Transatlantic Cultural Exchange: African American Women's Art and Activism in West Germany [1. Aufl.] 9783839422731

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
2 (African) Americanizing Germany
Debates on Americanization
Beyond the German “Sonderfall:” Americanizations in the Plural
Americanizations after 1945
3 African American Culture in (Postwar) Germany
African American Soldiers and ‘Racial’ Discourses
Jazz in Germany: A “Checkered History”
Jazz Icon, Show Star, Activist: Josephine Baker and Germany
4 Transatlantic Political Protests and Countercultures: Angela Davis
Contested Appropriations: Black Power in West Germany
Becoming Black, Becoming Active: “Freiheit für Angela Davis!”
Angela Davis in West German (Print) Media
Angela Davis’s Self-Representation and Counternarrative
5 Visions of (Global) Sisterhood and Black Solidarity: Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde’s Art and Activism
Afro-German Identities, Women’s Communities, and Lorde’s Legacy in Germany
The Black Diaspora, Germany, and Gender
6 Transatlantic Travels via Celluloid and the Literary Circuit: Alice Walker and Toni Morrison
African American Women’s Cultures on the Big Screen: The Color Purple
African American Literature and the Literary Establishment: Toni Morrison
7 Conclusion
Works Cited

Citation preview

Katharina Gerund Transatlantic Cultural Exchange

American Studies | Volume 5

Katharina Gerund (Dr. phil.) teaches American Studies at FAU ErlangenNürnberg where she also coordinates the interdisciplinary doctoral program »Presence and Tacit Knowledge«.

Katharina Gerund

Transatlantic Cultural Exchange African American Women’s Art and Activism in West Germany

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2013 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Left: picture of Audre Lorde and Dagmar Schultz, 1986. © Dr. Dagmar Schultz. Center: poster Freiheit für Angela Davis. FU Berlin, UA, Plakatsammlung, 717. Right: picture of Toni Morrison. MDCArchives, Wiki Commons. Proofread by Sebastian Schneider Typeset by Stephen Koetzing Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-2273-7

Contents

Acknowledgements | 7 1 Introduction | 9 2 (African) Americanizing Germany | 29

Debates on Americanization | 31 Beyond the German “Sonderfall:” Americanizations in the Plural | 40 Americanizations after 1945 | 44 3 African American Culture in (Postwar) Germany | 51

African American Soldiers and ‘Racial’ Discourses | 54 Jazz in Germany: A “Checkered History” | 70 Jazz Icon, Show Star, Activist: Josephine Baker and Germany | 85 4 Transatlantic Political Protests and Countercultures: Angela Davis | 101

Contested Appropriations: Black Power in West Germany | 107 Becoming Black, Becoming Active: “Freiheit für Angela Davis!” | 123 Angela Davis in West German (Print) Media | 137 Angela Davis’s Self-Representation and Counternarrative | 147 5 Visions of (Global) Sisterhood and Black Solidarity: Audre Lorde | 157

Audre Lorde’s Art and Activism | 162 Afro-German Identities, Women’s Communities, and Lorde’s Legacy in Germany | 175 The Black Diaspora, Germany, and Gender | 192 6 Transatlantic Travels via Celluloid and the Literary Circuit: Alice Walker and Toni Morrison | 211

African American Women’s Cultures on the Big Screen: The Color Purple | 216

African American Literature and the Literary Establishment: Toni Morrison | 244 7 Conclusion | 271 Works Cited | 281

Acknowledgements

This book is a slightly revised and updated version of my dissertation, which I submitted at Bremen University in 2011. It focuses on (cultural) exchanges between African America and (West) Germany and deals with transatlantic cultural mobility; and it is a product of the many stimulating and critical exchanges I have had with people who have helped me explore multiple routes while keeping my roots. This project would have been impossible without reliable companions and competent guides – and I have been lucky to have both. First and foremost, I would like to thank both of my supervisors, Sabine Broeck and Heike Paul, for their continuous support and critical feedback. Your scholarly expertise and exemplary dedication have been a source of great inspiration; and both of you have been incredibly generous in sharing your time, thoughts, resources, and, above all, your knowledge and advice. It has been a most wonderful, instructive, and rewarding experience to work with both of you. Several people and institutions have been of great help to my archival research. I am thankful to Dagmar Schultz who has kindly granted me access to her collection on Audre Lorde and has offered invaluable resources and information. I also owe thanks to Orlanda Frauenverlag and the APOArchive at FU Berlin, especially Ulrike Groß. Moreover, Rowohlt, the DNB at Frankfurt am Main, the Zeitungsarchiv of FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg’s university library, and several Landesrundfunkanstalten are among the institutions whose staff and resources have greatly assisted my research. During the last years I have had numerous opportunities to discuss my work with fellow doctoral students and distinguished faculty. I would like to particularly thank the participants of the BAA Summer Institute 2007,

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the PGF 2009, the HCA Spring Academy 2010, and the BAA Summer Academies 2010 and 2011 for their critical feedback and warm encouragement. In addition, I want to thank Gradnet e.V. for their support. It has also been an enriching and inspiring experience to be part of the American Studies communities at Bremen, Erlangen, and Düsseldorf. I am especially indebted to the participants of Erlangen’s American Studies Forschungskolloquium for probing questions and useful suggestions at all stages of this project. I owe special thanks to Stephen Koetzing and Sebastian Schneider – not the least for copyediting and proofreading the manuscript. Your friendship, Sebastian, has been invaluable to my life, academic and otherwise. And, Stephen, you have been the most understanding and caring partner I could have wished for. Your unconditional support – emotional, informational, and, yes, technical – has been enriching to my life and my work. Finally, a big thank you goes to all of my family and friends who have endured the ups and downs of this project, who have offered much needed encouragement, welcome distractions, and reality checks, and who have given me more love and support than I could ever hope to return. Nürnberg, December 2012 Katharina Gerund

