Mixed Race Studies

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.

Documentary ‘Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story’ Tells Untold Stories of Bi-Racial World War II Era Children

The AFRO
2014-01-15

Maria Adebola

Emmy-winning journalist Regina Griffin was inspired to tell a story and that’s how her film, Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story was born.

A family friend, entrepreneur Doris McMillon, had told stories about growing up the half-Black, half-White child of a Black G.I. and White German woman and the story was horrifying. Unwanted by both nations, the children often lived their lives as unwanted, ignored and forgotten people,

“I got chills learning about their lives, in orphanages and beyond,” said Griffin.

Griffin transformed her research into a documentary about the lives of the babies. The film was screened recently in front of about 50 people at the William McGowan Theater located at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

The film scrapes the surface of the difficulties that resulted from the interracial relationships between Black soldiers and German women during World War II. Many of the children ended up being adopted or sent to orphanages because their German mothers feared the public scrutiny that came with having a mixed-race child out of wedlock.

Some of the Black soldiers who wanted to marry their German girlfriends found it difficult because the relationships were viewed as forbidden. Those who wanted to return home to the African-American girlfriends and sometimes wives didn’t want to bring along children whose presence would indicate they had been unfaithful.

The children were caught in the middle…

Read the entire article here.

Imagining Ourselves: What Does it Mean to be Part of the African Diaspora?

Think Africa Press
2013-11-21

Jean-Philippe Dedieu, Research Fellow
IRIS of the École des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

Tina Campt talks to Think Africa Press about black European subjectivities, the US’ dominance in diaspora studies, and how photographs tell us more than we might realise.

Tina Campt, Director of the Africana Studies Program at Barnard College, Columbia University, has been examining gender, race and diasporic formation in black communities in Germany and Europe more broadly for the last decade.

Her earliest works were insightful contributions to the growing scholarship on the overlooked history of African communities in imperial and post-colonial Europe. Her first book, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich, was an oral history acknowledging the participation of African minorities to the German history, from the Weimar Republic to the postwar period.

More recently, Campt has deepened her intellectual reflection by exploring the crucial issue of visual representation. In Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe, published last year by Duke University Press, she traces the emergence of a black (European) subject by analysing a rich photographic documentation that intertwines her own family albums with snapshots of black German families and studio portraits of West Indian migrants in England.

In an interview with Think Africa Press, Campt talked to the French scholar Jean-Philippe Dedieu about the intellectual discourses on diasporas across the Atlantic as well as the significance of photography for allowing black people to imagine themselves, freed from racial prejudice…

…How did you end working on Afro-Germans?

Serendipity. The first time I went to Germany, I went to Berlin to pass my language exams in graduate school. I was in Berlin before the wall fell, in ‘87, and it was an extraordinary experience because I had never been outside the United States and I had never experienced the particularly bizarre form of racism I encountered there. It was a concatenation of exoticism and ignorance that just did not fit with any of the forms of racism that I was familiar with as an African-American who grew up in Washington DC. When I went back a second time, I was studying in Bremen in a context with other African-Americans and Africans. That was incredibly revealing, and taught me more about how to understand some of the responses I was getting.

Toward the end of my stay I happened, literally happened, to meet an Afro-German man on the street and had a conversation with him about being black and German, and there was something that distinguished his experience from mine because, as he described it, he had no point of reference. I remember him saying, “I am only German. I don’t have a history of slavery. I don’t have a history of a community that has fought racism or that has battled discrimination. I’m at the point where I am trying to gather that, to martial that as a set of resources that I can draw on to create this thing that I call Blackness in Germany, or Afro-German. I’m doing that in the absence of what you have – your history as an African-American.”…

Read the entire interview here.

From hair care to racism, Afro-Germans share experiences online

DW: Deutsche Welle
Berlin/Bonn, Germany
2013-12-18

Lori Herber, Cologne

Two 20-somethings in Germany have launched krauselocke.de, the country’s first online portal with an Afro-German perspective. For many in the community, it’s more than hair advice – it’s a roadmap to identity

After growing up with few role models who looked like them, Afro-Germans Barbara Mabanza (left) and Esther Donkor (right) didn’t want the same thing to happen to girls in Germany’s next generation. So they created a website to bring together a community.

