Mixed Race Studies

Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken

The New Book Network
2017-02-04

Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884-1960 (Cambridge University Press 2015)

“There were black Germans?”

My students are always surprised to learn that there were and are a community of African immigrants and Afro-Germans that dates back to the nineteenth century (and sometimes earlier), and that this community has at times had an influence on German culture, society, and racial thinking that belied its small size.

Germany’s role in colonizing Africa has received increased attention lately, with an exhibit on German colonialism appearing at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in October and recent headway on a deal for Germany to pay reparations to the descendants of Herero and Nama genocide victims in Namibia. In Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Disapora Community, 1884-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken supply a part of the colonial story that gets even less attention than that of Germans in Africa: what about Africans in Germany? Focusing primarily on a community of West-African-born black Germans and their families, Rosenhaft and Aitken trace the groups evolution in the nineteenth century through its persecutions by the Nazi state and postwar existence.

Download the interview (00:25:27) here.

The Fate of Afro Germans under Nazis

CNN (Cable News Network)
2017-07-21

Nosmot Gbadamosi

Caption: Two survivors prepare food outside the barracks. The man on the right is thought to be Jean (Johnny) Voste, born in Belgian Congo — the only black prisoner in Dachau. Photo Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Frank Manucci Date: May 1945

A new film aims to highlight a Nazi “secret” mission to sterilize hundreds of Afro German children.

(CNN)In 1937, mixed race children living in the Rhineland were tracked down by the Gestapo and sterilized on “secret order.” Some were later the subject of medical experiments, while others vanished.

“There were known to be around 800 Rhineland children at the time,” says historian Eve Rosenhaft, professor of German Historical Studies, at the University of Liverpool.

It was a little known part of Holocaust history until Mo Abudu, chief executive of Nigerian media network EbonyLife TV, read an online article by Rosenhaft on the plight of these children.

“When I read about it [the article] I just thought we need to put this to screen,” says Abudu. “There are many children in that era born of African and German parentage and I felt what happened to those people. Their stories are totally untold.”

EbonyLife TV intends to tell their stories through a film called “Ava and Duante.” The film is set in an undisclosed location in Europe and will focus on the plight of Afro Germans who suffered persecution under Hitler…

Read the entire article here.

Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century

Liverpool University Press
2017-03-01
216 Pages
210 x 147 mm
29 B&W illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9781781383117

Theodor Michael

Translated by:

Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies
University of Liverpool

This is the first English translation of an important document in the history of the black presence in Germany and Europe: the autobiography of Theodor Michael. Theodor Michael is the last surviving member of the first generation of ‘Afro-Germans’: Born in Germany in 1925 to a Cameroonian father and a German mother, he grew up in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic. As a child and teenager he worked in circuses and films and experienced the tightening knot of racial discrimination under the Nazis in the years before the Second World War. He survived the war as a forced labourer, founding a family and making a career as a journalist and actor in post-war West Germany. Since the 1980s he has become an important spokesman for the black German consciousness movement, acting as a human link between the first black German community of the inter-war period, the pan-Africanism of the 1950s and 1960s, and new generations of Germans of African descent.

Theodor Michael’s life story is a classic account of coming to consciousness of a man who understands himself as both black and German; accordingly, it illuminates key aspects of modern German social history as well as of the post-war history of the African diaspora. The text has been translated by Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies at the University of Liverpool and an internationally acknowledged expert in black German studies. It is accompanied by a translator’s preface, explanatory notes, a chronology of historical events and a guide to further reading, so that the book will be accessible and useful both for general readers and for undergraduate students.

What happened to black Germans under the Nazis?

The Conversation (US Pilot): Academic rigor, journalistic flair
2016-01-26

Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies
University of Liverpool

The fact that we officially commemorate the Holocaust on January 27, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz, means that remembrance of Nazi crimes focuses on the systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews.

The other victims of Nazi racism, including Europe’s Sinti and Roma are now routinely named in commemoration, but not all survivors have had equal opportunities to have their story heard. One group of victims who have yet to be publicly memorialised is black Germans.

All those voices need to be heard, not only for the sake of the survivors, but because we need to see how varied the expressions of Nazi racism were if we are to understand the lessons of the Holocaust for today.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, there were understood to have been some thousands of black people living in Germany – they were never counted and estimates vary widely. At the heart of an emerging black community was a group of men from Germany’s own African colonies (which were lost under the peace treaty that ended World War I) and their German wives…

Read the entire article here.