1 Introduction

This study explores the postwar reception, construction, and appropriation of African American women’s culture, art and activism in (West) Germany in order to examine its discursive formations and repertoires as well as the specific conditions and forms of cultural transfer between African America and Germany. While this project focuses specifically on the period between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, as an introduction I would like to offer some recent examples from German newspapers and magazines which illustrate that African American culture and images of blackness figure in diverse contexts in contemporary German discourses (and my observations are indicative of the general approach taken in this study). The selected articles reveal how African American culture and its representatives are discursively positioned in the cultural field and are depicted in racialized and gendered terms. They also show that African American culture is negotiated in connection with a range of seemingly disparate but still interrelated topics including German identities, images of blackness, constructions of whiteness, and white (popular) American culture in and beyond Germany. A feuilleton article by Andreas Kilb in the daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) about the 2007 Berlin literature festival names many poets and writers, while only mentioning in passing “one African American female poet” who “presented anti-Bush slogans” as an additional example alongside poet Ulf Stolterfoht’s performance (40, my translation);1 1

In the following, if not indicated otherwise, all translations of German texts and phrases are mine.

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the African American poet remains nameless. More prominently placed is Josephine Baker in an issue of Zeit Magazin from 2009 which features a recipe for “Josephine Baker’s asparagus omelet” in a series on the favorite food of famous men and women. The short article not only attests to the iconicity and popularity of the show diva herself but also of the powerful symbol most widely associated with her: The accompanying photograph displays the plate with the omelet on a tray of bananas, evoking her famous banana skirt (which is also mentioned in the text). The article opens with the line “Obama was not the beginning of it all” (46) and informs the reader that as early as the 1920s there had been an international black – and female – American superstar; it thereby reminds its readers that the 2008 German “Obamamania” has to be seen in the context of the African American show stars, athletes, singers, writers, and intellectuals who figured prominently in Germany throughout the 20th century and may be suggestive of a continuity of German projections on the African American presence. The very same issue of Zeit Magazin features an article dealing with a “German Obama:” Columnist Harald Martenstein uses this phrase to refer to German-Togolese Gerson Liebl who made headlines when he fought for his German citizenship but was deported to Togo in 2009 after living in Germany for 18 years. Not only does this article indicate the ubiquity of Barack Obama as a reference point whenever ‘blackness’ is evoked in contemporary popular German contexts but it also demonstrates that discourses on German whiteness and national identity cannot be separated from discourses on African American culture or ‘blackness’ in general. This is rendered even more evident by a 2009 article in the monthly magazine of Deutsche Bahn on Afro-German journalist and TV presenter Cherno Jobatey, in which Anja Dilk recounts the (in)famous anecdote of Jobatey’s first appearance on German television: A viewer called the TV station to ask if there was something wrong with the broadcast because the “presenter appeared so dark” (22). While its substance is, of course, questionable, this anecdote exposes the still prevailing association of German national identity with whiteness, a perception which particularly the Afro-German movement has openly challenged since the 1980s. In contrast to the Afro-German movement, African American culture does not ‘threaten’ a white German identity because it remains an Other which can easily be located outside of the “imagined community” (Benedict Anderson). That contemporary representations of the racially or ethnically Other still include instances of subtle or not so

INTRODUCTION | 11

subtle racism, racialism, and exoticization is disclosed in another newspaper article from 2008. Jonathan Fischer reports in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) on the death of African American singer, dancer, and actress Eartha Kitt and uses the metaphor of the kitten and her claws in his subtitle; he, of course, refers to Kitt’s own self-fashioning (e.g. her autobiography I’m Still There: Confessions of a Sex Kitten) and her role as Catwoman in the popular TV series Batman, but thereby also ascribes to the exoticization and animalistic stereotypes that frequently shape representations of African Americans. These examples showcase essential starting points for this study on the transatlantic cultural exchanges2 between African American women and (West) Germany. They attest to the different degrees of relevance which African American culture in its various forms is assigned in German media discourses and representations (from the marginal position of the nameless African American female poet to the diva status of Baker or Kitt). In addition, they demonstrate that the images of popular African American women have to be viewed with regard to both self-fashioning and media representations, which is obvious in the cases of Kitt and Baker alike. Moreover, African American culture and (to a much lesser extent) theory have influenced (public) debates on blackness and Germany and the development of Afro-German communities and identities. They also figure prominently in discourses of political resistance, empowerment, and subversion. Whiteness is often implicitly and explicitly considered an essential element of German identity (cf. the Jobatey anecdote) but this notion has been challenged by ethnic communities and discourses on blackness. While there might be a general audience for an exoticized culturally distant (but not too distant) Other like Baker or Kitt particularly in the entertainment sector, a broad acceptance and recognition of black Germans encounters much more resistance as it threatens presumably stable categories that structure relations of difference between self and Other. The examples also point towards the proliferation of representations of African Americans and

2

Cultural exchange is understood here as “the circulation – the giving, receiving, and redisposition – of cultural materials among differentiated socio-cultural formations. The component parts of the cultural exchange process […] are immensely varied in incidence, form, and purpose” (O’Regan 501).

