Antiracist Feminism in Germany: Introduction to Dagmar Schultz and Ika Hügel

Antiracist Feminism in Germany: Introduction to Dagmar Schultz and Ika Hügel Sara Lennox In September 1991 German skinheads attacked Vietnamese and Mozambican workers in the small East German town of Hoyerswerda as its townspeople watched and applauded. The events of Hoyerswerda vividly documented the rise in racist violence in Germany since 1989 and a more broad-based support for racism among the German people. Hoyerswerda also cast its shadow over the November 1991 Women in German conference and was responsible for WiG members' decision to focus the 1992 WiG conference on two guest speakers who had played a central role in German antiracist feminism, Dagmar Schultz, a white Christian woman, and Ika Hügel, an Afro-German woman. Their talks at the 1992 conference, slightly revised to account for developments in Germany since then, are printed in this volume. As the number of attacks on foreigners in Germany continues to mount (6300 in 1992 [Buchsteiner ]) and the names of other German towns—Hünxe, Rostock, Mölln, Solingen—have also become emblematic for escalating racist violence, the issues that Schultz and Hügel raise here remain of utmost urgency. In their essays, Schultz and Hügel draw on their many years of active engagement in antiracist struggle within the women's movement. Schultz, active in the German women's movement from its beginnings, was one of the founders of Berlin's Feministisches Gesundheitszentrum, and her name may be familiar to WiG members as a coeditor of the 1984 collection German Feminism (and author or editor of six other books). As she explains here, her own antiracist politics were forged in the American civil rights movement and still reveal their American origins, evident in the moral rigor with which she demands accountability from herself and others (particularly vis-à-vis white skin privilege), her emphasis upon differences among women, and her commitment to coalition-building. With typical modesty, Schultz does not reveal the major role her own often unacknowledged efforts have played in making racism a central concern of German feminism. She herself may have initiated the discussion of racism within the German women's movement with an article in the October 1981 issue of the feminist journal Courage, where she reported on the 1981 National Women's Studies Association convention, Women in German Yearbook 9 (1993) 226Antiracist Feminism focused on racism within the American women's movement, and then explored the relevance of the NWSA debates for German feminism. One of the most important vehicles for Schultz's antiracist work has been the Orlanda Frauenverlag, which she helped to found in 1972 and has directed since 1982. In 1983 Orlanda's publication of Macht und Sinnlichkeit, a collection of poetry and prose by Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich (the keynote speakers at the NWSA conference) opened a broader discussion of racism within the German women's movement; in 1987 Christina Thürmer-Rohr's Vagabundinnen, also an Orlanda product, dared to propose that women were not just victims of patriarchy but might also play some role in oppression themselves. In the eighties, Orlanda published a wide array of books dealing with the concerns of Jewish women and women of color within and outside of Germany, and its spring 1993 publication of Entfernte Verbindungen: Rassismus, Antisemitismus, Klassenunterdr ückung, a polemical collection of essays edited by Hügel, Schultz, and four other women associated with Orlanda, is sure to provoke further vigorous discussion. As Schultz notes, Orlanda's commitment to racial equity has been practical as well as intellectual: half of its paid positions are held by women of color, and it was to fill one of those positions that Ika Hügel joined Orlanda in 1990 as its Pressereferentin. Hügel's life, and that of other Afro-Germans in Germany, was profoundly transformed by one of Schultz's antiracist initiatives, her invitation to the African-American poet Audre Lorde to teach in the spring semester 1984 at the Freie Universität in Berlin. In 1984 and during her subsequent visits to Germany, Lorde helped Afro-German women to identify and organize around their commonalities—indeed, the very term "Afro-German" appears to be her coinage. One of the earliest and...