Filmic Restitutions

Between 1884 and 1899, the German Empire acquired colonies in Africa, northeastern China, and the Pacific. Consequently, Germany came to hold the fourth largest colonial empire among the European powers, even though it was a latecomer to colonial imperialism. Like their European counterparts, German colonialists built their empire following the notion of a civilizing mission where modernization was understood to bring progress to underdeveloped regions and populations. A racialized ideology marked the rule and administration of colonial subjects.

For the thirty-odd years of its colonial project, Germany played a significant role in shaping European imperial rivalries, until it lost its colonies under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that formally concluded the First World War. Despite Germany’s standing as a key imperial power, the short-lived nature of its colonial empire contributed to the marginal place of its overseas colonialism in accounts of German history. Low migration from the former colonies to Germany, along with the primacy of the Holocaust in the country’s postwar culture of national commemoration, also led to scholarly oversight and poor public awareness of its colonial histories. It was not until the 1990s that these histories were increasingly studied by academics and featured in political discussions and the media.1

Following some two decades of civic engagement and academic work, there are many state actors as well as political and cultural institutions in Germany today whose activities address colonial remembrance. Their belated acknowledgement of this colonial past nonetheless continues to be partial and selective.2 For instance, although the German government’s recognition in 2021 of the genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples—in today’s Namibia—serves as a moral admission, it hasn’t been matched by an adequate offer of reparations. A year later, Germany restituted looted African artworks from public collections, including the famous Benin Bronzes, to much media attention. However, these repatriations belie the unyielding eurocentrism of some of these institutions.3

Seen another way, such intransigence reflects how these actors and institutions are still grappling with their “implication” in colonial histories, to take on Michael Rothberg’s helpful term. With his notion of implication, Rothberg describes the “discomforting forms of belonging to a context of injustice that cannot be grasped immediately or directly.”4  Depending on how a party perceives its culpability for historical acts that “seem to involve spatial, temporal, or social distances or complex causal mechanisms,” Rothberg proposes divergent measures toward achieving reconciliation.5 Negotiating one’s implication can likewise be a tall order for individuals who seek amends for the injustices committed by their forebears, or by historical actors from the national context to which they belong. The numerous contemporary scholars and cultural producers who explore colonial remembrance in their work must navigate these challenges. Today, such practitioners include a sizeable cohort of filmmakers, who have taken up projects that present suppressed histories to a broad audience.

When assessing these filmic productions, it would be simplistic to regard what appears onscreen as “‘evidence’ of implication,” to turn to another of Rothberg’s propositions. Rather, as Rothberg suggests, we can read such films as “implicit or explicit theoretical acts that help us advance thinking about political responsibility and solidarity.”6 Given the current wide-ranging efforts of cultural producers to spotlight colonial remembrance, the issue in Germany’s contemporary cultural context is no longer the forgetting or suppression of the country’s colonial histories.7 Whether at an institutional or an individual level, or as it is discussed in an artwork or film, the greater difficulty lies in going beyond well-meaning acknowledgement of one’s culpability—merely recognizing that one is implicated in histories of colonial violence—to grapple with how one is implicated, and what to do with one’s implication. To strive toward just outcomes for inheritors of these complex histories—be it through intergovernmental measures negotiated between Germany and its former colonies, or commemorative and educational initiatives fostered through art and cultural projects—requires a nuanced apprehension of implication and the dynamics of power that such entanglement involves.

Jürgen Ellinghaus’s Togoland Projections (2023) exemplifies the challenges of taking responsibility for the colonial past. A poetic and at times moving film, it is ambitious but deeply flawed. Togoland is more than just a documentary film about places and persons in Togo, which, from 1884 to 1914, alongside a region of Ghana, constituted the former German colony of Togoland.8 A trading colony acquired by treaty, Togoland was among the vast territories in Africa that the German Empire colonized in the 1880s, which positioned the continent as the Empire’s geographical focus. Of its African colonies, Togoland was not of considerable economic significance to Germany.9 Yet Togoland did not require assistance from imperial coffers, produce colonial scandals, or see major military conflict. It hence came to be known as Germany’s Musterkolonie or “model colony.”