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African American culture in contemporary German popular culture, in the cultural archive, and in the collective imaginary. African Americans and African American cultural products are not simply passively received but rather actively constructed, appropriated, and oftentimes invested with specific new meanings or adapted to particular domestic concerns (cf. Obama and the “German Obama”). Therefore, it is not sufficient to analyze cultural exchange between the United States and Germany along the lines of (white) American (popular) culture. African American culture constitutes a distinctive factor in transatlantic cultural traffic which requires to be explored in its own right. I use the terms American culture and African American culture fully aware of the problematics of this binary logic. My analyses will expose the workings of this logic in German discourses and reveal that this dichotomy does not hold up. While I stick to this terminology to put forth my larger argument, I neither understand American culture as a homogeneous entity nor as more universal than African American culture. The latter is understood here as designating a cultural formation of its own that is, however, often defined in and through its relations to a dominant and predominantly (and usually unmarked) white American culture. It can neither be neatly subsumed under the label American culture nor is it used here to denote African American culture as the particular and marked Other of American culture – even though both notions can be found in the discourses under scrutiny. I cannot completely avoid reproducing these notions as I critically interrogate them in my analyses. The cultural exchanges between Germany and the United States have to be seen as frameworks for African American culture traveling across the Atlantic, and while these two discourses often overlap they are far from being identical. The contemporary reference to Baker points towards a necessity to situate recent receptions and adaptations of African American culture in Germany in a historical perspective and to examine the pre-existing images, stereotypes, and notions of blackness and African Americanness as a background against which African American cultural products and producers come to be viewed. These images and notions need to be taken into account because, as Lothar Bredella states, “we cannot perceive without presuppositions” (6). This study analyzes the reception of African American women’s art and activism in postwar (West) Germany. Although it includes examples from before World War II, the immediate postwar years, and the time after

INTRODUCTION | 13

reunification, its main focus is West Germany. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a particular national setting and cultural and political framework for interactions with African American culture will not be covered in any depth or detail.3 While a comparative (German-German) dimension is thereby deliberately excluded, a diachronic perspective is opened up; the first chapters sketch not only some prominent examples of African American culture in Germany before and during World War II but also examine the particular historical setting for cultural exchange during the occupation years. With regard to Americanization and the presence of American culture in Germany, World War II constitutes a caesura and 1945 marks the beginning of a new era of cultural exchange – as I argue, also between African America and Germany.4 However, rather than establishing a precise chronological account of instances of cultural contacts and crossovers, I follow the reverberations of specific moments of German interactions with African American culture and the resonances of particular African American women writer-activists and their works. I will therefore examine exemplary case studies that revolve around four prominent African American women: Angela Davis (born 1944), Audre Lorde (19341992), Alice Walker (born 1944), and Toni Morrison (born 1931). These women writers and activists are familiar to (West) German audiences and their (cultural) work has been relatively broadly received. Taking into account that “people can be cultural materials, too” (O’Regan 502), the four women have to be viewed as agents as well as objects of this cultural exchange. Their cultural productions, their writings and activism, have been

3

An exhaustive comparison of the reception of African American culture in the GDR and West Germany remains a desideratum at this point. Further in-depth studies of the respective socio-cultural and political settings and forms of reception still need to be conducted in order to provide a basis for a comparative approach.

4

The meaning of Germany of course changes throughout the 20th century not only with regard to its geographical boundaries but also its political and cultural identity. I first focus on the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich; after the caesura of World War II, my analyses will follow the main spheres of American influence on Germany: the American occupation zone, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and finally the reunited Germany.

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adapted, appropriated, (re)negotiated, and received in (West) Germany and garnered different responses: from the solidarity movement for Davis to the significance of Lorde for Afro-Germans to the literary relevance of Nobel Laureate Morrison to the enthusiasm among German audiences for Walker’s epistolary novel The Color Purple (1982) and its screen adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg. These four women roughly belong to the same generation of African American writer-activists. Not only have they shared a commitment to political activism (especially feminism), critical thinking, and their roles as (public) intellectuals, scholars, and cultural producers, but their individual careers and paths have also crossed at several points. For example, Morrison encouraged Davis to write her autobiography after she had been exonerated of all charges in 1972 (Meyer-Lenz 317). Davis explains in a 1995 interview with Lisa Lowe that she was at that time working together with Walker trying to “organize a campaign to ‘Boycott the Blockade’” in order to support Cuban women who suffered from the economic embargo (318). She also knew Lorde (Guy-Sheftall, “Epilogue” 256) and praises her work, for example, on the back cover of the 2009 collection I Am Your Sister (ed. Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall): “Audre Lorde’s unpublished writings, combined with her now classic essays, reveal her to be as relevant today as during the latter twentieth century when she first spoke to us. This new collection should be read by all who understand justice to be indivisible, embracing race, gender, sexuality, class, and beyond, and who recognize, as she so succinctly put it, that ‘there is no separate survival.’”

However, the individual agendas and different forms of cultural mobility provide for a heterogeneity covering instances of cultural exchange over three decades. Davis became known in East and West Germany for her political activism and as a (political) fugitive and prisoner in 1970. It was her (mediated) image which was turned into an icon of the generation of ’68. Lorde spent much time in (West) Germany and her personal encounters with Afro-Germans were essential to her seminal role for the Afro-German movement emerging in the 1980s. For Walker’s prominence in Germany, the 1985 Spielberg version of The Color Purple (released in West Germany in 1986) was crucial, but her literary works have also been (and continue to be) widely circulated. Morrison’s status in German discourses was deter-

