The Creole Elite and the Rise of Angolan Proto-Nationalism, 1870–1920

Posted in Africa, Books, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Europe, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery on 2011-10-15 21:17Z by Steven

The Creole Elite and the Rise of Angolan Proto-Nationalism, 1870–1920

Cambria Press
2008-09-08
340 pages
ISBN: 9781604975291

Jacopo Corrado

This book is about Angolan literature and culture. It investigates a segment of Angolan history and literature, with which even Portuguese-speaking readers are generally not familiar. Its main purpose is to define the features and the literary production of the so-called ‘creole elite’, as well as its contribution to the early manifestations of dissatisfaction towards colonial rule patent during a period of renewed Portuguese commitment to its African colonies, but also of unrealised ambitions, economic crisis, and socio-political upheaval in Angola and in Portugal itself.

Nineteenth-century Angolan society was characterised by the presence of a semi-urbanised commercial and administrative elite of Portuguese-speaking creole families––white, black, some of mixed race, some Catholic and others Protestant, some old established and others cosmopolitan––who were based in the main coastal towns.

As well as their wealth, derived from the functions performed in the colonial administrative, commercial and customs apparatus, their European-influenced culture and habits clearly distinguished them from the broad native population of black peasants and farm workers. In order to expand its control over the region, Portugal desperately needed the support of this kind of non-coloniser urban elite, which was also used as an assimilating force, or better as a source of dissemination of a relevant model of social behaviour. Thus, until the 1850s great creole merchants and inland chiefs dealt in captive slaves, bound for export to Brazil via Cape Verde and São Tomé: the tribal aristocracy and the creole bourgeoisie thrived on the profits of overseas trade and lived in style, consuming imported alcoholic beverages and wearing European clothes.

After the abolition, however, their social and economic position was eroded by an influx of petty merchants and bureaucrats from Portugal who wished to grasp the commercial and employment opportunities created by a new and modern colonial order, anxious to keep up with other European colonial powers engaged in the partition of the African continent.

This book thus considers the first intellectuals, the early printed publications in the country, and the pioneers of Angolan literature who felt the need to raise their roots to higher dignity. Thus, they wrote grammar, dictionaries, poetry, fiction, and of course, incendiary articles denouncing exploitation, racism, and the different treatment afforded by the colonial authorities to Portuguese expatriates and natives.

Table of Contents

  • Foreword
  • Acknowledgments
  • List of abbreviations
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1: Cherished Myths
    • The greatest and most Portuguese overseas possession
    • Lusotropicalism
  • Chapter 2: The Intellectual Setting
    • The Luso-Atlantic cultural triangle
    • Brazil
    • Portugal
    • The literary and cultural influences
    • Diffusion
    • Association
  • Chapter 3: Luanda
    • The advent of modernity
    • Between journalism and literature
    • The new century: Hope and failure
  • Chapter 4: The ‘Creole’ Elite and Early ‘Nationalism’
    • The term ‘Creole’
    • The term ‘Nationalism’
  • References
  • Index
Tags: , , ,

‘Going out of stock’: Mulattoes and Levantines in Italian literature and cinema of the Fascist period

Posted in Africa, Dissertations, Europe, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2011-10-09 02:14Z by Steven

‘Going out of stock’: Mulattoes and Levantines in Italian literature and cinema of the Fascist period

University of Connecticut
2008
255 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3329116
ISBN: 9780549826118

Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut

My dissertation examines, within Fascist propagandist literature and cinema of the 1930s, the hybrid figures of mulattoes—the offspring of interracial unions between Italian men and native women of Italy’s African colonies—and Levantines—white Italian immigrant merchants and craftsmen living in Alexandria, Egypt, who culturally intermingled with other ethnic groups. The popular novels and feature films I examine reveal the mulattoes and Levantines as interchangeable characters invalidating Benito Mussolini’s efforts at establishing a national identity based on a common cultural background, racial attributes, and religious beliefs. As my title suggests, I take mulattoes and Levantines out of the cinematic and literary “stock” of propaganda, where they were depicted as outside the stirpe (stock) of the Italian people, to reveal the inconsistencies within Fascist ideals of racial and cultural purity. In historical and anthropological terms, I intend to bring to light how literary and cinematic devices used to stigmatize mulattoes and Levantines often undermine themselves, calling attention to what was supposed to be absent or different from what was in “stock,” in the works themselves, in the actual peoples depicted and even in the motives of Fascist colonial enterprises. My analysis is informed by the framework of studies on exoticism, hybridity and mimicry, passing and the tragic mulatto, masculinity and femininity, and cultural studies, all of which lead back to the question: Why did Italians resist the ethnic and cultural metissage during colonialism and still to this day insist on “whiteness” when they describe themselves and their culture?

