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An Afro-German Microhistory: Gender, Religion, and the Challenges of Diasporic Dwelling

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An Afro-German Microhistory: Gender, Religion, and the Challenges of Diasporic Dwelling Central European History 49 (2016), 240–260. © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association, 2016 doi:10.1017/S0008938916000340 An Afro-German Microhistory: Gender, Religion, and the Challenges of Diasporic Dwelling Julia Roos ABSTRACT. This article traces the biography of an Afro-German woman born during the 1920s Rhineland occupation to examine the peculiarities of the black German diaspora, as well as po- tential connections between these peculiarities and larger trends in the history of German colo- nialism and racism. “Erika Diekmann” was born in Worms in 1920. Her mother was a German citizen, her father a Senegalese French soldier. Separated from her birth mother at a young age, Erika spent her youth and early adulthood in a school for Christian Arab girls in Jerusalem run by the Protestant order of the Kaiserswerth Deaconesses (Kaiserswerther Diakonissen). After World War II, Erika returned to West Germany, but in 1957, she emigrated to the United States, along with her (white) German husband and four children. Erika’s story offers unique opportu- nities for studying Afro-German women’s active strategies of making Germany their “home.” It underlines the complicated role of conventional female gender prescriptions in processes of in- terracial family-building. The centrality of religion to Erika’s social relationships significantly en- hances our understanding of the complexity of German attitudes toward national belonging and race during the first half of the twentieth century. Dieser Aufsatz verfolgt die Biographie einer afro-deutschen, während der Rheinlandbesetzung in den 1920er Jahren geborenen Frau, um die Eigenheiten der schwarzen, deutschen Diaspora sowie eventuelle Verbindungen zwischen diesen Eigenheiten und größeren Trends in der Geschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus und Rassismus zu untersuchen. „Erika Diekmann“ wurde 1920 in Worms geboren. Ihre Mutter war deutsche Reichsbürgerin, ihr Vater ein französischer Soldat aus dem Senegal. Erika, die früh von ihrer leiblichen Mutter getrennt wurde, verbrachte ihre Jugend und ihr frühes Erwachsenenalter in einer von den Kaiserswerther Diakonissen in Jerusalem betriebenen Schule für christliche, arabische Mädchen. Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg kehrte Erika nach Westdeutschland zurück. 1957 emi- grierte sie gemeinsam mit ihrem (weißen) deutschen Ehemann und ihren vier Kindern in die USA. Erikas Geschichte bietet eine einzigartige Möglichkeit, die Strategien afro-deutscher Frauen zu studieren, die versuchten Deutschland zu ihrer „Heimat“ zu machen. Dabei wird die komplizierte Rolle konventioneller, weiblicher Gender-Vorgaben bei den Prozessen von interrassischen Familiengründungen hervorgehoben. Darüberhinaus bereichert die zentrale Stellung, die Religion in Erikas sozialen Bindungen einnimmt, unser Verständnis der komplexen deutschen Einstellungen hinsichtlich nationaler Zugehörigkeit und Rasse während der ersten Hälfte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts ungemein. A 2014 Individual Research Award by the Institute for Advanced Study, Indiana University, Bloomington, and an Emergency Grant-in-Aid by the university’s Office of the Vice Provost of Research funded portions of the research for this article. I am grateful to Gerold Bönnen and Margit Rinker-Olbrisch of the Worms City Archive for their generous help retrieving and contextualizing the cor- respondence at the center of this article. Annett Büttner of the Fliedner-Kulturstiftung Kaiserswerth provid- ed vital assistance in identifying additional important documents. For their astute comments and suggestions, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for Central European History, as well as Birthe Kundrus, Julia Moses, Eve Rosenhaft, and Bill Scheuerman. My thanks also go to the editor, Andrew Port, for his careful and efficient handling of the manuscript. 240 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.226, on 02 Oct 2021 at 04:34:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938916000340 AN AFRO-GERMAN MICROHISTORY 241 Dear Baroness (Frau Baronin), [How] are you and your family? I hope everyone’s well. As you probably know, I’mbackin Germany with my husband and children. We already have four children, all of whom are healthy. The youngest one is two months old and I’d like you to be his godmother. My husband has been unemployed for four years now… What a pity that you cannot visit us… I think of you often, also of Worms. I’ve not forgotten it… Now I have a question for you— please tell me everything, and write back soon. Why was it that I had to leave Germany, how and when, and do you know anything about my father? I have to report all this to the German Office of Restitution (Wiedergutmachungsbehörde). [I have to know] whether my father was