http://www.abiolatv.com/2010/12/black-women-europe-germany-travel.html
About an American travelling and loving in Berlin.
Enjoy!
STRANDED – produced by an official Berlin homegirl
Filed under Culture
Afro-Germans and the Problems of Cultural Location
All Americans, other than the indigenous people, are relative newcomers to this land and can claim no special privileges based on anteriority. In no way, therefore, can the idea of Americanism be applied to the situation of the Afro-German and Germanism. To be German, then, is pre-eminently to be German by native ancestry. It is probably more equivalent to the idea of the Native American being the true American. To be African and German, in the German mind, is not to be German. Therein is the locational problem for the Afro-German, the Turk, Italian, Jew, and Albanian. But even in this instance the Afro-German is able to claim pre-eminence because of “some” German blood. Only color remains as the badge of non-Germanism since Germans are supposed to be white, and the ideal German is pale with blue eyes and blond hair, the essential characteristics of whiteness in the mythology of race.
Interesting article. Not sure I totally agree with his assesment that citizenship by birth or naturalization in the US represents a “unifying factor” that makes everyone with the same citizenship accepted as 100% first class equals. Otherwise this is a pretty good article showing another Afro-German perspective. I think you can compare his ideas of the problems of “cultural location” to immigrant Americans and even to 1st/2nd generation Americans of immigrant descent who are sometimes also seen as “others”.
Hat tip to Mixed Race Studies for highlighting this article.
Filed under Culture
Dissertation on Afro-German Identity Formation
Filed under Uncategorized
Read “Other Germans” online
http://press.umich.edu/titleDetailLookInside.do;jsessionid=B3B03593415DF709FD665BEA16B041DC?id=17684
To read about the experiences of Afro-Germans in Germany during WWII check the entire book at the link above.
Filed under afro-german, history, WWII
BLACK GERMAN HOLOCAUST VICTIMS
So much of our history is lost to us because we often don’t write
the history books, don’t film the documentaries, or don’t pass the accounts
down from generation to generation.
One documentary now touring the film festival circuit, telling us to
“Always Remember” is “Black Survivors of the Holocaust” (1997).
Outside the U.S.., the film is entitled “Hitler’s Forgotten
Victims”(Afro-Wisdom Productions). It codifies another dimension to the
“Never Forget” Holocaust story–our dimension.
Did you know that in the 1920′s, there were 24,000 Blacks living in
Germany? Neither did I. Here’s how it happened, and how many of them were
eventually caught unawares by the events of the Holocaust.
Like most West European nations, Germany established colonies in
Africa in the late 1800′s in what later became Togo, Cameroon, Namibia, and
Tanzania. German genetic experiments began there, most notably involving
prisoners taken from the 1904 Heroro Massacre that left 60,000 Africans
dead, following a 4-year revolt against German colonization. After the
shellacking Germany received in World War I, it was stripped of its African
colonies in 1918.
As a spoil of war, the French were allowed to occupy Germany in the
Rhineland –a bitter piece of real estate that has gone back and forth
between the two nations for centuries. The French willfully deployed their
own colonized African soldiers as the occupying force. Germans viewed this
as the final insult of World War I, and, soon thereafter, 92% of them voted
in the Nazi party.
Hundreds of the African Rhineland-based soldiers intermarried with
German
women and raised their children as Black Germans. In Mein Kampf,
Hitler wrote about his plans for these “Rhineland Bastards”. When he came to
power, one of his first directives was aimed at these mixed-race children.
Underscoring Hitler’s obsession with racial purity, by 1937, every
identified mixed-race child in the Rhineland had been forcibly sterilized,
in order to prevent further “race polluting”, as Hitler termed it.
Hans Hauck, a Black Holocaust survivor and a victim of Hitler’s
mandatory sterilization program, explained in the film “Hitler’s Forgotten
Victims” that, when he was forced to undergo sterilization as a teenager, he
was given no anesthetic. Once he received his sterilization certificate, he
was “free to go”, as long as he agreed to have no sexual relations
whatsoever with Germans.
Although most Black Germans attempted to escape their fatherland,
heading for France where people like Josephine Baker were steadily aiding
and supporting the French Underground, many still encountered problems
elsewhere. Nations shut their doors to Germans, including the Black ones.
