Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years, 1984–1992 by Dagmar Schultz (review)

With publications such as Zami, Sister Outsider, The Cancer Journals, and The Black Unicorn and public appearances at international conferences and symposia, prominent Afro-Caribbean feminist, poet, and activist Audre Lorde has influenced individuals across the United States, the Caribbean, New Zealand, and Africa. Less well known is that Lorde also had a significant presence in Western Europe, where she incited social change through her theories, speeches, and essays. Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years, 1984–1992 offers an account of Lorde’s experiences and time in Germany.¹

German feminist and activist Dagmar Schultz produced and directed this poignant documentary, which commemorates the twentieth anniversary of Lorde’s death in 1992. Schultz, a close friend of Lorde and publisher of her translated works, was responsible for bringing Lorde to Berlin as a visiting professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University in 1984, where she taught three courses.² Schultz’s film reflects upon Lorde’s little-known experiences in Berlin during the 1980s and 1990s. Combining sources such as personal photographs, video clips, audio recordings, and interviews, Schultz seeks to present Lorde’s readings, lectures, and exchanges in Germany to a wider international audience.

During a memorable scene in the beginning of the film, viewers are transported to a house party in Berlin, where the youthful presence of Audre Lorde, Gloria Joseph, Dagmar Schultz, Afro-German intellectual May Ayim, and African American scholar Tina Campt come into view. Smiling coyly into the camera, a barefoot Lorde moves toward the dance floor and begins to dance to upbeat music with Joseph, Ayim, and other women. Lorde appears carefree as she dances away, laughing and loving the moment, the people, and the space. This emblematic scene captures Lorde’s warm spirit and energy during her trips to Germany.

The film also includes archival footage from another documentary on Lorde, entitled A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, directed by Michelle Parkerson and Ada Gay Griffin in 1995. Like this earlier work, Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years captures how Lorde transcended borders through her literary works and public engagements by emphasizing mutual understanding and the negotiation of differences. While the films overlap, Schultz’s film, in particular, shows how Lorde’s personal and public exchanges and newly forged relationships with individuals in Germany, including Afro-Germans, rejuvenated and sustained her in ways that helped to prolong her life. “Berlin,” as Lorde’s partner Gloria Joseph remarks in the film, “added years to her life.”

Lorde’s experiences in Berlin affected her life, pedagogy, and work, especially as she wrote a number of poems from the city. It is also here that she actively searched for and met Afro-Germans. Interweaving audio clips from the short documentary Hope in My Heart: The May Ayim Story, directed by Maria Binder and produced by Dagmar Schultz in 1997, as well as recent interviews from Ria Cheatom, Jasmin Eding, Judy Gummich, Marion Kraft, and Ika Hügel-Marshall—women in the Afro-German movement—the film details how Lorde remained a friend, role model, confidante, and mentor to women in this African diasporic community. Through her interactions with Afro-Germans, as interviewees repeatedly acknowledge in the film, Lorde pushed them to document their histories, to claim and retain visibility, and to establish their own organizations that helped to usher in a new diasporic identity and movement in German society. Yet Lorde’s influence goes beyond Afro-Germans as she also inspired white feminists and other women of color in West Germany and then a reunified Germany. Berlin also enabled Lorde to pursue alternative medical treatment for cancer with Manfred Kuno.

The film engages the viewer on visual, sonic, and affective levels, to borrow terms from Tina Campt’s recent publication, Image Matters.³ The visual archive of Lorde’s Berlin experiences not only explores different aspects of her persona as a public intellectual—aspects that those familiar with her work will cherish...