Table of Contents

  • Approval Page
  • Acknowledgments
  • Table of contents
  • Introduction
  • Chapter One: ‘Speaking of Itself:’ Exoticism in ‘African Works’ of the Early Italian Colonialism
    • 1.1. Introduction
    • 1.2. Italian Colonialism from the Purchase of the Bay of Assab to the Ethiopian Campaign
    • 1.3. Exoticism and Colonialism
    • 1.4. Exploration and First Italian Colonization: Piaggia, Franzoj, Bianchi and Martini
    • 1.5. Italian Anthropology in the Second Half of the 19th Century and the Hamitic Theory
    • 1.6. Africa in the Literary Works of De Amicis, Salgari, D’Annunzio and Marinetti
  • Chapter Two: ‘Art of Darkness:’ The Aestheticization of Black People in Fascist Colonial Novel
    • 2.1. Introduction
    • 2.2. Mixed Race Children in Italy’s African Colonies
    • 2.3. The Colonial Novel
    • 2.4. Disciplining the Native Population and the Italian Audience
    • 2.5. Rosolino Gabrielli’s II piccolo Brassa
    • 2.6. Arnaldo Cipolla’s Melograno d’Oro, regina d’Etiopia
  • Chapter Three: Undermining Fascist Policies of Order and Risanamento. The Dissident Literature of Enrico Pea and Fausta Cialente
    • 3.1. Introduction
    • 3.2. Alexandria of Egypt: Historical Framework
    • 3.3. The Italian Emigrants of Alexandria
    • 3.4. Growing up in the Shadow of Alexandria
    • 3.5. Enrico Pea’s Egyptian Novels
    • 3.6. Fausta Cialente’s Levantine Characters
  • Chapter Four: Fade to White:’ How Italian Cinema Affiliated with Fascism Framed the Native Population of Italy’s African Colonies
    • 4.1. Introduction
    • 4.2. Demographic Colonization of Ethiopia
    • 4.3. Italian Cinema before Fascism
    • 4.4. ‘African Films’ during the Fascist Period
    • 4.5. Augusto Genina’s Lo squadrone bianco
    • 4.6. Guido Brignone’s Sotto La Croce del Sud
  • Bibliography

Purchase the dissertation here.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

The Born Identity

Posted in Articles, Europe, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive on 2011-10-03 04:35Z by Steven

The Born Identity

Arise Magazine
Issue 12
2011-09-28

Sarah Bentley

Photography by Liz Johnson-Artur

Thirty-six year-old Egor Belov has just told a childhood anecdote about scrubbing his face until it drew blood. He’d been playing in the snow and wanted pink cheeks like his friends. His dark complexion was never going to turn his desired shade but as a six-year-old living in a home otherwise occupied by white children, he struggled to understand why. The gathering of St Petersburg-based Afro-Russians (the collective name given to Russian nationals of mixed African and Russian parentage) with whom Belov shares this tale all smile knowingly and begin to offer up their own stories.
 
Some tales, including lovers who were shocked that black skin is lighter on different parts of the body, are humorous. But others, such as how school years were marred by bullying, fights and adolescent paranoia, are indicative of the challenges of the Afro-Russian experience. A candid confession from Marie Madlene, a striking 44-year-old with a blonde afro (pictured below), gets a raucous laugh: “I’m so used to being stared at that when I travel to more diverse countries, I miss the attention.”

Although the group has previously only met online through the ‘black-Russian-Ukranian-Belorussian-Kazakh’ page on Kontakt (Russia’s answer to Facebook), its members have developed instant camaraderie. After all, they are all mixed-race people living in a country that, despite its obvious multiculturalism (almost 180 ethnicities live in Russia), has one of the highest race-hate crime rates in the world. There are around 150 active far-right groups, many with ideologies of racial intolerance…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , ,

Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’: The Difficult Identities of Post-War Black Children of GIs

Posted in Articles, Europe, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2011-09-26 00:25Z by Steven

Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’: The Difficult Identities of Post-War Black Children of GIs

Speigel Online International
2009-10-13

Stephanie Siek


Rosemarie Pena’s identity document after her adoption. “Many of us never knew we were adopted, and many of us thought we were the only one,” Pena said. Her adoptive parents changed her name to Wanda Lynn Haymon. After discovering she was adopted, she reclaimed her birth name.

