Postcolonial city walks in Germany at the nexus of activism, education, and tourism

1 Introduction

Mostly, tourism is associated with motives of relaxation and recreation. Due to different needs and interests of people, tourism takes on a vast variety of forms, each with distinct characteristics. What the various forms have in common, however, is a promise of distance from everyday life through experiences of difference (Pott, 2007). Tourists are in search of a time-limited contrast to their regular living conditions characterized by rules, norms, and hierarchies (Scheuch, 1969). Put simply, tourism is about seeing something different.

Another central feature of tourism is that of a physical location change. While this rather technical approach is useful for statistical evaluations of the economic impact of tourism activities in which the tourist participates ‘outside their usual environment’ (UNWTO, 2014), too narrow an interpretation of mobility prevents access to the social impact of tourism (Hall et al., 2004). Since individual and societal perceptions of urban tourism are of interest for this paper, the defining aspect of ‘geographic distance’ is respected by recognizing ‘distance from daily life by experience of difference’ as movement (Trope & Liberman, 2010). Approaching ‘movement’ from a rather psychological perspective allows to conceptualize tourism as a phenomenon that can also be about seeing things differently.

One way of seeing ‘something different’ or seeing ‘different things’, especially in urban destinations, is through a guided city tour. While often associated with general tourist motives, such as a rather simple ‘sightseeing’, guided walking tours do not have to remain in the realm of tourists but can also target local audiences and address urban issues in a critical-reflective way (Diaz Soria, 2016). This means, that even if a person participates in a tourist activity, such as a guided walking tour, in a surrounding that is known to them, such as the city in which they live, the activity bears the chance of changing the person’s perspective on their ‘usual environment’ (Burckhardt, 1995; Diaz Soria, 2016). They then perceive their environment differently.

Therefore, guided walking tours are of interest for research in the fields of urban geography and tourism studies as they offer a critical reading of urban areas not only to visitors but also to locals (Hoogendoorn & Giddy, 2017; Mota Santos, 2017; Mavini, 2020). Analyzing guided walking tours in cities allows to not only understand what people participating in such tours perceive as tourist activities and why, but also to show the potential of enhancing the reach of critical guided walking tours by operating in touristic settings.

A special type of such a critical guided walking tour is that of the postcolonial city walk. In Germany, postcolonial initiatives regularly use city walks to sensitize interested audiences to coloniality in urban spaces (Bauche, 2010; Trzeciak, 2020). While tourist settings often resort to narratives that make use of processes of ‘othering’ (Said, 1978), the aim of postcolonial guided walking tours explicitly is to deconstruct these processes. This contrasting constellation raises the question of what constitutes the tours and in which area they do fall: activism, education or tourism – or all of them? In order to examine the relationships of the city walks with educational, activist, and touristic motives, the paper draws on empirical data that hints at a discrepancy in the perception of the specific tours and of tourism in a more general sense by the tour guides and the participants of the tours. The data was collected during interviews with German postcolonial initiatives and during postcolonial city walks in German cities. First, theoretical concepts relevant in analyzing urban tourism as well as understanding postcolonial perspectives are explained. Then, the research design will be outlined and the data will be presented and discussed. The article ends with a conclusion and an outlook.

2 Theoretical Background

As this paper explores the relation of guided postcolonial city walks with the realms of activism, education, and tourism, theoretical ideas that conceptualize the post-coloniality of these walks as well as the characteristics of activism, education and, especially, urban tourism are explained in this section. As the perception of the tours as well as tourism in general plays a central role for this paper, the section begins with basic considerations of the role of ‘distance’ and ‘difference’ in tourism and urban tourism, respectively.

Studies show that people do not necessarily have to travel far away from their place of residence in order to partake in tourist activities (Jeuring & Haartsen, 2017; Machado Pais, 2010; Diaz Soria, 2016; Kagermeier, 2016). Due to globalization processes, one can perceive ‘otherness’ – a defining feature of tourism – in contexts that are geographically close to their usual environment (Diaz Soria, 2016). Therefore, people can be tourists in the city they live in (Pricopoaia et al., 2021), which not only challenges the tourist-local dichotomy (Fabry et al., 2015) but also enables a more profound interaction of the inhabitants with their places of residence (Diaz Soria, 2016). This means, that whether or not something is considered a tourist activity is less defined by physical distance and more by the form of the activity as well as the attitude and the behavior of the participants.