INTRODUCTION | 15

mined by her literary success, above all her being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The literary and theoretical writings and the political activism of these four women differ with regard to their primary audiences, the media by which they traveled across the Atlantic, the ways they have been appropriated, understood, and represented in (West) Germany, and the cultural productions which established their status and popularity. Because they are often received as representative of African American women’s culture, race/ethnicity and gender are included in my analysis and considered in their intersectionality. I critically focus on the racialized and gendered structures in German discourses on African American women as well as the significance of these structures for (imagined) solidarities. Cultural exchange is always a reciprocal process (though generally unequal in terms of power) leaving none of the cultures involved unchallenged and unchanged. It is “a critical component of wider processes of cultural identity formation and cultural development” (O’Regan 500). Similarly, cultural transfer is “never a one-way street but always a story of constant circulation” (B. Davis et al., “Introduction” xi); it is “a cultural exchange in two directions” that works “according to codes of selection based on presuppositions” (Larsen 99, 95). Svend Erik Larsen’s “logic of cultural exchange” is helpful in this regard. He emphasizes that receiving cultures always “tend to select elements which can be transformed and […] integrated into its own cultural structure” but also that cultural influence needs to be conceptualized as a process of translation in which the specific identity of elements may be changed (92). He further elaborates on a notion of dominant and expanding cultures as “offering” its values to other cultures which takes into account that a strong culture does not necessarily determine “in details what other cultures will absorb” (93). Elements already present in a culture are unlikely to be replaced, absent elements will only be adopted if they are perceived as filling a vacuum (in this context the cultural impact is “most influential”), and neutral elements which may be present or absent in a culture “without structural consequences” constitute the level of “most direct” cultural influence (93-94). The analysis of African American women’s cultural impact on Germany needs to account for both self-representations and representations of African Americans within the framework of American culture (and cultural imperialism) as well as the German desires, needs, and interests served (or generated) by its reception.

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Cultural exchange can be seen as constitutive of any (always already hybrid5 and heterogeneous) culture and collective identity; yet, its appreciation or repulsion as well as the degrees of recognition or naturalization may vary widely. Culture is understood here as a “notoriously ambiguous concept” referring to both a process and a product (Hebdige 5), to an “active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasure within a social system” (Fiske 23). As John Fiske has pointed out, culture as “a living, active process […] can be developed only from within, it cannot be imposed from without or above” (23). Therefore, the different cultures and subcultures central to this study (West German and African American as well as to a certain degree East German and American) are regarded not only as hybrid, heterogeneous, and fragmented in themselves but also always in the process or struggle of transformation, (re)definition and (re)negotiation of their own identities. My analyses include the perspectives of the four African American women on Germany and the role of Germany for and in their work but they are primarily based on West German (mass) media representing a range of public opinions, reactions, and resonances. As Dick Hebdige argues, “[i]t is primarily through the press, television, film, etc. that experience is organized, interpreted, and made to cohere in contradiction as it were” (85). While representations of African American culture in the mass media (particularly newspapers and magazines) provide the main body of my material, I do not relegate German audiences to a state of passivity. Rather, reception and consumption are understood as necessarily active processes. Following Michel de Certeau, I conceive of consumption as a form of “production” and “characterized by its ruses” and ask “what do [people] make of what they ‘absorb,’ receive, and pay for?” (31). Arjun Appadurai points out that “[t]here is growing evidence that the consumption of the mass media throughout the world often provokes resistance, irony, selectivity, and, in general, agency” even though, as he continues,

5

Defining culture as necessarily hybrid as a premise for my argument, I still agree with Marwan Kraidy that hybridity is a “concept whose definition is maddeningly elastic, whose analytical value is easily questionable, and whose ideological implications are hotly contested” and that it requires an analysis which is situated in “a specific context where the conditions that shape hybridities are addressed” (3, vi).

INTRODUCTION | 17

“[t]his is not to suggest that consumers are free agents, living happily in a world of safe malls, free lunches, and quick fixes. […] consumption in the contemporary world is often a form of drudgery, part of the capitalist civilizing process. Nevertheless, where there is consumption there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure there is agency. Freedom, on the other hand, is a rather more elusive commodity.” (7)

Beyond its focus on media as “authorized channels of mass communication” which provide a certain structure and order in the process of generating meaning by disseminating “preferred meanings and interpretations” (Hebdige 86), this study draws on accounts by contemporary witnesses and unpublished archival documents. It seeks to unravel how (West) Germany and its diverse “interpretive communities” (Stanley Fish) have constructed African Americanness and blackness in general and African American womanhood in particular. Overall, this project follows a double objective: First, it strives to reexamine processes of Americanization in West Germany and relate them to the cultural traffic between Germany and African America. The framework and parameters of cultural Americanization have at the same time provided channels and limitations for the transatlantic cultural transfer of African American women’s culture. I argue in the following that among the numerous Americanizations in West Germany, it is possible to identify specific strands of African Americanization which are both part of mainstream cultural Americanization and potentially subversive to it. The term highlights the intricate connection between the postwar Americanization of West Germany and African American culture on the one hand and accounts for the fact that African American culture and the idea of America are elaborately intertwined in the German collective imaginary on the other. Second, this study attempts to contribute to German cultural history as it makes visible some specific instances and mechanisms of cultural exchange between Germany and African America. It focuses on German reactions to and negotiations of the black American (female) Other and illuminates how African American culture has influenced (West) German discourses and served as a projection screen for German anxieties and desires as well as a form of alterity constitutive for (West) German identities. Moreover, it examines some less known aspects of the circulations of Lorde’s, Davis’s, Walker’s, and Morrison’s “cultural work” (Jane Tompkins). While this book delves into specific moments in German cultural history, it intends

