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Walther Dobbertin

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Walther Dobbertin
Born(1882-08-28)August 28, 1882
Berlin, German Reich
DiedJanuary 12, 1961(1961-01-12) (aged 78)
Jesteburg-Wiedenhof, West Germany
CitizenshipGerman
Occupation(s)Photographer and publisher
Years active1903 – ca. 1932
Known forPortrait and documentary photography in German East Africa

Walther Alexander Dobbertin was a German photographer, publisher and writer, active mainly in the former colony of German East Africa, modern-day Tanzania. During the era of Nazi Germany, Dobbertin published glorifying portraits of German colonial soldiers and was a member of the Nazi Party's paramilitary wing SA. In 1945, his business licence was revoked by the British authorities in Germany. After his licence was restored, he continued his bookshop until shortly before his death.

Dobbertin is the only known photographer on the German side who documented the events before and during the fighting between German and British troops in the East African campaing of World War I. His images have been considered important resources for the history of East Africa and its documentation through photography.

Life and career

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Early life and career in German East Africa

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Dobbertin was born into a family of craftsmen in Berlin, the capital of the recently united German Reich. His ancestors came from Mecklenburg, where Dobbertin Abbey is located. He completed an apprenticeship as a photographer in Rostock and attended painting courses. In 1903, Dobbertin emigrated to German East Africa. After his arrival, he worked at Carl Vincenti's photo studio in Dar es Salaam, but some time later, Vincenti took Dobbertin to court, accusing him of having stolen photographic material.[1]

In 1906, Dobbertin opened his own studio in Dar es Salaam and also operated shops selling books, photographic and artistic material in Tanga and Moshi, where he also ran a photographic studio.[2] In 1910, he published his images of African life and scenery in his own "art edition" in Dar es Salaam. During the following years, Dobbertin became one of the most active photographers in German East Africa, producing hundreds of photographs. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Dobbertin was enlisted into the colonial army. There, he continued to take photographs and also shot scenes for a documentary film (now lost), where he expressed the stereotype notion of the camraderie between German superiors and "the brave Askari soldiers."[3] Based on his photographs of the war, Dobbertin is said to have been the only photographer on the German side who documented the events during the East African campaign of World War I.[4]

Later life in Germany

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In 1916, Dobbertin was taken prisoner of war by British forces as a member of the German Schutztruppe. At the end of the war, the Germans were expelled from East Africa and expropriated. Still, Dobbertin's wife, Alwine, managed to smuggle her husband's photographic plates out of the country. After his release from captivity, Dobbertin returned to Germany and moved to Wiedenhof, now a neighbourhood of Jesteburg, south of Hamburg, where again he opened a bookshop.[5]

In 1932, Dobbertin self-published his book Lettow-Vorbeck's Soldiers with glorifying portraits of soldiers during the colonial era, such as Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Further, prints of his photographs of East Africa were used as illustrations for a 1933 historical novel by German writer Alfred Funke.[6]

In Nazi Germany, Dobbertin was a member of the SA and district leader of the Reich Colonial Association. Because of these affiliations, his business licence was revoked by the British authorities in 1945. After his licence was restored, he continued to work in his bookshop until 1960. Dobbertin died in January 1961, shortly before a planned trip to Africa.

Africans working at a sisal plantation

Photographic work

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Dobbertin's photographs of colonial life in German East Africa include hundreds of images of political, social, economic and military events, also comprising photographs of big game hunting and wildlife, natural scenery and the construction of railways. His photographs of Africans depict indigenous people and their everyday life under colonial rule. These include images of Askari soldiers of the German Schutztruppe as well as staged "exotic" pictures of African women. Other images show life in villages, Africans working at a sisal plantation,[7] children on the banks of a river, launching dugout canoes, and fishing.[4]

Publications

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Own publications and illustrations for other books

  • Landschaftsbilder aus Deutsch-Ost-Afrika. Dar es Salaam: Kunstverlag Walther Dobbertin, 1910. OCLC number 838068870.
  • Bilder aus dem Negerleben. Dar es Salaam: Kunstverlag Walther Dobbertin, 1910. OCLC number 838068839.
  • Lettow-Vorbeck's Soldiers. A Book of German Fighting Spirit and Military Honor. Battery Press, Rockford, Ill., Nashville, 2005, ISBN 9780898393408. (German original: Die Soldaten Lettow-Vorbecks, published by Walther Dobbertin in 1932. Reprint 2019.)
  • Alfred Funke, Schwarz-Weiß-Rot über Ostafrika. Novel. With 126 photographs by Walther Dobbertin, Hanover 1933. (in German)
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  • Schutztruppe with canon in action
    Schutztruppe with canon in action
  • Archers in Ruanda-Urundi
    Archers in Ruanda-Urundi
  • African drummers and crowd
    African drummers and crowd
  • Young African woman
    Young African woman
  • Church of the mission station Mlalo, Usambara Mountains
    Church of the mission station Mlalo, Usambara Mountains

