German Colonial Memory from a Cameroonian Perspective

Between Past Coping and Relationship Interweaving

Abstract

For a long time, colonialism seemed to play a sidelined or incidental role in Germans' historical consciousness and little attention was paid to Germany's involvement in the colonial process. Only the emergence of a black African postcolonial literature in Germany has helped to make the colonial experience visible as a common heritage between Germans and Africans. The focus of texts written by African authors in German is to look back at past events, which are thematized from different perspectives. The present article examines the memory of the German colonial past with the example of two Cameroonian texts. This postcolonial reappraisal of colonial memory, as presented by Daniel Mepin and Philomène Atyame, revolves around coping with the past and mutual cultural rapprochement. To achieve this goal, Jan and Aleida Assmann use the term "cultural memory" to provide theoretical foundations that can make my thinking more plausible.