Mixed Race Studies

Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the Making of the African Diaspora in Europe by Tina M. Campt (review)

Callaloo
Volume 37, Number 1, Winter 2014
pages 169-171
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2014.0006

Nicosia Shakes
Brown University

Campt, Tina M., Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012)

In Image Matters, Tina Campt uses a remarkable archive of vernacular photography to analyze processes of black subjectivity in early-twentieth-century Europe. Defined by the author as a genre of “everyday image-making” (7), vernacular photography is considered an important archival resource for understanding how blacks have historically constructed self-images that affirm their worth in societies that devalue their humanity (see also Brian Wallis and Deborah Willis, African American Vernacular Photography 2006). Campt’s reading of the photographs centers on three main registers through which they interact with the viewer: the visual, the haptic, and the sonic. Blending her analysis of these registers with historical research and the findings from her fieldwork in Germany and England, Campt treats these images as more than historical objects. They are “statements that express how ordinary individuals envisioned their sense of self, their subjectivity, and their social status” (7).

Campt engages mainly with the field of Black/African Diaspora Studies in three ways. Firstly, she departs from the prevailing “roots versus routes” conceptualizations that tend to focus on dispersion from a homeland and transnational interactions. Instead, she emphasizes black people’s inscription of themselves into their adopted countries. Secondly, by focusing on Afro-Germans and Afro-Caribbean British immigrants—two very distinct groups—Campt underscores the importance of viewing the African Diaspora as diverse, rather than as a homogenous group. Thirdly, she engages with the question of how the construction of the archives affects the conceptualization of the Diaspora. Here, the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who Campt references, is very relevant. In his influential text Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), Trouillot discusses the omissions that occur in various stages of archive construction, which ultimately affect how history is written. Campt infers that the history of the African Diaspora has been affected by silences within the visual archives. As such, the existence of certain diasporic groups such as Afro-Germans appears as an interruption in the mainstream narrative.

The book is divided into two sections, with three chapters bridged by two “interstitial” essays. Part 1, “Family Matters: Sight, Sense, Touch,” focuses on the biracial offspring of African men and German women, and builds on the research in Campt’s previous book, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (2005). The first chapter, “Family Touches” focuses primarily on Hans Hauck and to a lesser extent, the brothers, Mandenga, Manga, and Ekwin Ngando. There are multiple photographs of Hauck posing with his white German family as a child, and many of him as a soldier in the German army. These are juxtaposed with similar images of the Ngando brothers. The military images are shocking considering the popular conceptualization of the Third Reich military as an Aryan space commensurate with the doctrine of Aryan superiority. The fact that non-Aryans participated in the army speaks volumes about the nuances in the German state’s performance of Aryan superiority, even while subjecting non-Aryans to violent repression (see also Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers 2002). Hauck was sterilized as a child along with many other non-Aryans in a secret campaign carried out by the Gestapo; yet, he was allowed to join the Hitler Youth as a boy and later, the army. Like the Ngandos, he was denied full citizenship rights even while being required to perform military responsibilities for the state. Campt highlights an important point regarding the tension between how the images register and divergent historical facts. For example, the fact that Hauck’s grandmother was the one who gave the Gestapo permission to sterilize him troubles our reading of the image depicting loving family embraces between the two. Also, though the experiences of the Ngando brothers were similar to Hauck’s, the specificities of their lives cautions against a general narrative of black penalization in Germany. For example, Manga had a child with a white woman, Hertha Pilisch, in 1943, and later married her after the fall of the Nazi regime. Thus, unlike Hauck, Manga was not sterilized, and violated one of the fundamental rules of Nazism without detection for several years.

Hans Hauck will probably stand…

Christine Buckley helped shift cultural axis on child abuse

The Irish Times
2014-03-12

Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent

From Broadstreet.ie

Those who insist that history is about movements not individuals might reflect on the achievements of Christine Buckley.

Her story is history as driven by one person. She was an original, a pioneer in exposing how badly this State “cherished” many of its children, whatever their age, throughout most of the 20th century, up to 1996 when the last Magdalene laundry closed. If a high point of much of her work was then taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s 1999 apology on behalf of the State to all who had been in residential institutions as children, as well as his announcement then of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (Ryan Commission) and the setting up of the Residential Institutions Redress Board, it was not all.

