Walther Dobbertin

Walther Alexander Dobbertin (28 August 1882 – 12 January 1961) was a German photographer and publisher, mainly active in the former colony of German East Africa, in modern-day Tanzania. His photographic work, consisting of hundreds of images in black-and-white, provides a comprehensive portrayal of the colony's political, social, economic, and military aspects. His subjects ranged from landscapes and wildlife to portraits of indigenous people and German settlers. Notably, he documented the activities of the German Schutztruppe and the experiences of Askari soldiers.

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 campaign of World War I. His images have been considered important resources for the history of East Africa and its documentation through photography.

Following his release as a prisoner of war, Dobbertin returned to Germany and ran a bookshop in a town south of Hamburg. In 1932, he self-published a photo book with glorifying portraits of German colonial soldiers. Further, he became a member of the Nazi Party's paramilitary wing — the SA. In 1945, his business licence was revoked by the British authorities in Germany. When his licence was restored, he continued his bookshop until shortly before his death.

In 21st-century post-colonial studies, scholars have emphasised that Dobbertin's photographs function not only as historical documentation but also as artefacts allowing new interpretations of the visual culture of German colonialism—framed for administrative and commercial audiences, shaped by colonial hierarchies, and later repurposed for inter-war and nationalist German contexts.

Life and career

Early life and career in German East Africa Dobbertin was born on 28 August 1882 into a family of craftsmen in Berlin, the capital of the recently united German Reich. His ancestors came from Mecklenburg, where Dobbertin Abbey was 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.

In 1906, Dobbertin opened his own studio in Dar es Salaam and subsequently operated shops selling books, photographic and artistic material in Tanga and Moshi, where he also had a photographic studio. 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 and picture postcards. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Dobbertin was enlisted into the colonial army, the so-called Schutztruppe. Until 1916, he continued to take photographs and also shot scenes for a documentary film that has been lost. Among other aspects, he expressed the stereotypical notion of the trustful relationship between German superiors and "the brave Askari soldiers". Based on his photographs of the war, Dobbertin is considered the only photographer on the German side who documented the events during the East African campaign of World War I.

Later life in Germany In 1916, Dobbertin was taken as a prisoner of war by British forces as a member of the German army. At the end of the war, the Germans were expelled from East Africa and expropriated. Nevertheless, 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, a neighbourhood of modern-day Jesteburg, south of Hamburg, where again he opened a bookshop.

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 in 1945 after World War II by the British authorities. After his licence was restored, he continued to work in his bookshop until 1960. Dobbertin died on 12 January 1961, shortly before a planned trip to Africa.

Photographic work

Dobbertin's photographs of colonial life in German East Africa amount to hundreds of images of political, social, economic and military events, also including photographs of large 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 amongst some neutral documentation. Other images show life in villages, including children on the banks of a river, launching dugout canoes, and fishing.

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. Thanks to improved printing and relatively cheap postal services, these created new forms of communication and served commercial and political interests. Then and now, these images have shaped the public vision of important historical changes in the lives of Africans. In the context of postcolonial studies and critical whiteness studies, such representations have been labelled with the term "colonial gaze".

Colonial and political context Recent curatorial projects and Tanzanian scholarship have examined the images’ continuing role in post-colonial memory and museum practice. Thus, in her study of African 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." Dobbertin's surviving photographs also include portraits and images of partially nude African women. According to Christraud M. Geary such images are examples for the "racial classifications and debasing stereotypes" of Africans by colonial photographers.

Dobbertin's photography is closely linked to the visual culture of German colonial rule in East Africa. Scholars have shown that his images, produced for both administrative and commercial audiences, reflected and reinforced colonial hierarchies through selective framing, staged scenes, and depictions of settler infrastructure and African labour. 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. This instance of photo-elicitation provided information about colonial changes of the natural environment and the long-lasting ecological consequences.

An Askari reading the colonial newspaper Kiongozi to his comradesA 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.

In an article published in 2022 by the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, historian Anastasia A. Banshchikova analyzed the depiction of people, military stations, monuments, and European-style streets both in anonymous picture postcards and in Dobbertin's photographs of Bagamoyo, the German colony's first capital. The author noted that African Muslims and Islamic buildings, such as mosques, were only rarely depicted on colonial postcards that rather represented German colonial achievements and infrastructure. In contrast, Dobbertin's photographs also include local Muslim culture, such as a mosques and Muslims in kanzu and kofia.

Contemporary German and Tanzanian scholars and curators have also investigated how Dobbertin's pictures have been appropriated and reinterpreted in post-colonial memory and museum displays – a process that highlights both the research value of the images and the ethical issues raised by their colonial provenance and the racialised language of some original captions. In her 2023 book about the (re-)appropriation of historical photographs in contemporary Tanzania, German historian Eliane Kurmann reported that she found Dobbertin's photographs and postcards of landscapes and people, the colonial infrastructure and World War I in museums and memorial sites throughout Tanzania. They are exhibited to provide a contemporary insight into the German colonial era and illustrate school and history books, as well as websites. As Kurmann noted, Charles Kayoka, a Tanzanian media scientist and photographer, has been engaged in a so-called re-picturing project to illustrate the changes in the places photographed by Dobbertin by photographing the same scenes and motifs 100 years later and juxtaposing these historical and contemporary images with each other. thumb

In her 2024 article titled "Visualizing Labour in German East Africa: Photographic Images and their Circulation", Ana Carolina Schveitzer of Humboldt-Universität of Berlin discussed Dobbertin's photograph of Africans working at a sisal plantation. She noted that this and a similar photograph by Dobbertin had been published in several books and as a postcard between 1913 and 1933. According to Schveitzer, this image was published both to promote an important crop of the colonial economy and as a "form of colonial nostalgia". German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences and Tip and Run: The Untold Tragedy of the First World War in Africa.

Collections Parts of Dobbertin's photographic estate are held in the German Federal Archives and in international collections. In 2014, nearly 1000 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. This library also owns a copy of Dobbertin's 1920 booklet Von Deutscher Arbeit in Deutsch-Ostafrika (Of German Work in GEA), containing monochrome photogravure postcards of agricultural and industrial scenes in German East Africa.

In the United States, there are collections of Dobbertin's photographs in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and in the Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860–1960 at Northwestern University. Among other photographs, the collection at Northwestern contains an album of original platinum prints and postcards entitled Deutschostafrikanische Bilder (German: 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 also "outstanding examples of portraiture", stating further that "the collection provides an unsurpassed resource for the study of the history of photography in East Africa."