Lifting the lid on this misleading designation, Ellinghaus seeks to inform his film’s viewer of Togo’s histories of conflict, forced labor, and killing. These Togolese histories are perhaps less familiar to audiences in Germany and the West, in comparison with conflicts such as the aforementioned Herero and Nama Genocide or the Maji Maji War in present-day Tanzania, which are remembered through commemorative efforts in Germany supported by national politicians and widely publicized in the media. As its title Togoland Projections suggests, the film is broadly structured around Ellinghaus’s documentation of screenings of colonial films that he organized in Togo, which were shown to local audiences at the very sites of their making. With this initiative, Ellinghaus wagers that disseminating these films among the people and places immediately affected by Germany’s colonial violence can make up for that violence—and that viewing and making film might counteract official Togolese political discourses and public sentiment that have come to include positive memories of German colonial rule. While the projected image undoubtedly possesses a potential affective power, Ellinghaus’s expectation that Togolese audiences will be educated and uplifted through viewing colonial film must be challenged. Togoland’s project of projections goes together with a certain violence.

Reframing Colonial Images   

Taking cinema as both his subject and a site of exchange, Ellinghaus attempts to redress German colonialism through two interventions in its filmic archive. First, at the level of the film, Togoland reframes historical footage from the colonial archive and counters it through new representations. Second, the filmmaker’s screenings of colonial films in Togo seek to circumvent the archive’s exclusionary structures. While the first intervention yields a fitting introduction to Togo’s cultures and colonial histories for Togoland’s international viewer, the second initiative of filmic “returns” prompts an ethical question: Can—and should—difficult histories be made visible at their sites of occurrence, to the inheritors of their violence?

The colonial films on which Togoland centers were made by the maverick hunter, explorer, filmmaker, amateur Africanist, and author Hans Schomburgk (1880–1967). Much of the filmic material that Ellinghaus features was made by Schomburgk on his northward peregrinations, inland from the coast at Lomé, Togo’s capital.10 Schomburgk’s genre-crossing films of the 1910s and 1920s, which combine facets of ethnographic and adventure films, embody key aspects of colonial filmmaking. Such films advance racially supremacist attitudes through the depiction of disciplined and exploited bodies, as well as the exoticization of unfamiliar people and places. Similarly, Schomburgk’s productions depict obedient and dispensable colonial subjects, whether uniformed local troops or shackled laborers toiling at building projects, supervised by white overseers. They are resources instrumental to the economic and infrastructural progress of Germany’s “model colony.” Schomburgk’s films also emphasize anthropometric difference between the “natives” and the white man. To exaggerated and whimsical effect, a Konkomba man is shown towering over Schomburgk himself; the man’s eyes engage the camera, while Schomburgk directs his gaze at his counterpart in the frame, drawing the viewer’s attention to their physical dissimilarity.

In his essayistic documentary film, Ellinghaus creates and deploys footage that counters such images from the colonial archive. Using contemporary footage of people, cities, and villages in Togo made with his team, the filmmaker reframes the bigoted and exoticizing depictions he reproduces in his film. Occasionally, the film’s images of Togo are accompanied by a voiceover that features two speakers: Ellinghaus himself, who loosely narrates his travels that trace Schomburgk’s passage; as well as a female voiceover in the film’s later sections, who reads excerpts from the memoirs of the actress and Schomburgk’s traveling companion, Meg Gehrts. Gehrts’s observations exemplify the abhorrent racism of German colonialists and their supporters.

The camera’s probing and intimate engagement of place is one of Togoland’s defining features, and this contributes to a circuitous and open-ended aesthetic. The film’s numerous landscape views are characterized by open space and ruins, such as in its lingering passages that track across wide plains and wave-lapped coastlines, which play out in a muted palette. These scenic vistas also yield glimpses of colonialism’s traces. A huddle of rotting wooden struts along the coast are the abject remnants of the pier at which Schomburgk arrived in Lomé. Concrete slabs in an overgrown field are all that endures of the German-built radio station near the village of Kamina. These infrastructural ruins of colonialism are a far cry from the pomp of imperial processions and display of technological accomplishment showcased in the archival material that Ellinghaus features—and which he plays to Togolese audiences—whether in the film depicting the colonial office minister Wilhelm Solf’s ceremonial welcome in Togo, or in the footage of the imposing radio tower when it was newly constructed.11

