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

PART I. ECHOES OF IMAGINED DANGER—SPECTERS OF RACIAL MIXTURE

part 1 echoes of imagined danger— SPECTERS OF RACIAL MIXTURE I knew that my father was Algerian, but we never talked about it. It was just sort of mentioned in conversation: “You can’t deny your heritage”— which was not at all meant to be mean. I couldn’t imagine that Algerians were different. I didn’t even know what that meant. I came to understand it much later. . . . The neighbors’ kids taught me that soon enough. . . . I was insulted and verbally abused about my father’s heritage. That was just after the war. The fathers of all the other kids were German soldiers. And mine was the enemy. —Hans (Johann) Hauck, born in Frankfurt, 1920 son of a German mother and an Algerian father1 In the above quotation, the speaker describes growing up in Germany as the son of an Algerian soldier conceived during the post–World War I French occupation of the Rhineland. Through the comments of others , this man came to think of his Algerian heritage as something that differentiated him from other German children. The topic of his mixed heritage and illegitimate birth was taboo in his family and thus was an issue that was not discussed with or around him. The direct and indirect remarks about his father conveyed to him a particular conception of Blacks and blackness. During the speaker’s youth in Germany during the 1920s and ’30s, this conception was strongly in›uenced and shaped by the presence and later the memory of the French occupation troops and by the accompanying mythology of marauding Black soldiers . The image of the “Rhineland Bastard,” a term that was coined during a 1919–22 newspaper campaign, came to embody the children these soldiers left behind as a complex representation of the manifold tensions of the occupation. 25 In the campaign protesting the use of Black occupation troops, at least four powerful discourses converged to create this early and perhaps most enduring image of a Black German population. The ‹rst of these was a scienti‹c discourse of race as a biologically immutable category of human difference. The authority of this essential notion of race lie in its value as a means of differentiating among individuals and the social and political implications these distinctions were imputed to have. What were seen as the signi‹cant genetic consequences of racial mixture—as postulated in the work of turn-of-the-century geneticists and eugenicists—made this a second particularly potent discourse in these debates. The threat that racial mixture was seen to pose within these essential discourses of race was articulated as a form of endangerment and violation of the boundaries that constituted German national identity. During the Kaiserreich, these discourses came together with a third, equally compelling, colonial discourse on racial mixture—speci‹cally, the legacy of prewar debates on mixed marriage in the German colonies. Together, these three factors signi‹cantly shaped German responses to the presence of a Black population, in both pre- and interwar Germany. Finally, a discourse of German victimhood combined with these discourses of race in the Rhineland protest campaign to transform German defeat into a larger narrative of German victimhood. In this narrative, Germany was only the ‹rst and most innocent victim of a racial conspiracy/pollution that would ultimately unite it in victimhood with its former enemies, in the process recasting defeat as heroic martyrdom. It was through these discourses that German responses to Blacks and Afro-Germans were articulated, and in their terms that Black Germans came to take on meaning. The two chapters in this section examine three important events in the history of a group of individuals whose experience constitutes one of the dominant historiographical paradigms of the Afro-German experience in the twentieth century. The Black German children of the Rhineland occupation are without a doubt one of the most well documented groups of Germans of African descent. Although the experiences of this group are in no way representative of those of other AfroGermans in either the Weimar Republic or the Third Reich (for example, the children of Black immigrants from Germany’s former African colonies or those of other African and African-American immigrants to Germany during this time), the events discussed in chap26 other germans ters 1 and 2 had an indelible impact on the lives of Afro-Germans through the representations they engendered in each of these periods.2 The...