For many of the now-adult children of white German women and African-American GIs, adopted by families in the United States after World War II, the search for the truth has been difficult. Online communities are helping.

Rudi Richardson knew something about what it meant to be a black man in the United States. But after being deported to Germany, the country where he was born, shortly before his 47th birthday, he had to start figuring out what it meant to be black and German—in a land he barely remembered and whose language he didn’t speak.

He started life as Udo Ackermann, born in a Bavarian women’s prison in 1955. His mother, a Jewish woman named Liesolette, was serving a prison term for prostitution. His father, whom he never met, was an African-American serviceman named George. Rudi was given up for adoption.

Like thousands of other postwar children with black GI fathers and white German mothers, Richardson was raised by an African-American military family in the US. He has spent his life trying to find where he fits in.

Born in an era when Germany was still grappling with its responsibility for the Holocaust and when the US Army had a policy of not acknowledging paternity claims brought against its soldiers stationed abroad, some of these children were put up for adoption in the United States. At the time, Germany judged itself incapable of absorbing these “brown babies”—as they have come to call themselves. In the late 1940s and 1950s, efforts were made to match them with African-American military families, many of whom were stationed around Germany at the time…

…But Cardwell, who is writing a book about his experiences, has learned that his own story is not that simple. Brought to the United States as a four-year-old and adopted by an African-American couple in Washington D.C., he was raised believing that he was a very light-skinned black man. It was not until he began trying to find his biological parents as an adult that he discovered his mother was a half-German refugee from Poland, and his father was native Hawaiian who was classified as “colored” by the military because of his skin color.

“I’ve been run out of white people’s houses: ‘Who’s this black person you’re bringing in here?’ I’ve been run out of black people’s houses: ‘Who’s this white person you’re bringing in here?'” Cardwell said of his adolescence and early adulthood. “There is no belonging, which is what brown babies sought most.”…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

German science and black racism—roots of the Nazi Holocaust

Posted in Africa, Articles, Europe, Health/Medicine/Genetics, History, Media Archive on 2011-09-21 21:48Z by Steven

German science and black racism—roots of the Nazi Holocaust

The FASEB Journal (The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology)
Volume 22, Number 2 (2008)
pages 332-337
DOI: 10.1096/fj.08-0202ufm

François Haas, Associate Professor
Department of Rehabilitation Medicine
New York University

The Nazi’s cornerstone precept of “racial hygiene” gave birth to their policy of “racial cleansing” that led to the murders of millions. It was developed by German physicians and scientists in the late 19th century and is rooted in the period’s Social Darwinism that placed blacks at the bottom of the racial ladder. This program was first manifested in the near-extermination of the African Herero people during the German colonial period. After WWI, the fear among the German populace that occupying African troops and their Afro-German children would lead to “bastardization” of the German people formed a unifying racial principle that the Nazis exploited. They extended this mind-set to a variety of “unworthy” groups, leading to the physician-administered racial Nuremberg laws, the Sterilization laws, the secret sterilization of Afro-Germans, and the German euthanasia program. This culminated in the extermination camps.

If the physician presumes to take into consideration in his work whether a life has value or not, the consequences are boundless and the physician becomes the most dangerous man in the state.

Christopher Willhelm Hufeland (1762–1836)

ALTHOUGH THE SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS has been a repeating theme throughout human history, only the Nazi-led extermination of millions of people deemed undesirable was framed in the scientific context of “racial hygiene.” At the core of Nazi philosophy was the view of the nation as a living organism. Using Herder’s concept of Volk, Hitler viewed German society as an organism with its own health. “Our people is also a biological entity… German people forms one great relationship, a blood society… This biological unity of people will be known as the people-body.” Because individual human beings were regarded as functional or dysfunctional parts of this larger whole and thus affecting the health of the people-body, racial hygiene became seminal to Hitler’s thinking. As Bavarian Cabinet Minister Hans Schemm declared in 1934, “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”

The rise of science-based medicine combined with physicians’ roles in national health reform during the late 19th century to give physicians first-time political leverage and continuous and unprecedented levels of public recognition. Hitler and the Nazis reached out early to physicians:

I could, if need be, do without lawyers, engineers, and builders, but… you, you National Socialist doctors, I cannot do without you for a single day, not a single hour. If…you fail me, then all is lost. For what good are our struggles, if the health of our people is in danger?

