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  • Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century by Theodor Michael
  • S. Marina Jones
Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century. By Theodor Michael and translated by Eve Rosenhaft. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. Pp. 231. Paper $14.99. ISBN 978-1781383117.

Over the past three decades, Black German studies have thrived on both sides of the Atlantic, ever since the publication in 1986 of the collection Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (later translated into English as Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out)—a landmark book that, as Theodor Michael explicitly recognizes in his autobiography, Black German, has continued to influence Afro-German writers.

Michael's memoirs, originally published as Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu (2013), are part of an effort to create a Black German archive beyond academia. A member of the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland, which organized a touring exhibition, Homestory Deutschland, he has made a conscious attempt to write himself into German history, one that reflects "the struggle to name and to assert an identity which is both black and German" (8). He gives readers a glimpse into the life of a Black German born in 1925, who experienced the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, World War II, and Germany's postwar transition into a democracy, the emergence of a new term for self-identification (Afro-German), the establishment of a new Black German community, and the reunification of the two Germanies. As his translator Eve Rosenhaft notes, Michael's autobiography, which unfolds over sixty-eight brief chapters, tells "three overlapping stories … a German story, a black story and a story of global diasporas consciousness" (1).

Michael was born in Berlin, the son of Theophilus Wonja Michael (1879–1934), a migrant from the former German colony of Cameroon, and Martha Michael [End Page 400] (1885–1926), née Wagner, a white German woman from Prussia, who died not long after Theodor's birth. Shortly thereafter, Theophilus Wonja Michael married Martha Schlosser, another white German woman, who divorced Theophilus when Theodor and his other siblings—two sisters and one brother—were between the ages of four and thirteen. The father began drinking and his health deteriorated; by the time of his death in 1934, his children had bounced around various foster families.

The Michaels faced other challenges during the 1920s and 1930s: as "non-Aryans," they and other people of African descent had restricted access to education, work, and ultimately German citizenship. They were compelled to find employment in human menageries (Völkerschauen), the circus, and film; but by 1937 work in the menageries had dried up. That same year, Theodor and his sister Juliana were deemed "stateless" by the German authorities, when their eldest sister, twenty-two-year-old Christiane, applied for guardianship over her younger siblings, so that they might live with her in France. But only Juliana received permission to leave for France; Theodor, as a ward of the state, was not granted leave and stayed behind with the ben Ahmeds, a Moroccan-German family.

During the war years, he appeared in German and Italian colonial films, along with other Afro-Germans, making ends meet with hotel jobs, until his conspicuous appearance rendered that no longer possible: he was ultimately interned in a labor camp (81). The end of World War II brought little relief from Michael's troubles. When the Russians entered Berlin, he had to convince them he was not a Nazi collaborator (100). He confounded American officials, too, after registering at a displaced persons' camp, because he had survived the Third Reich as a "non-Aryan" (113). Two of his three siblings also survived, and the family was reunited in 1950. Michael married a white German woman in 1947, and the couple had four children between 1948 and 1956. After years of suffering health problems and struggling to find well-paying jobs, his luck changed: he studied in France and subsequently worked in German theater and radio, as a journalist for the Africa Bulletin, and for the German Secret Service.

Theodor Michael's autobiography demonstrates the complexity of life as a Black German in the 1920s and...

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