The year 2004 saw the centenary of the German colonial war in Namibia (1904–7), the former German colony of South-West Africa, occasioning an unprecedented wave of public interest in German colonialism. Newspaper and journal articles, radio and television features, exhibitions, and new historical research used the centenary to remind Germany of its forgotten colonialism, in an attempt to reinscribe colonialism in German cultural memory and to reflect on its legacy in the postcolonial world of the early twenty-first century. This historical discourse about colonialism now resonates with the new wave of literary interest in Africa, which started during the 1990s and peaked in the early 2000s; it also resonates with debates about German multiculturalism since the 1980s and with postcolonial research in German literary, cultural, and historical studies since the 1990s. Today political debate about the legacy of German colonialism and literary reassessment of Germany's involvement in European colonialism reinforce one another. Such interaction between literary and academic as well as political discourses about colonialism, however, is not in itself a new development. Its origins date back at least to the “discovery” of the “Third World” during the 1960s, if not to the colonial period itself, when colonial literature played a crucial role in promoting colonial expansion and debate. Rather than simply following in the footsteps of academic research or public debate, however, contemporary writers are making their own genuine contributions to the postcolonial rediscovery, reassessment, and memory of German colonialism.