Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890-2000

268 Pages·2005·2.85 MB·English

by  Patricia Mazon

NOT SO PLAIN AS BLACK AND WHITE
Toyin Falola, Senior Editor
The Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History
University of Texas at Austin
(ISSN: 1092-5228)
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Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-
Ebere Nwaubani
German Culture and History, 1890–2000
Health, State, and Society in Kenya Edited by Patricia Mazón and
George Oduor Ndege Reinhild Steingröver
NOT SO PLAIN AS BLACK
AND WHITE
AFRO-GERMAN CULTURE AND HISTORY,
1890–2000
Edited by Patricia Mazón and Reinhild Steingröver
With a Foreword by Russell Berman
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER PRESS
Copyright © 2005 by Contributors
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this
work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in
public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by
any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2005
University of Rochester Press
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.urpress.com
and of Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN: 1–58046–183–2
Support was provided by the College of Arts and Sciences at the State
University of New York at Buffalo.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Not so plain as Black and White : Afro-German culture and history, 1890–2000 /
edited by Patricia Mazón and Reinhild Steingröver.
p. cm. — (Rochester studies in African history and the diaspora,
ISSN 1092–5228; v. 19)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–58046–183–2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Blacks—Germany—History. 2. Blacks—Race identity—Germany—
History. 3. Germany—Race relations. I. Mazón, Patricia M. II.
Steingröver, Reinhild. III. Series.
DD78.B55N68 2004
305.896(cid:1)043(cid:1)0904—dc22
2004024338
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
Tina Campt’s essay appeared in a slightly different version in Callaloo26, no. 2
(Spring 2003): 322–41 and is reprinted here with kind permission. © 2003 by
Callaloo.
CONTENTS
Foreword—Russell A. Berman vii
Introduction—Patricia Mazón and Reinhild Steingröver 1
Part I: Afro-Germans in Historical
Perspective
1 Dangerous Liaisons:
Race, Nation, and German Identity 27
Fatima El-Tayeb
2 The First Besatzungskinder:
Afro-German Children, Colonial Childrearing Practices, and
Racial Policy in German Southwest Africa, 1890–1914 61
Krista Molly O’Donnell
3 Converging Specters of an Other Within:
Race and Gender in Pre-1945 Afro-German History 82
Tina M. Campt
Part II: Cultural Representations and
Self-Representations of Afro-Germans
4 Louis Brody and the Black Presence in German Film
Before 1945 109
Tobias Nagl
5 Narrating “Race” in 1950s’ West Germany:
The Phenomenon of the Toxi Films 136
Heide Fehrenbach
v
vi Contents
6 Will Everything Be Fine?
Anti-Racist Practice in Recent German Cinema 161
Randall Halle
7 Writing Diasporic Identity:
Afro-German Literature since 1985 183
Leroy Hopkins
8 The Souls of Black Volk:
Contradiction? Oxymoron? 209
Anne Adams
Selected Bibliography 233
Notes on Contributors 241
Name Index 245
FOREWORD
THOMAS MANN, W. E. B. DUBOIS,
AND AFRO-GERMAN STUDIES
Russell A. Berman
Why Afro-German? Why Africa and Germany? As much as this coupling
may seem surprising or unexpected, it turns out, on closer examination,
to be uncannily familiar, sometimes a topic of explicit consideration in
foundational texts, sometimes only a fragmentary reference. Yet be it as
fading trace or as foregrounded topic, a linkage of the two terms shows up
repeatedly in the writings of seminal thinkers. In key texts, pertinent to
definitions of both Germany and Africa, the other term suddenly appears
and takes on a pivotal importance: “Africa” as a referent for German self-
reflection, and “Germany” as a figure in the emergence of pan-African
consciousness. Despite an initial assumption to think them apart from
each other, there is evidence that they tend to converge. It appears that the
twain shall meet, in complex entwinements of separation and identifica-
tion, dialectics of negation and appropriation, spread out through histo-
ries of subjectivity and across maps of colonialism and migration.
Consider for example Thomas Mann’s novella, Mario and the
Magician, published in 1930, the year after the author had been awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of the best known works of the lead-
ing German writer of the twentieth century, it is the story of a German
family’s summer vacation to a seaside resort in Italy. While the first-person
narration is very much unpolitical—in the mode of the “unpolitical” char-
acter of German conservatism that Mann himself had expounded in his
polemical essayism during World War I—it is nonetheless perfectly clear
that this travelogue is very much about politics: the story of going to the
beach in fascist Italy. It is in effect a conservative description of totalitari-
anism, addressed to a democratic audience. In other words, Mann has
fashioned a text for his readers in the Weimar Republic, Germany’s fledgling
vii
viii Foreword
democracy, that amounts to a conservative German’s report on the character
of life and culture under Mussolini.
Not only life and culture are at stake, however: at a crucial point Mann
