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

This book is a “must read” for students and scholars of modern Germany and the United States. It is a companion volume to a digital archive (http://www.aacvrgermany.org/AACVR.ORG/) that traces the links between African-American history and German history, and it represents a decisive achievement in our understanding of transatlantic relations in the twentieth century. Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke have both written widely in this area, and this book represents at once a synthesis of existing scholarship and a road map for future research.

The book’s jumping-off point is the participation of black American GIs in World War I and their striking realization that they were fighting for freedom and democracy in Europe without fully experiencing either at home. This contradiction was even more evident in the next world war, when black soldiers were asked to destroy a racist regime in Germany while accepting the status quo of racism in the United States. This tension between American ideals and behavior received sustained attention from the black press in the United States during the war, and it helped animate the push for civil rights that would follow. For those readers steeped in the literature on Nazi racism, this emphasis on America’s sad record is both jarring and necessary. For without denying the uniquely genocidal hatred of National Socialism, Höhn and Klimke remind the reader that racial hierarchies existed on both sides of the Atlantic, and that commentators discussed them widely during the interwar and war years. While an exploration of the similarities between Adolf Hitler and Jim Crow is, of course, not new, the authors give it an added urgency and scholarly weight.

As Höhn and Klimke show, this tension between American principles and social realities persisted into the postwar period of military occupation, when many African Americans felt a greater sense of liberty in a post-Nazi Germany than at home in the United States. In documenting this “breath of freedom” that black GIs experienced abroad, Höhn and Klimke offer a powerful challenge to the portrayal of World War II veterans as the “greatest generation.” This generation may have indeed beaten down fascism and presided over the postwar American boom, but its members left much to be desired in their views on racial equality. Here, Höhn draws on her own research into the occupation years to depict vividly how black GIs stationed in Germany could interact with civilians—particularly white women—in ways that would have been impossible in the American South. The authors leave no doubt that African-Americans in Europe savored their freedom from American racial norms. But one may still wonder whether there were other factors besides race underlying their attraction to Germany. Might it also be the case that the allures of serving in a foreign land and the thrill of being away from home (often marred by rural poverty) were equally significant?

Whatever the causes, black GIs—notably Colin Powell—openly attributed their sense of freedom to being away from Jim Crow. Even in Germany, however, they could not escape American racism entirely. White soldiers often brought their hostility toward blacks to the barracks and pubs of Germany, and their superiors all too often countenanced such discrimination. But it was not only negative examples that the United States provided with respect to race: at the height of the civil rights movement, American models of antiracist activism also made their way across the Atlantic. A widely celebrated visit by Martin Luther King, Jr. to both Germanies in the early 1960s later gave way to Black Power and anti-imperialist rhetoric, and Germans in both the Federal Republic and the GDR embraced and rejected respectively these more radical forms of black activism. Today, some of these 1970s activists—most prominently Angela Davis, who spent much time in Germany—have...