Physicians responded in kind (Table 1 ): “The National Socialist Physicians’ League proved its political reliability to the Nazi cause long before the Nazis seizure of power, and with an enthusiasm, and an energy, unlike that of any other professional group.”

Central to this affinity was the 19th century etiologic notion evolving from Social Darwinism that certain diseases (e.g., mental illness, feeblemindedness, criminality, epilepsy, hysteria, alcoholism) are genetically determined. The physicians who had developed this theory—primarily psychiatrists, neurologists, and anthropologists—became Germany’s eugenicists and authored the country’s racial policy, and it was primarily these physicians and their disciples who eventually led the Nazi government’s policy of ethnic cleansing. This program evolved in a series of discrete steps of ever-increasing barbarism that emerged during the German colonial period in Africa and terminated in the extermination camps of the Holocaust…

The African colonies and concentration camps also served racial scientific inquiry. Post-mortems were performed to study causes of death and bodies of executed prisoners were preserved and shipped to Germany for dissection (Fig. 1 , (14) ). A 1907 chronicle reported that: “A chest of Herero skulls was recently sent to the Pathological Institute in Berlin, where they will be subjected to scientific measurements.”

Probably the most well-known study was the physician Eugen Fisher’s evaluation of Basters, the mixed-blood children of Dutch men and Nama women. He argued that “Negro blood” was of “lesser value” and that mixing it with “white blood” would destroy European culture, and advised that Africans should be exploited by Europeans as long they were useful, after which they could be eliminated…

…In 1920, Doctor F. Rosenberger wrote in the Medical Review, “…Shall we stand in silence and allow it to happen that in the future the banks of the Rhine shall echo not with the songs of beautiful and intelligent white Germans, but with the croaks of stupid, clumsy, half-animal and syphilitic mulattos?” This reiterated the threat first articulated during Germany’s colonial period that racially mixed offspring (called Mischlings) will destroy the purity of the German white race. As Colonial Secretary Solf had incited people in 1912, “You send your sons to the colonies: do you want them to return with wooly-haired grandchildren?…Do you want your girls to return with Hereros, Hottentots and bastards?. …We are Germans, we are white, and we want to stay white…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , ,

Geteilte Geschichte: The Black Experience in Germany and the U.S.

Posted in Europe, Live Events, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2011-08-07 01:50Z by Steven

Geteilte Geschichte: The Black Experience in Germany and the U.S.

The German Historical Institute
1607 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C.
Thursday, 2011-08-19, 18:00-20:00 EDT (Local Time)

RSVP (acceptances only) by August 12, 2011
Telephone: 202-387-3355, FAX: 202-387-6437
E-Mail: events@ghi-dc.org

Noah Sow

Noah Sow is an acclaimed journalist, musician, and producer. In 2001, she founded der braune mob e.V., the first anti-racist German media watch organization (www.derbraunemob.de). Her latest book Deutschland Black & White is based on her extensive experiences as an anti-racism activist.

Her lecture will be the public keynote address of the First Annual Convention of the Black German Cultural Society, NJ. to be held from August 19 to 21, 2011, at the GHI.

In cooperation with the Black German Cultural Society, NJ. (A New Jersey nonprofit organization) and the Humanities Council of Washington, DC.

For more information, click here.

Tags: , , , ,

“Roots Germania” A Personal Search for Identity (Film Screening and Panel Discussion)

Posted in Autobiography, Europe, Identity Development/Psychology, Live Events, Media Archive, United States, Videos, Women on 2011-08-06 22:58Z by Steven

“Roots Germania” A Personal Search for Identity (Film Screening and Panel Discussion)

The German Historical Institute
1607 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C.
Thursday, 2011-08-18, 18:00-20:00 EDT (Local Time)

RSVP (acceptances only) by August 12, 2011
Telephone: 202-387-3355, FAX: 202-387-6437
E-Mail: events@ghi-dc.org

The Grimme award nominated documentary “Roots Germania” was directed by Mo Asumang, the daughter of a German and Ghanaian. She decided to search for her own roots and identity, after she received a death threat by the neo-Nazi band White Aryan Rebels, who sing in one song: “This bullet is for you, Mo Asumang.” Her search leads her through Germany and then to Ghana, where she speaks with family and friends, but she also engages with NPD party representatives and racist groups to ask questions many would not dare to ask.

