Discussions surrounding Germany's Nazi past only somewhat mirror volumes on the history of architecture: much has been written about Hitler's architect Albert Speer, Nazi visions of Germania, and ongoing efforts to confront the relics of the Third Reich; German colonial architecture, on the other hand, has seen less attention. Itohan Osayimwese's volume aims to address this silence by decolonizing “the landscape of colonial memory in the history of German architecture” (247). She argues that “the striking image of the masters and their protégés discussing colonialism and architecture holds true if we consider that they exchanged views and shaped policy through a series of exhibitions, competitions, meetings, lectures, journal articles, books, correspondences, and actual buildings and places that reached back to at least the 1890s and continued into the interwar period” (4). Whereas Osayimwese's study seems to be primarily aimed at historians of architecture and colonialism, scholars from other disciplines can greatly benefit from the author's use of primary source materials and her efforts to globalize as well as decolonize history.
Osayimwese organizes her monograph around five case studies, each building on the previous one on different levels. She begins with a discussion of the 1896 Berlin Trade Exhibition, an event that provided the perfect space to spread “the colonial idea” (22). The author points readers to “at least six spatial, visual, and building types” (29), including the native village. In her view, these appear again and again in similar expositions and venues, and ultimately linked German cities to a wider world. Her conclusion of Chapter 1 ties into the subsequent discussion of what Osayimwese calls “architectural travel” (91). More specifically, “German colonialism may have engendered architectural effects that operated beyond the limits of form and instead intervened on the level of discourse—the level where architects and designers generated new ideas in relation to existing knowledge” (60). In Chapter 2, she follows individuals such as Gottfried Semper, Hermann Frobius, Hildebrand Baltzer, and Karl Döhring as they became mobile and global, and attracted to ethnographic research. She ends by contemplating how architectural ethnographies may have affected these and other architects.
A competition organized by the German Colonial Society in summer 1914 provides the avenue for her study of colonial Heimatschutz. The protection of Heimat against modern industrial life had become institutionalized in the Bund Heimatschutz in 1904. But what did it mean to protect Heimat in the colonial age? A variety of individuals saw it as “an opportunity to try again” (119) somewhere else, in an unspoiled space. Soon professor and member of the Colonial Society Adolf von Oechselhäuser called for reform in colonial architecture; elsewhere individuals such as Friedrich Gurlitt aimed to formulate a specific colonial style. The 1914 Colonial Society architecture competition aimed to find such designs. Osayimwese's inquiry into the competition submissions offers readers not only insights into different ideas and subsequent efforts to disseminate results—it also becomes a welcoming workshop on how to analyze and contextualize sketches, proposals, and buildings for those scholars making little use of such materials. Thankfully, the publishers included an array of sketches in the volume, thus allowing laymen and experts alike to follow specific arguments. Throughout her analysis, Osayimwese repeatedly reinserts “colonialism into the discussion of modern architecture in Germany” (177). In fact, she reads the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne “as a colonial site” (153). After all, as she highlights in the conclusion, “a new, nonlinear, and more global history of German architecture” (248) is needed. As a result, even those familiar with the event can walk away with a better understanding when realizing how “Modernist reform and colonial architecture met and inflected each other on the occasion of the Werkbund Exhibition” (185).
The last chapter brings it all together as the author explores the advanced industrial process of the prefabrication industry. To plan and produce ahead of installation was widespread among colonial powers yet has seen surprisingly little attention within the scholarship. Osayimwese changes that by focusing on the company Christoph & Unmack from Niesky in Saxony. She describes plans, types of structures, and advertisements as well as the implementation and broader logistics surrounding these setups. In her view, “panelized and log systems, interchangeable components, utilitarian built-in furniture, and standardized types, achieved what the architectural reform community sought avant la lettre” (241).
Osayimwese puts forward a well-researched and multifaceted study. She demonstrates that she is not only familiar with ongoing scholarly discussions but can make good use of argument for her own work. Countless voices appear in her volume, ranging from theoretical discussions by Edward Said and Homi Bhaba, to more German-centric studies by Sebastian Conrad and Dirk van Laak. Her own use of primary source materials, accessed around the world, highlights that “colonialism is embedded in German history on a number of intersecting levels and contributes to efforts to make colonialism's impact visible” (9). Future researchers could easily build on her work by discussing the role of architecture within Germany's “informal empire”, as it has been titled, be it histories of German communities in Paraguay, Brazil, the United States, or Eastern Europe more broadly. Scholars might also explore the importance of networks and interactions among colonial powers when it came to colonial architecture, a subject the author explores to some extent already. Such studies would further strengthen efforts to “engage critically with these traces in an attempt to understand the ‘historical-political crimes of German colonialism,’ promote an ‘antiracist and countercolonial culture of memory,’ and ‘reveal postcolonial and racist thought and social patterns of today’” (246).
