Freedom and the Cage: Modern Architecture and Psychiatry in Central Europe, 1890–1914

Abstract

so much the result of commander Lothar von Trotha’s premeditated genocidal intentions, but rather the consequence of multiple previous military blunders and failures on part of the German forces. Only after the Herero had successfully escaped an open engagement with von Trotha’s forces by fleeing into the desert did the German commander decide on the genocidal tactic of closing down all escape routes from the Omaheke (pp. 47–51). Because of its highly original focus on Germany’s three colonial wars, it is somewhat odd that in the book’s introduction Kuss feels the need to essentially describe and define her work as merely an intervention in the ‘From Windhoek to Auschwitz’ debate. This debate was initiated by scholars such as Jürgen Zimmerer and Benjamin Madley in the early 2000s, and Isabel Hull’s Absolute Destruction (2004) can also be viewed as an at least indirect contribution to this discussion. Madley and Zimmerer argued for straight lines from the atrocities committed in Germany’s colonies before the First World War (especially in Namibia) to the Holocaust. The debate sparked by these scholars stimulated a renewed and fruitful engagement of historians with German colonial history, yet it also quickly became clear that the assumed continuities and causalities between the genocide in Namibia and the Holocaust could not be substantiated. Kuss’s study, too, leaves no doubt that such continuities did not exist, yet historians Robert Gerwarth and Matthew Fitzpatrick had already made this abundantly clear before even the publication of the original German version of Kuss’s account. The English version of Kuss’s study could therefore have benefited from a more substantial rewrite of the original introduction. The new English version should have stressed the study’s originality rather than reengaging with ultimately unconvincing arguments of a long-settled debate. The main reason why Kuss’s study does not need this by now rather stale debate as backdrop is its uniqueness. Kuss’s analysis of Germany’s colonial wars, which in all three cases is based on a meticulous reading of the existing source materials, stands on its own and is a major contribution to the scholarship on pre-1914 German colonial and metropolitan history.