From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers Between African America and Germany (review)

Based on a 2006 conference on “Crossovers: African Americans and Germany” in Münster, this collection is now appearing in an American edition after its 2010 publication in the LIT-Verlag. Its sixteen contributions, plus an introduction, examine transatlantic and intercultural relationships in visual art, literature, film, photography and music. Two pieces are reprints and one a revision of a previously published article; the last two are an interview and a personal narrative. The authors are a mix of young and established scholars, mostly from North American institutions, and their work proposes that there are rich but overlooked connections between African-Americans and German arts and artists, even though most such research to date has focused on French culture. The editors emphasize the openness of the new scholarship, as “the essays trace the back-and-forth interplay between Germany and Black America and examine how both entities are transformed in the process” (12).

Some essays are case studies and close readings, while others are comparative examinations and still others broad overviews, and they proceed in roughly chronological order. Following Hanna Wallinger’s study of stereotypical images of blacks in nineteenth-century German literature through readings of Kleist and Storm, the first major complex consists of four essays devoted to the culture of the Weimar Republic. A.B. Christa Schwarz documents the experiences of Harlem Renaissance writers in Germany, along with their reception in the German-language literary culture. Peter Schneck uncovers a little-known German portraitist whom Alain Locke lionized as a model for Black artists. Christian Rogowski recounts the explosive reception of Krenek’s 1927 opera Jonny spielt auf to expose ambivalences and aggressions lurking within the iconography of Afro-Americans, and Jonathan Wipplinger traces the controversial development of a 1928 jazz course in Frankfurt—a story in which actual Afro-Americans are, significantly, all but absent.

The next four essays offer unusual perspectives on the Third Reich. Tina Campt gives an interpretive reading of private photos of an Afro-German who grew up during the Weimar Republic and served in the German army, and Gundolf Graml takes an unusual tack by tracing the construction of white German identity (as a foil to Blackness) in a Luis Trenker film. Two essays on John A. Williams’ novel Clifford’s Blues discuss the fictional portrayal of Nazi persecution of a gay, black jazz musician: Christina Oppel shows connections to the Afro-American slave narrative, and Mark A. Reid portrays the novel as a narrative of what he calls postNegritude.

The remaining articles are devoted to German-language and American culture in the wake of World War Two. Angelika Femmler exposes (perhaps overstated) parallels between Robert Stemmle’s 1952 film Toxi and Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, and Page R. Laws investigates Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s use of black figures, particularly the actor Günter Kaufmann and the outrageous 1970 camp film Whity. Michelle M. Wright overviews Afro-German autobiographical writing, Leesa Rittelmann looks at the Afro-American adaptation of the silhouette tradition, and Jürgen Heinrichs recounts the career of the Berlin-based artist Marc Brandenburg. In an interview, Ben Paterson describes his role in the Fluxus movement (an account that has little to do with the topic of black identity), and finally, the poet and scholar Melba Joyce Boyd recounts her personal experiences in West Germany in the 1960s. What emerges as a running theme in this broad palette of studies is perhaps the very lack of commonality, and the ambiguity of these intercultural relationships that are filled with tensions and unresolved questions. Wippplinger speaks of jazz in Germany as “a messy cultural artifact,” while for Wright black identity is “fluid, heterogeneous, and intersecting rather than homogenous” (282), and Rogowski shows the debates surrounding Krenek’s opera to be a “jumbled complexity” full of ironies (108).

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