Remapping Black Germany: New Perspectives on Afro-German History, Politics, and Culture ed. by Sara Lennox (review)

The field of Black German studies is flourishing on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, the last three decades have seen innovative analyses of whiteness in Germany, colonial activism, Black visual culture, Black German feminism, and more. Yet Black German studies has also entailed work outside of academia, especially with the Initiative of Black Germans (Initiative Schwarze Deutsche) and its Homestory Deutschland traveling exhibition, the Black German theater ensemble Label Noir’s play Heimat, bittersüße Heimat, the Black diasporic publication series Witnessed, and the library and archive Each One, Teach One. These examples represent recent attempts to disseminate knowledge about “Black Germany.” Incorporating philosophers, historians, cultural theorists, and activists, Remapping Black Germany expands this scholarship and activism by exploring the contours of Black Germany from the Enlightenment to the present. It contests the “coloniality of power” (3), decenters hegemonic narratives, and advances new understandings of the Black German experience.

The first three chapters, which were previously published, explore Black German knowledge production, self-definition, and resistance from the mid-1980s to the present. Maureen Maisha Eggers draws connections between Black German women’s activism and their production of knowledge about Blackness. She shows how Black German women’s writing shaped the movement, centered Blackness, pushed epistemic change, decolonized knowledge, and challenged practices. Nicola Lauré Al-Samarai examines the dynamics that inspired Black German cultural productions in literature, film, visual arts, and music to confront racist practices, resist their erasure from German history, define their identities, and cultivate connections across the diaspora. Dirk Göttsche maintains that Black German postmillennial writing reflects more confidence about Black German identity. These writers actively participate in and critique mainstream German culture, using their minority interventions as a postcolonial project for change.

The next chapters offer historical analyses on Black Germany. From Immanuel Kant’s perspectives on race to anthropologist Eugen Fischer and the Nazis, Robert Bernasconi details Germans’ aversion to racial mixing. Though the scientific idea of race was German in origin, Bernasconi demonstrates that transnational contexts informed its development and implementation during the Third Reich. Tobias Nagl considers two Cameroonian men’s claims for recognition, rights, and citizenship in Weimar Germany. Nagl traces the emergence of a Black German subjectivity and how these men resisted othering, carving out spaces for themselves legally and illegally. Christian Rogowski excavates black voices within the “Black Horror on the Rhine” campaign, and illustrates how the Germans and the French used Black voices to support their causes. Analyzing the Afrikanischer Hilfsverein’s letter to the Reichstag, Rogowski stresses the agency and engagement of Germany’s Black diaspora.

Exploring multiple African American texts of the 1930s and 1940s, Maria Diedrich analyzes how such works reflect on the experiences of Black Germans and others of the diaspora in Germany during their travels. In these works, African Americans fail to acknowledge the existence of Blacks and anti-Black racism during the Third Reich. Also focusing on the Nazi period, Tina Campt turns to photographs to illuminate how Black Germans forged kinships. Her contribution, also a reprint, demonstrates that white Germans included Black Germans in their communities and that these individuals envisioned themselves as German. Felicitas Jaima introduces Black German Martha Stark, who shared her lived experiences under the Third Reich in the Pittsburgh Courier. Stark’s account shows how her privileged and happy life changed with the Nazis. Her family’s background and community ties enabled other Germans to shelter her from more harsh treatment and further discrimination.

The next two previously published chapters address Black German experiences after World War II. Heide Fehrenbach argues that the transition away from Nazi racial thinking was a prolonged process and entailed a discursive shift from an emphasis on Jewishness to Blackness. This was due to the presence of a small proportion of postwar mixed-race children born to Black soldiers and white German women. Next...