This project aims to develop a methodology for reading German colonial law by integrating archival critique with oral history and cultural memory. As Germany continues to revisit its colonial past, the public discourse is still largely mediated through colonial documentation and its legal vocabulary. This is reflected in contemporary political debates, including Germany’s recognition of the Herero and Nama genocide without agreeing to appropriate reparations. Beyond limited acknowledgement of other colonial atrocities, such as the Maji Maji War, the legal and epistemic legacies of German colonialism remain insufficiently addressed in both public policy and scholarship. Colonial archive studies have advanced critical approaches to reading the colonial record, yet these perspectives have rarely been applied systematically to German colonial law. Research is further complicated by the unclear motivations, strategies, and practices of colonial actors, which are often obscured by the supposed neutrality of legal documentation. The first phase of the project has examined memory of German colonialism in literature, oral history interviews, and in the work of local community activists and historians from Tanzania, both in Tanzania and Germany. Alongside this work, students attended an exhibition tour, lectures and a walking tour. The students have used these sources and experiences as a starting point from which the narrative analysis of the legal documentation is conducted. Meaning, the legal documentation is interpreted as a literary text that presents an emotionally dry yet emotionally structured source. These documents are narrative texts that construct political realities that suppress the lived experiences of both the victims of occupation and, in completely different ways, the colonisers and intermediaries. Reviewing the interim results after this first phase reveal both the strengths and challenges of an interdisciplinary research group, necessitating an assessment of diverse historical methods, their usefulness and applicability for this project specifically and scholarship invested in redressing German colonialism generally. A planned outcome of this project is the development of a reflexive and ethically grounded methodology for interpreting German colonial law, and yet a more important question developed alongside this project asks whether contemporary German academia can create the institutional and epistemic space necessary for such an approach.