Samoa and the dateline

[K9 Kai Niggemann]

On 29.12.2011, at 14:16, Jay Vaughan wrote:


> Kai, you've set me off on a grand adventure of discovery about your great-grand-uncle, the German Samoan situation, and so on .. but one thing stuck with me:


hey, I'm very happy! I find the story of his life very interesting and have decided that I need to find out even more about him.


> This actually isn't surprising to me .. Was he probably also a Wanderkind?


He certainly looks like it. I have thought the same as well. I like to think he was this cool, sort of hippie guy. In his pictures you can see him hang out with the Samoans in a way that suggests he became friends with them, which seems to me (but I'm related, so I'm biased!) that he must have been a very open minded person, considering the nationalistic times of the German Empire.

But I also heard from Samoans that the governor Solf that Germany put into power over its colony Samoa was a failure when it comes to colonization and actually an agreeable person who was interested in the country and the people, not in exploiting them. This changed after WWI when Germany had to give up Samoa and New Zealand took it as a colony. Maybe it just became so much worse that the German rule seemed like Wunderland in comparison, but maybe Solf actually knew what he was doing.

There is one picture he took (or someone else may have taken it, Otto Tetens is in the picture). It shows a picknick, on a lawn. Tetens wears a ringed shirt and shorts, looks like a bathing suit or gymnastic suit of the times. On the back of the picture there is a handwritten note saying: "Wettstreit der 'Carnivoren' mit den 'Vegetariern'." ("Wettstreit" is a competition or a contest).

Kai


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