has his narrator, concerned like every summer vacationer with the weather,
choose to describe Italian heat, oddly, as “African.” Why this choice of
terms, this incongruous geographical referent in the midst of this German
travel narrative to Italy, which is after all the privileged site of German
tourism? A close examination of this deployment of the African epithet in
the text of the leading author of the Weimar Republic can help tease out
some of the tensions and fault lines in the duality under question: Germany
and Africa.
Part of the answer surely has to do with the subtle and only interlinear
characterizations of Italian politics throughout the text. Without naming
the regime or even coming close to an outwardly political discourse, Mann
has his discrete and tasteful, if not overly analytical narrator describe aspects
of contemporary Italy that would be read in Germany as critical comments
on fascism, despite the lack of any explicitly tendentious vocabulary. Thus
the reference to Africa, in this regard, names the Italian colonial legacy: the
failed effort to conquer Abyssinia in the late nineteenth century, and the
colonization of Libya in the early twentieth. Mann’s reference was in fact
tragically prophetic: by the mid-1930s, Mussolini would engage in an effort
to establish a “new Roman Empire” by invading Abyssinia, one of the first
steps toward World War II. Understood in this way, the usage of “Africa”
in Mario and the Magician entails a postcolonial German perspective
(Germany’s colonies were lost in World War I) on the ongoing colonial-
ism of its nondemocratic neighbor. The text, therefore, reminds the reader
in the democratic Weimar Republic that Italy, a victor in the Great War,
remains a colonial power and an African presence, while Germany’s colonies
had been confiscated and redistributed among the victors. This line of
thought ends, however, ambivalently, oscillating between competing con-
clusions: a democratic Germany’s disdain for the colonialism of authori-
tarian Italy or, alternatively, a German resentment that the victors could
claim the spoils that a rearmed Germany might still hope to recover in the
future.
Yet the characterization of Italian weather as “African” has an even
more complex reverberation, because in the lines that follow immediately,
Africa is explicitly contrasted with an antithetical definition of German or
“northern” identity, all in the mouth of Mann’s troublesomely unreliable
narrator. “The heat—if I may bring it in evidence—was extreme. It was
African. The power of the sun, directly one left the border of the indigo-blue
Foreword ix
wave, was so frightful, so relentless, that the mere thought of the few steps
between the beach and luncheon was a burden [. . .]. The burning void of
the sky, day after day, weighs one down; the high coloration, the enor-
mous naiveté of the unrefracted light—they do, I dare say, induce light-
heartedness, a carefree mood born of immunity from downpours and other
meteorological caprices. But slowly, slowly, there makes itself felt a lack:
the deeper, more complex needs of the northern soul remain unsatisfied.
You are left barren—even it may be, in time, a little contemptuous.”1The
signifier “Africa” is evidently much more than a marker of Italian colo-
nialism. It points instead to a substantive geography of temperament and
culture, a hierarchy of regions in which a putatively African clarity, bril-
liant but empty, consistently external, fully enlightened and therefore lev-
eled, is judged inferior to a North, a Germany, of complexity, interiority,
and romantic soulfulness. This polarized dialectic of South and North, of
enlightenment and romanticism, of terrible simplification and complex
individuation would seem to suggest that our own starting point, the dou-
ble exposure of Africa and Germany is unattainable: the twain may not
meet after all, at least according to the assumption of Mann’s vacationing
narrator.
It would, however, be a cardinal critical error to regard the rhetoric
of irreconcilable geographical alternatives, articulated so emphatically by
the narrator, as itself the last word on the meaning of the text or the inten-
tion of the author. On the contrary, it is in the very nature of Mann’s writ-
ing here and throughout much of his fiction that any explicit statement in
the narrator’s discourse is subject to revision due to the overriding irony
ofthe work and, more generally, by the principled autonomy of literature.
The fundamental distinction between the terms, the Africa of solar illu-
mination and the nocturnal interiority of the German North, is written
into the speech of the conservative, unpolitical narrator, whose judgments
throughout the text are consistently shown to be inadequate. One gets
closer to the crux of the matter by understanding that Mann’s text portrays
this central figure as incapable of adequate thought and, even less, of ade-
quate action, and the meteorology passage demonstrates how his racist
geography contributes to his immobility, which is both conceptual and
political. The symptomatic inability to think “Africa” and “Germany”
together, or rather, the inability to think of them as anything but oppo-
sites, is part and parcel of the same cultured indolence that renders him
incapable—incapable like most of the public of Torre di Venere, the resort
where the novella takes place—of resisting the mesmerizing power of the
tyrannical magician.