It is no exaggeration to claim that such huge shift in the cultural axis of Ireland, made possible by Christine Buckley, paved the way for the Murphy Commission which investigated the handling of clerical sexual abuse allegations in Dublin and Cloyne dioceses, as well as the McAleese committee which investigated the Magdalene laundries…

…Her own story, as we now know, was in many ways typical. Through its telling she liberated others to do likewise, and not just from an institutional context. Writing in this newspaper in 1997 she recalled: “My mother lived within 20 minutes of the orphanage where I was placed as a child. I never knew it. Nobody seemed to know it. After a two-year courtship she took the baby boat to England in 1946 to hide, to wait and to give birth to her dark secret.

“She forgot to tell my father that she was separated from her husband. She forgot to tell him she already had children, one of them in an institution. Two weeks after my birth we returned to Ireland. My father refused to support her. The following day she placed me with, an adoption agency, vehemently refusing to sign the adoption papers and nobody asked her why.

“Guilt ridden, my father tracked me down six months later in a baby home. For six years he was the pivot of my life until one Saturday he never came back.”…

…Her campaign began after she met her birth mother for the first time in 1985. Three years later she travelled to Nigeria to meet her father. She “told him about my life in Goldenbridge . . . and how I intended to go public about the horrors of that place once he returned to Ireland to meet my children.”…

Read the entire article here.

Black History Month in Germany

German Mission to the United States
2014-02-14

In the United States February has been celebrated as Black History Month for the past four decades or so, with schools, media, institutions and celebrities taking the opportunity to highlight the accomplishments and historical experiences of African Americans. In recent years, Germany has joined a number of other countries, namely Canada and the UK, with its own Black History Month events.

In Germany, people with a black African background use the term “Afrodeutsch” or “Schwarz” to identify themselves. Their ethnic backgrounds are varied: many are immigrants or children of immigrants from African countries, some with one white German parent; others are the children or descendants of black US soldiers who were stationed in Germany as far back as the 1950s. It is impossible to say how many black Germans there are, however; in 2008, Spiegel magazine used the number 500,000, though ethnicity is not officially counted.

The proportion to the overall German population is thus quite small, but with Black History Month events, a number or organizations are raising the profile of black people in Germany. Hamburg and Berlin, commonly recognized as the cities with the largest black communities, are the cities with the largest and most long-standing Black History Month celebrations. In both cities, the organization Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (Initiative of Black People in Germany) was instrumental in organizing the first celebrations in the early 90s…

Read the entire article here.

Breath of Freedom

The Smithsonian Channel
Premieres Monday, 2014-02-17 20:00 EST

Narrated by Cuba Gooding Jr.

They fought to liberate Germany from Nazi rule, as racism reached unfathomable levels. Their fight would continue back home on American soil. This is the story of the one-million-plus African Americans who fought in World War II. Discover their encounters with hatred, from the enemy and from within their own ranks. Explore this paradoxical chapter in American history through interviews with war heroes, including Colin Powell, Tuskegee ace pilot Roscoe Brown, and Charles Evers, brother of Civil Rights activist and WWII veteran Medgar Evers. [The documentary also features Theodor Michael, author of Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu: Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen [Being German and also Being Black: Memoirs of an Afro-German].]

Watch the exclusive premiere here.

Dark skin, blue eyes: Genes paint a picture of 7,000-year-old European

NBC News
2014-01-26

Alan Boyle, Science Editor

A 7,000-year-old man whose bones were left behind in a Spanish cave had the dark skin of an African, but the blue eyes of a Scandinavian. He was a hunter-gatherer who ate a low-starch diet and couldn’t digest milk well — which meshes with the lifestyle that predated the rise of agriculture. But his immune system was already starting to adapt to a new lifestyle.

Researchers found all this out not from medical records, or from a study of the man’s actual skin or eyes, but from an analysis of the DNA extracted from his tooth.

The study, published online Sunday by the journal Nature, lays out what’s said to be the first recovered genome of a European hunter-gatherer from a transitional time known as the Mesolithic Period, which lasted from 10,000 to 5,000 years ago. It’s a time when the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was starting to give way to a more settled existence, with farms, livestock and urban settlements.

The remains of the Mesolithic male, dubbed La Braña 1, were found in 2006 in the La Braña-Arintero cave complex in northwest Spain. In the Nature paper, the researchers describe how they isolated the ancient DNA, sequenced the genome and looked at key regions linked to physical traits — including lactose intolerance, starch digestion and immune response.

The biggest surprise was that the genes linked to skin pigmentation reflected African rather than modern European variations. That indicates that the man had dark skin, “although we cannot know the exact shade,” Carles Lalueza-Fox, a member of the research team from the Spanish National Research Council, said in a news release. At the same time, the man possessed the genetic variations that produce blue eyes in current Europeans…

Read the entire article here.

Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960

Cambridge University Press
September 2013
379 pages
18 b/w illus.
235 x 158 x 22 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781107041363

Robbie Aitken, Senior Lecturer in Imperial History
Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom

Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies
University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

This groundbreaking history traces the development of Germany’s black community, from its origins in colonial Africa to its decimation by the Nazis during World War II. Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft follow the careers of Africans arriving from the colonies, examining why and where they settled, their working lives and their political activities, and giving unprecedented attention to gender, sexuality and the challenges of ‘mixed marriage’. Addressing the networks through which individuals constituted community, Aitken and Rosenhaft explore the ways in which these relationships spread beyond ties of kinship and birthplace to constitute communities as ‘black’. The study also follows a number of its protagonists to France and back to Africa, providing new insights into the roots of Francophone black consciousness and postcolonial memory. Including an in-depth account of the impact of Nazism and its aftermath, this book offers a fresh critical perspective on narratives of ‘race’ in German history.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. The first generation: from presence to community
• 2. Should I stay and can I go? Status and mobility in the institutional net
• 3. Settling down: marriage and family
• 4. Surviving in Germany: work, welfare and community
• 5. Problem men and exemplary women? Gender, class and ‘race’
• 6. Practising diaspora – politics 1918–33
• 7. Under the shadow of national socialism
• 8. Refuge France?
• Epilogue

The Propaganda War in the Rhineland: Weimar Germany, Race and Occupation after World War I

I. B. Tauris
2013-02-28
352 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781780763460
216 x 134mm

Peter Collar

Piecing together a fractured European continent after World War I, the Versailles Peace Treaty stipulated the long term occupation of the Rhineland by Allied troops. This occupation, perceived as a humiliation by the political right, caused anger and dismay in Germany and an aggressive propaganda war broke out – heightened by an explosion of vicious racist propaganda against the use of non-European colonial troops by France in the border area. These troops, the so-called Schwarze Schmach or “Black humiliation” raised questions of race and the Other in a Germany which was to be torn apart by racial anger in the decades to come. Here, in the first English-language book on the subject, Peter Collar uses the propaganda posters, letters and speeches to reconstruct the nature and organization of a propaganda campaign conducted against a background of fractured international relations and turbulent internal politics in the early years of the Weimar Republic. This will be essential reading for students and scholars of Weimar Germany and those interested in Race and Politics in the early 20th Century.

Introduction

Under the terms of the Armistice Agreement that ended World War I, those regions of Germany that lay to the west of the Rhine were immediately occupied by Allied troops. At the subsequent Peace Treaty negotiations presupposition of German responsibility tor the war led to the imposition of extensive penalties on the nation. Included in these was the continuing occupation of the Rhineland for a number of years in order to guarantee German fulfilment of the Peace Treaty clauses relating to reparations and disarmament.

Within Germany the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty were widely regarded as being unduly harsh and were greeted by the majority with anger and dismay. However, the use of force to overturn the situation was out of the question: the only way forward was to use persuasion. Following the reluctant signing of the Treaty, Therefore, strenuous efforts were made using propaganda to influence international opinion against the allegation of German war guilt and against the Treaty provisions. It was hoped that the Allies would agree to revision of the Treaty. The Rhineland occupation was one of the main targets of the stream of propaganda of all kinds that came out of post-war Germany and it is with this aspect that this book is concerned.

However, German propaganda against the occupation was aimed not only at an international readership. At home, there was the necessity of maintaining morale in the occupied regions, which at first were virtually isolated from the remainder of Germany. It was equally important to keep the public in unoccupied Germany well informed and to maintain its interest in, and support for, the occupied regions. Propaganda came from a wide range of sources. Some were official or semi-official bodies, though at the rime efforts were made by the governments of the Reich and those of the constituent states to conceal this fact. Private individuals and organisations, some set up specifically for the purpose, also took part.

The Allied armies occupied individual zones in the Rhineland territory of four German states: Prussia, Bavaria, Hessen and Oldenburg. Much German propaganda embraced the Rhineland as a whole, making no particular distinction between the territory of individual states. This was generally the case where private organisations and individuals were involved. Naturally, the Reich government had a national perspective. But propaganda was also organised at the level at the individual states, though even then the themes often included national issues. The picture overall was thus a very complex one. The roles of the different agencies actively engaged in this propaganda, often with conflicting interests and motivation, have so far nor been comprehensively addressed by historians.

