Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange (review)

This eclectic collection focuses on the nexus between African Americans and Germans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Editors Larry A. Greene and Anke Ortlepp underscore the rich cultural, demographic, and intellectual elements that have long connected Africans, African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Germans. Their book suggests how the linkages between black Americans and Germans “shaped the African American freedom quest and both their attempts at ethnic self-definition” (vii).

Scholars identify the exchange between African Americans and Germans on several levels. The most obvious results from the presence of almost 3,000,000 black American GIs stationed in Germany in the half-century following the end of World War II. The syncretism of African Americans and Germans took and continues to take many forms—from personal and familial relationships to the merging of language, music, art, dance, and history. But even before World War II, German scholars expressed fascination with and conducted research in African American agriculture, folklore, literature, and social science, an interest that continues to manifest itself regularly in the meetings and publications of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien and the Collegium on African American Research. As Eva Boesenberg notes, African American studies comprises “an esteemed, even prominent segment of U.S.-American Studies in contemporary Germany” (227). Though German-speaking peoples played a minor role in the transatlantic slave trade, they nevertheless engaged with Africans and African Americans in British colonial and US national contexts. Greene and Ortlepp observe that “Germany . . . served as a source of both support and opposition to that historic quest of African Americans for freedom and independence in the modern age” (ix). The essays in their compilation complicate, contextualize, and add nuance to that assertion.

Victor Grossman, for example, touches autobiographically on the experiences of black GIs who sought refuge or asylum in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), raising the important question of the degree of racial tolerance in the post-Nazi Germanys in comparison to the segregated American South and, later, an increasingly multiethnic and multicultural United States. Aribert Schroeder’s article on the life of Oliver Wendell Harrington, the prominent black cartoonist and journalist who took asylum in East Berlin in 1961, adds detail and context to understanding this complex expatriate community. From East Germany Harrington championed equality for black Americans and African liberation movements.

Looking at an earlier age, Mischa Honeck and Jeffrey Strickland examine the interactions of German immigrants and people of African descent, also immigrants, in antebellum Cincinnati, Ohio and Charleston, South Carolina, respectively. Honeck details what he terms the “unexpected alliance” between two radicals—the black educator Peter H. Clark and the German socialist editor August Willich—in challenging class and racial bias and championing abolition. Strickland examines how Charleston’s German immigrants became “southern” following the Civil War, identifying with conservative Democrats who, as W. E. B. Du Bois explained in Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935), worked to return the freed people to a metaphorical “slavery.”

Leroy Hopkins charts the ambiguous German responses to the brilliant African American performer Louis W. Douglas, whose work in radio, musical reviews, and film transformed him into an iconic figure in the Weimar Republic from 1925 to 1931. In bringing “Harlemania” to Weimar, Douglas both reinforced German and white American racist caricatures of blacks and served “as an agent of conciliation between nations” (67). The rise of the Third Reich and Germany as a racist totalitarian state, Larry A. Greene explains in his essay, led African Americans to draw a parallel between the Nuremberg Laws and the de jure segregation of the Jim Crow South. America’s entry into World War II, Greene observes, “heightened the already existing contradictions between America’s democratic rhetoric and the reality of America’s segregated society,” a “contradiction that initiated the modern African American civil rights movement led by an African American press . . .” (70).

In his fascinating analysis of Julius Lips, the German Africanist, one...