Based on the idea that travel and tourist activities function as a ‘counter world’ to everyday life where the unfamiliar and so-called ‘other’ can be found, it is assumed that when traveling, people are looking for factors that they cannot encounter in their ‘everyday world’ (Kresta, 1998). Tourism promises to provide a temporary escape from daily constraints. Therefore, in tourist settings the focus lies on experiences that constitute an alternative to people’s daily routines (Pott, 2007). Thus, it is less important, where the experience takes place (in the sense of physical distance or location), but rather how different it is from daily customs (in the sense of mental distance or movement). This perspective incorporates tourist activities in local contexts and, thus, allows to see cities not only as tourist destinations that attract urban travelers but also as seemingly ordinary places with distinct aspects that might not be as visible to their inhabitants as commonly assumed – and, therefore, could be of interest to them as well (Machado Pais, 2010). Due to daily routines and limited time, crucial aspects regarding the historic formation of urban landscapes can be missed by urban inhabitants (Burckhardt, 1995), which means they could pass a public place or monument multiple times a day without knowing about its possibly controversial history or meaning. They might even have some connection or association with it, however, it might be rather innocent.

In order to make the regular extraordinary, a specific perspective that is fueled by curiosity has to be adopted – which in sociology is referred to as ‘gaze’ (Urry & Larsen, 2011). Through the conscious decision to take part in a guided walking tour, the participants adopt a tourist’s point of view, regardless of their initial motif (Diaz Soria, 2016). Thereby, seeing one’s own city in a different way becomes attainable. In the context of postcolonial city walks, the specific way of revealing aspects of coloniality in urban landscapes can be conceptualized as a variation of the ‘postcolonial gaze’, which can lead to changes in the participants’ spatial perception (for original meaning of the term see Said, 1978). Placing emphasis on spatial perception adds both an educational and an activist component to the tourist setting: for the duration of the tour, the persons taking part in the activity are intensively engaged with and, thus, are appropriating the space they are experiencing, which can extend knowledge and also deconstruct perceptions.

In Germany, the aim of postcolonial city tours is to direct the public attention to postcolonial issues in the public urban space. Of interest are places that either directly reproduce racism or reference colonial narratives and whose shape and significance is currently being negotiated by society (Lehmann, 2020). Certain monuments and street names as well as botanical and zoological gardens, universities, libraries and museums are part of the colonial urban topography of German cities. Using specific places in the city as anchor points, tour guides explain how mindsets, practices, and orders that were established during the time of European imperialism continue to shape current social conditions even long after the formal end of the colonial era (Bechhaus-Gerst, 2019).

Postcolonial criticism argues that stereotypical, colonial-racist representations are firmly settled in the everyday life of Western societies. The reproduction of racist stereotypes fulfills the purpose of ‘othering’ (Said, 1978), whereby the European position is constructed as superior compared to other regions. This manifestation of binary spatial images – or binary geographies (Verne & Müller-Mahn, 2020) as imagined geographies of difference (Power, 2003) – contributes to the perpetuation of asymmetrical power relations. Postcolonial perspectives can help to both reflect on the hegemony of Western forms of knowledge as well as the perceived superiority of European values which is often seen as problematic in global political relations (Jickling & Sterling, 2017). As postcolonial activist groups orientate their work, e. g. postcolonial city walks, on these theories and perspectives, they take up a power-critical, anti-colonial attitude and carry out educational work that is critical towards racism and social inequalities. Therefore, postcolonial tours bear the chance to provide space for transformative learning experiences. Again, the connections to the realms of activism (demanding political and social change) and education (addressing personal knowledge bases and world views) become evident.

