Does anyone knew that the southpacific island of Samoa was part of the former german empire? Indeed! At the beginning of the 20th century, the Mount Kilimanjaro, the big Victoria Sea, the diamant mines of today Southwest Africa, some smaller landscapes around chinese town Tsingtau and a big part of New Guinea belonged to the kingdom of the bizarre Wilhelm II. The history of german colonies came abruptly to an end with World War I.
The December issue of mare-magazin, # 83, takes a closer look on some special items of this part of german history. Very exiting is the story of early german dropouts, based on the idyllic island Kabakon. There, the disciples around charismatic franconian pharmacist August Engelhardt decided exclusively to feed on coconuts. But their last and ultimative aim was to abstain any earthly food and live only on the absorption of light!
Almost lost and forgotten are some special colonial language variations - the mixture of German with native african speech and, very exotic, a special kind of Pidgin German, only spoken in one part of the Bismark Archipel.The magazin asked me to make a double-paged map of those former colonies. So I did it with prominent help of an ancient book, bougth years ago at a southgerman flee market: Rudolf Schmidt's Bayrischer Schulatlas, 1910.
- Dieter
Waaw, your style/way of working fits really good for this 'historical-looking' maps!
ReplyDeleteThat's what I wanted to say!
ReplyDelete