Not So Plain As Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890-2000
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NOT SO PLAIN AS BLACK AND WHITE Toyin Falola, Senior Editor The Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History University of Texas at Austin (ISSN: 1092-5228) Power Relations in Nigeria: Ilorin Black Business and Economic Power Slaves and Their Successors Edited by Alusine Jalloh and Ann O’Hear Toyin Falola Dilemmas of Democracy in Nigeria Voices of the Poor in Africa Edited by Paul Beckett and Elizabeth Isichei Crawford Young Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Science and Power in Colonial Mauritius Africa: Southern Gabon ca. 1850–1940 William Kelleher Storey Christopher J. Gray Namibia’s Post-Apartheid Regional The Politics of Frenchness in Colonial Institutions: The Founding Year Algeria, 1930–1954 Joshua Bernard Forrest Jonathan K. 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Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2005 University of Rochester Press 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.urpress.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN: 1–58046–183–2 Support was provided by the College of Arts and Sciences at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Not so plain as Black and White : Afro-German culture and history, 1890–2000 / edited by Patricia Mazón and Reinhild Steingröver. p. cm. — (Rochester studies in African history and the diaspora, ISSN 1092–5228; v. 19) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–58046–183–2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Blacks—Germany—History. 2. Blacks—Race identity—Germany— History. 3. Germany—Race relations. I. Mazón, Patricia M. II. Steingröver, Reinhild. III. Series. DD78.B55N68 2004 305.896Ј043Ј0904—dc22 2004024338 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America. Tina Campt’s essay appeared in a slightly different version in Callaloo 26, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 322–41 and is reprinted here with kind permission. © 2003 by Callaloo. CONTENTS Foreword—Russell A. Berman vii Introduction—Patricia Mazón and Reinhild Steingröver 1 Part I: Afro-Germans in Historical Perspective 1 Dangerous Liaisons: Race, Nation, and German Identity 27 Fatima El-Tayeb 2 The First Besatzungskinder: Afro-German Children, Colonial Childrearing Practices, and Racial Policy in German Southwest Africa, 1890–1914 61 Krista Molly O’Donnell 3 Converging Specters of an Other Within: Race and Gender in Pre-1945 Afro-German History 82 Tina M. Campt Part II: Cultural Representations and Self-Representations of Afro-Germans 4 Louis Brody and the Black Presence in German Film Before 1945 109 Tobias Nagl 5 Narrating “Race” in 1950s’ West Germany: The Phenomenon of the Toxi Films 136 Heide Fehrenbach v vi Contents 6 Will Everything Be Fine? Anti-Racist Practice in Recent German Cinema 161 Randall Halle 7 Writing Diasporic Identity: Afro-German Literature since 1985 183 Leroy Hopkins 8 The Souls of Black Volk: Contradiction? Oxymoron? 209 Anne Adams Selected Bibliography 233 Notes on Contributors 241 Name Index 245 FOREWORD THOMAS MANN, W. E. B. DUBOIS, AND AFRO-GERMAN STUDIES Russell A. Berman Why Afro-German? Why Africa and Germany? As much as this coupling may seem surprising or unexpected, it turns out, on closer examination, to be uncannily familiar, sometimes a topic of explicit consideration in foundational texts, sometimes only a fragmentary reference. Yet be it as fading trace or as foregrounded topic, a linkage of the two terms shows up repeatedly in the writings of seminal thinkers. In key texts, pertinent to definitions of both Germany and Africa, the other term suddenly appears and takes on a pivotal importance: “Africa” as a referent for German self- reflection, and “Germany” as a figure in the emergence of pan-African consciousness. Despite an initial assumption to think them apart from each other, there is evidence that they tend to converge. It appears that the twain shall meet, in complex entwinements of separation and identifica- tion, dialectics of negation and appropriation, spread out through histo- ries of subjectivity and across maps of colonialism and migration. Consider for example Thomas Mann’s novella, Mario and the Magician, published in 1930, the year after the author had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of the best known works of the lead- ing German writer of the twentieth century, it is the story of a German family’s summer vacation to a seaside resort in Italy. While the first-person narration is very much unpolitical—in the mode of the “unpolitical” char- acter of German conservatism that Mann himself had expounded in his polemical essayism during World War I—it is nonetheless perfectly clear that this travelogue is very much about politics: the story of going to the beach in fascist Italy. It is in effect a conservative description of totalitari- anism, addressed to a democratic audience. In other words, Mann has fashioned a text for his readers in the Weimar Republic, Germany’s fledgling vii viii Foreword democracy, that amounts to a conservative German’s report on the character of life and culture under Mussolini. Not only life and culture are at stake, however: at a crucial point Mann has his narrator, concerned like every summer vacationer with the weather, choose to describe Italian heat, oddly, as “African.” Why this choice of terms, this incongruous geographical referent in the midst of this German travel narrative to Italy, which is after all the privileged site of German tourism? A close examination of this deployment of the African epithet in the text of the leading author of the Weimar Republic can help tease out some of the tensions and fault lines in the duality under question: Germany and Africa. Part of the answer surely has to do with the subtle and only interlinear characterizations of Italian politics throughout the text. Without naming the regime or even coming close to an outwardly political discourse, Mann has his discrete and tasteful, if not overly analytical narrator describe aspects of contemporary Italy that would be read in Germany as critical comments on fascism, despite the lack of any explicitly tendentious vocabulary. Thus the reference to Africa, in this regard, names the Italian colonial legacy: the failed effort to conquer Abyssinia in the late nineteenth century, and the colonization of Libya in the early twentieth. Mann’s reference was in fact tragically prophetic: by the mid-1930s, Mussolini would engage in an effort to establish a “new Roman Empire” by invading Abyssinia, one of the first steps toward World War II. Understood in this way, the usage of “Africa” in Mario and the Magician entails a postcolonial German perspective (Germany’s colonies were lost in World War I) on the ongoing colonial- ism of its nondemocratic neighbor. The text, therefore, reminds the reader in the democratic Weimar Republic that Italy, a victor in the Great War, remains a colonial power and an African presence, while Germany’s colonies had been confiscated and redistributed among the victors. This line of thought ends, however, ambivalently, oscillating between competing con- clusions: a democratic Germany’s disdain for the colonialism of authori- tarian Italy or, alternatively, a German resentment that the victors could claim the spoils that a rearmed Germany might still hope to recover in the future. Yet the characterization of Italian weather as “African” has an even more complex reverberation, because in the lines that follow immediately, Africa is explicitly contrasted with an antithetical definition of German or “northern” identity, all in the mouth of Mann’s troublesomely unreliable narrator. “The heat—if I may bring it in evidence—was extreme. It was African. The power of the sun, directly one left the border of the indigo-blue Foreword ix wave, was so frightful, so relentless, that the mere thought of the few steps between the beach and luncheon was a burden [. .]. The burning void of the sky, day after day, weighs one down; the high coloration, the enor- mous naiveté of the unrefracted light—they do, I dare say, induce light- heartedness, a carefree mood born of immunity from downpours and other meteorological caprices. But slowly, slowly, there makes itself felt a lack: the deeper, more complex needs of the northern soul remain unsatisfied. You are left barren—even it may be, in time, a little contemptuous.”1 The signifier “Africa” is evidently much more than a marker of Italian colo- nialism.