Franz Vollrath Carl Wilhelm Joseph von Bülow (11 September 1861 – 18 October 1915) was a German author, soldier and homosexualactivist.
Life
Franz Vollrath Carl Wilhelm Joseph von Bülow was born on 11 September 1861 in the Free City of Frankfurt. Bülow's father was Bernhard Vollrath von Bülow, chamberlain of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and envoy to the German Confederation's Bundesversammlung in Frankfurt am Main, while his mother was Paula, née von Linden. Bülow attended high schools in Schwerin and Waren for his studies. Following that, he completed cadet schools at Plön and Gross-Lichterfelde. Bülow had advanced to the rank of lieutenant by 1890. In the same year, he left the service and joined the South West Africa Company in the German colonialSouth West Africa. In the years that followed, he authored a book on his experiences in German South West Africa and Cecil Rhodes' politics, as well as the Herero and Namaqua genocide. Bülow was blinded by a gunshot wound and therefore returned to Germany. He married divorced Countess Konstanze Beust, née von Goldacker, in 1898, but they divorced a year later.[1][2][3]
Sociologist George Steinmetz describes Bülow's ethnographic writings as genocidal. He counts his books, together with the writings of Kurd Schwabe, among the most important eye witness accounts of the relations between German colonial power and the Herero in the 1890s.[4] Historians have used von Bülow's detailed recounting of the brutal approach of the Schutztruppe in South West Africa as sources for reconstructing the prehistory to the Herero and Nama genocide.[5][4]
References
^ abTabel, Werner (1976). "Erlebnisschilderungen von Soldaten und Siedlern aus der Kolonial- und Mandatszeit Südwestafrikas". Afrikanischer Heimatkalender 1976 (in German). Windhoek: Verlag Afrikanischer Heimatkalender. pp. 85–120.
^ abHergemöller, Bernd-Ulrich (1998). Biographisches Lexikon zur Geschichte von Freundesliebe und mannmännlicher Sexualität im deutschen Sprachraum (in German). Hamburg: MännerschwarmSkript Verlag. pp. 161–162. ISBN3928983652.
^ abKruse, Jens (2007). Reiseberichte aus den deutschen Kolonien: Das Bild vom "Eingeborenen" in Reiseberichten der deutschen Kolonialzeit 1884–1918 (in German). GRIN-Verlag. ISBN978-3-638-70704-6.
^ abGeorge Steinmetz (2007), The devil's handwriting: precoloniality and the German colonial state in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa, Chicago studies in practices of meaning, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 155, ISBN978-0-226-77241-7