Mixed Race Studies

Editor who grew up black in Nazi Germany dies

The Miami Herald
2013-01-21

Freida Frisaro, Associated Press

MIAMI — Hans Massaquoi, a former managing editor of Ebony magazine who wrote a distinctive memoir about his unusual childhood growing up black in Nazi Germany, has died. He was 87.

His son said Massaquoi died Saturday, on his 87th birthday, in Jacksonville. He had been hospitalized over the Christmas holidays.

“He had quite a journey in life,” said Hans J. Massaquoi, Jr., of Detroit. “Many have read his books and know what he endured. But most don’t know that he was a good, kind, loving, fun-loving, fair, honest, generous, hard-working and open-minded man. He respected others and commanded respect himself. He was dignified and trustworthy. We will miss him forever and try to live by his example.”…

…He writes that one of his saddest moments as a child was when his homeroom teacher told him he couldn’t join the Hitler Youth.

“Of course I wanted to join. I was a kid and most of my friends were joining,” he said. “They had cool uniforms and they did exciting things – camping, parades, playing drums.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Bringing together our collective stories

The African Courier: The International Magazine Published in Germany
October/November 2012

Gyavira Lasana

The second annual convention of the Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey took place at Barnard College in New York City recently. Our New York-based contributing editor Gyavira Lasana reports on the convention, which focused on the theme of “What Is the Black German Experience?”

“Black German studies did not come from academia,” insisted Peggy Piesche, “but from young people who wanted to know their own history.” Professor Piesche, who was born and raised in the former East Germany and who now teaches at Hamilton College in New York, asserted her observation during an early-morning panel discussion on “Teaching the Black German Experience” at the second conference of the Black German Cultural Society (BGCS) held recently at Barnard College in New York City.

Piesche’s words echoed a decided difference between Black Americans and Black Germans on the study and teaching of the Black German experience, a difference that would reverberate throughout the conference. The panel also included Noah Sow, the German poet/writer and music performer who was the keynote speaker at the first BGCS conference last year in Washington DC. Sow suggested that the term Afro-German be replaced by Afro-Deutsch, which is surely more German. All in all, the panel noted that Afro-Deutsch studies continue to fascinate students in the US, and are thriving and growing. That is questionable.

Here in America, Black professors of German are reaching retirement age, and they are not being replaced. Black American students are following the global trend and pursuing Asian studies – Chinese, Japanese and Korean. German lies quite low on the list of options for study. Still, the Black professors of German maintain a high degree of enthusiasm, fuelled mostly by the emerging focus on the history and culture of Blacks in Germany…

…These highly personal stories reflect the heartache, confusion and repeated dysfunction of many (but not all) biracial children growing up in the American milieu. Their quest is often identity: Am I Black or White (in this case German)? Or something in between? Is a mixed-race identity desirable/acceptable?

There is a growing discourse and body of literature on these topics in the US, but they tend to be marginalised by the journey of Blacks born and raised in Germany who more often cite systemic and day-to-day racism. For example, during an earlier panel discussion on “Claiming the Black German Experience”, Lara-Sophie Milagro, a Black German actress and founder of Label Noir, a Berlin-based Black theatre company, stated that “what I had considered to be my personal struggle is really the struggle of all people of colour in Germany, and what I had regarded as my personal problem and failure – not to be a real German and full-value human being – was really the problem and failure of a privileged and ignorant White majority.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Mischling Experience in Oral History

The Oral History Review
Volume 35, Issue 2 (2008)
pages 139-158
DOI: 10.1093/ohr/ohn025

Peter Monteath, Associate Professor of History
Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia