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neither to produce a teleological narrative nor to gloss over the many gaps in this history. Rather, I scrutinize the resonances of specific phenomena in (West) German culture and society. The case studies also examine the circulation of ideas, cultural materials, and persons within and beyond the “Black Atlantic” (Paul Gilroy). They illuminate how cultural exchanges between (West) Germany and African America are shaped, enabled, and/or limited by racialized and gendered parameters; and they illustrate the workings of what Stephen Greenblatt defines as “cultural mobility” and follow the dicta which Greenblatt proposes in his “Mobility Studies Manifesto;” namely, that (cultural) mobility studies should (1) take mobility literally, (2) examine both hidden and conspicuous movements of “peoples, objects, images, texts, and ideas,” (3) identify and analyze “contact zones,” i.e. spaces where cultural goods are exchanged, (4) offer a new perspective on the “tension between individual agency and structural constraint,” and (5) account for mobility in relation to rootedness (250-52). Moreover, I take up impulses from critical Whiteness Studies and reflect on the positionality and situatedness of (West) German discourses on African Americans in general and African American women in particular. Therefore, I examine how the African American (female) Other has served to define, establish, uphold, and negotiate whiteness in (West) Germany or rather as (West) German property. Whiteness, as Ruth Frankenberg elaborates, “changes over time and space and is in no way a transhistorical essence. Rather […] it is a complexly constructed product of local, regional, national, and global relations, past and present” (236). This backdrop is pertinent as I write this book as a white German woman for whom it has to be imperative to critically reflect her own privileged and (to some degree) powerful (discursive) position as well as the specific perspective that this position entails. Even though I do not strive to produce a neat historical narrative and reconstruct a “meaningful, progressive and developing series of changes,” I, of course, “cannot simply step outside history” (Colebrook 4, 5). Engaging with history in a critical manner, I am well aware that “the writing of history is a form of power” (Colebrook 1) and that I cannot operate outside its structure and strictures.

INTRODUCTION | 19

This study is situated in the context and research tradition of African American Studies in Germany6 and it relies extensively on previous scholarly work on the cultural exchange between African America and (West) Germany and on related topics such as Africans in Europe/Germany, German colonialism, racism in Germany, or Afro-German history and culture. The cultural crossovers and transatlantic connections between Germans and African Americans have recently received heightened scholarly and public attention, as have critical Whiteness Studies in Germany and German ‘blackness.’ Maria Diedrich and Jürgen Heinrichs underscore in From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers between African America and Germany (2010) that scholarly interest in Germany and the black diaspora has recently grown (particularly among historians), yet there are still many blind spots (12). Their volume features several essays which map uncharted territory by investigating these cultural crossings beyond a historical perspective. Similarly, Anke Ortlepp and Larry A. Greene’s collection Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange (2011) covers a broad scope of case studies that encompass both East and West Germany and, as the title promises, two centuries of transatlantic cultural exchange. These two volumes exemplarily attest to the increasing interest in GermanAfrican American cultural crossings as well as Afro-German history. Recent relevant publications also include the volume Crosscurrents: African Americans, Africa, and Germany in the Modern World edited by David McBride, Leroy Hopkins, and C. Aisha Blackshire-Belay (1998), Heike Raphael-Hernandez’s collection Blackening Europe: The African American Presence (2004), Moritz Ege’s monograph Schwarz werden: “Afro-Amerikanophilie” in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren (2007), Black Europe and the African Diaspora (2009) edited by Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small, and Fatima El-Tayeb’s book European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (2011). Yet, there have been a number of publications on the subject before the current proliferation of the field. Not surprisingly, they relate not only to blacks in Germany but also to images of Africans in the context of German colonial history. Sander Gilman’s seminal On Blackness without Blacks

6

For an overview of the development of African American Studies in Germany see Boesenberg.

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(1982) as well as other studies have shed light on the images of blackness constructed and circulated in Germany. For example, Rosemarie K. Lester’s Trivialneger (1982) deals with serialized novels in West German magazines, Abduraman Maho Awes’s Die schwarze Gazelle (1983) focuses on prejudices in sports coverage, and Gottfried Mergner and Ansgar Häfner’s volume Der Afrikaner im deutschen Kinderbuch (1989) offers analyses of the portrayal of Africans in children’s literature before the Third Reich. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand’s Blacks and German Culture (1986) is one of the earliest volumes dealing with blacks in/and Germany specifically and focusing on diverse dimensions like Germany’s colonial endeavors, German views on black culture, and German blackness. Among the more recent publications on images of blackness and German colonial history are Michael Schubert’s Der schwarze Fremde (2003), which examines the representations of Africans in German debates on colonialism from the 1870s into the 1930s, and The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy edited by Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (1998), which has been a major contribution to the scholarship on German colonialism and constitutes a useful starting point for conceptualizing Germany as a ‘postcolonial’ and ‘diasporic’ space. As the editors point out in their introduction, after 1945, colonialism in German discourses “became a thing of the past, little studied and barely remembered” (18), and it has only recently come to the fore of scholarly and public debates. Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst and Reinhard Klein-Arendt’s AfrikanerInnen in Deutschland und schwarze Deutsche (2004) comprises contributions on encounters between Germany and Africa as well as German colonialism and its long-term consequences. Henrick Stahr’s Fotojournalismus zwischen Exotismus und Rassismus (2004) analyzes the images of blacks and ‘Indians’ in German weekly magazines between 1919 and 1939 and Heike Paul’s study Kulturkontakt und ‘Racial Presences’ (2005) examines African Americans in German literature on America and the discourses on the cultural contact between African Americans and Germans between 1815 and 1914. Peter Martin’s book on Africans in German history and imagination captures already in its title Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren (2001) the ambivalent image of black people including elements of both fear-provoking demonization as well as desire-generating exoticization. African Americans have to be viewed as a specific group but in the German imagination ideas of blackness as well as of Africans are significant for