In order to place postcolonial guided walking tours in the context of urban tourism, the author uses three central characteristics of urban tourism: regionalization, historicization, and heterogenization (Pott, 2007). According to Pott (2007), regionalization means the classic differentiation in tourism between everyday places (‘own’/’here’) and vacation destinations (‘other’/’there’) that goes along with a physical location change. However, regarding the participation in tourist activities in the participants’ usual environment, the ‘othering’ of familiar places is achieved by adapting a specific view, which lets the participants visit places that are usually not part of their daily routines or that have a different meaning in their everyday lives (Pott, 2007). Applied to postcolonial city walks, this perspective helps to show how colonialism was not something that only happened ‘there’, i. e. somewhere in overseas colonies, but that also intensively shaped the lives and mindsets of the people ‘here’, in societies of European colonial powers (Heyden & Zeller, 2008).

The next characteristic, historicization, refers to the temporal perspective of urban tourism. It is mainly about contextualizing historical events which shaped the city’s form and its inhabitants’ mindsets. The historicization perspective is important because it adds specific content to the regionalization perspective (Pott, 2007). Furthermore, it is interesting because it shows the ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’ (Pott, 2007). This is particularly crucial when it comes to visualizing colonial narratives that are not directly or no longer visible because they have been overlaid by other narratives of the city’s history (Bechhaus-Gerst, 2019).

Lastly, heterogenization refers to the differences within the city, which means that the unity of the city recedes in favor of its differentiation (Pott, 2007). Here, not only the past and the present but also the familiar and the unfamiliar can appear and exist at the same time. For postcolonial city walks, this contrasting perspective is especially interesting because it allows to address and discuss ambivalences and contradictions that are part of urban colonial topographies in German cities, e. g. certain monuments commemorating problematic historic persons.

The presented perspectives of urban tourism and the aims and contents of postcolonial guided walking tours show the various connections that can be drawn from the tours to urban tourism, which is why one could argue that the tours can be considered a part of urban tourism. However, there seems to be a difference in perception of the nature of the own work and what is considered tourism by the providers of such tours, i. e. by postcolonial initiatives. This discrepancy is discussed in chapter 4. To better understand the work of postcolonial initiatives as well as the way in which the research was conducted, the research design is briefly explained in the next section.

3 Research Design

Although postcolonial guided walking tours have been organized by committed individuals and activist groups in German cities for several years, the academic debate on these informal offers of political education has been rather small. So far, postcolonial walking tours in Germany were of interest for historical-didactic research (see for example Bernhard, 2016). Research based on methodologies that draw upon the fields of social geography and geography education highlights new aspects, e. g. how the walks function as spaces for critical-reflexive discussions of mental spatial images or how they can provide spaces for transformative learning experiences.

Figure 1:

Postcolonial initiatives in Germany in 2022 (own illustration)

Analyzing postcolonial walking tours from a tourism-geographical perspective is beneficial as it allows to evaluate the perception of the tours by both the providers and the participants in a spatial context. This, in turn, enables not only a discussion about the respective motifs to offer and to participate in the tours but also about how to increase the attractiveness of critical walking tours to an audience that so far has had little contact with the topic of the tours but would benefit from participating in such a tour. A tourism-geographical perspective also allows to emphasize a central feature and discuss a possible point of conflict of postcolonial walking tours which is related to the aspect that tourist narratives resort to processes of ‘othering’, while postcolonial activists precisely aim to reveal and deconstruct them (Magelssen, 2012; Holst, 2018; Burgold, 2022).

Through their work, postcolonial activist groups demonstrate how mindsets and practices of European colonialism continue to shape contemporary social conditions in societies of formerly colonized countries as well as former colonial powers even after the formal end of the European colonial era. The postcolonial initiatives are active in a number of European countries, among them Germany. Here, the activists’ work ranges from exhibitions over lectures to interactive walking tours through urban colonial topographies. This study focuses on these city walks and particularly on the positions of the tour guides and the participants during the walks which are observed and analyzed by methods of qualitative research (Flick, 2007).

The research design of the overall study, which this article represents one part of, follows a mixed-methods approach consisting of three strands: a qualitative content analysis of eight interviews with representatives of German postcolonial initiatives, a standardized survey of 124 participants of postcolonial city walks using a pre-post questionnaire, and a participant observation during twelve postcolonial walking tours in German cities. For this article, selected data from the qualitative interviews and the questionnaires is analyzed as it allows to show and discuss the ways in which the tours are perceived by different actors.

