Reading the Black German Experience: An Introduction

Author(s): Tina M. Campt

Source: Callaloo, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring, 2003), pp. 288-294
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 READING THE BLACK GERMAN EXPERIENCE
An Introduction

by Tina M. Campt

This special issue represents an important opportunity to present an Ameri

audience with critical insights into the situation of a black European commun
whose history has, until recently, gone largely overlooked in scholarly engagem
with the African Diaspora in the US. The cultural and political formation of the
German community provides a rich site for exploring the dynamics of the Afr
Diaspora. As the essays collected here demonstrate, the Black German experien
adds a new dimension to existing modes of articulating the tensions of diaspo
relation-at once affirming, contesting and rearticulating these complex positi
ings.
In the twelve years since its introduction, there has been much discussion among
members of the Black German movement of the appropriateness of the term "Afro-
German." As this movement has evolved and come to include individuals of more

diverse cultural backgrounds (for example, individuals of Indian, Arab, and A

heritage), the more inclusive term "Black German" ("Schwarze Deutsche") has co
be widely accepted among members of the movement. "Black German" emph
the constructedness of blackness in German society and the fact that public percep
of blackness in Germany is not restricted to the attribute of skin color. Both
German and Afro-German remain meaningful and relevant designations
Federal Republic and among the Black German population in general, for
implicitly ask the question of what/who is "Black" in German society an
blackness is defined.

To some, particularly an American audience, "Afro-German" is a concept whic

on the surface, appears almost self-explanatory as a form of hyphenated identification
directly related to the term "Afro-American." As the authors of Farbe bekenn
explained in this pathbreaking publication, the term evolved in the interactions
Afro-German women with Audre Lorde, one of the most influential African Ameri-
cans involved in the Afro-German movement (Opitz, et al 10 [trans. Adams xxii]). It
was in this moment of articulation through dialogue-coinciding with the founding
of the movement through organizations like the Initiative of Black Germans (Initiative
Schwarze Deutsche-ISD) and ADEFRA, the Afro-German women's association-that
Afro-German identity emerged as a relational concept where the construction of both
race/blackness and identity are constituted through a sense of community and
relation both to those positioned in similar ways, as well as to the discourses and
categories of racial difference and identity through which this process of positioning

Callaloo 26.2 (2003) 288-294

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 CALLALOO

is enacted. Black German identity is thus the produ

individual, social, and cultural meanings to blackness
definition and identification.1 Afro-German and Black German can be seen as thor-

oughly diasporic terms, which emerged through a cross-cultural dialogue among

Black women on the specificities of the experience of race and blackness in thei
respective cultural contexts. In this dialogue, the African-American experience ser
initially as a central point of reference through which to articulate the very different
experiences of Black Germans.
In recent years, diaspora has become an important conceptual lens for thinkin
about Black identity cross-culturally. Traditionally, diaspora has been associa
with an historical event of migration, dispersal, or displacement and complex re
tionships between real and imagined communities in the "homeland" and places
settlement. Here the primary reference is often the Jewish diaspora (as the diasp
par excellence), although the African diaspora also conforms to this model. Black
British theorists of culture and identity, most notably Stuart Hall and Paul Gilro
have theorized diaspora in the British context as complicated processes of positioni
in the construction of a sense of belonging and community through the creation
psychic, symbolic, and material communities and "home(s)" in the places of sett
ment. These theorists highlight the creative and syncretic processes of cultu
formation.2 More recently, scholars like Jacqueline Brown have developed even mo
nuanced elaborations of diaspora as a theoretical concept of analysis. Analyses lik
Brown's emphasize sophisticated notions of diasporic desire and longing for comm
nity and belonging, and what she terms the "diasporic resources" (for examp
popular cultural artifacts such as music, shared memories, or cultural narratives)
which individuals draw in creating distinctive cultures and communities in the pla
that they are.3
Yet with respect to Afro-Germans (a population that differs substantially fro
both the African-American and the Black British communities), the relevance of
diaspora as an analytical tool for understanding Black identity and commun
formation in the German context must necessarily be measured against the specif
historical circumstances that gave rise to this community. Understanding the Bla
German experience in relation to a model of diaspora/diasporic identity also requi
a critical examination of discourses and representations of race and racial differen
that engages both the external and self-definitions that shape these individuals' o
articulations of self in very specific ways in earlier historical contexts as well as in the
present.
The readings of Black German history and identity presented in this volume
explore both the most traditional aspects of diaspora, while also responding
perhaps the most infuriatingly familiar question encountered by both Black Germ
and those whose work focuses on this population: namely, "Where do you/they com
from?" On the one hand, this query addresses the issue of displacement so often se
as crucial to a conception of diaspora as an historical event of dispersal. At the sam
time, it complicates any simple understanding of the relevance of such a notion for the
Black German community. For as Germans and unlike other "settlers" in Germany
Black Germans have no originary collective migration or displacement (either volu

