Der vermessene Mensch

Summary

Measures of Man

Berlin, end of the 19th century. At the "German Colonial Exhibition", the ambitious ethnology doctoral student Alexander Hoffmann meets a delegation of Herero and Nama who have traveled to Berlin from "German Southwest Africa". He develops a special relationship with the group's interpreter, Kezia Kambazembi. Not least through his conversations with her, his interest in the Herero and Nama is awakened. The more he learns about them, the more massive his rejection of the common evolutionist racial theory of his colleagues becomes. Eventually, he himself travels to the colony of "German Southwest Africa", where an uprising of the Herero and Nama is looming, which eventually leads to war with the Germans. Under the protection of the imperial army, Hoffmann travels through the country – ostensibly to collect artifacts for the Berlin Ethnological Museum, but in truth primarily to find further evidence for his thesis. In Kezia, Hoffmann witnesses how German soldiers proceed against the Herero and Nama with inhuman savageness and cruelty: the imperial order is for total annihilation. But Hoffmann himself, in his urge to explore, also crosses moral boundaries.