The interviews were conducted using a semi-structured guide, both face-to-face and online. The interviewees spoke openly about the work of the postcolonial initiatives, their aims, and the contents of the tours. For this article, part two of the interview guide ‘self-conception and motivation’ is of interest because the interviewees were asked to place their initiative in a triangle between the points ‘tourist offer’, ‘activist collective’, and ‘educational policy mission’.

Compared to the interviews, there was less interaction with the participants of the walking tours, yet it was also present due to the standardized questioning and participation in the tours. Since, on the one hand, there were moral arguments in favor of disclosing the role of the researcher (Perryman & Wildemuth, 2009) and, on the other hand, there would be interaction with the participants anyway when filling out the questionnaires, the researcher briefly introduced the research project to the participants before the start of the tour. Only the most necessary information was given so that the participants would complete the questionnaires distributed directly after the introduction with as little bias as possible. The questionnaire of the pre-post survey consists of an association task on the term ‘colonialism’ and a seven-item agreement test with a four-point Likert scale, for which the items were derived from the literature (Bönkost & Apraku, 2015; Danielzik, 2013; Messerschmidt, 2008; Burckhardt, 1995) (see Tab. 1). For this article, the answers to the questions 2.6 and 2.7 are of interest. A total of 144 questionnaires was distributed during 11 walking tours (all tours, except Cologne), of which 124 were answered in a way that they could be used for analysis.

The interviews and tour protocols were digitized and evaluated using MAXQDA. The category system used for the content analysis was developed with the help of a deductive-inductive procedure based on Kuckartz (2014). The questionnaire was digitized and analyzed using simple statistical methods in MS Excel. The initiatives that are part of the overall analysis are active in the cities of Berlin, Bielefeld, Cologne, Essen, Frankfurt, Hagen, Hamburg, Hanover, Karlsruhe, Leipzig, and Osnabrück (Fig. 1). Figure 1 shows the initiatives that are part of the research. It provides information about the initiatives’ first activity and the year of their first walking tour.

In the following section, the insights that can be gained from the analysis of the empirical data derived from the interviews and the questionnaires is presented and interpreted.

4 Results

The analysis of the empirical data indicates that there are differences between the tour guides’ and participants’ perception of the tours: While the participants are hardly or not at all concerned about the touristic connotation of the postcolonial walking tours, the interviewed representatives of the initiatives attach great importance to not associate their tours with the term ‘tourism’. The data indicating this discrepancy will now be presented and interpreted.

The pre-post survey shows that the city walks are positively received by the participants, who are usually residents of the cities in which the walks take place. This means the walks are set in the participants’ familiar surroundings, which bears the chance for the tour guides to reveal the determinacy of human forms of perception, reflect on them critically and thus re-evaluate familiar situations in urban spaces during the walks (Burckhardt, 1995; Dickel & Scharvogel, 2013). For most of the participants, it is their first postcolonial city walk (97 out of 124) and many of them say that they are informed about German colonialism (22 out of 124 say they are ‘very much’ informed and 61 out of 124 say they are ‘to some degree’ informed). The majority of participants agree with the statement that city tours are well suited to contextualize colonial issues (pre: 101 agreed, 23 did not agree or did not make a statement; post: 113 agreed, 11 did not agree or did not make a statement). Most participants see potential for the tours to become a regular part of the city’s tourist offer (pre: 99 agreed, 25 did not agree or did not make a statement; post: 114 agreed, 10 did not agree or did not make a statement).

In contrast, the qualitative interviews show that the tour guides of the guided postcolonial walking tours are rather reluctant to be associated with tourism (Fig. 2). Figure 2 illustrates that almost all initiatives see a clear educational mission in their work, while some say they are also driven by activist motifs. However, despite offering guided walking tours, not a single initiative perceives their initiative as a provider of a touristic offer.

Some initiatives added their own aspects to the triangle, such as scientific communication, institutions, and fundamental research, underlining a proximity to academic environments from which many of the analyzed initiatives have emerged. Regardless of the context of origin, for the initiatives it is important to be at a “maximum distance from tourist attraction” (Kopp, pers. comm., 2022). The qualitative interviews reveal three main motivations behind this attitude, which can be summarized as follows and illustrated by exemplary quotes from the material:

• The initiative has academic or political roots. The tour guides state that a tourist offer does not fit with the aims of the initiative as they have no interest in monetization because one “should not make money with the suffering of people” (Fechner, pers. comm., 2022).

