Tropenkoller: the Interdiscursive Career of a German Colonial Syndrome

Abstract

The cover illustration of Henry Wenden’s colonial novel Tropenkoller (1904) shows a remarkable combination of two pictorial elements. The image is framed by a stylized representation of the war flag of the German Empire, which divides the illustration into four equal-sized parts. From the right margin a white male hand, firmly holding a whip, projects into the picture. The lower part of the emblematic illustration is dominated by the somewhat menacing inscriptio ‘Tropenkoller’. The delicate ambiguity of the image results from the fact that it facilitates two readings without privileging one of them: On the one hand, the whip-swinging hand can appear as a disturbing intruder in the square heraldic order of the flag and can therefore be seen to highlight the incompatibility of German imperial authority and pathological forms of violence. On the other hand, it may also be regarded as a new heraldic element of the flag that is tentatively added to point to an intrinsic affinity between imperial power and sadistic violence.