When I learned that the 15 year interregnum between Spanish and Japanese administrations was filled by German imperial control of Saipan, I recognized yet another gap in my understanding of world history. This trip has been full of those. Germany? Colonies? In the Pacific? Why?
Germany as a naval power is inherently odd. Because of the Zimmerman telegram, the sinking of the Lusitania, and several banger movies about WWII U-Boats, I knew that the Germans had some naval power. However, even at its largest European borders, the bulk of the German coastline was on the North and Baltic seas. I assumed that the Atlantic was the extent of their reach. It is not an intuitive place from which to run a bunch of Pacific islands.
Germany was centuries behind in the colonialism game. Most European nations have cities and cultures that long predate the nations to which they are now associated, but Germany is the most extreme example. Though the Romans referred to the area and the tribes as Germania, there was nothing like a centralized state. The nation only came into being in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian war. It united 25 existing states, from the large kingdoms with real sounding names like Prussia, Saxony, and Bavaria to the silly Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and the Free and Hanseatic City of Lübeck. I knew that some African nations had a history of German presence - Namibia, Cameroon, and Togo; the cluster of Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi. But getting to Africa from Europe is a much different operation than establishing a presence in the Pacific, especially after 300 years of naval superiority by other European powers, the presence of Japan and China, and the upstart presence of a far flung American naval presence.
The primary focus for Germany was one of the only lands unclaimed by a European power- a space that is still mostly untouched - the eastern part of the island of New Guinea. In 1884, the Germans started in the northeast of the island, in what is now Papua New Guinea. They called it ‘Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land.’ A predictable lot.
The British - Australia was not yet independent - were exerting their own presence from the south and did not want the encroachment on their turf.1 They split the island along the Fly River in 1885. The west half of the island - the part that is now controlled by Indonesia - was controlled by the Dutch until 1962.2
It was not a particularly large colony. The forest peoples of New Guinea were ruled over by the 3,000 Germans that functioned as administrators, merchants, and missionaries. Over the next decade, the German Empire established coaling, coconut, and phosphate operations in Samoa, the Marshall Islands, the Solomon Islands, and Palau.
When the United States passed on the Northern Marianas, Wilhelm bought the Spanish Micronesian holdings - including the Carolines and Marianas - for 25 million pesetas, or 17 million US dollars at the time. In today’s dollars, it is $806 million dollars.3 The Spanish and Germans met and changed the guard in 1899.
I will write tomorrow about their impact on Saipan during their brief administration.
I don’t think that they quite appreciated the irony.
That seems entirely too late to be real, but it is.
Or 1.024 Fox News defamation settlements.