Gustav Frenssen (1863–1945)

In 1904, in southwest Africa / Namibia, the native Herero people rebelled against German colonists, killing around 200 white farmers. In response the German military invaded and killed 10s of thousands of men, women and children. It was an attempted extermination, now considered an early 20th century genocide, an antecedent to the Holocaust. A few years later, in 1906, German novelist Gustav Frenssen published a fictional memoir by "Peter Moor" who takes part in the campaign. It is well written and not at all like fiction, Frenssen supposedly relied on multiple accounts from veterans to build a composite story that reads like a real memoir - impressive craft. It is not nationalistic glory, rather bloody reality of a young man who only wants to return home and survive. It is IMO anti-war fiction, brutally showing the banality and waste of war, a loss of innocence and no clear right and wrong. But there is the problem: Frenssen does not go far enough in documenting the genocide (a term and concept that did not yet exist). But neither is it apologia, contemporary reviewers in the English world considered this book as evidence of Germany brutality and lack of civility - by no accident did the English translation appear in 1914.

It provides a visceral sense of this campaign. The massive and imposing ox-driven caravans with red-boxed driver seats manned by Boers who made "wagon forts", the constant need for water, dysentery and typhoid rampant, thorn brush injuries, watering holes subsumed by masses of dead cattle, dead cattle everywhere on the roads and trails, isolated outposts of Germans that have gone feral beaming light signals into the night for relief that never comes, horses that continually die and are replaced, locust storms, the scene of two year old abandoned on the roadside gnawing an old bone, etc.. Apocalypse Now. It helps to read more up to date works to properly place this conflict in context.… (more)