Twelve-year-old Magdalena Inou is one of those girls the two had in mind. Magdalena has her Austrian mother’s quick smile and her Cameroonian father’s kinky hair. Tonight those tresses are pulled into a ponytail. She sits beside her mother, Sylvia and is quick to point out the obvious.

“My hair is different from the hair of my mother,” she explains, matter-of-factly. Her mother, Sylvia Inou adds. “I have German hair. Austrian hair. Straight hair.”

They’ve traveled more than eight hours from Vienna to Cologne to meet more than 50 fellow members of the online community called “Krauselocke,” or “kinky curls.” They want to get tips on how to care for Magdalena’s hair and, most importantly, to show Magdalena she’s not alone…

Read the entire article here.

Rheinland

2013
Mokoari Street Productions
Berlin, Germany
Written and directed by Lemohang J. Mosese
Produced by Hannah Stockmann, Julius B. Franklin & Christian Wagner

During the first World War the French government forced African men—many coming from Senegal or Cameroon —from their colonies to fight for the French army in the Rheinland. ​In 1919, there were between 25,000 and 40,000 African soldiers from the colonies based in the Rhineland. After Germany’s defeat, some of the soldiers stayed and founded families.

Their lives, which were already scarred by discrimination and racism were threatened existentially when Hitler and the Nazi-Party seized power. In 1937 the so called Commission Number 3 was instated which had the secret order to sterilise all so called “Rheinlandbastards“, a derogatory term used for the offsprings of white German women and African men. Local officials reported the “Rheinlandbastards” living under their jurisdiction and with their help a vast number of children was forcefully sterilised or disappeared forever. In “Mein Kampf” Hitler referred to them as contaminators of the white race “by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe.”

Rheinland tells the story of the so called “Rheinlandbastards” through the eyes of 12-year-old Joachim, the son of the Senegalese Awa and the German Annemarie. Joachim is forced to deal with his identity when the village his family lives in becomes more and more hostile.

For more information, click here.

Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story

Regina Griffin Films, Inc.
2011
102 minutes
color
United States

Regina Griffin, Director

Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story reveals the tragic lives of biracial, bicultural children, unwanted, ignored and forgotten by enemy nations. Imagine being born in a place and time where racism and hatred run rampant, and your mother is white and German and your father is a black American serviceman. Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story tells the painful and personal story of a forgotten piece of world history through eyes of the people who suffered most.

• ŸBest Documentary, American Black Film Festival 2011
• Best Film, Audience Award, African-American Women in Cinema 2011
• HBO Finalist, Martha’s Vineyard Black Film Festival, 2011
• Best Documentary Nominee, Black Reel Awards, 2012

Blackness in Germany: Locating “Race” in Johannes Schaaf’s 1986 Film Adaptation of Michael Ende’s Fantasy Novel Momo

Focus on German Studies
Volume 19 (2012)
pages 133-148

Benjamin Nickl
Georgetown University

Michael Ende’s 1973 fantasy novel, Momo first became popular in West Germany. Decades later, the book remained successful in the unified Republic. Intended as a piece of alternative literature for children, the story advocates resistance to consumerism, capitalism, and the time bind, in which free market economies situate members of the working population. The novel’s protagonist is the titular character, a small girl named “Momo.” She fights her adversaries, the “Gray Agents,” who are sent by the “Timesaving Bank” to steal mankind’s unused time and use it to sustain their lives. What allows for Momo’s resistance to the time-thieves is her state of innocence, a natural purity which prevents the young heroine from falling prey to Western civilization’s dogma of capitalism.

