Germany

Country in northern Europe, and former colonial power, where blacks have had a presence for centuries.

Black people may have had a presence in the region that became Germany since the time of Julius Caesar, whose Italian troops conquered parts of the Rhineland, 58–50 B.C.E. Blacks first appeared in the region in larger numbers in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Initial contact came through trade with Africa, and Africans made an early appearance in art (portraits of Africans living in Germany) and literature (the courtly epic Parzival, written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries). Germans also engaged in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Traders brought Africans back in order to prove they had visited the continent, and made gifts of Africans to royal courts. Hofmohren, meaning “court Moors,” were not uncommon. Often, such court Moors were treated as servants or buffoons. An exception was Anton Wilhelm Amo (from the area of present-day Ghana, who was given to the Dukes von Wolfenbüttel by the Dutch West India Company in 1707. Amo studied at the universities in Halle and Wittenberg and became a leading German Enlightenment scholar.

Germany came late to its colonial empire, acquiring Togo, Cameroon, German East Africa (present-day Tanzania), and German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia) by 1885 in the Scramble for Africa. The Berlin Conference of 1884–1886, called by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, established African colonial boundaries. This empire would last only thirty-five years, until the end of World War I (1914–1918). But the acquisition of African colonies, German emigration there, and German missionary activities increased encounters with blacks and led to a spate of travel literature that provided Germans with a largely stereotypical picture of Africa. German attitudes toward their colonial subjects were paternalistic and, of course, racist. Germans came to see blacks more and more as inferior and exotic—part “noble savage,” part primitive barbarian.

German colonial policy was extremely brutal. A series of revolts in its colonies, such as that of the Herero in 1904, were put down with extreme cruelty and great loss of life. Mixed-race children born in the colonies were not recognized as Germans. Germany, unlike France or 〈Great Britain〉, did not grant citizenship to its colonial subjects, and, to this day, German citizenship depends on blood descent, a fact that continues to shape German attitudes toward race. Still, some colonized Africans did develop bonds with Germany. Even today, in fact, the Herero of Namibia wear German dress. Africans from the colonies came to Germany to study, and some remained.

After World War I, Germany was stripped of its colonies. Equally important for the history of black Germans, the Versailles Treaty that ended the war provided for a fifteen-year occupation of the Rhineland, the region of Germany west of the Rhine River, by the victorious powers. Among the French occupying forces, a large contingent—as many as 40,000—had come from France's African colonies. The Germans decried the “humiliation” of occupation by black troops, calling it “the black disgrace,” and the public image of these soldiers, promulgated through the press, public statements, and political propaganda, was that of barbaric rapists. The accusation of rape was more fiction than reality, connected in part with myths of black sexuality; few incidents of rape were actually recorded. The presence of black troops did, however, result in the birth of a number of mixed-race children. In reality, Germans were most outraged that the French would degrade Germans by forcing on them occupiers of what they considered an inferior race. There were those even in Germany who pointed out the hypocrisy of condemning French barbarity while ignoring that of German soldiers, both in the colonies and within Germany itself.

The French occupation left behind between 500 and 800 children of mixed race, popularly known as “Rhineland bastards.” Even in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, some Germans advocated sterilization of these children—an approach growing out of the Eugenics popular throughout Europe and North America at the time. Theories of racial purity and the dangers of mixed blood were already in circulation. Under the National Socialists (also known as Nazis), they would become determinative.

When the Nazis took power in 1933, the propagation of the Aryan race became a priority; at the same time, steps were taken to ensure the elimination of what they considered degenerate influences on the race. At first, however, Nazi policy toward the small number of blacks in Germany was cautious. Considerations of foreign policy and economics required that Africans from the colonies or elsewhere in Europe be treated respectfully, and this also affected the treatment of Afro-Germans.

This caution disappeared as German foreign policy became more aggressive after 1937. In contrast to their program with regard to the Jews, however, the Nazis did not propose to exterminate black Germans. Their main fear in regard to blacks was racial mixing, and their solution was sterilization. A law already existed mandating the forced sterilization of certain groups deemed “unfit,” including the mentally ill. Though it shared the same ideological origins, the program to sterilize the black Germans took place separately, and in great secrecy. Parental permission, though ostensibly required, was most likely coerced. Ultimately, it is thought that roughly 385 of the Rhineland children were sterilized.

The Nazis persecuted black Germans in other ways. Often they were deprived of education or employment, and some were deported to concentration camps. (The plight of blacks in Nazi Germany was portrayed in the character played by black German actress Karin Boyd in the 1981 German-Hungarian movie Mephisto, directed by Istvan Szabo.) Others survived by working as actors (a number of films with colonial themes were made during the period), or in circuses. Hitler famously snubbed Olympic superstar Jesse Owens, an African American, at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, when he won four gold medals in one day.