In cooperation with the Black German Cultural Society, NJ (A New Jersey nonprofit organization) and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

For more information, click here.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Persistent Borderland: Freedom and Citizenship in Territorial Florida

Posted in Dissertations, Europe, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Slavery, United States on 2011-08-01 01:41Z by Steven

Persistent Borderland: Freedom and Citizenship in Territorial Florida

Texas A&M University
August 2007
295 pages

Philip Matthew Smith

A Dissertation by Philip Matthew Smith Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History

Florida’s Spanish borderland was the result of over two hundred and fifty years of cooperation and contention among Indians, Spain, Britain, the United States and Africans who lived with them all. The borderland was shaped by the differing cultural definitions of color and how color affected laws about manumission, miscegenation, legitimacy, citizenship or degrees of rights for free people of color and to some extent for slaves themselves.

The borderland did not vanish after the United States acquired Florida. It persisted in three ways. First, in advocacy for the former Spanish system by some white patriarchs who fathered mixed race families. Free blacks and people of color also had an interest in maintaining their property and liberties. Second, Indians in Florida and escaped slaves who allied with them well knew how whites treated non-whites, and they fiercely resisted white authority. Third, the United States reacted to both of these in the context of fear that further slave revolutions in the Caribbean, colluding with the Indian-African alliance in Florida, might destabilize slavery in the United States.

In the new Florida Territory, Spanish era practices based on a less severe construction of race were soon quashed, but not without the articulate objections of a cadre of whites. Led by Zephaniah Kingsley, their arguments challenged the strict biracial system of the United States. This was a component of the persistent borderland, but their arguments were, in the end, also in the service of slavery and white patriarchy.

The persistent border included this ongoing resistance to strict biracialism, but it was even more distinct because of the Indian-African resistance to the United States that was not in the service of slavery. To defend slavery and whiteness, the United States sent thousands of its military, millions of its treasure, and spent years to subdue the Indian-African alliance and to make Florida and its long shorelines a barrier to protect whiteness and patriarchy in the Deep South.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • ABSTRACT
  • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  • TABLE OF CONTENTS
  • LIST OF FIGURES
  • LIST OF TABLES
  • CHAPTER
  • I INTRODUCTION
    • The problem
    • An imaginary line
  • II FLORIDA’S BORDERS
    • First-contact Florida.
    • First Spanish Period, 1565-1763
    • British Period, 1763-1784
    • Second Spanish Period, 1784-1821
    • The Adams-Onís Treaty, 1818-1821
  • III A NEW TERRITORY
    • “The Province is as yet such a Blank”
    • First impressions
    • “warm climates are congenial to bad habits.”
    • “There is such a heterogeneous mass here.”
    • Who was in Florida?
    • Appendages and sustenance
    • Who can be a citizen?
    • “no law except the law of force”
    • “the retreat of the opulent, the gay and the fashionable.”
    • Citizenship, lotteries and matrimony
    • Color, race, and subjection of the borderland
  • IV OPPORTUNITIES IN A CARRIBEAN PLACE
    • Borderland or profitable periphery
    • Unlocking the economy
    • Infrastructure
    • “In a Spanish street”
    • “The sickness rages here.”
    • “an added peculiar charm”
  • V INDIAN LANDS AND CARIBBEAN THREATS
    • “ – the land was not theirs, but belonged to the Seminoles”.
    • Natural and unnatural connections
    • “apprehensions of hostilities on our southern border”
    • “a separate and distinct people.”
    • “most exposed, but important frontiers of the Union”
    • “apply force to a much greater extent.”
    • “the horrors of St. Domingo enacted over again in earnest”
  • VI WHITE ADVOCATES
    • Liberty for people of color
    • Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr. and Anna Madigigine Jai
    • Kingsley’s arguments
    • “this species of our population”
    • “the grand chain of security”
    • “the materials of our own dissolution”
    • Colonization versus naturalization
    • The difference between biracial and multi-tier slavery
    • Memorial to Congress of 1833
    • Leaving Florida for Haiti
    • Other signers
    • Another white advocate
    • Legacy of white advocacy
  • VII BLACK CITIZENS
    • Free blacks in Florida
    • Slavery laws and manumission
    • Free black rights reduced
    • Free blacks resist
    • Mixed families, white allies
    • Parents and children
    • The good old flag of Spain
  • VIII CONCLUSION
    • Summary
    • True to our native land
    • The defining feature
    • The insecure Deep South
  • REFERENCES
  • APPENDIX A
  • APPENDIX B
  • VITA