The camera’s observations of the built environment unravel another key thread: the forgetting of German colonialism, and the downplaying of its oppressiveness. Compared to memories of more recent colonialization by the French, German dominion is perceived by many of Ellinghaus’s interlocutors in Togo to have been benign, even beneficial at times. Ellinghaus chances upon evidence of the failure to remember this history’s violence at an entrance to a school in Sokodé, which features a crudely painted wall mural of “the last German governor of Togo, Friedrich (Adolf) Duke of Mecklenburg 1912–1914,” who, the voiceover notes, was known for his cruelty and his discrimination against mixed-race children. A proud monument to German–Togolese friendship, erected in the 1970s, stands at the beach in Aného. At a Lomé screening, young cinephiles observe the common perception of the “good German,” attributing the favorable perception of German rule to more recent memories of anticolonial struggle against the French.12

Troubling Projection

The film’s titular projections involved Ellinghaus playing different cuts of two hours of footage from colonial films, mainly by Schomburgk, at screenings in Togo. These were coordinated with the Togolese chapter of the traveling cinema Cinéma Numérique Ambulant, a network of African and European associations that bring films to rural locations in Africa through mobile projection teams. Ellinghaus’s ambition behind Togoland’s screening program is a “return” of Schomburgk’s images—to democratize the hermetic archive, restituting its images from Germany to Togo. This, of course, itself contains colonial logic: Europe as the site of knowledge, responsible for paternalistically enlightening the former colony. As such, the film’s well-intentioned initiative begs the question: Whom does the attempted restitution via projective operations actually serve?

Togoland’s viewer in the West might certainly be moved by Ellinghaus’s staging of filmic projections within in his film. Emphasizing the projected image’s materiality and its spatial dimensions, the camera adopts a patient and protracted approach when showing the various screening set-ups in Togo: in lieu of more permanent cinema venues, Schomburgk’s films are beamed onto crumbling walls and make-shift screens in courtyards and open-air spaces, making for projective situations that sometimes lend the images an electrifying intensity. At a screening in Kamina, dematerialized, spectral figures of laboring bodies hover over barren fields at twilight, not far from where these indentured workers once struggled, collapsing space and time to produce an atmosphere of charged indexicality. At such moments, which are among Togoland’s most evocative, the projected image inhabits a virtual space in which contradictions seem momentarily suspended—the illuminated figures are poised between past and present, the forgotten and what remains, the spaces of the archive and of everyday life, Germany and Togo.

Troublingly, the affective qualities of these resonantly material films within the film seem directed toward Togoland’s international viewer, rather than the Togolese audiences who participated in the film’s making. Scrutiny of another key type of footage that Togoland features, Ellinghaus’s documentation of audiences at the screenings, further arouses the viewer’s skepticism toward these projections. Over the course of the film, the viewer’s interest in the Togolese audiences’ responses gives way to a discomfort at recognizing Ellinghaus’s blind spots concerning power asymmetries and other types of forgetting: With their responses limited to gentle denunciation, mild outrage, and slight amusement, the Togolese viewers of Schomburgk’s films don’t appear constructively engaged. Barring some instances of identification, the act of viewing produces limited insight into colonialism’s histories and legacies for these filmgoers.

Their reactions, which are recorded during and after the screening, likewise teach us little as viewers: A woman from Kamina recognizes the land on which the former radio station structures stand as hers; in footage of the calvary in Sokodé, audience members identify a grandfather and father of friends. Nonetheless, there are charged moments. A man from near the northern village of Bandjeli shares a disquieting account of his grandfather’s brutal physical punishment for insubordination by a German officer. The pain of this memory is deeply etched across his face. This conversation stands out amid otherwise awkward reaction shots and dialogue, which cause the film’s documentation to verge intermittently on ethnographic territory. On the whole, Togoland’s projective situations appear less to constitute a metabolic environment that produces meaningful exchange than they deploy the screen-as-surface that holds apart.13

Although the viewer would prefer more clarity about the compact between Ellinghaus and the audiences he recruits, this relationship remains unaddressed in the film. In part, the film’s discursive shallowness can be explained by its complex logistical and organizational undertakings. Given the extensive organizational work with different regional, municipal, and tribal authorities, Ellinghaus’s approach to the screenings was ad hoc in some measure. To engage the public at screenings, Ellinghaus’s team drew on local translators, who also ended up introducing the films and facilitating the discussions. The film doesn’t detail the specificities of this arrangement, but Ellinghaus shared them at a December 2024 screening in Berlin.14 Would more extended dialogue between the film’s team, its community partners, and the audiences—especially those not accustomed to speaking about film—have yielded more meaningful engagement?