Reception

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Photographs as visual documents for historical studies

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Like other historical images and texts, photographs from colonial Africa serve as documents for research into the history of the country and its inhabitants. In academic scholarship, disciplines such as visual anthropology, visual culture, as well as the history of photography and the production of images are concerned with such photographs. As cultural anthropologist Christraud M. Geary pointed out, their meanings are multiple and can be interpreted in open-ended ways. As historical documents, they bear witness to colonial rule, the domination of native people, the extraction of natural resources and the work of missionaries to spread Christian faith.[8]

Starting at the end of the 19th century, photography and picture postcards became increasingly popular with visitors and residents of European colonies in Africa and elsewhere. Through improving and relatively cheap postal services, they created new forms of communication and served political interests. Then and now, these images have shaped the public vision of important historical changes in the lives of Africans.[8]

Compared to the photographs taken by colonial officers and scientists, less authentic images of Africa and its peoples were often created by commercial photographers who catered to the rapidly expanding European market for photographs and postcards from Africa. Commercial photo studios such as Dobbertin's produced appealing and sales-promoting photographs by carefully staging the people photographed in certain poses and often with "typical" clothing and jewellery. Their manipulated portraits thus contributed to the stereotyping of Africa and Africans.[9] In the context of postcolonial studies and critical whiteness studies, such representations have been labelled with the term "colonial gaze".[10]

Thus, in her study of women as depicted in historical photographs from the Swahili coast, African art historian Prita Meier discussed Dobbertin's 1906 picture of an "Indigenous woman with jewelry, settler and boy" as a staged example for "the privileges enjoyed by white men in Africa."[11] Other "exotic" photographs such as partially nude African women[12] are examples for the common visual presentation of Africans by colonial photographers.[8]

In news media, books and studies about German East Africa, Dobbertin's photographs have been used as historical documents. For example, German news media such as Der Spiegel and Deutsche Welle published Dobbertin's images to document military training, forced labour and other atrocities committed by German and other European colonial powers in World War I. The images served as visual documents for these "largely forgotten victims".[13][14]

In 2014/15, a research team from Utah State University used 32 of Dobbertin's early 20th-century photographs from the Usambara Mountains as a starting point for community discussions and historical inquiry. The researchers included oral history sessions and compared past and newly taken photographs of the same locations to explore changes in the region's environment and culture.[15] Another study by the same author discussed Dobbertin's landscape photographs of the Evangelical Lutheran mission station Mlalo Kaya along with a Trappist monastery and a settler farm. These photographs provided information about colonial changes of the natural environment and the long lasting ecological consequences.[16]

Askari reading the colonial newspaper Kiongozi to his comrades

A 2021 scholarly article about the role of the German-run Swahili newspaper Kiongozi used a photograph by Dobbertin as evidence for how the colonial state employed this publication to spread information from the German colonizers to their indigenous subordinates.[17] In a 2022 article published by the Russian Academy of Sciences, the author analysed the depiction of Africans and Arab-Muslim people in colonial postcards and Dobbertin's photographs of Bagamoyo.[18]

Among other publications, photographs by Dobbertin have been used in books about World War I in East Africa, such as King's African Rifles Soldier vs Schutztruppe Soldier: East Africa 1917–18[19], German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences [20] and Tip and Run: The Untold Tragedy of the First World War in Africa.[21]

Dobbertin's photographs in collections

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In Germany, photographs and postcards by Dobbertin can be found in the collections of the German Federal Archives.[22] In 2014, 982 photographs by Dobbertin were published on Wikimedia Commons by the German Federal Archives. The National Museum of Tanzania holds a collection of 107 glass plate negatives by Dobbertin.[1] In the United Kingdom, Cambridge University Library holds a collection of monochrome postcards of scenes in German East Africa by Walther Dobbertin and Carl Vicenti.[23]

In the United States, there are collections of Dobbertin's photographs in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University[24][25] and in the Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960 at Northwestern University.[26] Among other photographs, the collection at Northwestern contains an album of original platinum prints and postcards entitled Deutschostafrikanische Bilder (lit.: German East African pictures), published between 1900 and 1910. This collection documents the changes of European life and nature in East Africa. In particular, photographs show the construction of railways, the growth of urban centers and of German colonial administration. According to the collection, there are "outstanding examples of portraiture". Further, "the collection provides an unsurpassed resource for the study of the history of photography in East Africa." Finally, the webpage comments on the cultural context of the time and place in which the images were created, adding that these historical sources are "including materials that may contain offensive images or language reflecting the nature of European colonialism in Africa."[27]

