{"id":57735,"date":"2019-03-03T03:03:29","date_gmt":"2019-03-03T03:03:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=57735"},"modified":"2019-03-03T03:04:05","modified_gmt":"2019-03-03T03:04:05","slug":"that-was-the-worst-day-of-my-life-recrafting-family-through-memory-race-and-rejection-in-post-wwii-germany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=57735","title":{"rendered":"That was the Worst Day of My Life: Recrafting Family through Memory, Race, and Rejection in Post-WWII Germany"},"content":{"rendered":"

That was the Worst Day of My Life: Recrafting Family through Memory, Race, and Rejection in Post-WWII Germany<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Genealogy<\/a>
\nVolume 1, Issue 2 (2017)<\/a>
\n25 pages
\nDOI: 10.3390\/genealogy1020011<\/a><\/p>\n

Tracey Owens Patton<\/strong><\/a>, Professor
\nDepartment of Communication & Journalism
\nUniversity of Wyoming<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"Genealogy<\/a>
\nFigure 1. Ebony<\/em> October 1948 (on left); \u201cBrown Babies<\/a> Adopted by African American Families, Jet Magazine<\/em>, 8 November 1951 (on right) (Jet Magazine 1951).<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

This research project is a historical and narrative study of cross-racial, international couplings between Black U.S. servicemen and White German women during WWII<\/a> and the children who resulted from these relationships. Once pejoratively referred to as \u201cBrown Babies<\/a>,\u201d or worse, often both the U.S. and German governments collaborated in the destruction of families through forbidding interracial coupling and encouraging White German women to either abort mixed raced babies or give up these children for international adoption in an effort to keep Germany<\/a> White. Using my own family\u2019s history to show that mixed race children are the dross<\/a> that needed to be removed from Germany, I employed memory and post-memory as my theoretical framing, coupled with authoethnography<\/a>, family interviews, and narratives as my methodological tools. Of primary concern is what place Black German children and their mothers were allowed to occupy in the German national imagination and to what extent their individual rights and interests were superseded by the assertion of state interest in managing the German citizenry. Ultimately, it is argued that different tactics of constituting Germanness as homogenously White comes at the expense German women\u2019s rights over their bodies and the exclusion of mixed race Black German children.<\/p>\n

Read the entire article HTML<\/a> or PDF<\/a> format.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Using my own family\u2019s history to show that mixed race children are the dross that needed to be removed from Germany, I employed memory and post-memory as my theoretical framing, coupled with authoethnography, family interviews, and narratives as my methodological tools.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,28,459,8,25],"tags":[3228,28827,2948,27653],"class_list":["post-57735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-europe","category-history","category-media-archive","category-women","tag-afro-germans","tag-genealogy","tag-germany","tag-tracey-owens-patton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57735"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57738,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57735\/revisions\/57738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}