I have concentrated on one particular region, the Bavarian Palatinate, or Pfalz. There are several reasons for this. By virtue of its position and the nature of its terrain the Pfalz in the southern Rhineland held a unique strategic and military importance for both France and Germany. For France, deeply concerned about her future security, the future of the region at the end of World War I presented both opportunity and frustration. Ideally, the Rhine, which formed the eastern border of the Pfalz, would also have made a natural eastern frontier for France, for it provided a natural line of defence against arrack from the east. Direct annexation of the Pfalz, however, was out of the question in the face of hostility from other Allies. Instead, the policy adopted by the French government was to encourage the local German population to form a Rhineland state, independent of the German Reich and friendly to France, which could act as a buffer zone…

…Of all the many propaganda themes of the early Weimar years none aroused as much passion and caused as much uproar as the campaign against the use of non-European colonial troops in the French army of occupation, the propaganda against the so-called Schwafze Schmach (the Black Humiliation). It was  intended to bring events in the Rhineland to the attention of the outside world, to influence foreign public opinion and so bring pressure to bear on foreign governments, especially that of the USA, where race had long been an issue. The underlying aim was to pressure the Allies into revising the terms of the Peace Treaty. At the same time the campaign was intended to mobilise support in unoccupied Germany. The origin, organisation, main themes and national and international impact of this campaign are therefore a subsidiary focus of this study.

Schwarze Schmach propaganda has already received considerable attention from other historians. Among the early studies, that by Keith Nelson drew mainly, though not exclusively, on archives in Washington to assess the international impact of the campaign and particularly its effect on the North American public. Gisela Lebzelter analysed the character and symbolism of the campaign in terms of the national mood prevailing in Germany following defeat in 1918, bringing in attitudes concerning racial superiority and drawing parallels with the development of anti-Semitism. The official sources cited by Lebzelter are almost exclusively drawn from the files of the Auswartiges Amt (Reich Foreign Minisrry) in Berlin, to which organisation she attributed major influence on the campaign.

The work by Reiner Pommerin had as its main theme the fate suffered by the few hundred children of mixed race who were born as a result o relationships between colonial troops and local German women. Such children offended against National Socialist concepts of racial purity and in 1937 a programme of enforced mass sterilization was carried our on them. Pommerin outlined the development of the Schwarze Schmach campaign, and noted the main organisations taking part, before exploring concerns about racial purity – evidently already beginning to surface in the Weimar period – through to the National Socialist era. The role of neither the Pfalzzenrale nor rhe Rheinische Frauenliga (Rhineland Women’s League), organisations that feature prominently in this study, received much mention. This may have resulted from a reliance mainly on the records of the Foreign Ministry, for relatively little reference was made to the extensive records that are available in the Bavarian State Archives in Munich. In passing it may also be noted that at the time these two studies were made records held in the Potsdam archives of the former DDR were nor available…

Editorial January 2014: On Reading Two Recent Memoirs by Afro-Germans

The Collegium for African American Research (CAAR)
January 2014

Gundolf Graml, Associate Professor of German and Director of German Studies
Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia

Two recent memoirs by German authors with an African connection emphasize that German history cannot be written without including the histories and perspectives of black Germans (as well as that of many other non-white people).

In Deutsch sein und Schwarz dazu [Being German and also Being Black], published in 2013 with Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, author Theodor Michael takes a long and probing look back at his experiences as a black German. Born in 1925 to a white German mother from the Eastern Prussian provinces and a black Cameroonian father, Michael’s childhood and youth coincided with the decline of the democratic German Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism.

In a low key style Michael recollects his participation in the infamous Völkerschauen [colonial peoples exhibits] organized by circusses and zoos. He describes his attempts to get by as hotel page and as extra in some of the Third Reich’s anti-British colonial films. And he details the toll that life under the Nuremberg race laws took on his body and mind. While his siblings managed to get out of Germany, Theodor Michael stayed behind, spending the last years of the regime as a forced laborer in a factory outside of Berlin, where he survived the war. After liberation, he managed to get into the Western zone, where he then tried to rebuild his life…

…Jennifer Teege’s memoir, Amon: Mein Großvater hätte mich erschossen [Amon: My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me], published in 2013 with Rowohlt Verlag, addresses the topic from the perspective of the second postwar generation of Germans. Teege, born in 1970 to a white German mother and a Nigerian father, grew up in an orphanage and later was adopted by a white middle-class German family. Decades later she finds out that her mother’s father, her grandfather, was Amon Göth, the concentration commander of Plaszow near Krakow, whose brutality and inhumanity are depicted in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. For Teege, who has lived in Israel for several years and worked with Holocaust survivors, the sudden discovery of a biological connection to one of the most infamous Nazi perpetrators was surpassed only by the shock that the grandmother to whom she has been attached so closely was Göth’s girlfriend and one of his most ardent defenders…

Read the entire review of the books here.

