With the rise of the mass media at the end of 19th century, the German colonial project became a new focus of the public at large. What was worth attention in general, was particularly interesting in terms of increased media attention in times of war. Thus, for the first time newspaper agencies sent so-called special correspondents to the German colonial war theatres in order to less dependent on official dispatches and to obtain first-hand reports. This dissertation project is located within this context. The proposed investigation deals with the mental appropriation and interpretation of colonial landscapes by war correspondents in the three major German colonial wars. The Boxer War in China (1900/1901), the Herero-Nama-War in German Southwest Africa (1904-1907) and the Maji-Maji-War in German East Africa will be analysed in a comparative perspective as transnational media events.

With regard to the interdependency of the journalists´ already existing colonial imaginations on the one hand and the `real´ colonial landscapes on the other hand, the focal point here aims at examining the role of correspondents as transmitters of colonial violence. By focusing on the structural conditions of war reporting as well as taking the journalists´ biographies, their publications, and the highly various colonial realities into account, it will be investigated whether and in what way colonial violence found its way back to Germany.