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 CALLALOO

tary or forced) with which they can identify or trace t

traces their history primarily to a number of individua
centuries from different nations. Until recently, only an i
uals had any connection to one another, either in their cou
arrival in Germany and, with the exception of the curr
that Black German children grew up with their Black paren
much of this community is the absence of the shared n
and community which sustain so many other Black com
draw (i.e., make use as "resources," diasporic or otherw
The conundrum posed by Black German identity is a
notion of a stable, fixed, or unified identity that has becom
be called melting pot multiculturalism. Yet Black Germa
that the first term of this hyphenated identity is un
overdetermined relationship to German society based on
seen to arise from it in relation to other Blacks or people o
German and Black German are at once a demand to
Germanness and a desire to express a relationship to bla
ily Africa) that is not self-evident based on the color of on
functions as a most insistent form of provocation-for
vokes not only a different conception of German cultu
time, contests essential, phenotypical, and nationalist d
In many ways, this provocation is emblematic not on
Germanness and German identity are traditionally con
some of the more problematic aspects of multiculturali
both the United States and Europe. One of these is the
underlies this project and its very limiting effects on
political interaction. The pluralist tendencies that inevit
multiculturalism usually presuppose a notion of identity
is deeply flawed. For in attempting to "pluralize" who we t
or Germans by highlighting the existence of ethnic and
African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, or Native Americans in the United
States or Black Germans and German Turks in the Federal Republic, these terms often
have the effect of reducing these individuals to fixed categories of identification that
not only fail to reflect the complicated experiences and positionings of these individ-
uals in their respective societies but also mask the hierarchies and asymmetries of
power that structure their circumstances socially, politically, materially, and discur-
sively. A multiculturalist project that focuses on difference as something that people
"are" or "have," and which is the root or source of their discrimination overlooks the
fact that differences are themselves produced by power and through discrimination.
Discrimination itself is an integral part of the process through which norms of
superiority, inferiority, and universality are established, inscribed, and institutional-
ized.5

As Joan Scott so eloquently points out, identity is a product of an ongoing process

of differentiation that is constantly subject to redefinition, resistance, and change (11).
The rich articulations of identity of members of the Afro-German community and

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 CALLALOO

their expressions of their sense of themselves as Germ

ined in this section complicate what we think of
supposed to comprise the ideal of a multicultural societ
us to think beyond ethnic and cultural pluralism,
tolerance, beyond a conception of identity that marks
identification, and given all this, perhaps even beyon
force us to critically rethink notions of pluralism, div
that underlie popular conceptions of multiculturalism
of different groups of people are imagined to live sid
identities of these individuals are far more complex th
us think and are more than simply a set of shared cu
experiences. Any potentially successful vision of mul
equipped to engage this complexity.
The articles and photographic images collected here e
and political articulations of Black Germans in ways t
from a focus on multiculturalism in Germany toward
of both difference and ethnicity as products of histor
material configurations. At the same time, they require u
Joan Scott terms "the unstable, never-secured effect o
cultural difference" (11), or as Stuart Hall describes it,
complete, always in process, and always constituted wi
tion" ("Cultural Identity" 222). The critical readings an
this special issue render a complex picture of who Afr
they were in decades past. Some of these pieces explor
came to define them in the past, while others point to
to resonate in the present. Several speak to the quest
German discourses on identity and community will ta
on the impact they might have on the cultural politics
next millennium.

Reading the Black German Experience is organized into three sections. The first
section, "'Borderless and Brazen': Theorizing Black German Literary Expression,"
theorizes the nexus of identity and representation central to the work of Black German
writers. The first article in this section, Michelle Maria Wright's "Others-from-Within
from Without: Afro-German Subject Formation and the Challenge of a Counter-
Discourse," sets the terms of this exploration by offering a sophisticated analysis of
Black German articulations of identity through a close reading of the poetry of
Germany's most prominent Black German literary and political figure, the late May
Opitz-Ayim. Her reading of what she terms an "Afro-German counter-discourse"
emphasizes the necessity of theorizing Black identity critically and comparatively in
a manner that allows for understanding the similarities between different Black
communities without the erasure or reification of important cultural differences.
In the second essay in this section, Karein Goertz undertakes a detailed analysis of
May Ayim's blues in schwarz weiss and examines her development of what she terms
Ayim's "hybrid language"-an expressive poetic style in which African and German
elements are not mutually exclusive but rather two interwoven strands that Ayim

