Issue from 2024

Volume 118 (2024)

TOPIC: RELIGION AND POSTCOLONIAL MEMORY

  • Felicity Jensz | Films of Faith and Colonial Fantasy in Inter-War Germany

    Films of Faith and Colonial Fantasy – Postcolonial Religious Memories
    in Inter-War Germany

    After the ‹loss› of the colonies at the end of the First World War, German missionary societies turned to the medium of film to spread information about religious work including work in the former German colonies. Between 1927 and 1960, over 65 missionary films were produced by Catholic and Protestant missionary societies, many with an explicit connection to the former German colonies. The media of film has not been examined in terms of how this media contributed to postcolonial religious memory making. This article focuses on Protestant missionary films and their supporting documentation to argue that they were imbued with ‹imperial nostalgia›/‹imperialist nostalgia› (Lorcin/Rosaldo) and ‹colonial nostalgia› (Lorcin) as well as reference used by the popular colonial revisionist movement to make moral claims for the return of the colonies and the role of German missionaries. In the cultural and political turmoil of the late 1920s, the connection to political and religious memory making was blurred through the use of colonial and imperialistic nostalgia in missionary films.

    Films – Propaganda – Protestant mission – Post-Colonial Germany – Inter-War period.

  • Daniel Annen | Reziproke Missionierung - Thomas Immoos

    Thomas Immoos’ Reciprocal Mission

    Thomas Immoos was a Catholic priest who had attended the Bethlehem Brothers’ school in Immensee and later became a member of this missionary society. Born in Schwyz in 1918 and then raised in Steinen, he probably experienced the restrictive norms of the Catholic milieu in his childhood and youth. This is interesting because he experienced completely different mentalities in Japan and in the wide world in general. At the beginning of the 1950s, he took up a teaching position in Japan, which he maintained until he died in 2001, from 1962 as a professor of German-language literature at the University of Tokyo. However, he interrupted his stay in Japan from time to time, partly to complete a doctorate under the famous Germanist Emil Staiger at the University of Zurich in 1961, as well as simply to visit his still beloved homeland of Central Switzerland. Should his Central Swiss origins, together with his Catholic priesthood, not have urged him to proselytize in favour of his original denomination in Japan? That might be expected but was not the case, not with Thomas Immoos. Even as a missionary in foreign lands, he remained the researcher, the questioner. Instead of imposing a religion, he searched for what united the religiosity in Japan with Catholic positions, which is why his missionary work can be described as reciprocal. His main areas of research were Japanese cult theatre, Shintoism, and Buddhism, where he found similarities and analogies and was thus able to draw attention to deficits in Catholicism as well – an area, where C.G. Jung’s theory of archetypes was helpful to him. Ironically, one might almost say, that Thomas Immoos’ view of the Far East can reveal new psychological and theological insights into the near West.

    Catholicism of the Milieu – System of Norms – Analogies – Cult Theatre – Shinto – Buddhism – Reciprocity.

  • Fabio Rossinelli and Filiberto Ciaglia | The Collateral Activities of Missionaries in Southern Africa between Exploration and Exploitation

    Memories in Tension – The Collateral Activities of Missionaries in Southern Africa
    between Exploration and Exploitation in the 19th Century

    This article analyses the activities of several European missionaries who worked in Lesotho, Zambia, Mozambique and the Transvaal in the 19th century through the missions of Paris (Société des Missions évangéliques de Paris, founded in 1822) and Lausanne (Mission romande, former Mission vaudoise, 1874). The focus is on how these missionaries developed their personal interests outside their mandate. Knowledge and money were at stake. While some activities were made public, others were treated with the greatest discretion. This affected and shaped the way in which the missionary memory was constructed. The sources used for this study are listed in a database created by the authors themselves, with a multidisciplinary team in Italy: missioniprotestanti-africaaustrale.org (online since 2022, interactive from 2024).

    Mission – South Africa – Knowledge – Money – Remembrance – Memory.

  • Christian Antonio Rosso | Le memorie dei padri della Consolata e dei frati minori in Somalia

    «In the Land of Aromas» – History of the Catholic Missionary Experiment in Somalia in the 20th Century in the Memoirs of the Fathers of the Consolata and the Friars Minor

    There is a deep nexus linking the history of the Catholic mission in Somalia to the political events of the last Italian colony, in close dependence on the seasons that colonialism had experienced in the succession of the liberal and fascist during the British and Italian administrations. This article will attempt to give a succinct account of the different phases of missionary expansion in Somalia, starting from the pioneering attempt of the Trinitarians, which began in 1904, to the more lasting attempt of the Friars Minor