It comes as little surprise that the most insightful discussions of the colonial films emerge at a final screening for a cinephile audience in Lomé, where university-age members of the cinema exchange Cinereflex debate the films with verbosity. While watching the documentation of the Lomé screening, the viewer’s own creeping vexation is mirrored by the youths’ discomfort. A heated discussion among the group ensues: some argue that all Togolese children should watch these films, making up for the gaps in what is taught at school. Others cannot fathom showing children the films, as it would be difficult to teach them these images and their context. These significant conversations are included far too late in the film, and some reflexivity regarding the issues that these viewers raise would have made for a different engagement with projection. It is difficult to imagine what audiences confronted with egregiously propagandistic and stereotypical depictions of their forebears can be expected to perform for the camera. Neither does it bring the viewer much to broach the intimacy of watching them watch this complicated material.

Right to the Archive

Moreover, Togoland does not evidence thoughtfulness about the privileges of access to the colonial archive  and the dissemination of its materials. Consider the voiceover, read by Ellinghaus, that accompanies the film’s opening sequence, the footage of Minister Solf’s processional welcome. Ellinghaus recalls how the film’s images had deeply impressed him: like many Germans, he didn’t know much about Germany’s colonization of Togo. Housed across German archives and only known by experts, the images, according to the filmmaker, “belong” to the Togolese, who must view them: “It’s about time […] to finally show [the images] to whom they first and foremost belong, the Togolese.”15 Ellinghaus’s motivation reflects an imposition that begs further scrutiny. Even as he strives for accountability and justice, the program of projections reveals a misjudged solidarity. His impulse is to restitute these images—to remove them from Germany rather than confront Germans with the violence perpetrated in their colonies, even though many aren’t familiar with this history. Ellinghaus regards this image repatriation as the rightful rectification of a kind of ownership. But the flaw in this logic is in thinking that these images “belong” to Togo as much as they do to Germany. Even though they were made in Togo, Ellinghaus cannot fathom that they in fact rest more squarely in the German theater of memory than the Togolese one.16

Further, the action he takes to account for Germany’s colonial history is rooted in “[solidarity] premised on … logics of sameness and identification”—to borrow Rothberg’s observation on implication’s complexities—rather than on aspects of difference.17 Its underlying operative logic appears to be: for it touches me, a German filmmaker, so will it affect those in Togo; I must show these images to them. But audiences with a vastly different relationship to the images than Ellinghaus may not be similarly moved, and the filmic projections can produce deleterious outcomes, rather than simply constitute an act of sharing.

As the filmmaker commences his travels through Togo, following Schomburgk’s own journey, he ponders in the voiceover: “How would the Togolese receive these films today? Would they want to be confronted with the colonial past, anyhow—at the risk of rekindling old pain?”18 Yet Ellinghaus has no real plan to manage the memories and emotions that the screenings conjure for the local audiences—or to attenuate the violence inevitably set up by the confrontation with the images. There are overlooked ethical concerns at play.

Regarding accountability, another organizational detail in the project should be raised. As Ellinghaus reflected on his team’s composition at the aforementioned Berlin screening, no one from Togo was involved as a director in the project, and local partners on the ground were engaged only as producers. He did not regard collaboration at a conceptual level as necessary for his film, a musing that was met with considerable critique from the audience. This decision by the filmmaker comes across as a lapse, and it accounts for the archival violence the projections unleashed.

Seeing as the redress meted out by Ellinghaus doesn’t accord with the Togolese viewers’ choices and concerns, their placement as recipients of Schomburgk’s filmic images feels strained. Paradoxically, the most salient moments of transfer in Togoland occur when the colonial images fail to be recognized, and Ellinghaus makes such disconnect explicit: as they sing about no longer knowing the dances they see in the films, Ellinghaus’s Konkomba audiences in northwest Togo dance in the projection’s glow, presumably with new rhythms and motions, both in disjunction and in sync with their dancing ancestors on screen.