INTRODUCTION | 21

their reception because identities are not always adequately differentiated and ‘black’ provides a vague but widely applied category. However, as the editors of Crosscurrents state, it is necessary to “go beyond the focus on ‘images’ and stereotypes” and to account for the interactions and exchanges between Africans, African Americans, and Germans (McBride, Hopkins, Blackshire-Belay ix). Several collections, (scholarly and non-scholarly) books, and studies have drawn attention to the situation of blacks under the National Socialist regime. Most notably, Peter Martin and Christine Alonzo’s volume Zwischen Charleston und Stechschritt (2004), journalist Serge Bilé’s book Noirs dans les camps Nazis (2005), and the exhibition documented in Z. Nia Reynolds’s Black Victims of the Nazis (2006), Clarence Lusane’s Hitler’s Black Victims (2002), Tina Campt’s Other Germans (2004), Raffael Scheck’s Hitler’s African Victims (2006), and Peter Martin’s essay “‘…auf jeden Fall zu erschießen:’ Schwarze Kriegsgefangene in den Lagern der Nazis” (1999). Additionally, there are a range of publications that address Afro-German history and culture beyond this specific period. Katharina Oguntoye’s groundbreaking study Eine afro-deutsche Geschichte (1997) and the seminal volume Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (1986) have paved the way for further explorations of Afro-German history. These include Not So Plain as Black and White (2005) edited by Patricia Mazón and Reinhild Steingröver, a special section entitled “Reading the Black German Experience” in a 2003 issue of the journal Callaloo edited by Tina Campt and Michelle Wright, and Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay’s volume The African-German Experience (1996). Black Germans and discourses on race and nation before the Third Reich are the topic of Fatima El-Tayeb’s Schwarze Deutsche (2001). She highlights that there was a black presence in Germany well before the AfroGerman movement and exposes ‘false’ assumptions about the non-existence of German racism and black Germans, about the separateness of race and racism, and about the ‘naturalness’ of race (7-8). Reiner Pommerin’s Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde (1979) addresses the case of the socalled “Schwarze Schmach am Rhein” [Black Horror on the Rhine], which came to bear on German notions of blackness and to some degree on German reactions to African American GIs after World War II. There is also a recent tendency to make critical Whiteness Studies feasible for the German context; for example Mythen, Masken und Subjekte

22 | TRANSATLANTIC CULTURAL EXCHANGE

(2005) edited by Maureen Maisha Eggers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Piesche, and Susan Arndt offers an inventory of critical Whiteness Studies in Germany. Furthermore, there are advanced attempts to bring together AfroGerman perspectives with other German minorities and to capture Germany as both a diasporic and postcolonial setting. Kien Nghi Ha, Nicola Lauré alSamarai, and Sheila Mysorekar’s re/visionen: Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland (2007) comprises voices and perspectives of Afro-Germans and other people of color in order to examine the history and realities of racism, cultural politics, and resistance in Germany. An earlier example is the 1999 volume AufBrüche which collects contributions on the cultural productions of migrant, black, and Jewish women in Germany (ed. Cathy S. Gelbin, Kader Konuk, and Peggy Piesche). The growing public and political interest in the black diaspora is reflected, among others, in the brochure Rewriting the Footnotes (2000) by Paulette Reed-Anderson which was published by Berlin’s Commissioner for Foreigners’ Affairs and focuses on the history of black Germans and African immigrants in Berlin.7 In 2004, the House of World Cultures in Berlin staged Der Black Atlantic: Travelling Cultures, Counter-Histories, Networked Identities a “much-noted series of events featuring symposia, lectures, concerts, film screenings, and exhibitions on Black German culture, history, and politics” (Diedrich and Heinrichs 9). Diedrich and Heinrichs read the English/German hybrid which served as the title of this project as a reminder of “Germany’s indirect geographic link to the Atlantic” as well as “the mediated German reception of African American and Black British theories of racial identity formation” (11).8 The study of the

7

This brochure is an extended and revised version of Eine Geschichte von mehr als 100 Jahren: Die Anfänge der Afrikanischen Diaspora in Berlin published in 1995.

8

See also the related publication Der Black Atlantic (ed. Haus der Kulturen der Welt with Tina Campt and Paul Gilroy). It presents a diverse range of texts in German that deal with the black diaspora and the black Atlantic. Its structure repeats the English/German hybrid of the title; individual texts are in German but the chapters have English titles. Similarly, the brochure Rewriting the Footnotes includes texts in English as well as German and their respective translations.

INTRODUCTION | 23

black diaspora in Europe has in fact been shaped by “[r]esearch and writing on Blacks in the United States [which] has been tremendously useful” in this context (Small xxix). Yet, Stephen Small warns in a section of his introduction to Black Europe and the African Diaspora tellingly entitled “(Dubious!) Comparisons with the United States” that the “concepts from elsewhere will prevent the emergence of appropriate, location-specific concepts developing in Europe” (xxx). The list of relevant publications could, of course, be further extended and is not at all meant to be exhaustive. It attests to the wide scope of topics related to cultural crossovers between African America and (West) Germany and to the current expansion of this interdisciplinary field. My focus on Germany (primarily West Germany) and its connections to African America (particularly African American women’s culture) provides a very specific aspect within the context of research on Europe and African America or blacks in Europe. At the same time that the scholarly and public interest in German blackness, Germany’s connection to the black Atlantic and African America, and transatlantic cultural mobility has grown, there have been similar developments with regard to other European countries, most prominently perhaps Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands. The research on African Americans and/in France offers a particularly useful context and to some degree serves as model and inspiration for my project on (West) Germany. To name just a few prominent examples: Patricia Archer-Straw’s Negrophilia (2000) examines the white avant-garde’s response to black people in 1920s Paris. Tyler Stovall’s seminal study Paris Noir (1996) traces the steps of African Americans in France’s capital. The collection French Civilization and its Discontents (2003) edited by Stovall and Georges van den Abbeele offers inroads into contemporary France, its national identity and colonial past, and the intersections of the African diaspora with the francophone world. Michel Fabre follows African American writers From Harlem to Paris (1991) and Iris Schmeisser draws attention to the Transatlantic Crossings between Paris and New York (2006) with regard to black culture and the arts in the interwar years. In his 2009 article “No Green Pastures: The African Americanization of France” Stovall has introduced the term African Americanization which I use to describe German interactions and interconnections with African American culture within and beyond (but in any case decisively shaped by) processes of Americanization. Stovall, among other things, compares the French and American black

