Although much research on Namibia's past as a German colony has already been undertaken in recent years, the history of its German population after 1915 has yet to be investigated in detail. This study by Martin Eberhardt, a doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Konstanz, aims to rectify this situation. According to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, German South West Africa, today's Namibia, was declared a League of Nations mandate in 1919 and placed under the administration of South Africa. This led to an interesting constellation, which is the main focus of the author's book: on the one hand, the German settlers belonged to the privileged part of a racially segregated society; on the other hand, they were subjected to foreign rule as a result of the lost war.

Eberhardt has structured his study in parallel to the tenuous relationship between the former German colonial masters and the South African government. He interprets the years that followed 1919 as a history of confrontation, which escalated when the National Socialists came to power in Germany, finally giving way to a third period of cooperation after 1945. Colonial revisionism was until 1945 the key issue for the German inhabitants of ‘South West’, most of whom expected that the policymakers of the Weimar Republic and, in particular, Germany's Nazi leadership would ensure that South West Africa would again become part of the ‘Reich’. This irredentism triggered the ethnicization of the German population and fortified their resistance to being assimilated into the mandate's society. Disappointed with Germany's Weimar democracy and its half-hearted attempts to regain the colonies, badly hit by the Great Depression of the early 1930s and browbeaten by the South African government as troublesome citizens, many former colonists hoped in 1933 that a re-strengthened Germany would take energetic action on the issue of colonial revisionism. Eberhardt argues that consensus on a fundamental racist stance was not a major factor in shaping this affinity to National Socialism; the logic of anti-Semitism hardly played a role in day-to-day life in a colony in which the polarity between black and white was perceived as the dominant issue. Nazi colonial racism, moreover, hardly exceeded the practices that already prevailed among the settlers.

The author convincingly refutes the thesis that a generational conflict emerged among Germans in Namibia, with older colonists taking a skeptical stance towards the Nazi movement, while younger settlers proved much more receptive; he points, for example, to equal representation of both groups in the Nazi party's local branch. Instead, he maintains, talk of a generational conflict was a contemporary model for explaining why conflicts among the Germans living in South West Africa escalated following the Nazi takeover. For as his research shows, the NSDAP's program of controlling all sectors of life collided with the notions of the German settlers, who were accustomed to a considerable degree of autonomy and autocratic rule over the African population. Uncovering the settlers' and the Nazis' conflicting interests is one of the merits of Eberhardt's research, but it also represents an issue that might have warranted further attention. In any event, the result was a split in the German part of society, leading to three factions: opponents of the NSDAP, who advocated cooperation with South Africa; those who chose to ‘wait and see’ and, to a certain extent, to distance themselves from the Nazis; and those who supported the National Socialists.

With the demise of the ‘Third Reich’ and the end of all revisionist hopes, the antagonistic relationship between the German population of South West Africa and the Union of South Africa again underwent a transition. In addition to the preexisting racism of the Germans and their increasingly anti-British and pro-Boer position, the anticommunism that became a major factor in the Cold War era, the perceived threat posed by decolonization movements and the United Nations with its strong stance on human rights represented new challenges that induced the German settlers to join sides with their white neighbors. A further incentive was the promise of secure income for farmers thanks to South Africa's booming economy. Nevertheless, there was still a discernable will among settlers to preserve their identity as Germans, thereby asserting their existence as a distinct group next to the Boers. For what was presumably the majority of the Namibian Germans, this orientation was to become problematic in the face of increasingly liberal and anti-colonial tendencies in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Based on first-time examination of copious archival material from Switzerland, Namibia and Germany, Martin Eberhardt's research has produced a thorough, differentiated and knowledgeable study that has laid a new foundation for further work on the history of the Germans in South West Africa. It will be interesting to see how the volume is received in Namibia itself.