Black Germans and the Holocaust

International Slavery Museum
Liverpool, England, United Kingdom
2015-01-14

The International Slavery Museum will be marking Holocaust Memorial Day on Tuesday 27 January with a special free guest lecture by Professor Eve Rosenhaft from the University of Liverpool, who will be talking about the experiences of the Black German community during the Holocaust.

Eve tells us more:

“When Hitler came to power in 1933, there were a several thousand people of African descent in Germany. They included African Americans, African-Caribbean and Africans passing through, working or recently settled, but the core of Germany’s Black community was made up of men from Germany’s former colonies – East Africa, Togo, and especially Cameroon – with their German-born wives and ‘mixed-race’ children.

This talk focuses on those families. While Hitler was still hoping to recover colonies in Africa, the Nazis hoped to make use of them for political propaganda. But ‘mixed’ families represented a particular challenge to Nazi racial policies, and in the long run they suffered exclusion, harassment, internment, and compulsory sterilisation. At the same time people’s experiences were varied and sometimes adventurous. Most individuals survived in Germany or as emigrants, thanks to support from other members of the community and from their families, though the community itself came out of World War II largely broken and scattered…

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

Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century

Liverpool University Press
January 2013
304 pages
Illustrations: 8 colour plates, 12 black and white illustrations
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781846318474

Edited by:

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

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

This volume explores the lives and activities of people of African descent in Europe between the 1880s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It goes beyond the still-dominant Anglo-American or transatlantic focus of diaspora studies to examine the experiences of black and white Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans who settled or travelled in Germany, France, Portugal, Italy and the Soviet Union, as well as in Britain. At the same time, while studies of Africans in Europe have tended to focus on the relationship between colonial (or former colonial) subjects and their respective metropolitan nation states, the essays in this volume widen the lens to consider the skills, practices and negotiations called for by other kinds of border-crossing: The subjects of these essays include people moving between European states and state jurisdictions or from the former colony of one state to another place in Europe, African-born colonial settlers returning to the metropolis, migrants conversing across ethnic and cultural boundaries among ‘Africans’, and visitors for whom the face-to-face encounter with European society involves working across the ‘colour line’ and testing the limits of solidarity. Case studies of family life, community-building and politics and cultural production, drawing on original research, illuminate the transformative impact of those journeys and encounters and the forms of ‘transnational practice’ that they have generated. The contributors include specialist scholars in social history, art history, anthropology, cultural studies and literature, as well as a novelist and a filmmaker who reflect on their own experiences of these complex histories and the challenges of narrating them.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• 1. Introduction / Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken
• I. Enacting Identity: Individuals, Families and Communities
  • 2. Prince Dido of Didotown and ‘Human Zoos’ in Wilhelmine Germany: Strategies for Self-Representation under the Othering Gaze / Albert Gouaffo
  • 3. Schwarze Schmach and métissages contemporains: The Politics and Poetics of Mixed Marriage in a Refugee Family / Eve Rosenhaft
  • 4. ‘Among them Complicit’? Life and Politics in France’s Black Communities, 1919–1939 / Jennifer Anne Boittin
  • 5. ‘In this Metropolis of the World We Must Have a Building Worthy of Our Great People’: Race, Empire and Hospitality in Imperial London, 1931–1948 / Daniel Whittall
• II. Authenticity and Influence: Contexts for Black Cultural Production
  • 6. Féral Benga’s Body / James Smalls
  • 7. ‘Like Another Planet to the Darker Americans’: Black Cultural Work in 1930s Moscow / S. Ani Mukherji
  • 8. ‘Coulibaly’ Cosmopolitanism in Moscow: Mamadou Somé Coulibaly and the Surikov Academy Paintings, 1960s–1970s / Paul R. Davis
  • 9. Afro-Italian Literature: From Productive Collaborations to Individual Affirmations / Christopher Hogarth
• III. Post-colonial Belonging
  • 10. Of Homecomings and Homesickness: The Question of White Angolans in Post-Colonial Portugal / Cecilie Øien
  • 11. Blackness over Europe: Meditations on Culture and Belonging / Donald Martin Carter
• IV. Narratives/Histories
  • 12. Middle Passage Blackness and its Diasporic Discontents: The Case for a Post-War Epistemology / Michelle M. Wright
  • 13. Black and German: Filming Black History and Experience / John Sealey
  • 14. Excavating Diaspora: An Interview Discussing Elleke Boehmer’s Novel Nile Baby / John Masterson with Elleke Boehmer
  • 15. Afterword / Susan Dabney Pennybacker
• Bibliography
• Index