Germany’s Contemporary Colorscape: Part III

My initial intent with this last post of the series was to talk about how Germany’s colonial and national socialist experiences helped shape its response to the refugee crisis and ongoing migration.

But there’s been an unending stream of news and opinion pieces on both sides of the fence over the past few years about the refugee situation: the welcoming, the hatred, the support, the blame, the integration, the isolation, the resentment.

A handful of success stories are being held up to counter the accusations about an increase in violent acts and anti-Semitism which are being attributed to refugees.

image from prx.org

The rhetoric is passionate and frightening and illuminating. At a couple of points over the past few weeks as I read and researched, I felt as though Germany was stuck in America circa 1950s in terms of race relations. Then I realized there’s no real comparison because the histories are so vastly different.

Once explorers and colonists arrived in the U.S., American racial diversity had begun. Native Americans, Africans, whites, Mexicans, Spaniards, there were plenty of shades to go around. Germany, meanwhile, had a population that was largely white until the early 20^th century.

While Americans have struggled (and continue to struggle) with the fallout of Native American massacres and relocations, enslaved Africans and their disenfranchised descendants, Chinese rail labor, and Japanese internment camps, Germany’s melting-pot woes have been comparatively brief and, though devastating, limited in scope.

This is not to pit one country's bad deeds against the other's, or to let Germany off the hook by any means. But it’s helpful for me to remember these different histories when I see articles that say Germans don’t “get” American racism or why blackface is a big deal or don’t understand that procedures they’ve described are, in fact, racial profiling, or assume every brown person they see is new to the country and without means.

All I can do is honor who I am and my history, learn from and try to affect the circle of people around me, and hope there’s a rippling effect.

I guess that’s all any of us can hope to do.

“For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.” ― Immanuel Kant

This is my final post in honor of Black History Month, focusing on race and diversity in Germany. If you missed my previous posts, you can find them here:

• German Colonialism

• German Nationalism & The Question of Color

• Germany’s Contemporary Colorscape: Part I

• Germany’s Contemporary Colorscape: Part II

Germany’s Contemporary Colorscape: Part II

One night we were out to dinner with friends, chattering away in English about the difficulties with language and adjusting to the reserved German demeanor, when the woman at the next table began speaking to us.

She was originally from the Caribbean, but came here as a young woman to learn German to help the family business. She ended up staying and raising a family. Even though she had spent most of her life in Germany, she said she went “home” to visit the Caribbean periodically, because she had never felt accepted here.

Things are not always as "schoen"
as this curvy model casting call
would suggest

At the time I assumed her story was an exception. The nerdy, ever-hopeful American in me wanted to believe that if you worked hard enough you’d find your niche, no matter where you were.

Sometimes there are bigger challenges to overcome.

The German edition of The Local, an English-language European news outlet, has had several articles over the past year about systemic and specific instances of racism. I was surprised to find that many of them were not centered here in conservative southern Germany, but in supposedly hip and laid-back Berlin.

Berlin and Hamburg were both occupied after the war, and, as the first- and second-largest cities in Germany, have a larger percentage of Afro-Germans (an exact number is not known, because ever since the Holocaust census data does not include ethnicity or religion).

While Hamburg has the resources to address its changing population, Berlin--the one European capital that actually drags down the wealth of its country’s citizens--seems to have neither the funds nor the inclination to create one big happy family.

American Isaiah Lopaz confronts racism
in Berlin by wearing a series of t-shirts
with the questions people always ask him

With the rise of the right-wing AfD party, it’s not just the every-man who’s a target. Noah Becker, son of German tennis legend Boris Becker, is pressing charges against an AfD official who called him a “little half negro” on Twitter following Becker’s complaints about racism in Berlin.

Last year, UN experts determined there are “no-go” areas in Germany for blacks, such as Saxony (where even the state’s deputy leader admitted the police there had a problem with racism). 

The UN team's preliminary findings also suggested a lack of willingness by police to investigate racial violence and hate crimes. 

But it’s not just on the streets.There are also indications black children are disproportionately given grades that prevent them from pursuing higher education (here’s a quick video explaining how the German system works).

I think it’s telling that even though there‘s a group called Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (Black People in Germany), who are supposed to promote the presence of contributions of Afro-Germans, my searches for Black History Month events in Germany came up with few options, and of those, 99% were focused on some aspect of American black history.

So I’m left wondering exactly who’s going to stand up and carve out that much-needed niche for this overlooked segment of the population? And how does the recent refugee situation further complicate the German colorscape?

Germany’s Contemporary Colorscape: Part I

It’s hard enough to know what lens to view yourself through as an expat. As I mentioned in a post on another blog, sometimes your enthusiasm about being open and non- judgmental of your adopted culture leaves you vulnerable.

But race adds another complicating dimension.

I only had a few reservations about moving to Munich, and most had to do with incidents of violence or discrimination against recent immigrants and other people of color that seemed to be based in southern Germany.

