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

3. CONVERSATIONS WITH THE “OTHER WITHIN”

chapter 3 conversations with the “other within” Memories of a Black German Coming of Age in the Third Reich In the National Socialist (NS) state, race served as the primary signi‹er of difference through which speci‹c groups of Germans were produced as subjects in particular ways. The memory narratives of Afro-Germans offer a unique view from within this regime—one that focuses our attention on the everyday politics of race. Their testimony reveals some of the very local processes of subject formation in this regime that produced individuals as differentially valued legitimate and illegitimate racialized and gendered subjects. Yet before exploring the testimony of these individuals, it seems important to dwell momentarily on what might seem an obvious point—that race is neither an essence nor a scienti‹c fact of biology. Individuals are not born “raced” but rather become raced subjects through complex social processes of constructing meaning. As I argued in chapter 1, de‹ning race as essence or as a “natural” biological trait that differentiates individuals has never been either objective or restricted to a separate province of science or biology . De‹ning and establishing racial difference has always been a political project with concrete social consequences. As we saw in both the colonial mixed-marriages debates and during the Rhineland campaign , in spite of the fact that the power of a scienti‹c discourse of race lies in the authority of its claim that race is an objective term of human classi‹cation, this has never been the case. There is no “essence” of race (biological or otherwise), only the social and political consequences that arise from social de‹nitions of race that impute certain meanings to what are seen as racial differences. Race is nothing more and at the 91 same time nothing less than a mode of differentiation between individuals in society, yet race is such a mode with particularly powerful material and symbolic effects. In this study, both race and gender are conceived as powerful modes of social differentiation that produce and inscribe meaningful forms of subjectivity. With respect to de‹ning each of these categories, I adopt Judith Butler’s concept of “materialization” as way of describing the social and discursive processes through which not only gender and sex but also the raced body come to take on meaning in society. Materialization is particularly useful concept that at once connotes both the ways in which gender and/or race are produced as meaningful (that is, how they come to matter [verb]) and the equally social processes through which we come to think of the sexed, gendered, or raced body as “real” or material substance (that is, as matter [noun]) in ways that erase and obscure the processes of their production as such. Butler argues that both sex and gender come to matter and are produced as material through the forcible reiteration and citation of regulatory social norms. Her notion of materialization is particularly helpful with regard to the functioning of race, allowing us to conceive of social construction as more than simply a linguistic process and accounting in important ways for the historical accumulation of meaning of the category of race as substance and its often quite material effect on the lives of individuals in society.1 Thus, speci‹cally with regard to de‹ning the concept of race, rather than speaking of racial essences or experiences, we must think of racialization as a process through which particular meanings of social differences are produced and come to be attributed to, synonymous with, and identi‹ed as the differences we refer to as race. In this way race is both a representation of social difference and, at the same time, the social process of representation through difference produced as meaningful. Beyond a notion of social construction that focuses primarily on language and discourse, the meaning of race is also the product of histories and bodies whose meaning has evolved from historical and material groundings (that is, from concrete situational and ideological contexts that have evolved over time). Indeed, at the most basic of levels, the “raced bodies” of Africans and Afro-Germans and their presumed racial difference from whites have historically come to take 92 other germans on diverse forms of social meaning in German society. The situation of Afro-Germans exempli‹es this process. As a potentially important marker of identity, it is tempting to say that...