COLONIAL TOPONYMS IN GERMAN GUIDEBOOKS FOR TANZANIA

From 1884 until the end of World War I, the German Reich was a colonial power. Their so-called protectorates included the area of present-day Tanzania. During their rule, Germans were responsible for countless crimes against humanity, including genocide. However, the German public shows little interest in its colonial past, as opposed to its ongoing mindfulness of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Against this background, guidebooks are tasked with attracting tourists to the destinations they respectively promote and providing them with interesting and useful on-site information. This raises the question of whether and, if so, how the German colonial period should be approached in guidebooks on Tanzania. This might not only exhume a dark past, but also risk broaching a topic that hardly anyone is interested in. In fact, most of the guidebooks analysed here chose to make only passing reference to the period of colonial rule in the section on the country’s history. In the tourist section, however, a considerable number of German place names can be detected, almost all of which date back to the colonial period. As a more detailed analysis shows, these names can be divided into two groups, with the names of one group referring to geo-objects that today bear local names. The other group, by contrast, comprises names that have survived to the present day and continue to be used on international maps.