LIST OF FIGURES

  1. La Florida, 1584
  2. Drake’s attack on St. Augustine, May 28 and 29, 1586
  3. Spanish missions in Florida, 1680
  4. Castillo de San Marcos, St. Augustine
  5. Fuerte Negro
  6. East Florida, 1826
  7. Florida, 1834
  8. Kingsley home, Fort George Island
  9. Anna’s house, Fort George Island
  10. Former slave dwellings on Fort George Island
  11. Ruins of Fort George Island slave dwellings

LIST OF TABLES

  • 1 Northeast Florida Non-Indian population
  • 2 Non-Spanish immigration to Florida during Second Spanish Period
  • 3 Population of St. Augustine during the Second Spanish Period
  • 4 Percent free blacks to slaves in 1830
  • 5 Percent free blacks to slaves in 1860
  • 6 Pre-emancipation census
  • 7 Free blacks in households, 1830
  • 8 Memorial signers’ households, 1830 and 1840
  • 9 Free blacks as a percent of total population during antebellum years
  • 10 Population of Nassau, Duval and St. Johns counties
  • 11 Black baptisms in St. Augustine, 1784-1821
  • A-1 1820 United States Census
  • A-2 1830 United States Census
  • A-3 1840 United States Census
  • A-4 1850 United States Census
  • A-5 1860 United States Census
  • A-6 1840 Florida Census
  • A-7 1850 Florida Census
  • A-8 1860 Florida Census

Read the entire dissertation here.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany

Posted in Books, Europe, History, Media Archive, Monographs, United Kingdom on 2011-07-30 05:24Z by Steven

A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany

Palgrave Macmillan
September 2010
282 pages
6 x 9 1/4 inches, Includes: 50 pgs illus
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-230-10473-0, ISBN10: 0-230-10473-8
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-230-10472-3, ISBN10: 0-230-10472-X

Maria Höhn, Professor of History
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Martin Klimke, Research Fellow
German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

Based on an award-winning international research project and photo exhibition, this poignant and beautifully illustrated book examines the experiences of African American GIs in Germany and the unique insights they provide into the civil rights struggle at home and abroad. Thanks in large part to its military occupation of Germany after World War II, America’s unresolved civil rights agenda was exposed to worldwide scrutiny as never before. At the same time, its ambitious efforts to democratize German society after the defeat of Nazism meant that West Germany was exposed to American ideas of freedom and democracy to a much larger degree than many other countries. As African American GIs became increasingly politicized, they took on a particular significance for the Civil Rights Movement in light of Germany’s central role in the Cold War. While the effects of the Civil Rights Movement reverberated across the globe, Germany represents a special case that illuminates a remarkable period in American and world history.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Closing Ranks: World War I and the Rise of Hitler
  • Fighting on Two Fronts: World War II and Civil Rights
  • “We Will Never Go Back to the Old Way Again”: African American GIs and the Occupation of Germany
  • Setting the Stage for Brown: Desegregating the Army in Germany
  • Bringing Civil Rights to East and West: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Cold War Berlin
  • Revolutionary Alliances: The Rise of Black Power
  • Heroes of the Other America: East German Solidarity with the African American Freedom Struggle
  • A Call for Justice: The Racial Crisis in the Military and the GI Movement
  • Epilogue
Tags: , , , , ,

GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany

Posted in Books, Europe, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2011-07-29 01:39Z by Steven

GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany

University of North Carolina Press
December 2001
360 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 13 photos, 1 map, notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-5375-7

Maria Höhn, Professor of History
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

With the outbreak of the Korean War, the poor, rural West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate became home to some of the largest American military installations outside the United States. In GIs and Frauleins, Maria Hohn offers a rich social history of this German-American encounter and provides new insights into how West Germans negotiated their transition from National Socialism to a consumer democracy during the 1950s.

