These excerpts from the 1927 documentary film In Jesu Dienst von Bethel nach Ostafrika [From Bethel to East Africa in Service to Jesus] documented the resumption of German missionary work in Tanganyika, which had comprised the vast majority of Germany’s East African colony from 1885 and until the British took control in 1919, under provisions of the Versailles Treaty. The British immediately expelled the 1145 German missionaries working there, but eight years later German doctors, missionaries, and deacons started returning to this region to reestablish their colonial-era network of churches, schools, hospitals, and even brass bands. The Bethel Mission sponsored these missionaries and produced this film as a means of raising awareness of its activities and soliciting financial support. The documentary contained extensive footage of the entire journey, which began in Bethel, just outside of Bielefeld (a city midway between Essen and Hanover), a renowned site of physical, psychological, and spiritual healing since the 1870s. Spectacular and exotic scenes of the subsequent voyage from Genoa to Port Said and then to Tanga, on the Tanganyikan coast (contemporary Tanzania), appealed to German viewers’ curiosity and virtual Wanderlust. From there, the missionaries traveled inland to their mission stations in the Usambara Mountains, some of which bore German names in this film—such as Hohenfriedberg and Neu-Bethel—but whose official names the newly ensconced British administrators had subsequently changed. Frequent Bible quotations appear as intertitles to remind viewers of the broader Christianizing mission, and a series of scenes portrayed Protestant services, church construction and repair, vocational education, caring for the sick, and even the mending of musical instruments.

The film framed the missionaries’ return to their work in 1927 as a reestablishment of the ostensibly close bonds between German and East African peoples that the postwar settlement and British colonial rule had severed. The film’s intertitles referred to the British only as “the enemy,” and then only in the context of vindicative acts, such as the destruction of a German church. The careful depiction of local African deacons, ministers, and teachers eagerly working alongside their German counterparts, meanwhile, suggested that Germany’s influence over its former colony continued in spirit, if not in legal fact. Moreover, the film’s opening scenes of the missionaries’ procession from Bethel to the train station at the start of their journey—accompanied by a band, local dignitaries, and hundreds of well-wishers—suggested the patriotic as well as spiritual significance that many in the area had attached to this moment. Finally, the film reminds us of the central role that religious institutions continued to play in the Weimar Republic, even as they faced the same forces of social change that buffeted German society as a whole.