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 CALLALOO

brings together to articulate the texture of her iden

contends that Ayim's use of complex forms of iron
through verbal puns and the shuffling and reshuffli
ticated practice of "defamiliarization." By integr
symbology into her German-language poems, Go
challenges her readers on a number of different leve
motifs and proverbs are a crucial elaboration of her
overlooked, for they offer an important new signify
expression.
The essays in Section Two, "'Auf der Spueren ihre
German History," examine the history of Afro-Germ
ny. The first of these historical essays, my "Converg
Race and Gender in Pre-War Afro-German History
historical contexts in which Germans articulated a
population. It explores the discourse of racial end
German colonies in the debates on the status of rac
Afro-German progeny of these relationships, and l
recurrence of the spectre of racial mixture in the Weim
mixed-marriages debates in relation to one of Germa
representations of a Black German population, the fi
the article reconstructs the emergence of this figure
ganda campaign protesting the use of Black troops by
the Rhineland.
The second article in Section Two shifts the focus to a different historical context.
"'Germany's "Brown Babies" Must Be Helped! Will You?': U.S. Adoption Plans for
Afro-German Children, 1950-1955" explores the debate that arose around the adop-
tion of Black German children by African-American parents and the subsequent
immigration of these children to the United States. Between 1945 and 1955 over four
thousand children were born to African-American soldiers of the occupying forces
and German women in the nascent Federal Republic of Germany. Yara-Colette Lemke
Muniz de Faria argues that the German national and cultural heritage of these biracial
children was regarded as a direct contradiction to their "race" and that their dual
ethnic heritage and national/cultural affiliation were seen as a problem both for
German society and the African-American community. Using a comparative ap-
proach, her article probes the underlying internal social and political controversies in
postwar Germany and the United States that led to and accompanied these events. She
concludes that both the plans for and practical implementation of the adoption of
these Black German children abroad was very much an attempt to solve the complex
problem a German-born Black population was seen to pose.
Section Three, "Nothing Less Than Both: Black German Identity as Political
Practice," brings this issue full circle, by once again posing complex questions on the
African diaspora in Germany. Carmen Faymonville's article, "Black Germans and
Transnational Identification" engages the ways in which many Black women in the
diaspora have come to challenge and redefine what it means to be Black within their
particular national communities. She contends that in the German context, being

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 CALLALOO

Black and German contests a system of binary opp

cultural and national self-definitions. Through a crit
German poet and essayist Sheila Mysorekar, Faymo
women's strategic use of blackness as a political tool
and cultural categories of identification, while at t
possibility for the redefinition and recreation of Bla
tional context.

At the end of the section is a portfolio of historical photographs by Nancy Rudolph

of Black German children from the post-World War II period. These images add a
haunting and profound dimension to the commentary that accompanies them. They
vividly document one generation of Afro-Germans whose fate was widely discussed
at home and abroad. Yet Black German youth had no opportunity to participate in
these discussions, either directly or indirectly. The presentation of these photographs
offers an oblique reentry of members of this group into this retrospective discussion
of the speculation that surrounded them as youths, and the later articulations of
future generations of this community.
Finally, all of the articles in this collection owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the
members of the Black German community on whose experience our work is based. It
is their day to day struggles (past and present) with the effects of race from which we
have learned and continue to learn tremendously. And it is their inspiring attempts
to theorize the implications of these experiences and the contestatory forms of
identity they have developed from them that we hope to render here as examples of
the possibility of engaging the processes through which Black people are constituted
as both subjects and objects in Western society in ways that are both creative and
oppositional, as well as uncompromising in their ability to remind us of the stakes of
race, culture, and identity in the present and the future.

NOTES

1. Published works like Farbe bekennen, as well as autobiographical writings

individual Black Germans (in particular, those of May Opitz-Ayim, 1993, 1995
quite specific articulations of Black German identity-individual expression
same time overlap in the numerous similarities shared with those of other me
group despite obvious differences in these individuals' personal histories. In
consciousness-raising work of organizations like ISD and ADEFRA are also an i
of the development of a conscious sense of self and identity among Black Germ
less, it must be emphasized that the existence of the forms of identity articu
Germans engaged in the cultural politics of the Federal Republic does not
Germans of African descent partake of it nor do they do so with the same under
This issue becomes particularly difficult when speaking of older Germans of A
who, although they had no access to a "Black German identity," did indee
alternative forms of identification that encompassed multiple aspects and mea
Black heritage in a self-conscious manner.
2. See Stuart Hall's "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" and "Minimal Selves," an
There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack.
3. See Jaqueline Brown's "Black Liverpool, Black America and the Gendering
Space." Avtar Brah provides an equally illuminating and clarifying conceptual
tensions of home and belonging through her notion of "diasporic space" in Ca
Diaspora. Contesting Identities. In addition, Barnor Hesse offers a provocative

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 CALLALOO

Brah and an insightful explication of diaspora in his article,

Reflexive Globalization through the Black Diaspora."
4. Another noteworthy exception to this characterization of
Black German children of a small group of African immigra
in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. These individu
structured around their involvement in the entertainme
colonial film industry. See Katharina Oguntoye's Eine Afro-
ation von Afrikaner und Afro-deutsche in Deutschland von 18
5. For a masterful analysis of these and other questionable a
Scott's "Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity."

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.Nachtgesang. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1997.
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