Focusing on the conservative reaction to the American military presence, Hohn shows that Germany’s Christian Democrats, though eager to be allied politically and militarily with the United States, were appalled by the apparent Americanization of daily life and the decline in morality that accompanied the troops to the provinces. Conservatives condemned the jazz clubs and striptease parlors that Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe opened to cater to the troops, and they expressed scorn toward the German women who eagerly pursued white and black American GIs. While most Germans rejected the conservative effort to punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs, they vilified the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. Hohn demonstrates that German anxieties over widespread Americanization were always debates about proper gender norms and racial boundaries, and that while the American military brought democracy with them to Germany, it also brought Jim Crow.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • Abbreviations
  • Introduction
  • 1 “… And Then the Americans Came Again”
  • 2 Living with the New Neighbors
  • 3 When Jim Crow Came to the German Heimat
  • 4 Heimat in Turmoil
  • 5 Controlling the “Veronikas” and “Soldiers’ Brides”
  • 6 Keeping America at Bay
  • 7 Punishing the “Veronikas”
  • 8 The Kaiserslautern Steinstrasse Affair
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Introduction

In October 1952, the German Bundestag declared a large stretch of Rhineland-Palatinate—a poor, rural state in the southwest of Germany—to be a moral disaster area.  The legislators resorted to this dramatic step because the buildup of American military personnel in West Germany in the wake of the Korean War had allegedly wrecked havoc in the provinces. The American troop deployment, they complained, instead of creating a bulwark against Soviet expansionism, had brought striptease parlors, prostitution, common-law marriages, and unprecedented levels of illegitimacy. The Christian Democratic legislators, who dominated the debate, were equally distressed to report that in one small town alone, 343 German women were neglecting their children because they were in the employ of the American occupation power. The counties of Birkenfeld and Kaiserslautern, home to the garrison communities Baumholder and Kaiserslautern, were identified as the key trouble spots. Convinced that the American-induced economic boom had rendered the rural population oblivious to the moral emergency, the conservative Christian Democrats demanded federal intervention. With great dismay, the Bundestag resolved that West Germany’s military rearmament underway in Rhineland-Palatinate needed to be accompanied by a moral rearmament of the state’s population.

Discovering this anxious Bundestag debate during the preliminary stages of my research significantly changed the direction of this book. When I first began my project on the American military in Rhineland-Palatinate, I set out to explore how West Germans had negotiated their transition from Nazism into consumer democracy during the 1950s. I had chosen my topic because I speculated that the extensive presence of American military personnel and their injection of the “American way of life” would produce a rich collection of sources to comment on those crucial founding years of the Federal Republic. My exploration of the German-American encounter was to provide insights into how economic, social, and cultural changes after 1945 played out in the everyday life of people. How did Germans, after the experience of Nazism, manage to establish a successful democracy in West Germany? Moreover, I hoped that the German-American encounter would reveal how Germans assessed the transformations in their lives. Would they agree with those historians who dismiss “Americanization” as an explanatory model by insisting that the transformation of German society after 1945 was part of a larger process of modernization that had been long underway and was merely disrupted by World War II and the postwar suffering? What would Germans living in close proximity to the American military bases have to say to the Westernization scholars who do not ignore America’s impact on postwar Germany but nonetheless stress that the Bonn Republic succeeded because West Germany’s political and cultural élites abandoned their resistance to the “Western” liberal tradition?…

…By exploring local reactions to the conservative project, I show that the moral rearmament of German society is only one aspect, albeit an important one, of the 1950s. By the second part of the decade, conservative observers in Rhineland-Palatinate provided exasperated accounts of their failure to keep the population from eagerly embracing the prosperity and social mobility that the American-induced economic boom entailed. Their accounts also bemoan the fact that the strict morality that the deeply conservative Christian Democratic state and federal governments were trying to enforce through the Christian welfare agencies, the police, and the courts did not play well in the provinces. Most Germans were unwilling to return to the rigid pre-Weimar sexual norms that conservatives wanted to reimpose. The unprecedented prosperity of the Korea Boom convinced all too many that the era of deprivation and self-sacrifice was over; indeed, the time had come to “live for once.” In light of their experience with Nazism, many Germans also found the conservative program intrusive and inappropriate for the new democracy. Consequently, the population rejected the conservative effort to stigmatize and punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs. Notwithstanding the concerted efforts of the chruches and of state and federal ministries, even in the deepest provinces, attitudes toward premarital sexuality and women’s sexual expressiveness outside of marriage relaxed considerably by the later part of the decade.