Ende’s original text, which is now in its 47th edition, never explicitly connects Momo as a symbol of pristine nature to non-white notions of race. However, the cinematic adaptation does exactly that. Cast in the role of Momo, then eleven-year-old Afro-German actress Radost Bokel was the visibly “exoticized” female lead. Her race set Bokel apart from her white cast members in the German-Italian production. Director Johannes Schaaf chose to define Momo in the context of a racial discourse to construct knowledge about otherness as ethnic difference. I read this as an exclusion of ethnic minorities in Germany, underscored by German film’s long tradition of nationalism based on ethnic affiliation.

Schaaf’s adaptation perpetuates a racial bias, which occupies a large part of the country’s ethnic history. The film exemplifies the projection of identities on the black body and performative manifestations of (black) identity, which were authored by a white majority despite the actual presence of individuals who identify as black. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, “becoming black” was a widespread phenomenon in West Germany. In the wake of the nation’s politicized student movement in 1968 (“68’er Studentenbewegung”), a great part of the white population imagined “blackness” as a way to express (national-political) innocence and justified anger over being the victim of capitalist rule. White people appropriated racial features of the black body, which they believed was unrightfully oppressed by the establishment; hence they made claims to socio-cultural aspects of both Afro-German and Afro-American identity. Especially the German youth expressed their white afrophilia in terms of fierce socio-politic engagement and wide circulation of cultural products branded as “Afroblack”…

Read the entire article here.

Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe

Duke University Press
2012
256 pages
118 photographs, 10 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5074-3
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5056-9

Tina M. Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College

In Image Matters, Tina M. Campt traces the emergence of a black European subject by examining how specific black European communities used family photography to create forms of identification and community. At the heart of Campt’s study are two photographic archives, one composed primarily of snapshots of black German families taken between 1900 and 1945, and the other assembled from studio portraits of West Indian migrants to Birmingham, England, taken between 1948 and 1960. Campt shows how these photographs conveyed profound aspirations to forms of national and cultural belonging. In the process, she engages a host of contemporary issues, including the recoverability of non-stereotypical life stories of black people, especially in Europe, and their impact on our understanding of difference within diaspora; the relevance and theoretical approachability of domestic, vernacular photography; and the relationship between affect and photography. Campt places special emphasis on the tactile and sonic registers of family photographs, and she uses them to read the complexity of “race” in visual signs and to highlight the inseparability of gender and sexuality from any analysis of race and class. Image Matters is an extraordinary reflection on what vernacular photography enabled black Europeans to say about themselves and their communities.

Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich

University of Michigan Press
2004
296 pages
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-472-03138-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-472-02160-4

Tina M. Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College

It’s hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity.

Tina M. Campt’s Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of individuals, with important distinctions from other accounts. Most strikingly, Campt centers her arguments on race, rather than anti-Semitism. She also provides an oral history as background for her study, interviewing two Black German subjects for her book.

In the end the author comes face to face with an inevitable question: Is there a relationship between the history of Black Germans and those of other black communities?

The answers to Campt’s questions make Other Germans essential reading in the emerging study of what it means to be black and German in the context of a society that looked at anyone with non-German blood as racially impure at best.

Contents

• Front Matter
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race, Memory, and Historical Representation: Contextualizing Black German Narratives of the Third Reich
• Part I: Echoes of Imagined Danger – Specters of Racial Mixture
  • Chapter 1: “Resonant Echoes”: The Rhineland Campaign and Converging Specters of Racial Mixture
  • Chapter 2: Confronting Racial Danger, Neutralizing Racial Pollution: Afro-Germans and the National Socialist Sterilization Program
• Part II: Memory Narratives/Memory Technologies: Race, Gendering, and the Politics of Memory Work
  • Chapter 3: Conversations with the “Other Within”: Memories of a Black German Coming of Age in the Third Reich
  • Chapter 4: Identifying as the “Other Within”: National Socialist Racial Politics and an Afro-German Childhood in the Third Reich
  • Chapter 5: Diaspora Space, Ethnographic Space – Writing History Between the Lines: A Postscript
• Appendix: Original German Interview Excerpts
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index