deported or gassed back then, because you are the only one who would know something about this. It’s sad that I was not told the whole story back then, and that I was forbidden to write to my mother—even if she may have been bad (schlecht), still, she was my mother, and other people were only kind to me out of pity. It’s regrettable that I was raised so strictly. I don’t want to blame anyone for this, though. Please write to me soon. My best wishes to you and your family; my husband and children send their love. Yours, Erika Diekmann April 18, 19541 RIKA Diekmann was born in the city of Worms in Rhine Hesse (Rheinhessen) in 1920. Her mother was German. Her biological father was a Senegalese soldier stationed in EWorms as a member of the French army of occupation.2 Erika’s mother was married to a day laborer. In 1916, and again in 1921, the police subjected her to regular supervision for prostitution (Sittenkontrolle).3 In 1924, Erika’s mother lost custody of her four children.4 The district welfare office (Bezirksfürsorgestelle) placed Erika and her slightly older half-sister Gudrun in a local children’s home run by a Protestant women’sclubandstaffedbydeaconesses (Diakonissen) from Nonnenweier in Baden. It was here that Erika first encountered Martha Baroness von Moos, the honorary president of the women’s club in charge of the children’s home and wife of Ernst Baron von Moos, son of a powerful Worms industrialist. Ernst von Moos’s family had founded the children’shome.ThevonMoos’s were socially and politically conservative, as well as deeply devout. Martha von Moos came from one of Prussia’soldestaris- tocratic families with a long Lutheran tradition. Ernst von Moos’s family had Calvinist roots. During the 1920s, he and his relatives were actively involved in the affairs of Worms’s Protestant churches and maintained close ties to the Evangelical State Church of Hesse (Evangelische Landeskirche in Hessen). Ernst von Moos helped run the family business and repre- sented the right-wing, liberal German People’sParty(Deutsche Volkspartei,orDVP)inthe Hessian state parliament. Though Martha and Ernst von Moos never formally adopted Erika, they exerted great influence over her life. In March 1931, the couple decided to send 1Stadtarchiv Worms (henceforth StadtAWo) Abt. 185/714, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha Baroness von Moos, April 18, 1954. To preserve anonymity, I have changed the names of the correspon- dents and their relatives. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are my own. 2During the early 1920s, an average of twenty-five thousand colonial French troops of predominantly North African origin served in the occupied Rhineland. See Sandra Maß, Weiße Helden, Schwarze Krieger. Zur Geschichte kolonialer Männlichkeit in Deutschland, 1918–1964 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), 79. 3Information on Erika’s mother and stepfather is from the residential registry (Melderegister) of the city Worms in StadtAWo Abt. 11/1. 4StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Martha von Moos to Erika Diekmann, May 19, 1954. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.226, on 02 Oct 2021 at 04:34:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938916000340 242 JULIA ROOS Erika to Talitha Kumi, a school for Christian Arab girls in Jerusalem.5 Talitha Kumi belonged to the Kaiserswerth Deaconesses (Kaiserwerther Diakonissen), a religious order founded in 1836 by the Lutheran minister, Theodor Fliedner. Established in 1851, the school was one of the oldest Protestant German institutions in Jerusalem.6 The Worms district welfare office agreed to pay for Erika’s education at Talitha Kumi for a period of seven years, as well as to cover the costs of her journey to the Holy Land.7 Erika’s three siblings, among them Gudrun and her younger half-brother Ludwig, the son of a Vietnamese French soldier, remained in Germany. Erika stayed in Palestine until the eve of Israeli statehood. During World War II, the British mandate government requisitioned Talitha Kumi and other German-owned build- ings in Jerusalem and turned them into accommodations for British troops and Jewish refu- gees.8 Together with over five hundred other Germans, Erika moved to an internment camp for enemy nationals in Wilhelma near Jaffa (today, the neighborhood of Bnei Atarot in Tel Aviv), a colony founded by the Pietist German sect, the Templers.9 Here she remained until her departure from Palestine around April 1948.10 Erika’s earliest extant letter to Martha von Moos is dated June 1946. Shortly before leaving Palestine, Erika married Heinrich Diekmann, a fellow German whom she may have met in the Wilhelma camp.11 In January 1949, while still in transit, Erika gave birth to the couple’s first child. Between 1949 and 1957, the Diekmanns lived in Schwege bei Dinklage, Heinrich’s birthplace, a village in Lower Saxony in the north of the Federal Republic of Germany. Heinrich was un- employed, and the couple and their four children lived in makeshift rooms in a converted old barn.
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