Before the German Empire forcibly ceded its colonies to the ‘victorious powers’ of the First World War, it had a dark colonial history – including the Herero and Nama genocide in today’s Namibia. Dominant narratives of colonialism in Germany often understate its scope and long-lasting effects on society, but since the middle of the 2000s and especially in recent years, individuals and groups in Germany have organized ‘postcolonial’ and ‘decolonial’ city walking tours that critically re-evaluate or ‘revisit’ city historiography. Unlike the previously dominant case studies, this paper offers a comparative analysis. Semi-structured interviews with guides in nine German cities and participant observation in six tours serve to examine how these city tours can challenge dominant narratives of colonialism.

Results show that across several stations in a city, the guides attempt to change peoples’ mindsets by educating white and other-than-white participants about racist structures and thinking patterns as continuities of colonialism. To decentralize knowledge, the guides encourage participants to contribute their own perspectives. While some tours have institutional anchorage, most are conducted by civil society initiatives that originated at universities. Still, many tour guides identify more readily as political educators than as activists. Although city inhabitants are the main target group, most stations allow parallels to other Ger-man cities and colonialism as a global system. The guides also adhere to an inclusive approach to remembrance as proposed by Azarmandi and Hernandez (2017), who ask “who remembers, how and with what effects” (p. 8) – e.g., when it comes to statues honoring former colonial rulers. The tours show that in truly inclusive cities, historical narratives cannot be viewed solely from the perspective of the white German majority.