24 | TRANSATLANTIC CULTURAL EXCHANGE

diasporas and briefly explores how “contemporary France in general […] has manifested traits reminiscent of the Black American experience” (181). Yet, he does not provide any extensive reflection on the terminology (with its references to Africa and/or the African diaspora as well as to a more general Americanization) and prioritizes the comparison between the two ‘black’ cultures. In contrast, my usage of the term not only deliberately connects it to the framework of Americanization and examines the relationship between African American culture and the Americanizations of (West) Germany but also analyzes primarily the resonance of African American culture in (white) German mainstream culture and to a lesser degree its significance for a German black diaspora. My different case studies inherently resist being fit into a single, clearly defined methodological and theoretical framework. I therefore draw on theoretical debates and methodological approaches as the analyses of the individual cases and cultural materials require. For example, a critical assessment of Lorde’s significance for Afro-Germans and her interventions into (West) German discourses demands a thorough discussion of the conceptualization of diaspora, while an analysis of the West German reception of the film Die Farbe Lila [The Color Purple] cannot do without at least some basic theories of dubbing and adaptation. In all cases, however, I follow an intersectional approach. While I deal with individual categories of difference for the sake of analytical clarity, these also have to be viewed in their interplay. Of particular interest in this context are the intersections of race and gender, whereas some categories of differences (like sexuality) do not figure prominently in my analyses (even though they would provide further significant insights that, however, lie beyond the scope of this project). Despite the diversity of issues and texts covered, there are some common methodological premises on which the following chapters are based. In its overall approach, this study is informed by new historicism and discourse analysis. New historicism has frequently been termed a “practice rather than a doctrine” (Greenblatt, “Towards” 146) and has “been reluctant to identify itself with any particular theorist or theory” (Colebrook 23). Similarly, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt emphasize that “new historicism is not a coherent, close-knit school” (2). Yet, Louis Montrose’s famous statement about the “reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history” (20) captures a hallmark of new historicist projects, which often practice a “form of textual inductivism” as

INTRODUCTION | 25

they “deal directly with sources and particulars rather than pre-given totalities such as ‘world-picture’ or ‘ideology’” (Colebrook 24). The anecdote is central to new historicism because it disrupts grand historical narratives and provides a means to access and create “counterhistories” (Gallagher and Greenblatt 52-53). H. Aram Veeser sums up the major presuppositions which to some degree unite new historicism as it “really does assume: 1) that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices; 2) that every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes; 3) that literary and nonliterary ‘texts’ circulate inseparably; 4) that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths or expresses unalterable human nature; and 5) that a critical method and language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe.” (2)

These premises are foundational for my analyses which pay attention not only to the cultural products or “cultural artifacts” including people themselves (Geertz 51), but even more to their resonances as they are transferred into another culture and appropriated, received, and consumed. Resonance is understood here in Greenblatt’s sense as “the power of [an] object […] to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer [or reader] the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which as metaphor or simply as metonymy it may be taken by a viewer to stand.” (“Resonance” 170)

Greenblatt examines “resonance” together with what he calls “wonder,” i.e. “the power of [an] object […] to stop the viewer in his tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention” (“Resonance” 170).9 He regards it the task of new historicists “to continually renew the

9

Claire Colebrook explains that “wonder is considered to be part of a colonising strategy which seeks to contain the radical difference of the New World” and “is also the recognition of difference so radical that it will resist any attempt at complete comprehension” (214). She elaborates that “wonder is that which resists recuperation – however fleetingly” (219).

26 | TRANSATLANTIC CULTURAL EXCHANGE

marvelous at the heart of the resonant” rather than to “supplant wonder with secure knowledge” (“Resonance” 181). My analyses, however, follow the resonances of specific cultural texts and examine how the cultural material “is transferred from one discursive sphere to another” and from one cultural context to another (Greenblatt, “Towards” 157). Meaning is in this approach not inherent in a (cultural) text but is “manufacture[d] […] through various procedures (including production, consumption and circulation)” (Colebrook 28). Therefore, I closely examine a diverse corpus of texts from accounts by contemporary witnesses to newspaper articles, reviews, and interviews to pamphlets, conference programs, and leaflets and subscribe to new historicism’s “intensified willingness to read all of the textual traces of the past with the attention traditionally conferred only on literary texts” (Greenblatt, “Introduction” 14). My readings rely on the new historicist “commitment to particularity” (Gallagher and Greenblatt 19) and at times resort to microscopic “thick descriptions” in Clifford Geertz’s sense. New historicism, according to Winfried Fluck, offers not only “new ways of relating a diversity of cultural material” but also makes “this material newly relevant” (“Activist” 40). Fluck argues that Foucault’s work “is used for special purposes” in new historicist thought which “offers a more moderate and compromising version of Foucault” (“Activist” 42, 43). In line with Foucault’s dictum that “[d]iscourse must not be referred to the distant presence of the origin, but rather treated as and when it occurs” (28) and his insistence on questioning “teleologies and totalizations” in the field of history (17), new historicism emerges as a “history in the present,” to adopt a phrase Foucault used to described his own work (Colebrook 67). It decidedly does not present a revival or re-affirmation of an ‘old’ historicism and, in this sense, is a label that is “misleading” (Greenblatt, “Resonance” 164).10 Considering the general outline of my project, I cannot do away with all the unities Foucault