However, this greater tolerance in sexual matters tells only part of the story. Germans negotiated this overall relaxation of sexual mores by vilifying as unacceptable the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. When Germans, in both East and West, read about the American garrison communities during the 1950s, the focus was increasingly on the “many” black GIs who met “sexually unrestrained” women in the bars that Eastern European Jews made available to them. The prostitution records of Baumholder and the press coverage of the garrison communities reveal that attitudes toward such relationships hardened considerably, especially after Germany regained sovereignty in 1955.

Historians of postwar Germany have only recently begun to explore how racial hierarchies continued to inform notions of German identity. Exciting new scholarship on German reactions to American popular culture and German policies toward the children born of German mothers and African American fathers make important contributions to the field. That scholarship also shows that it would be too simple to assume a straightforward continuity from Nazi racism to racial attitudes in the 1950s. A process of negotiation was at work as liberal policy makers, influenced by social science research in the United States, distanced themselves from the biologically based racial hierarchies of the past. While the language of eugenics disappeared, this did not mean that racial hierarchies ceased to matter. German policy makers, for example, drew on this psychologically based language of difference to condemn jazz and rock and roll for undermining proper class, race, and gender boundaries.

My book contributes to this work by expanding the exploration of German racial attitudes beyond those of politicians and policy makers to include such debates at the grassroots level. The fact that millions of black GIs have spent time in Germany since 1945 makes it clear that German racial debates after 1945 did not take place in a vacuum. Because of the national attention the garrison communities received throughout the 1950s—not just in Germany’s tabloid press—these debates on race also did not remain just local affairs but engaged the country as a whole.

We know from Heide Fehrenbach’s important work that during the late 1940s and the 1950s the German liberal discourse on race shifted from a preoccupation with Jews to an overwhelming concern with blacks. However, in the garrison towns, that shift is less manifest for a number of reasons. Most importantly, debates on race are not driven by the self-conscious efforts of national policy makers to overcome the shameful Nazi past. Just the same, despite the murderous rage of the Nazi regime, Jews were not “absent” from German communities or German consciousness during the 1950s. Germans in these communities encountered Eastern European Jews and American blacks simultaneously and on a daily basis. Consequently, German debates on race were marked by the coexistence of separate but also overlapping discourses on “racial others.”

This study is also a first attempt to argue that German racial attitudes after 1945 can be understood only if they are examined in light of their face-to-face interaction with those of the American military. Black GIs, and not just those from the Jim Crow South, experienced in Germany a tolerance and acceptance unknown to them in their own country. Their status, first as conquerors and then as occupation soldiers, made possible unprecedented encounters with white Germans. In My American Journey, General Colin Powell gave voice to that experience when he recalled his service in Germany in 1958: “[For] black GIs, especially those out of the South, Germany was a breath of freedom—they could go where they wanted, eat where they wanted, and date whom they wanted, just like other people. The dollar was strong, the beer good, and the German people friendly, since we were all that stood between them and the Red hordes. War, at least the Cold War in Germany, was not hell.” Yet the record also shows that side-by-side with this tolerance existed a profound unease and often even resentment over the presence of black GIs. Nowhere were the limits of German racial tolerance more forcefully expressed than in the condemnation evoked by the relationships between black GIs and white German women.

Observing the deep reluctance, if not outright opposition, in the American military toward the relationships between German women and black American soldiers convinced many Germans, and not just conservatives, that their own racial prejudices should not mark them as Nazis. Thus, when Germans during the 1950s condemned the relationships between German women and African American soldiers, they cited the model of racial segregation of their American mentor as informing their own convictions. Germans were able to do so with ease because American opposition to interracial sexuality and interracial marriage was so similar to their own pre-Nazi models of racial exclusion. Thus Germans could reject the racial excesses of Nazism while at the same time invoking racial hierarchies of exclusion that were based in timeless laws of nature and tied firmly to the Western liberal tradition…

Read the entire Introduction here.

Tags: , , , , ,