Despite Hamburg’s reserved demeanor, it turned out to be pretty liberal. Munich, by contrast, is more open, but also more conservative.

That's me in the background,
my sister in the foreground,
when we lived in Hanau

When I lived in Germany as a kid, I started school here and I spoke German, but outside of our military base surroundings I think we were uncommon. My mother told me of a time she took us to a city here in southern Germany, and people on the street would approach us with some amount of awe and rub our skin(!).

These days, in my second go-round living in Germany, I have a lifetime of experiences that make me both sensitive to, and more dismissive of, potentially “racial” situations.

Shortly after we moved here, I had been running some errands and just got back into the apartment when the main door buzzer sounded. I hit the intercom and could barely make out what the speaker was saying, but I did hear the word Afrikanerin (African woman) with a question mark after it. 

I said nein and hung up. Knowing that I am the only black person living in my building, there really was no best case scenario I could come up with to make me want to engage in further conversation/clarification.

As you know from past posts I’ve done a lot of traveling around. And on only one route—a train trip to and from Italy—did I feel profiled. On both legs of the trip, border agents entered the car on the opposite side of where I was sitting, so I had time to observe and play a little guessing game.

They clearly weren’t checking all passports, so who would they choose? I guessed correctly when, in a train car of approximately 50 people, they only checked passports for me and a multiracial Spanish family on the trip down and me and a large Middle Eastern family on the trip back.

There are other things I’m quicker to dismiss, like when we first moved in and a man in the lobby turned to stare as Larry and I walked past. I chalked it up to the fact that we were new residents in a private building, since people down here have little compunction about staring (definitely not a racial thing, I have other anecdotal evidence about the staring).

And there is our landlady’s nervous fascination with me. The few times we’ve met in person she seems painfully eager to communicate with me, but I chalk that up to her knowing Larry speaks no German and, as a psychologist, her desire to learn more about her expat tenants.

On the streets, non-German speakers seek me immediately for help in English. Yet most of the time when I go somewhere people assume I speak German or ask if I would prefer German or English rather than assuming. 

(Most of the time. There are definitely some museums where I’m greeted in English and they’re already pushing the English brochure or map on me rather than asking.)

Although the Fasching costumes
I saw were a little more homemade-
looking than this one, this is the image 
for a costume currently for sale 
on Amazon.de

On Tuesday, I went downtown to see the dances and celebration for the last day of Fasching. As I was leaving, I happened to glance over at a stall in the Viktualienmarkt blaring “We Will Rock You.” I saw three or four people dancing and was so shocked by their costumes I kept walking until I could process what I had seen.

I felt like I had after a visit to the Museum of the Five Continents last year. Most of the museum was not a learning tool--more a display of “oddities” and exoticism. In the exhibit on Africa, accompanying text implied Africans might not have created art just for arts’ sake, like other cultures did.

Unbelievable. Just like those full-body-blackface primitives/savages stereotypes I saw out on the street.

Yesterday, in stark contrast, I saw a new Meetup for reading and discussing African literature to promote a better recognition and understanding of African art and contributions. Probably not a coincidence that it appeared on the day Black Panther premiered, but I was heartened that most of the members so far are white.

The fact that I tick something in this column or that column and try to tally and wonder whether I’m too sensitive or too forgiving is not new. It’s simply muddled by the fact that I’m not on my home turf where I know the racial history and the attitudes and the rules of engagement.

On the whole, my personal experiences as a person of color in Germany have been positive. I think there are many factors contributing to that, one of which may, in fact, be some rose-colored glasses. 

But in my next post, I’ll take a look at incidents and experiences for other folks that have not been as positive.

German Nationalism & The Question of Color

I never thought I’d have a conversation where Nazis and American slavery intersect. Last year, following a dinnertime gathering of Larry’s colleagues, we spent the later evening hours hanging out and talking with one couple.

Somehow the conversation turned to the legacies under which we labor. Larry’s colleague talked about the struggle between knowing his grandfather and knowing that his grandfather was a Nazi.

When he asked about my history, I realized no one had ever done that before. I told him what little we knew, about my sister’s discovery of a great-great relative’s slave papers and my father’s genealogical research.

In just those few moments, however, I felt a bit of catharsis. That someone would ask about and acknowledge my personal history--without sidestepping around its horrific origins--was a bit freeing.It’s something most African Americans and, I suspect, no Afro Germans get to experience.

In the early 20th century, increased exposure to the world at large was changing the face of Germany—literally. After World War I immigrants from former African colonies came to study and explore life in Germany. 

Due to Germany’s failure to pay reparations under the Treaty of Versailles, the Rhineland was occupied by Belgian and French-African soldiers, and many were starting multiracial families there.

As national socialism gained popularity and the Nazis came to power, the one thing that probably saved Afro Germans from a worse scourge was the party’s focus on Jews. But that’s not to say blacks in Germany came away unscathed.