Following the war, victorious Allied soldiers once again occupied Germany, and again, in western Germany, many of these were black—specifically African American. Once again, a legacy of occupation was several thousand mixed-race children, most of whom remained in West Germany with their white German mothers when their GI fathers returned to the United States. While racism against them was no longer institutionalized, the “occupation babies” still faced numerous hurdles. Ignorance and paternalism, as well as a sometimes unconscious racism, combined to make the situation of these children and their mothers difficult. Some West Germans even suggested sending these children abroad to solve what was seen as a “problem.”

In the early 1950s, when many of the children entered school, they became the focus of scholarly and media attention. Cartoons and popular articles, as well as films, such as Toxi (the story of the child of a black American soldier and German mother who is adopted by a German family), attempted to educate the public about these children and to create sympathy for them. Often, however, they also promoted traditional stereotypes or painted an unrealistically positive picture.

As this generation of black Germans matured, they shared the experience of racial stereotyping, discrimination, and unfair treatment by a society that defined itself as white and better. At the same time, West Germany was their country; they were socialized as Germans and had internalized German attitudes and values. The lack of a cohesive Afro-German culture or community prevented the formation of a separate identity, or even an awareness of similar experiences.

This began to change in the 1980s. In 1984, American poet Audre Geraldine Lorde taught several courses at the Free University in West Berlin, where she met black German women. Her presence sparked a growing awareness, which ultimately led to the 1986 book Farbe Bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out) by May Opitz, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz. For the first time, a group of Afro-German women wrote about the black experience in Germany, interviewing black German women of different ages and backgrounds. The term Afro-German was coined by Lorde and the book's authors, replacing words like mulatto and Mischling, or “half-breed.” That same year, a group of Afro-Germans founded the Initiative Schwarze Deutsche (Initiative of Black Germans, or ISD), a group dedicated to breaking through the isolation in which black Germans had been living, providing a supportive environment in which to explore their identity, and disseminating information about blacks in Germany. Around 1993, the group changed its name to Initiative of Black Germans and Blacks in Germany to include blacks from other backgrounds living in Germany. ISD now has chapters in most major German cities and sponsors a yearly Black History Month. Soon after ISD was formed, a group of black women founded the black women's organization ADEFRA, which publishes the magazine Afrekete.

Meanwhile, a parallel process had taken place in East Germany. Students from African countries, such as Cameroon, Ghana, and Nigeria, came to study in East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, followed in the 1970s and 1980s by students from Angola, Mozambique, and other socialist countries. Relationships between African men and East German women resulted in the birth of more mixed-race children. Often the students were required to return to their home countries after completing their studies, so that the children frequently grew up without their black parent. They experienced the same isolation as black children in West Germany. Though racism was officially forbidden in East Germany, black Germans felt it nevertheless, and no opportunities existed for them to come together as a group.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Afro-Germans from the East made contact with the ISD, and some founded organizations of their own, such as I. G. Farbig in Leipzig. These East-West contacts were not immune to the frictions that affected all contacts between East and West Germans; Afro-Germans from the East, for example, rejected the West German preference for excluding whites from their groups. Afro-Germans in both parts of the country, however, have been affected by, and have joined in resisting, the racism and xenophobia that grew exponentially following the fall of the Wall. Racist behavior and attacks on foreigners and anyone who looks “different” have risen in both eastern and western Germany, increasing the insecurity of the black German population.

The appearance of Farbe Bekennen and the founding of the ISD raised awareness of the existence of an Afro-German minority in Germany. United Germany's roughly 300,000 black residents (this includes Africans and Americans as well as Afro-Germans) are still not a highly visible presence. In recent years, the black television moderators Cherno Jobatey of Berlin and Arabella Kiesbauer of Austria have become popular personalities in Germany, and in the early 1990s a black German Hip-Hop group called Advanced Chemistry, based in Heidelberg, produced several popular songs about racism. But they are among the few black Germans in visible positions. Police forces in some German cities have made highly publicized efforts to recruit members of minority groups, including black Germans.

The greatest difficulty for Afro-Germans continues to lie in German society's vision of itself. Despite the fact that it has become increasingly ethnically diverse over the years, Germans still generally do not consider themselves a multiracial society, and German is still synonymous with white in the popular mind, both within and outside of Germany. Black Germans complain that white Germans view them with the same hostility reserved for foreigners, rather than a racially motivated hatred. This view implicitly relegates non-white Germans to the status of outsiders, even when they were born and raised in Germany, and have German citizenship. At the same time, the prevailing German view refuses to recognize that race hatred, not foreignness, is the basis of the hostility that Afro-Germans face.

In recent years, Afro-Germans have begun to reclaim their history and to develop an identity based, in part, on their shared experience of belonging to a culture that does not entirely accept them. The question in the future will be whether German society will come to expand its definition of German to encompass different ancestry, and thereby embrace Germans of African heritage.

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