This paper examines the usefulness of oral history in dealing with the fate of the so-called Mischlinge in Nazi Germany; that is, people categorized by the authorities as being of “mixed race.” It argues that oral history provides an invaluable supplement to the written, official record. The latter is by its nature a view “from above” and from the perpetrators; it generally excludes the perspective of the victims of Nazi racial policy. Moreover, as an overview of the treatment of Mischlinge demonstrates, there were stark discrepancies between policy and practice which are difficult to comprehend on the basis of the written record alone, but which are well exemplified through a study of individual experiences. The paper uses several examples of such experiences collected from three separate video testimony repositories to analyze the nature of those experiences, detecting discrepancies between official policy and practice and observing the considerable variations in the nature and harshness of those experiences. Finally, the oral history record is found to be invaluable in tracing some of the longer-term consequences of the Third Reich for surviving Mischlinge, especially in terms of their constructions of identity and the ways in which, for the period after the Second World War, they dealt with the ascribed identities which had so heavily impacted them in their early years.

Read or purchase the article here.

Germans Loving Others: Narrating Interracial Romance in Kenya, North America, and Guatemala

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 70: Central European History Society 3
Friday, 2013-01-04: 08:30-10:00 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom II (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Andrew Zimmerman, George Washington University

Papers:

• “Seeking Winnetou: German Women and the Appeal of American Indian Masculinity” / H. Glenn Penny, University of Iowa
• “Romantic Dimensions of the Second Scramble for Africa: ‘A White Lady Is Like Gold for Us’” / Nina Berman, Ohio State University, Columbus
• “Between Twin Souls: German-Maya Children and Politics of Interracial Romance in Guatemala, 1930–45” / Julie A. Gibbings, University of Manitoba

Comment: Lora Wildenthal, Rice University

The German fascination with the non-European world and its native populations, as documented and imagined in various forms of the German cultural archive, presents intriguing questions for scholars of race, sex, and empire. The German love affair with natives, including North American Indians, Bedouin nomads, and Masai warriors, dates back to the early days of colonial expansion, and gave rise to romanticized representations and staged performances of native nobility and ethnic pride. These cultural representations produced sentiments and desires that shaped contact and conduct as Germans sought out and stumbled upon native peoples abroad. While scholarship of the past two decades has explored a wide range of political, economic, and cultural aspects of the colonial and postcolonial encounter, interracial contact has received less attention. Scholars have given short shrift to the stunning array of unofficial, personal, and often quite intimate interconnections between Germans and non-Europeans during the modern era.

The proposed panel addresses this lacuna in scholarship, and focuses on the question of whether interracial love subverts or replicates the colonial and postcolonial histories that produced socio-economic inequalities, gendered norms, and racial hierarchies. The papers in this panel explore these questions through the lives, narratives, and memories of Germans, native peoples, and mixed-race children in three vastly different places: postcolonial Kenya, North America, and Guatemala. They collectively challenge and problematize assumptions of colonial and postcolonial scholars about the regulatory norms of interracial sex that shielded white female sexuality from dark, colonized men and often made interracial children the subject of state scrutiny and care. The papers demonstrate how German romance with natives could, in practice, vary widely across historical and geographical contexts, particularly with regard to cultural, economic, and political dimensions of these relationships. Finally, the papers consider the agency of the non-German partners in these interracial and binational relationships. The panels intends to shed new light on interracial and binational romance by probing questions of power and inequality in a comparative and transnational framework.

Exhibition brings black Germans’ stories to light

DW
2012-11-09

Helen Whittle

An exhibit gives voice to the histories of Africans, African-Americans and Afro-Germans from the past 300 years of German history. It presents a differentiated perspective on the lives and histories of blacks in Germany.

Asked what comes to mind when they think about Germany, many foreigners conjure up stereotypical images of Oktoberfest, the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall.

But these images of Teutonic culture and society do little to reflect the diversity of the contemporary, multiethnic Federal Republic of Germany where one fifth of the population has an ethnic minority background, according to an exhibition that opened Saturday (3.11.2012) at Cologne’s Alte Feuerwache.

Jonas Behre, director at the Initiative for Black People in Germany (ISD), helped organize the exhibit titled “Homestory Deutschland: Black Biographies from History and the Present” and which provides a collective self-portrait, giving voice to the complex and varied histories of Africans, African-Americans and Afro-Germans from the past three centuries of German history.

