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Heimattransgressions, Transgressing Heimat

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Heimattransgressions, Transgressing Heimat Vanessa D. Plumly Heimat Transgressions, Transgressing Heimat Black German Diasporic (Per)Formative Acts in the Decolonization of White German Heimat Landscapes Black/Afro-Germans1 embody the fear of sexual transgressions and miscegeny that racist discourse in the former German colonies instilled in white Germans and that Wilhelminian Germany legally sanctioned through the ius sangui- nus definition of German citizenship.2 The Third Reich further exploited this through its enactment of the Nuremberg laws, which once again considered Black Germans non-members of the imagined national German community. Today, Black Germans remain excluded from the reunited Berlin Republic, even though a new citizenship law passed in the Federal Republic in 1999 signaled a transition away from Germany’s blood-based definition toward a more civic one, and despite the fact that some Black Germans can trace their German ancestry over three or more generations.3 White Germans’ constant questioning of Black Germans’ origins because of their racial constitution and visible diasporic roots performatively enacts this resolute denial of their na- tional identity and belonging.4 1 The word Afro-German is used most often to denote Black Germans with one white German parent and one black or African/African diasporic parent, and Black German is most often used to denote anyone who chooses to identify with the term and has had similar experi- ences of racial exclusions. See Katharina Oguntoye, May Ayim (Opitz), and Dagmar Schultz, Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte, Frankfurt a.M. 1992, p. 10. 2 El-Tayeb makes clear that »›German blood‹ meant explicitly ›white blood‹«, in Fatima El- Tayeb, »We are Germans, We are Whites, and We Want to Stay White!« Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik (2004), 56.1, pp. 185-205, here p. 205. See also Fatima El-Tayeb, Schwarze Deutsche: Der Diskurs um Rasse und nationale Identität, 1890-1933, Frankfurt a.M. 2001. 3 »Reform of the State Citizenship Law«, in: Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes (Eds.), Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955-2005, Berkeley 2007, pp. 169-170 and see, for example, the autobiography of Marie Nejar whose mother was also Afro-German (her mother’s father was Martinique). Marie Nejar, Mach nicht so traurige Augen weil du ein Negerlein bist, Hamburg, 2007. 4 See, among others that discuss the questions Afro-Germans repeatedly face, Noah Sow, Deutschland Schwarz Weiß. Der alltägliche Rassismus, München 2008, pp. 252-263; May Ayim, Grenzenlos und unverschämt, Berlin, 1997, p. 11; and Grada Kilomba, Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism, Münster 2010, pp. 64-68. © Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2019 | doi:10.30965/9783846761939_011 126 Vanessa D. Plumly In post-war contexts, Black Germans particularly exemplified the observ- able remnants of Germany’s loss of power and loss of colonial territories. Likewise, their presence served as a reminder of Black occupation troops sta- tioned within Germany during both the interwar and post-WWII periods.5 In order to establish Black German exclusion from the body politic and in an ef- fort to reassert racial power hierarchies which had been superficially inversed in times of military occupation, white Germans paradoxically ascribed first aggressive and then infantilizing names to them. Post-WWI discourse referred to Black Germans from this era as Rhineland bastards and that of post-WWII as occupation children/brown babies. These racial and historical signifiers refer to the offspring of white German women and Black men, in the former case to offspring of French colonial occupation troops and in the latter to that of African American soldiers. While the terms express more about post-war white German hegemonic trauma than the subjects they are meant to describe, Black Germans, nevertheless, are diagnosed as the source of contemporaneous societal woes by way of such epithets. These post-war Black German popula- tions represent two of the highly visible subgroups existing within the incred- ibly heterogeneous Black diaspora in Germany that historical documentation dates to the Middle Ages.6 Both of these categorizations of post-war Black Germans not only call the German national construct into question, but also productively complicate diasporic narratives and epistemologies that attempt to produce a single point of origin within the Black Atlantic paradigm.7 Although the latter term, »oc- cupation children«, is one that refers to all children resulting from the liaisons of occupational military forces in general, Germans tactically deployed it to refer to those mixed race children who were visibly distinguishable as a prod- uct of encounters between white Germans and those viewed as racial Others/ foreigners.8 According to Heide Fehrenbach in Race after Hitler, one white German post-WWII view of these mixed race children in the west was that due to their visible difference in physical appearance, they should be adopted out 5 See Clarence Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era, New York 2003, and Michelle Wright, Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora, Durham 2004, p. 187. 6 See Philip Khabo-Koepsell, and Asoka Esuroso, Arriving in the Future: Stories of Home and Exile, Berlin 2014, pp. 15-16. 7 See Wright, Becoming Black (see note 5), pp. 194-195 and Michelle Wright, »Middle Passage Blackness and Its Diasporic Discontents: The Case for a Post-war Epistemology«, in: Eve Rosenhaft und Robbie Aitken (Eds.), Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century, Liverpool 2013, pp. 217-233. 8 Heide Fehrenbach, Race After Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America, Princeton 2005, p. 2. .
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