• The topic of the tours is considered a part of memorial and adult education. The tour guides see their offer as not suitable for “normal” (as in ‘conventional’) tourist groups because in their perception it is for people “who want to think rather than consume” (Heese, pers. comm., 2022); furthermore, they stress the fact that people need to be interested in the topic already.

• The tour is understood as an offer directed at locals. The tour guides think the walks are of interest for the inhabitants of the city in order to show that “colonialism is something that happened here and not just far away” (Häuser, pers. comm., 2022).

Figure 2:

Self-perception of postcolonial initiatives during qualitative interviews (own illustration)

The stated reasons indicate that a rather negative image of tourism prevails among the postcolonial initiatives. The statements of the activists also hint at a perception of tourists or tourism according to which tourists exclusively have ‘recreational interests’ and ‘come from far away’ in order to classify as tourists – a view that this article challenges. Therefore, in the next section the relation of the walks with urban tourism will be discussed.

5 Discussion

This article explores the relationship of guided postcolonial walking tours with the realms of activism, education, and tourism. In order to do so, it connects a theoretical urban tourism concept with the guided walking tours and discusses the observable discrepancy in the perception of tourism between theoretical concepts and the self-perception of the postcolonial initiatives.

Using Pott’s (2007) constitutive categories regionalization, historicization, and heterogenization, the many connections between urban tourism and the walking tours can be illustrated. First, regionalization means differentiating between here (everyday life, familiar) and there (vacation time, ‘other’). For purposes of increasing the attractiveness of cities, urban narratives at times romanticize or even glorify a city’s past in order to set it apart from other cities (Cole et al., 2022).

Even though the interviewees do not explicitly express this in the conversations and communicate this rather subconsciously, in this context it can be made evident why postcolonial activists prefer to not be associated with tourism: their aim is to deconstruct narratives, while tourism utilizes them (Magelssen, 2012). During postcolonial walks, tour guides are particularly concerned with identifying romanticizing elements in the urban landscapes and to use them as examples to break up common myths about Germany’s colonial era, e. g. Germany would have ‘brought progress’ to the colonies or the other colonial powers would have been ‘even worse oppressors’. By doing so, they not only visualize colonial narratives that are not or no longer directly visible in the city as they have been overlaid by other urban narratives, but also point out colonial continuities that show how here and there nowadays are often closer to each other than expected. This differentiation takes place even though the participants stay in their city of residence, making the experience of the walk about seeing the unknown, ‘other’ side of familiar places (Burckhardt, 1995).

In addition, some of the stations during the tours allow explicit discussion of the concept of ‘othering’, which plays a central role in postcolonial discourse (Said, 1978). This is, for example, done in Hanover, where the logo of local coffee roaster Machwitz is used as an example to talk about racialized discrimination, exoticization, and othering (Fig. 3).

The next category, historicization, refers to the temporal perspective in urban tourism. It fills urban tourism with content as it focuses on historical events and people which shaped the city (Pott, 2007). Colonial-critical tours in particular connect to this category as a core element of the tours is to use specific places in the city to address events and people of the German colonial era which have played a central role for the particular city – and also exemplify aspects that are of importance in societal debates in other cities in Germany.

The stations, for example, thematize a historical person who had a colonial impact on the city or who was a central actor in the German colonies. One example is Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg which is named after Carl Hagenbeck who opened the zoological garden in 1907. There, not only exotic animals can be watched today, but also so-called Völkerschauen (ethnological shows) were held there as late as the early 20^th century. The shows are problematic for the way in which the people from the colonies were presented and treated. Another exemplary station is the grave of Hermann von Wissmann at Melaten Cemetery in Cologne. Today, Hermann von Wissmann is still honored there despite committing numerous atrocities in German East Africa during German colonial rule. A historical explanation is missing at this site. The guides point out non-visible or overwritten meanings of the supposedly-known by sharing important background information. By explaining the ongoing connections from the past to the present, the audience not only learns about the historic matter but can also better understand current postcolonial debates about compensation for people of formerly colonized societies or renaming of streets in German cities.

