hamza). The term “askari” refers to “the African men who fought for the German colonial army during the East African campaign of World War I.” Moyd, Violent Intermediaries, xi.

36 Gurnah, Afterlives, 220. Subsequent references to the novel will be cited parenthetically.

37 Göttsche, “German colonialism in East Africa,” 276; Pujolràs-Noguer, “Tracing Lines,” 386; Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 5.

38 Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies, 39.

39 Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” 103.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 Ha, “Macht(t)raum(a) Berlin,” 105.

43 Ayim/Opitz, Oguntoye, and Schultz, Showing Our Colors, 135.

44 Ibid.

45 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.

46 Pujolràs-Noguer, “Tracing Lines,” 386.

47 Zimmerer, “Academy Cologne: Jürgen Zimmerer,” 1:39–1:41.

48 Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” 98.

49 Ibid., 102; see also Hartman’s reflections on archives and silences in “Venus in Two Acts.”

50 Steiner, “Euryclea’s Greeting,” 399. For additional approaches to intertextuality and multilingualism in Gurnah’s work, see Helgesson, “Shifting Comprehension” and Lewis, “Postmodern Materialism.”

51 For the Qur’an as intertext, see Steiner, “Euryclea’s Greeting,” 400; for Heart of Darkness as intertext, see Samuelson, “Worldmaking,” 366; for mentions of “The Psalm of Life” and “The Solitary Reaper,” Gurnah, Afterlives, 244; for Black German life writing as intertexts, see Göttsche, “German Colonialism in East Africa,” 9.

52 Steiner, “A Conversation,” 166.

53 For Schiller, especially for his relationship to Goethe and Weimar classicism and as a representative of the foundation of what is considered traditionally German literature outside of Germany, see Hofmann, “Wirkung,” 568. For Heine and his identity as a Jewish German and his critical approach to Germany in his writings, especially his satirical epic poem Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen [Germany: A Winter’s Tale], see Pinkard, “Introduction,” vii; Heine, Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen.

54 Gurnah, “Schillerrede 2023,” 23:59–28:01.

55 Ibid., 32:32–34:06.

56 Hofmann, “Wirkung,” 561; Höhn, “Einleitung,” VII.

57 Both Schiller and Heine invoke an understanding of Germany as “Land der Dichter und Denker,” a common phrase used to signify Germany as a nation of poets and thinkers and which continues to hold relevance for Germany’s self-image today. See a similar statement on Germany’s culture and colonial past in Adichie, “Festrede von Chimamanda Adichie,” 10:05–10:14. For context on Germany as “Kulturnation,” see Glaser, “‘Deutschland? Aber wo liegt es? … ’” My thinking on the intertextual references and their role in how the novel remembers German colonialism is informed in part by Renate Lachmann’s understanding of the novel, “[a]s a collection of intertexts” and therefore in and of itself “a memory place.” “Mnemonic and Intertextual,” 305.

58 Bramwell, “Blut und Boden,” 380.

59 Göttsche, “German colonialism in East Africa,” 282.

60 Gurnah, “Schillerrede 2023,” 41:53–42:06.

61 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86; Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies, 155.

62 Branach-Kallas, “Askari,” 469.

63 Translation by Richard Wigmore in Johnson, Franz Schubert, 657.

64 Edwards, “Other Afterlives,” 237.

65 Helgesson, “Shifting Comprehension,” 127.

66 Heine, Heine: On the History, 15.

67 Pinkard, “Introduction,” viii.

68 Ferner, “Nachwort,” 229.

69 Gurnah, “Afterlives | Life and Times Series,” 19:57–20:07.

70 See Bechhaus-Gerst, Treu bis in den Tod for additional information and Gurnah “Frankfurter Forum” 46:30–48:55 for Gurnah’s reference to his inspiration for Uncle Ilyas. See also Gurnah, “Afterlives | Life and Times Series,” 27:45–28:05 for his reference to Eva Knopf’s film Majubs Reise (2013), which tells the life story of Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed.

71 Göttsche “German Colonialism in East Africa,” 277.

72 Along these lines, see James Baldwin’s thinking on uppercase and lowercase “civilization” and “education.” Dark Days, 5. The oscillation between the lowercase and uppercase “erinnern” also creates a juxtaposition between “remembering” as a verb (written in lowercase) and “memory” as a noun (written in uppercase).

73 Otoo, “das erinnern.”

74 Ibid. (my translation).

75 Bremer, Die drei, 9; Göttsche, “Memory and Critique,” 251.

76 Otoo, “das erinnern” (my translation).