“Even though black people have lived in Germany for hundreds of years, it is not viewed as a reality of everyday life,” said Behre, who was born in Eritrea but has lived for virtually all of his life in Germany. “And that can be seen in the discrimination and exclusion in daily life, and that’s what we hope to tackle with this exhibition.”…

…Another of the biographies illuminated in the exhibition is that of Afro-German actor, journalist and activist Theodor Wonja Michael. Born in Hamburg in 1925, Michael is Germany’s oldest living Afro-German. His father moved from Cameroon—then a German colony—to Germany in 1904.

Denied access to higher education on the basis of skin color, he would have liked to have become an archeologist or an ethnologist. But as a young man, one of the few possibilities he had to earn a living wage was as an actor in colonial films or “Völkerschauen”—the ethnological expositions or “human zoos” popular in Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

After the end of the Second World War, Michael found it hard to get work he managed to get work as an actor of the theater stage.

Michael remembers how his father always felt it was his natural right to live in Germany and how this attitude remains integral to own perspective on life as an Afro-German today.

“Afro-German means that one has two backgrounds, namely an African one and a German one,” Michael said. “I think it’s an advantage having an insight into two cultures. I see it as a very positive thing.”…

Read the entire article here.

Against Black-Face Roles in German Theatre

Avaaz: Community Petitions
2012-10-14

Gyavira Lasana

Last January Schlosspark Theatre in Berlin opened “I’m Not Rappaport” by Herb Gardner. The production featured a white actor in black-face in the role of Midge Carter, portrayed in New York by Ossie Davis. When concerned theatre professionals complained on the website of Schlosspark, they were blocked; yet neo-Nazis, who charged that the “niggers should go back to Africa,” were allowed access. Schlosspark insisted the production was not “racist,” that they cast a white actor because they could not find a “qualified black actor.” The widow of Herb Gardner has deflected inquiries about the rights to “Rapport” to the agent in Germany. And she points to a 1986 conversation in which Gardner agreed to black-face “if a suitable black actor could not be found.” That time and circumstance have passed. I am asking Actors Equity and the Dramatists Guild to decline participation in productions featuring black-face and condemn its use in Germany.

Why this is important

The German theatre use of “black-faced” white actors in roles written and designed for blacks subverts the intentions of the dramatists and denies work to black actors. On a broader scale, black-face demeans black Germans and reinforces racist societal and political positions of power.

For more information, click here.

Jazz, Race Collide With War In 1930s Europe

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2012-03-26

Jacki Lyden, Host

The novel Half Blood Blues explores an often overlooked slice of history: black jazz musicians in Germany on the eve of World War II. The book moves from 1992 to 1939, from Baltimore to Berlin to Paris. It’s told by an elderly black jazz musician and his friend who survived the war. Guest host Jacki Lyden speaks with author Esi Edugyan.

Transcript:

This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I’m Jacki Lyden. Michel Martin is away this week. Now we’re going to take a trip back in time with the help of a prize-winning novelist.

The novel, “Half Blood Blues,” considers a slice of history that often gets overlooked: black jazz musicians and their fate in Germany just before World War II. The novel moves back and forth from 1992 to 1939, from Baltimore to Berlin, Berlin to Paris and it’s told through the eyes of an elderly Baltimore black jazz musician, Sid Griffiths, and his lifelong friend, Chippewa Jones, all in invented period slang.

The novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize this year and won the Giller Prize in Canada and its author, Esi Edugyan, joins us now from member station KUOW in Seattle. Welcome.

ESI EDUGYAN: Thank you.

LYDEN: Esi, just to establish, you are a Canadian author.

EDUGYAN: I am.

LYDEN: And you live in…

EDUGYAN: I was born and raised in Calgary.

LYDEN: Born and raised in Calgary, of Ghanaian parents and you live in Victoria?

