Bruno Domke

Bruno Domke (born March 20, 1876 in Munich near Birnbaum , Province of Posen ; † December 29, 1962 in Ponta Delgada , Portugal ) was a German farmer, big game hunter (in what was then German East Africa ), coffee planter and hotelier (in Venezuela) and landowner (in Portugal).

Life

Origin and family

Domke was the son of an estate manager and came from a Pomeranian bourgeois family with roots in the dynastic Middle Ages. He married the pastor's daughter Magdalene Schönberg from Stolp in Pomerania and had five children with her.

German East Africa and the First World War

After studying agriculture and military service with the Guard Rifle Battalion in Berlin-Lichterfelde , he went to German East Africa in March 1902 , where he initially became a farmer and accounting officer at the Kilimanscharo Handels- und Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft, which among other things produces large African animals captured and delivered to the Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg .

Around 1906 he founded the Geraragua farm on the western slope of Kilimanjaro and tried to establish a good relationship with the local tribes ( Maasai , Wajagga ) even against the instructions of the colonial administration - which saw his behavior as a challenge. He had his bride Magdalene Schönberg from Pomerania join him and they married on January 28, 1907 in Tanga.

When the First World War broke out , the 9th mounted rifle company of the German Schutztruppe was stationed in Geraragua , whose staff consisted mainly of the local farmers. In 1916 the farm was lost to the English. During the war he was in the stage of the protection force , most recently as leader of a Fighter Command for the meat supply of the troops on the river Rufiji . Seriously ill, he was taken prisoner by the British in November 1917 and was interned in the Tura camp in Egypt. On the return transport to Germany in December 1919, the Turkish ship narrowly escaped failure in the storm on the northern Spanish coast and could only be saved by taking over the ship by captured German seafarers.

Venezuela

In view of the desolate situation in post-war Germany , he emigrated to Venezuela in 1921 with his wife Magdalene and their now only four children (the youngest had died in an accident). After the first difficult years as a coffee planter in Los Teques , he founded the Hotel Casa Domke in Caracas in 1926 , which soon became a success. In this way he was able to enable the return of three children to training in Germany and returned himself at the end of the 1920s, settling in Malente .

Portugal

After differences with the National Socialists, who came to power in 1933, he decided to emigrate again in 1934 and by chance came to the Azores island of São Miguel in Portugal. There he built the Monteverde estate on Lake Furnas and acquired the Abelheira pineapple plantation near the island's capital, Ponta Delgada. In 1938 he made a trip around the world that took him to New Zealand and Abyssinia .

Expelled from Portugal as an "enemy alien" during the war at the instigation of the English, he survived the expulsion of the Germans from the Eastern Territories in 1945 - where he had since settled in Pomerania - and was only able to return to his property in Portugal in 1949.

He was active as a writer (memoirs from German East Africa, African novels, a number of fairy tales), planted and exported pineapples, ran a timber industry, built various houses and in 1955 even visited "his" prisoner of war camp Tura in Egypt. He died in Ponta Delgada in 1962, known in respectful derision by the local population as the "Kaiser von Deutschland" ("imperador da Alemanha"). He and his wife are buried there in the São Joaquim municipal cemetery.

progeny

Bruno Domke and his wife Magdalene Schönberg had five offspring: the sons Hermann (* 1907, died 1943 in Russia), Gunther (* 1911, died 1941 in Russia), and the daughters Brunhild (* 1909, died 2002 in Gröbenzell), Ortrud (* 1914, died 1986 in Gröbenzell) and Walburg (* 1915, had an accident in Stettin in 1920).

Works

• Memories , manuscript 1938
• Lost homeland , novel manuscript
• Several fairy tale manuscripts

literature

• Philippa Söldenwagner: Spaces of Negotiation / European settlement and settlers in German East Africa 1900-1914; Meidenbauer, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-89975-072-1 ; P. 175
• Tanja Buehrer. The Imperial Protection Force for German East Africa ; Contributions to Military History, Vol. 70; ISBN 3-486-70442-7
• Falecimentos: Bruno Domke "in the" Diário dos Açores "of December 29, 1962 (obituary); Ponta Delgada, Azores, Portugal