References

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  1. ^ a b Kurmann, Eliane (2023-01-20). Fotogeschichten und Geschichtsbilder: Aneignung und Umdeutung historischer Fotografien in Tansania (in German). Campus Verlag. pp. 47–48. ISBN 978-3-593-45187-9.
  2. ^ Ana Carolina Schveitzer (2024-05-15). "Visualizing Labour in German East Africa: Photographic Images and their Circulation". German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved 2024-11-30.
  3. ^ Oksiloff, A. (2016-04-30). Picturing the Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography, and Early German Cinema. Springer. pp. 78–79. ISBN 978-1-137-05687-0.
  4. ^ a b "Guide to the Collection of photographs relating to European colonization in Africa. Series III: East Africa Collection of photographs relating to European colonization in Africa, 1887–2005" (PDF). Yale University Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Retrieved 2024-12-06.
  5. ^ Dobbertin, Walther (2019). Die Soldaten Lettow-Vorbecks: ein Buch von deutschem Wehrwillen und deutscher Waffenlehre. Historische Bibliothek (in German) (Nachdruck der Originalausgabe von 1932 [Reprint of the 1932 original edition] ed.). Jerxheim: Jericksen, Historischer Verlag. pp. 141–142. ISBN 978-3-96569-013-4.
  6. ^ Funke, Alfred (1933). Schwarz-weiss-rot über Ostafrika: Roman (in German). with 126 photographs by Walther Dobbertin. Hannover: Sponholtz.
  7. ^ See the photograph and discussion in Schveitzer 2024.
  8. ^ a b c Geary, Christraud M. (2018). Postcards from Africa: Photographers of the Colonial Era: Selections from the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive. Boston: MFA Publications. p. 8. ISBN 978-0-87846-855-3.
  9. ^ Anne-Marie Eze (2013), John Hannavy (ed.), "Africa (Sub-Saharan)", Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, Routledge, p. 18, ISBN 978-1-135-87327-1
  10. ^ Easthope, Antony (1998), "Der kolonialistische Blick. Medien gegen den Strich lesen." [The colonial gaze. Reading media against the grain.], in Terkessidis, Mark; Mayer, Ruth (eds.), Globalkolorit, Multikulturalismus und Populärkultur. (in German), St. Andrä-Wördern: Hannibal, p. 195, ISBN 3-85445-152-0
  11. ^ Meier, Prita (2024-10-15). The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast. Princeton University Press. pp. 101–102, 190. ISBN 978-0-691-20187-0.
  12. ^ "Category:People of German East Africa - Wikimedia Commons". commons.wikimedia.org. Retrieved 2025-03-28.
  13. ^ Eckert, Andreas (2022-09-19). "(S+) Kolonialismus: Die Legende von der »freien Arbeit«". Der Spiegel (in German). ISSN 2195-1349. Retrieved 2025-03-27.
  14. ^ "African victims of WWI largely forgotten – DW – 04/16/2014". dw.com. Retrieved 2025-03-27.
  15. ^ Conte, Chris (2021). "The Usambara Knowledge Project: Place as Archive in a Tanzanian Mountain Range". History in Africa. 48: 83–102. doi:10.1017/hia.2021.11. ISSN 0361-5413.
  16. ^ Conte, Chris (2018-10-02). "Power, production, and land use in German East Africa through the photographs of Walther Dobbertin, c. 1910". Journal of Eastern African Studies. 12 (4): 632–654. doi:10.1080/17531055.2018.1528753. ISSN 1753-1055.
  17. ^ Krautwald, Fabian (2021). "The Bearers of News: Print and Power in German East Africa". The Journal of African History. 62 (1): 5–28. doi:10.1017/S0021853721000049. ISSN 0021-8537.
  18. ^ Banshchikova, Anastasia (2022). "Bagamoyo Imperial and Real: Image of the First Capital of German East Africa in Colonial Postcards and Author's Photograph by Walter Dobbertin". КиберЛенинка (in Russian). Retrieved 2025-03-29.
  19. ^ Adams, Gregg (2016-09-22). King's African Rifles Soldier vs Schutztruppe Soldier: East Africa 1917–18. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4728-1328-2.
  20. ^ Berman, Nina; Muehlhahn, Klaus; Nganang, Patrice (2018-07-19). German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-03727-8.
  21. ^ Paice, Edward (2021-02-04). Tip and Run: The Untold Tragedy of the First World War in Africa. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-80024-033-9.
  22. ^ "Bestandssignatur: N 5034, Bestandsbezeichnung: Dobbertin, Walther". invenio.bundesarchiv.de (in German). Bundesarchiv. Retrieved 2025-03-27.
  23. ^ "[Miscellaneous postcards of German East Africa i.e. Tanzania], 1910 - 1920 | ArchiveSearch". archivesearch.lib.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 2025-03-27.
  24. ^ "Collection of photographs relating to European colonization in Africa". Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Retrieved 2024-11-29.
  25. ^ "Walther Dobbertin - German East Africa - Yale University Library". collections.library.yale.edu. Retrieved 2025-03-27.
  26. ^ "Dobbertin, Walther | Archival and Manuscript Collections". findingaids.library.northwestern.edu. Retrieved 2025-03-27.
  27. ^ "Deutschostafrikanische Bilder". Digital Collections - Northwestern University Libraries. Retrieved 2025-03-27.

Further reading

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