Amon: Mein Großvater hätte mich erschossen [Amon: My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me]

Rowohlt Verlag
2013-09-20
272 pages
Hardcover ISBN 978-3-498-06493-8

Jennifer Teege with Nikola Sellmair

Es ist ein Schock, der ihr ganzes Selbstverständnis erschüttert: Mit 38 Jahren erfährt Jennifer Teege durch einen Zufall, wer sie ist. In einer Bibliothek findet sie ein Buch über ihre Mutter und ihren Großvater Amon Göth. Millionen Menschen kennen Göths Geschichte. In Steven Spielbergs Film «Schindlers Liste» ist der brutale KZ-Kommandant der Saufkumpan und Gegenspieler des Judenretters Oskar Schindler. Göth war verantwortlich für den Tod tausender Menschen und wurde 1946 gehängt. Seine Lebensgefährtin Ruth Irene, Jennifer Teeges geliebte Großmutter, begeht 1983 Selbstmord.

Jennifer Teege ist die Tochter einer Deutschen und eines Nigerianers. Sie wurde bei Adoptiveltern groß und hat danach in Israel studiert. Jetzt ist sie mit einem Familiengeheimnis konfrontiert, das sie nicht mehr ruhen lässt. Wie kann sie ihren jüdischen Freunden noch unter die Augen treten? Und was soll sie ihren eigenen Kindern erzählen? Jennifer Teege beschäftigt sich intensiv mit der Vergangenheit. Sie trifft ihre Mutter wieder, die sie viele Jahre nicht gesehen hat.

Gemeinsam mit der Journalistin Nikola Sellmair recherchiert sie ihre Familiengeschichte, sucht die Orte der Vergangenheit noch einmal auf, reist nach Israel und nach Polen. Schritt für Schritt wird aus dem Schock über die Abgründe der eigenen Familie die Geschichte einer Befreiung.

Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu: Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen [Being German and also Being Black: Memoirs of an Afro-German]

Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag
November 2013
200 pages
Hardback ISBN: ISBN 978-3-423-26005-3
ePub ISBN: 978-3-423-42033-4
eBook ISBN: 978-3-423-42034-1

Theodor Michael

Theodor Michaels Autobiografie ist so aberwitzig, dass sie erfunden sein könnte, wenn sie nicht allzu wahr wäre. Er entfaltet in ›Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu‹ eine Welt, die man so nicht gekannt hat, beschrieben von einem Mann, den man für seine Kraft, das alles zu bewältigen, nur bewundern kann, und dafür, dass es ihm gelungen ist, die Menschlichkeit zu bewahren. Theodor Michael erzählt ganz nüchtern, aber die Ereignisse sprechen für sich.

Der Lebensrückblick des schwarzen deutschen Zeitzeugen Theodor Michael

Theodor Michael wurde 1925 in Berlin als Sohn einer Deutschen und eines Kameruners geboren wurde. Als sein Vater nach Deutschland kam, war Kamerun noch deutsches Schutzgebiet, sprich Kolonie. Afrikaner wurden in Deutschland ganz freundlich aufgenommen. Nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg waren die Kolonien verloren und das Klima wurde deutlich unfreundlicher. Man fand, die Schwarzen sollten den Deutschen keine Arbeitsplätze wegnehmen. Aber in den sehr beliebten Völkerschauen kamen sie noch unter, die “Artfremden” mit dem “negroiden Einschlag”. Sogar in der Nazi-Zeit, als Statisten in den äußerst beliebten Kolonialfilmen. Doch dann landeten sie im KZ oder in Zwangsarbeiterlagern. So erging es auch Theodor Michael: Nachdem seine Eltern starben, schlug er sich als Page, Portier und Komparse durch, bis er 1943, mit 18 Jahren, in einem Zwangsarbeiterlager interniert wurde.

Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu‹ hat Theodor Michael in der Vergangenheit viele Probleme bereitet

Theodor Michael hat das alles überstanden, um dann nach Kriegsende feststellen zu müssen, dass er der Kollaboration verdächtigt wurde, weil er überlebt hatte. Damals hätte er es sich nicht träumen lassen, dass er einmal als Regierungsdirektor beim BND in den Ruhestand gehen würde.

Seit seiner Pensionierung engagiert er sich für die afro-deutsche Gemeinde und ist ein gefragter Ansprechpartner für die Presse.