The end of the First World War also marked the end of the German overseas empire. And while it was ultimately a rather quiet and subdued end, colonialism did not vanish without a trace. During the thirty years of German colonial presence in Africa, China, and the Pacific islands, geographers and climatologists had been busy collecting atmospheric data and mapping the climatic conditions of territories from the deserts of Southwest Africa to the tropical forests of the Bismarck Archipelago. In the 1920s these maps would not only serve as a reminder of the colonial past and material for further studies, but also as propaganda for colonial revisionism – practiced with particular vigor by the group of German geographers and climatologists who had worked in the German protectorates before the war.
This paper will trace the history of not only the scientific and economic circumstances of the creation of climate maps in the German colonies, but also their changing scientific and political valences from the colonial period to the post-colonial years of the Weimar Republic. While depicting the notionally borderless atmosphere, climate maps nevertheless contributed to the spatialization of the German Empire and, ultimately, to the Germanization of colonial space, which enjoyed its heyday only after the official end of German overseas colonialism. Finally, the paper will pose and begin to answer the question in how far the static display of climatic conditions on maps related to the desired – if ultimately fleeting – permanence of political borders in the colonies.
