Understanding the Complexity of Black German Identity

Patricia M. Mazón, Reinhild Steingröver, eds.. Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890-2000. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005. xvii + 247 pp. $75.00, cloth, ISBN 978-1-58046-183-2. Reviewed by Lynn Kutch Published on H-German (June, 2009) Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher Given the long and varied history of cultural dispute that comfortable assumption, they also interactions between Africans and Germans--from sharpen the markedly German angle of the exam‐ the 1400s, when Africans populated Europe as ination by claiming that attention paid to Vergan‐ slaves and court servants, to the pinnacle of Ger‐ genheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the man colonization in Africa in the late 1800s, to the National Socialist past, has consistently overshad‐ post-World War I Rhineland occupation--the dom‐ owed the German colonial legacy and historical inant German culture, perhaps understandably, attitude about Africans. A vital reading given its has always viewed Africans as foreigners. This multicultural approach to German studies, the multifaceted collection interrogates the difficulty book demonstrates that, despite the widespread of categorizing the experience of Afro-Germans, a cultural eclipse of this theme, historians, writers, new organizing term in its own right. In each es‐ and flmmakers have successfully exploited their say, the authors seek to expand the relatively lim‐ talent to display a new self-confidence while edu‐ ited current base of knowledge about the black cating others on overt acts of prejudice and German experience and to rectify the oftentimes racism in Germany. ill-informed German and international reaction to Building upon previous research in the feld that tradition. As a whole, the collected essays rep‐ and combining disciplines and methodologies, the resent, as Sander Gilman puts it, a "major con‐ editors have organized the volume into two the‐ frontation between the German image of Black‐ matic sections that will appeal to Afro-German ness and the reality of the Black" (p. 83). Gilman's readers as well as scholars with varying degrees "confrontation" materializes in each essay's dis‐ of interest in and knowledge about the subject. tinctly articulated challenges to the common no‐ The frst subdivision, "Afro-Germans in Historical tion that racism toward blacks never existed in Perspective," traces African intersections with Germany. The book's authors and editors not only German history from the colonial period through H-Net Reviews 1945. The second portion, "Cultural Representa‐ In the next chapter, "The First Be‐ tions and Self-Representations of Afro-Germans," satzungskinder," Krista Molly O'Donnell presents offers specific examples from various disciplines a more in-depth look at colonial childrearing of the ever-changing perceived image over time practices and racial policy in German Southwest and how the community of Afro-Germans seeks to Africa between 1890 and 1914. Even from within define itself as a reaction to those general percep‐ her highly specialized topic, O'Donnell touches tions. more general themes, such as the ongoing, even In chapter 1, "Dangerous Liaisons: Race, Na‐ legislated, refusal to acknowledge the black race tion and German Identity," Fatima El-Tayeb identi‐ within German culture. The author describes the fies a "tension between the central metaphorical German inability to resolve the ambiguity of the presence of blackness and a simultaneous denial children's identities, and underscores the tenden‐ of the existence of actual blacks within the na‐ cy for Germans to "erase ... the Afro-German pop‐ tion" (p. 29). She arrives at her conclusions by ulation in the colony from their consciousness looking "specifically at the role the Social Darwin‐ and their categories of citizenship" (p. 61). ist sciences and colonial politics played in consoli‐ O'Donnell's chapter further informs the reader dating a racialized concept of Germanness" (p. about shifts in collective thinking that changed 31). El-Tayeb details colonial studies that claimed how officials categorized different races. For ex‐ to show the "impossibility of influencing genetic ample, even if authorities made exceptions for racial disposition" as justification for separating Africans deemed to have the same level of educa‐ "primitive" Africans from "civilized" Europeans tion as the dominant culture, a common opinion (p. 31). In addition, she reports on scientific stud‐ of blacks as a "moral danger" and general "bad in‐ ies that also helped to pass mixing laws, which fluence" (p. 74) still prevailed. Like other authors both churches and mainstream media supported. in the book, O'Donnell links policies and realities Subsequent historical events, such as forced ster‐ as experienced by children from the African ilization and amplified propaganda against troops colonies to those of the later Besatzungskinder, in the Rhineland, substantiated the chief fear that for whom Germans "worked to create institutions blacks could taint German blood. El-Tayeb makes that perpetuated Afro-Germans' isolation" (p. 79). implicit parallels explicit with her claim that Through her meticulous and well-organized essay, racism and antisemitism connect because, in both O'Donnell guides readers to her conclusion that cases, a dominant culture discounted the social Germans worked with determination to make al‐ value and genetic quality of a minority popula‐ ready fatherless Afro-German children mother‐ tion. She summarizes the historically and scientif‐ less, stateless, and invisible as well. ically defined existence of Afro-Germans this way: In a subsequent chapter concerning race and "The loss of citizenship, the exclusion from gender in pre-1945 history, Tina Campt considers schools, universities and professions, and the how propagandistic material that predated the forced sterilization had changed the status of Third Reich and that showed Afro-Germans as a African Germans from outsider to that of perse‐ pollutant threat to the pure German nation pro‐ cuted minority" (p. 51). El-Tayeb is careful to men‐ vided fertile ground for subsequent regimes. Her tion, however, that policies in the Third Reich rep‐ methodological backward glance, which involves resented less a direct result of previous develop‐ examining associations, if not direct links be‐ ments than the zenith of carefully mechanized tween historical periods, confirms that the author policies of exclusion. does not suggest cumulativeness or inevitability of later events. Instead, she provides isolated and intertwined moments that evidence blacks as 2 H-Net Reviews nothing more than "raced subjects." Campt sub‐ all the proposed solutions, integration is ultimate‐ stantiates her claims by reporting on public de‐ ly impossible. She cites an ambivalence that "for‐ bates concerning interracial individuals and at‐ sakes principle of racial integration in favor of tempts to assert race as a legal category. Campt racial tolerance," and lays bare the pervasive cul‐ augments her study with an analysis of a gen‐ tural conceit that "preached racial tolerance but dered discourse that privileges the body of the insisted on maintaining racial difference" (p. 150). white woman and equates the body with purity, After studying subsequent flms in the essay, order, and cohesion. By extension, Germanness Fehrenbach boldly links the issue of race with the becomes equated with purity and the vulnerable postwar German difficulty of coming to terms female body while blackness represents the with the past. Specifically, Fehrenbach detects a equivalent of "a deeply threatening specter of "shifting [of] the location of race from Jewishness racial mixture that endangered German national to blackness in order to distance it from the Holo‐ identity through the perils of racial purity" (p. caust and Germans' crimes against humanity" (p. 102). Consequently, "metaphors of victimhood and 156). Randall Halle rounds out the study of flm by endangerment served as a form of national adhe‐ examining flms that have developed out of the sive that offered a source of unity and identifica‐ Afro-German community itself. Halle makes the tion in the later period of postwar national crisis" bold claim that the "new German audience" of (p. 102). Campt's intriguing conflation of the con‐ these flms can "experience its laughter as part of cept of nation with the contours of a body can an antiracist movement" (p.175), and that the both stand alone and ft into a retrospective ex‐ Afro-Germans speak for themselves and more im‐ amination of racist impulses that fed subsequent portantly speak outside of stereotypes. Third Reich ideologies. Considering approaches to studying Afro-Ger‐ In the frst essay of the second part of the man literature, Leroy Hopkins takes readers on a book, Tobias Nagl refocuses the lens to flm stud‐ tour of that branch of writing since 1985, marking ies as he considers "Louis Brody and the Black the starting point as one when authors "could cre‐ Presence in German Film Before 1945." Although ate a group identity to speak out against racism Nagl focuses on the biography of black actor Louis and discrimination" (p. 183). Hopkins identifies Brody, he broadens the scope to consider flms as and examines the general cultural implications of documentation of stereotypical images. In their at least three common denominators of Afro-Ger‐ roles as "non-threatening stereotypes ... embody‐ man literature. Largely autobiographical and ing nature," black actors, Nagl argues, lost their largely by women, the

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