Projects that analyse and use photographs from the collection in innovative ways.
Togo and German Colonial Photography - Perspective and Deconstruction of Imperial Eye
This website was created in 2013 as part of a research project funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. It proposes analytical methods that enable the scientific and didactic use of colonial images.
Koloniale Verbindungen
Düsseldorf / Dschang
Rheinland / Grasland
Deutschland / Kamerun
Till date, Germany and Cameroon remain linked in a special way by a shared colonial history. Meanwhile the 30 years of German presence have not been forgotten in Cameroon, while very little is known about it in Germany.
To trace back this common history, an institutional partnership sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation between the History Department of the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf and the Department of Applied Foreign Languages of the University of Dschang came into being in 2015. Researchers of these two institutions carried out research alongside their students in History, Media and Cultural studies as well as in German Studies.
This website presents the results of this research as a polyphonic mosaic. The different perspectives of this or these historie(s) are presented. Instead of an omniscient narrative and a standard interpretation, this website offers a greatly diversified picture. It certainly presents these things in a selective manner, but it also permits you to navigate between media forms such as archived documents, oral history, literature or pictures. The footnotes of historiography can be experienced here - on open cartography of scientific work.