The principles of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws were also applied to blacks. Even those born in Germany were considered to be foreigners and given papers identifying them as “stateless negroes.” 

Black children were banned from schools in 1941, and the following year Himmler began a survey of all black people living in Germany.

Meanwhile, the Nazis harassed interracial couples and families, forcing them to flee the country or separate. Discrimination made employment for blacks difficult, and many found the “Afrika-Schau”—a traveling exhibit in the tradition of the “human zoos” that first sprung up in the late 1800s—their only option.

As part of their attempts to rouse a sentiment of a united, superior Germany, the Nazis assumed control of the Afrika-Schau. They had one hope to gather and control all the country’s blacks in one place. They had a larger goal to use the show as a propaganda tool: one of their ideas was to revive German colonialism.

But the Afrika-Schau was short-lived and failed on both fronts, particularly since only dark-skinned blacks were accepted to fit the stereotype presented, and Germany had too many other fronts to handle without adding overseas colonies to the mix.

Master plan or not, the Nazis continued to oppress the black populace into silence. An estimated 800 interracial children now lived in the Rhineland, their existence irksome enough to Hitler for him to mention it in Mein Kampf. The solution? At least 400 of those children were kidnapped and sterilized.

At 15, biracial teen Gert Schramm was branded a
"political prisoner" and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp

And though they did not make up a recognized percentage of prisoners, black Germans were also sent to concentration camps.

With the survivors mostly mum or ignored, these stories risk being lost. But a new film—Ava and Duante—is scheduled to come out later this year, providing a fictionalized account of an interracial German couple trying to survive during this time.

Maybe it will bring the acknowledgement this chapter of history deserves. Maybe it will bring some small amount of catharsis to those who have suffered.

Hopefully it will be a catalyst to acknowledge and discuss what happened here less than a century ago, and how it’s shaped the attitudes of Germany today. 

German Colonialism

When we talk about the history of German expansion, we usually focus on the Third Reich and the period leading up to and including World War II. Before that, we talk about border disputes, invasions, and land swaps with other European countries.

But what about expansion outside Europe?

To be honest, the idea had not really occurred to me until I saw an exhibit in Hamburg about German colonialism in East Africa. The ruthlessness of the Dutch and the Portuguese regarding Africans and the slave trade was familiar, but an actual German presence in Africa? I was intrigued.

Because Germany was a collection of independent kingdoms when most countries were conducting their exploits in Africa, it was late to the game. It seems the Brandenburg kingdom engaged in slave trading till around 1700, but until German unification in 1871, the rest of the soon-to-be country lacked the necessary resources.

It was then that Germany established “protectorates” in Togo, Cameroon, German Southwest Africa (Namibia), and German East Africa (Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi), up to or partway through World War I.

Many empires sought new lands for natural resources, commercial goods, labor, and/or taxable subjects. The Germans seemed to care only about their infamous Lebensraum. To that end, most sources agree they had little consideration for the people who were native to the lands they took over.

The Hamburg exhibit only touched lightly on these ideas, focusing more on photos of daily life in the colonies and during World War I. There was some mention of unrest and uprisings, but I got the sense that this was a piece of history that was not widely explored in public.

Which is perhaps understandable when during the most famous uprising, the Maji Maji Rebellion of 1904, Germans killed tens of thousands of Herero people, nearly wiping the tribe from existence. Parallels have been drawn between this genocide and the later extermination of Jews in concentration camps.

Colonial atrocities do not receive the same recognition as Nazi atrocities--only a memorial stone in a Berlin cemetery and a statue in Bremen mark the Hereo genocide. But over the past few decades, efforts to rename streets and other urban spaces that honor colonial leaders have met with fair success. (Munich hosted a campaign and series of exhibitions from October 2013 to February 2014 around just that topic.)

In 2011, an international conference was held to discuss the long-term consequences of German colonial rule. Unfortunately, the conference was held in Ghana and only attended by about 50 scholars—seemingly too far removed from the world stage for major impact.

New light may be shining on the past, however. Also in 2011, nearly two dozen skulls—taken as trophies more than a century before—were returned to their homeland. While they may be only a fraction of stolen remains, their return is a (very) small start.

In 2016, the German government finally acknowledged the Namibian genocide (while still stopping short of an apology), and promised recompense in the form of government aid.

And in January 2017, descendants of the Herero and Nama tribes filed a class action lawsuit against Germany in reference to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007.

Whether or not the lawsuit is successful, it’s not too difficult to ponder possible next-step scenarios here in Germany. It's a shameful chapter in history that will be categorized and filed, and life will move forward. The real questions are those that inspired that conference in Ghana just 7 years ago.

What are the continued repercussions for a people still rebuilding their population, culture, and economy? What of those colonial descendants, white German-speaking peoples living and prospering on land seized from the ancestors of their black neighbors? 

How do you move on to find a new normal when the past is still so unresolved?