Unlike the first two categories, heterogenization does not draw comparisons to other cities but addresses the differences within the same city. In touristic advertising, cities are often described as places of contrast in order to appeal to many different travelers (Pott, 2007). In a similar way, yet more selectively and with a critical connotation, the walking tours point out contrasts within the city or within certain places in the city. This can be demonstrated using examples of ambivalent historical persons, such as Robert Koch, whose role in German colonialism and medicine is discussed in front of Mensa Lindenthal in Cologne. The discussions contribute to understanding more complex societal debates, e. g. about international development cooperation or medical research in a global context. When talking about controversial historical persons during the guided walks, ambivalences and, thus, contrasting feelings become especially evident. As they offer a different (hi)story to the established one, the activists show that there is no one culture of remembrance but in fact several. By doing so, they emphasize the numerous connections of the past and present between formerly colonized and formerly colonizing societies in the so-called Global South and the so-called Global North. This, in turn, can lead to self-reflexive discussions about Eurocentrism in the development discourse which can sensitize the participants to more diverse perspectives as well as deconstruct hegemonic patterns of power.

Using examples from the tours, the explanations illustrate which connections can be drawn between postcolonial walks and urban tourism. It becomes evident that during the touristic activity of the postcolonial city walk, knowledge transfers, reflexive discussions, and re-evaluations of spatial perceptions can take place. These aspects hint at a proximity to education and activism as knowledge is added and re-arranged and thought patterns are deconstructed during the tours. Yet, using Pott’s categories, connecting points to urban tourism can also be shown. Additionally, the majority of the participants sees the postcolonial walking tours as a suitable component to tourism offers of the particular city.

With regards to the participants’ perceptions it should be noted, however, that people need to have a basic interest in the topic in order to sign up for the tours – a fact that becomes visible in the questionnaires as many participants state that they have dealt with the topic of German colonialism already and, thus, might be biased. However, one could also say that people just need to take interest in their city – and in seeing things differently. One example of how this could work can be found in Bielefeld where the postcolonial guided walking tour is sometimes offered under the title ‘blind date with your city’ (Bielefeld Marketing, n.d.). Here, the participants only know that they will go on a guided thematic city walk but they do not know the exact topic until the beginning of the tour. The surprise effect and the personality of the tour guide who is an expert in the field can help to engage with this topic, which the participants do not have on their regular agenda.

Figure 3:

Participants of a guided postcolonial walking tour stop at Machwitz coffee roasters in Hanover (own photograph)

To summarize, postcolonial city tours allow tour guides to contextualize aspects of coloniality in urban spaces. The guides expose colonial myths that persist in people’s minds as they explain how in current times post-coloniality is present, for example, in cultural institutions or tourist advertisements, i. e. in settings where alterization and otherness play a central role (Thurner, 2021). In their work, the tour guides use the touristic form of the ‘city walk’ not because they see themselves as providers of touristic services but rather because they want to provide an educational offer that is more informal than for example a lecture (Bechhaus-Gerst, pers. comm., 2022). Furthermore, because they spend a lot of time with the participants and move through the city together with the group, the experience allows for more depth which can stimulate critical-reflexive thought processes and initiate processes of deconstruction (Heese, pers. comm., 2022; Häuser, pers. comm., 2022). The discussion shows that arguments for how the analyzed postcolonial guided walking tours are connected to all three realms – activism, education, and tourism – can be made.

6 Concluding Remarks

In the end, and in line with the self-assessment of the postcolonial initiatives, it could be said that the guided walking tours are exactly that: guided walks through a city, however, without the aim to infer a form of tourism or monetization (Burgold, 2014). The idea is to only use the form of the city tour for educational work or as a decolonial intervention, in which adopting a specific (‘tourist’) gaze can open up new perspectives on seemingly familiar places for local people.

However, the data received from guided postcolonial walking tours and the discussion of the results not only reveal references to elements of activism and education, but also show the connections to urban tourism. Therefore, the tour guides of the postcolonial city walks could acknowledge possible educational aspects of tourism and, consequently, dare to open their walks a little bit towards urban tourism offers as this bears the chance to enhance the reach of the tours to an audience who in the eyes of the tour guides might not be the ‘regular’ audience of the walks but who could benefit from the contents of and the discussions during the tours nonetheless.