Das Album.

Hello, my name is Nicolai Messerschmidt, I am a student and I will be guiding you through this exhibition. Since my childhood, stories about my great-great-grandfather Theodor Schneemann have been told in our family. He was a soldier in the colony of German East Africa, which comprises the present-day countries of Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda, from 1903 to 1910.
These family stories have always interested me greatly because I enjoy traveling and discovering new places. When I was 16 years old, my grandmother showed me the photo album inherited from Theodor Schneemann. It contains more than 100 photographs from the colonial period, some of which he purchased and others he took himself. Even back then, I realized that this was politically significant and requires a form of historical examination.
This came about nine years later when, in 2022 and 2023, I took seminars on German colonial history for my master’s degree. I cataloged the preserved photos, transcribed the postcards and
letters, and wrote a term paper on them. During my research, many facts came to light that were previously unknown. My professors encouraged me to continue my research.
In 2024, I won the university competition of the German Science Communication Initiative with the idea of developing an exhibition from the photographs. Here you see the result of a process that took place between me, the Göttingen Postcolonial Association, and the anti-racism process facilitators Patricia Vester and Wilma Nyari. We do not intend to provide definitive answers here; instead, we aim to highlight unanswered questions. Many areas still need to be explored in the future.

19 January 1879: Born into a farming family in Rittmarshausen near Göttingen
2nd October 1897: Enlisted as a three-year volunteer in the Prussian military
1903: Joined the „Imperial Protection Force for German East Africa“ as head of the stud farm in Dar es Salaam
1907: Married Bertha Kopp
1910: First child, Walther, born
1910: Left the Protection Force, moved to Göttingen, and worked as the Chief Inspector of the city bathhouse
Residences in Göttingen: Weender Street, Lotze Street
1913: Second child, Irmgard, born
1937: Passed away

From 1903 to 1910, Schneemann was in Dar es Salaam, in present-day Tanzania. Unlike most soldiers who lived in the barracks, he had an apartment directly above the large stable, his workplace. In the photo on the left, his apartment is marked in red, and Schneemann himself labeled the photo in pencil: „My Apartment.“ The stable was located on the former Kaiser Street (now Gezani Street), with the non-commissioned officers‘ casino and the post office building visible to the right.
As a stud farm manager, he took care of the horses, tamed zebras, and even crossbred them with horses and donkeys to create zebroids.

The top right picture is found as it is in the album. It shows two soldiers of the Protection Force of equal rank. One of them is Theodor Schneemann, and the other is an Askari of unknown name. Despite having the same rank, the photo creates a hierarchy by placing Schneemann in an
elevated position on a horse. The primarily Black soldiers of the colonial military were subjected to racist discrimination, and their deaths did not need to be justified in Germany.
For the cover image of the exhibition, I edited the picture. I replaced the Askari soldier on the left with a silhouette to obscure his identity, as his consent to the photograph cannot be assumed. I decapitated Theodor Schneemann