Some Black Germans were able to eke out a living during Hitler’s
reign of terror by performing in Vaudeville shows, but many Blacks,
steadfast in their belief that they were German first, Black second, opted
to remain in Germany . Some fought with the Nazis (a few even became Lut
waffe pilots)! Unfortunately, many Black Germans were arrested, charged with
treason, and shipped in cattle cars to concentration camps. Often these
trains were so packed with people and (equipped with no bathroom facilities
or food), that, after the four-day journey, box car doors were opened to
piles of the dead and dying.
Once inside the concentration camps, Blacks were given the worst
jobs conceivable. Some Black American soldiers, who were captured and held
as prisoners of war, recounted that, while they were being starved and
forced into dangerous labor (violating the Geneva Convention), they were
still better off than Black German concentration camp detainees, who were
forced to do the unthinkable–man the crematoriums and work in labs where
genetic experiments were being conducted.. As a final sacrifice, these
Blacks were killed every three months so that they would never be able to
reveal the inner workings of the “Final Solution”.
In every story of Black oppression, no matter how we were enslaved,
shackled, or beaten, we always found a way to survive and to rescue others.
As a case in point, consider Johnny Voste, a Belgian resistance fighter who
was arrested in 1942 for alleged sabotage and then shipped to Dachau. One of
his jobs was stacking vitamin crates. Risking his own life, he distributed
hundreds of vitamins to camp detainees, which saved the lives of many who
were starving, weak, and ill–conditions exacerbated by extreme vitamin
deficiencies.
His motto was “No, you can’t have my life; I will fight for
it.”
According to Essex University’s Delroy Constantine-Simms, there were
Black Germans who resisted Nazi Germany, such as Lari Gilges, who founded
the Northwest Rann –an organization of entertainers that fought the Nazis
in his home town of Dusseldorf –and who was murdered by the SS in 1933, the
year that Hitler came into power.
Little information remains about the numbers of Black Germans held
in the camps or killed under the Nazi regime. Some victims of the Nazi
sterilization project and Black survivors of the Holocaust are still alive
and telling their story in films such as “Black Survivors of the Nazi
Holocaust”, but they must also speak out for justice, not just history.
Unlike Jews (in Israel and in Germany), Black Germans receive no war
reparations because their German citizenship was revoked (even though they
were German-born) The only pension they get is from those of us who are
willing to tell the world their stories and continue their battle for
recognition and compensation.
After the war, scores of Blacks who had somehow managed to survive
the Nazi regime, were rounded up and tried as war criminals. Talk about the
final insult! There are thousands of Black Holocaust stories, from the
triangle trade, to slavery in America, to the gas ovens in Germany. We often
shy away from hearing about our historical past because so much of it is
painful; however, we are in this struggle together for rights, dignity, and,
yes, reparations for wrongs done to us through the centuries. We need to
always remember so that we can take steps to ensure that these atrocities
never happen again.
For further information, read: Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black
in Nazi Germany, by Hans J. Massaquoi.
PLEASE PASS THIS ON, AND ALWAYS REMEMBER…LEST WE FORGET!
Slow posting
Sorry about the lack of posts! More to come as soon as possible.
Thanks for your patience!
Filed under Uncategorized
Picking Sides
Official governmental classification systems can create as well as reflect social, economic, and political inequality, just as policies of taxation, welfare, or social services can and do. Official classification defines groups, determines boundaries between them, and assigns individuals to groups; in “ranked ethnic systems” (Horowitz 2000), this process enshrines structurally the dominant group’s belief about who belongs where, which groups deserve what, and ultimately who gets what. Official racial categories have determined whether a person may enter the United States, attain citizenship, own a laundry, marry a loved one, become a firefighter, enter a medical school, attend an elementary school near home, avoid an internment camp, vote, run for office, annul a marriage, receive appropriate medical treatment for syphilis, join a tribe, sell handicrafts, or open a casino. Private racial categories have affected whether an employer offers a person a job, whether a criminal defendant gets lynched, whether a university admits an applicant, and whether a heart attack victim receives the proper therapy. In these and many more ways, racial classification helps to create and maintain poverty and political, social, and economic inequality. Thus systems of racial categorization are appropriate subjects for analysis through a policy-centered perspective because they are “strategies for achieving political goals, structures shaping political interchange, and symbolic objects conveying status and identity” (p. 2 of Intro). Race is also, not coincidentally, the pivot around which political contests about equality have been waged for most of this country’s history.
Filed under Uncategorized
