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years of the century, an age in which European cities vied with each other for status and entrepreneurs sought out new ways of entertaining vast captive urban audiences, individuals from the colonial world (and even the Arctic Circle) were brought to Europe to appear as living exhibits.
    Supposedly untouched by science and unburdened by culture, such peoples clearly occupied positions lower down the chain of being, but they were pure and unpolluted, in a way that held enormous appeal to the populations of industrial London, Paris and Berlin. In Germany they were known as the Naturvolk – the natural people – and were viewed as fragile specimens of races very possibly doomed to extinction in the not too distant future. Just as Europe’s ethnographers rushed to salvage the artefacts and record the cultures of the tribes unearthed by imperial expansion, the urban public clamoured to see representatives of the ‘dying races’.
    In Germany the people of the new Weltstädte (world cities) could encounter the Naturvolk in the popular Völkerschauen (people shows). Some took place in circuses or even zoos, others in the ever-popular panopticons (see-alls). Specialists like Carl Hagenbeck, who had made his fortune trapping and exporting exotic animals and is considered by many to be the father of the zoo, supplied living specimens of the exotic races to the panopticons . Human exhibits displayed in Germany in the latenineteenth century included people from Sudan, North America, the Pacific Islands, Somalia and Lapland. Today, when a stroll through most European or American cities involves encounters with members of most of the races of the earth, the appeal of the nineteenth-century Völkerschauen is difficult to understand, but in the racially monotone Europe of the nineteenth century they were a sensation.
    The more established Völkerschauen sought to maintain a semblance of respectability and distinguished themselves from the backstreet freak shows by evoking the legitimacy of science. Before German race scientists began to travel to the colonies themselves, the Völkerschauen offered them access to a steady stream of human subjects, to examine and measure. The proprietors of the Völkerschauen could then assure their audiences that their living exhibits had been authenticated by men of science. They could even claim that their shows, in some small way, were contributing to scientific progress.
    In the summer of 1896 an event took place that was to eclipse all the traditional German Völkerschauen and offer German race scientists an unprecedented opportunity to advance their studies. The Berlin Colonial Show was a joint venture between the government’s Colonial Department and the Colonial Society, whose patron was Kaiser Wilhelm’s close friend the Prince von Hohenlohe. With both royal patronage and state support, it was destined to be a spectacular affair, but what made it a true sensation was that more than one hundred colonial subjects from across the whole of the German colonial Empire were recruited for the event. 4
    It was envisaged as a human zoo placed in the very heart of the empire. There, all the races over whom the Kaiser claimed dominion could be viewed in their natural and primitive state. The ‘exhibits’ were to be housed with a series of specially built and ethnologically authentic native villages within an enclosure in Berlin’s Treptow Park. According to an official report, the event ‘transplanted a piece of natural savagery and raw culture to the centre of a proud and glamorous metropolis, with itsrefined morals and fashion-conscious people’. 5 It was both an official celebration of Germany’s new empire and a chance for the Berlin bourgeoisie to revel in the sheer excitement of their nation’s colonial adventure.
    The men of the German Colonial Department had other motives. They had deliberately encouraged the local administrations in the colonies to recruit from the ruling elites of each