As Michael Rothberg argues, “Practices of memory—even multidirectional practices—intersect with power dynamics, forms of complicity and distancing, and risks of forgetting.”19 While Ellinghaus’s project attends to overlooked histories of German colonialism, and takes action toward a repatriation by image, he underestimates the mediation required for real transfer. Consequently, Togoland registers other omissions and produces new complications. It reminds its viewers that acts of solidarity and the sharing of knowledge can be glossed with a veneer of paternalism, such that these deeds can assuage those seeking to take responsibility more than they comfort the descendants of those who suffered. In many ways, Togoland’s projections ultimately seem simplistic or entirely idealistic. But even so, Ellinghaus’s film represents one of a growing number of films that deploy experimental tactics to reflect and enact the possibilities of restitution. With the rise of such explorations, projection’s potential as transmission and transfer can only be advanced.

1 On the histories of the remembrance of German colonialism, see Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History, trans. Sorcha O’Hagan (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

2 For one recent civil society perspective on the shortcomings of the German government’s responses to Germany’s colonial history and its consequences, despite the government’s willingness to “intensi[fy] the process of coming to terms with [this] past,” see “Reappraisal of German Colonialism: Many Individual Measures, No Overall Concept,” Dekolonial Erinnern/decolonial memories blog, August 19, 2025: https://dekolonial-erinnern.de/reappraisal-of-colonial-history-many-individual-measures-no-overall-concept/.

3 At what is perhaps the most prominent of these institutions, Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, museum heads have not meaningfully addressed the institution’s fundamentally neocolonial import—with its imperial architecture and universalist, encyclopedic approach to its displays—despite the years of criticism received even in the lead-up to its construction, and since its opening to the public in 2021.

4 Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford University Press, 2019): 8.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid, 23.

7 Certainly, the rise of an ethnonationalist right in Germany—and in Europe more broadly—portends the future suppression of colonial remembrance. However, discussions of how to sustain practices of colonial remembrance shouldn’t foreclose debates on different approaches to commemorating colonial histories, as is the focus of this piece.

8 After Togo’s invasion in the First World War by British and French troops, western Togo was ceded to the British and eastern Togo to the French. French Togoland remained a colony until 1960, when it gained its independence as the Togolese Republic.

9 Such as in comparison to Germany’s settler colony German Southwest Africa—present-day Namibia—with its livestock farming industry and rich mineral resources; or Cameroon, where the Germans developed cash crop plantations.

10 In his film (and in the series of screenings in Togo), Ellinghaus in fact includes some contemporary colonial films featuring the Togo region that were not made by Schomburgk. Although he does not mention this in Togoland—perhaps for the purposes of narrative simplicity—he fully lists the films he excerpts in the film credits. See also note 1.

11 It remains unclear who commissioned or shot the documentary short State Minister Solf Visits the German Colony of Togo (1913); it was not made by Schomburgk.

12 See note 8.

13 Here, I reference Giuliana Bruno’s ideas about the potentials of projection as a medium of transmission. See Giuliana Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

14 The screening of Togoland Projections, followed by a conversation with Ellinghaus, took place at the FSK Kino am Oranienplatz on December 4, 2024.

15 [Es wäre doch Zeit, denke ich, sie endlich denen zu zeigen, denen sie zuallererst gehören, den Togolesen.] Author’s translation.

16 I borrow from Y. Michal Bodemann’s and Max Czollek’s critical discussions of Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance. Bodemann and, following him, Czollek charge that the performative staging of national acts of remembrance place Jews in the role of witnessing Germans reconcile their past in a post-Holocaust “theater of memory,” rather than actually mitigate the effects of the German Jewish community’s historical trauma and its recurrence. See Y. Michal Bodemann, Gedächtnistheater: Die jüdische Gemeinschaft und ihre deutsche Erfindung (Rotbuch, 1996); Max Czollek, Desintegriert euch! (Hanser, 2018).

17 Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 12.

18 [Doch wie würden die Togolesen diese Filme heute aufnehmen? Wollen sie überhaupt mit der kolonialen Zeit konfrontiert werden? Auf die Gefahr hin, alte Schmerzen wiederaufleben zu lassen?] Author’s translation.

19 Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 26.

Ying Sze Pek is an art historian whose research explores how migration and colonial histories are imbricated in the formation of European and global artistic modernisms. She is currently the Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. 

All images: © Les Films de l’œil sauvage, maxim, UGP, rbb, Vosges TV