EDUGYAN: Yes.

LYDEN: Well, please tell us about this novel, which has had so much success. Tell us about the men at the center of your story. They’re jazz musicians from a group called the Hot Time Swingers. We meet them in Paris. They already have escaped from Berlin. They’ve met Duke Ellington and at the center of the group is this really intriguing character you’ve invented called Hieronymus Falk. And he is eventually picked up by the Gestapo in June of 1940. Tell us about these fellows and Hieronymus.

EDUGYAN: Well, essentially, the novel is told in two parts and the first part centers around the Hot Time Swingers who, you know, are a jazz band who’s had quite a bit of success playing in Berlin. And, you know, now the Third Reich has been ushered in and they’re trying to decide exactly how to proceed now that they’ve been prohibited from playing in public.

And so the band consists of two African-American players, Sid and Chip from Baltimore, as well as the German players, Paul, who’s a pianist who has a Jewish background, and Ernst. And then Hieronymus Falk, who is an Afro-German, the child of a French colonial soldier and a German mother, and he’s the trumpet prodigy.

LYDEN: Hieronymus Falk really intrigued me, Esi Edugyan. He is, you say in the novel, the German word was mischling. He is of mixed race and there really were such Afro-Germans prior to the Nazis taking power…

Read the entire transcript here. Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here.

Blackface, Whiteness and the Power of Definition in German Contemporary Theatre

The International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” invites Bühnenwatch
Studio 1 Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2 / 10 997 Berlin
2012-10-16, 11:00-16:30 CEST (Local Time)

With presentations by Sharon Otoo, Sandrine Micossé-Aikins, Dr. Daniele Daude, Dr. Azadeh Sharifi and Julia Lemmle

Moderated by Oliver Kontny

Program

11.00 Introduction by Oliver Kontny
11.30 “Reclaiming Innocence: Unmasking Representations of Whiteness in German Theatre,” Sharon Otoo
12.00 “Not just a Blackened Face: The Back Stage of a Stereotyp,” Sandrine Micossé-Aikins
12.30 “The (Un)Chosen Bodies of Myths. Performing Race on Opera Stage,” Dr. Daniele Daude
13.00-13.30 Discussion
Lunch
15.00 “Black artists in German theatre,” Dr. Azadeh Sharifi
15.30 ““Ich bin kein Nazi!” The blackface debate in the German mainstream media,” Julia Lemmle
16.00-16.30 Discussion…

For more information, click here.

Afro-German Literature and Films

Gerlind Institute for Cultural Studies, Oakland, California
4 two-hour classes

Marion Gerlind, Founder and Executive Director

This seminar will familiarize students with the history of a minority population in Germany who has gained significant visibility in German media since the 1980s. Having confronted racist stereotyping and media (mis)representations, Black Germans have formed empowering social and historical identities around the self-label “Afro-German.” Using the classic book Farbe bekennen (Showing Our Colors), autobiographical essays, excerpts from novels and films, including later work by May Ayim and Ika Hügel-Marshall, students will study pre-colonial representations of Africa in Germany, Afro-Germans in the Weimar Republic and under National Socialism, as well as after 1945 to the present.

This seminar will be conducted in German and/or English. Students are asked to read assigned texts prior to each session and be prepared to contribute to email discussions.

Invisible Woman: Growing up Black in Germany

University of California, Berkeley
Center for Race & Gender
Multicultural Community Center, Hearst Field Annex-D
2012-09-25, 12:40-14:00 PDT (Local Time)

A reading by Ika Hügel-Marshall

Ika Hügel-Marshall was the child of an African-American serviceman and a white German woman. Born and raised in post-Hitler Germany, she tells about her experience of anti-Black racism and how she came to terms with her identity as an Afro-German. Only at the age of 39 she met other Afro-Germans and was involved in setting up the “Initiative of Black Germans” (ISD). In 1993, she found her father in Chicago and met him and his family—a most profound experience.

For more infomation, click here.