10 Greenblatt maintains that new historicism ascribes to none of the meanings of “historicism” as they are listed in The American Heritage Dictionary: “1. The belief that processes are at work in history that man can do little to alter. 2. The theory that the historian must avoid all value judgments in his study of past periods or former cultures. 3. Veneration of the past or of tradition” (cf. Greenblatt, “Resonance” 164).

INTRODUCTION | 27

submits to critical questioning and potential abandonment, including such “ready-made syntheses” as notions of tradition, influence, development and evolution, spirit, or the book and the oeuvre (23-25). While I engage in a discourse analytical approach that views (cultural) texts and statements, the “atom[s] of discourse,” as embedded in discursive structures, in “a system of references” and not as autonomous units, I cannot completely dismiss notions of tradition or influence (Foucault 90, 25). My approach might only to some degree be able to hold “pre-existing forms of continuity” temporarily “in suspense” (Foucault 28). In line with Foucault’s theory, my analyses pay attention to “discursive formations,” which are regulated by “rules of formation” and which capture groups of statements together as “they refer to one and the same object,” according to their “form or type of connexion,” the “permanent and coherent concepts involved,” or “the identity and persistence of themes” (35-42). Discursive formations, however, “operate by exclusion” and it is the “discursive event” which harbors the potential of “new relations of power” (Colebrook 43). Additionally, my analyses seek to reveal what Frankenberg has called “discursive repertoires,” i.e. “the clustering of discursive elements” that occur in (West) German discourses on African American culture in general and African American women in particular (16).11 According to Nina Mackert and Johanna Meyer-Lenz, four aspects are constitutive of discourse analysis following Foucault: the position and site of discursive statements, the inscription of discourses, the limits of discourse and ‘interdiscourses,’ and the archive (263-64). What Foucault calls “strategies,” the themes and theories of a particular discourse, are of particular relevance (71) as I zoom in on the ways in which German (media) discourses have constructed African American culture and the strategies that characterize these discursive formations. Also, Foucault’s concept of the archive is crucial to my analyses. The archive is the “general system of the formation and transformation of statements;” it is never accessible and describable in its entirety

11 While I do not focus on race exclusively, Frankenberg’s elaboration on her employment of ‘repertoire’ is indicative of my own usage of the term. She states that the term ‘repertoire’ captures “something of the way in which strategies for thinking through race were learned, drawn upon, and enacted, repetitively but not automatically or by rote, chosen but by no means freely so” (16).

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but rather occurs “in fragments, regions, and levels” (Foucault 146, 147). Following Foucault – and the new historicist take on his work – this study is concerned with an “archaeological analysis” rather than a history of ideas. Archaeological analysis “individualizes and describes discursive formations. That is, it must compare them, oppose them to one another in the simultaneity in which they are presented, distinguish them from those that do not belong to the same time-scale, relate them […] to the non-discursive practices that surround them and serve as a general element for them. […] archaeological study is always in the plural; it operates in a great number of registers, it crosses interstices and gaps; it has its domain where unities are juxtaposed, separated, fix their crests, confront one another and accentuate the whitespaces between one another.” (Foucault 174)

In Claire Colebrook’s words, “Foucault’s archaeology seeks to describe rather than interpret. A text itself is not the bearer of a meaning; it is an occurrence and an intervention within a field of forces” (46). The following analyses of heterogeneous cultural texts and materials provide some tentative insights into the (West) German “cultural archive.” They take up Edward Said’s idea of “look[ing] back at the cultural archive” and the sense of “begin[ning] to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally” (Culture 59). They examine West German discourses on African American culture, and concentrate on the “description of the discursive and material domains in which a text is situated” (Colebrook 28). The exploration of West German discourses on African American women’s culture in relation to Americanization, which offers a context but not necessarily limitation for my argument about African Americanization, already reveals that “processes of subversion and containment are mutual rather than mutually exclusive” (Colebrook 27). The case studies are arranged in a roughly chronological order but they are not intended to emerge as a coherent historical narrative or suggestive of sequentiality; rather, as the analyses follow resonances and reverberations of individual cultural texts, discontinuities, fissures, fault lines, and breaks emerge alongside (constructed) continuities, changes, and developments.

2 (African) Americanizing Germany

There is no doubt that America’s culture is visible everywhere. (RICHARD PELLS, “DOUBLE CROSSINGS” 198) Americanization, then, should be the story of the travels of an American cultural language and of other people acquiring that language. What they actually say with that language, however, is a different story altogether. (ROB KROES, “ADVERTISING” 284) In the final analysis, we are not being Americanized. We Americanize ourselves! (WINFRIED FLUCK, “CALIFORNIA BLUE” 223)

Whether it is viewed a blessing or a curse, self-inflicted or imposed, the (postwar) Americanization of West Germany and other parts of the world is typically bound up with notions of a global hegemony of American popular culture as exemplified by Hollywood, pop music, or fast food. Usually, it is thereby imagined as representing the white dominant mainstream of US society and culture. Outside of this mainstream, African American culture can then easily be viewed as an ‘other’ America; inherently different from and (potentially) subversive to standardized and commodified American

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mass culture. This dichotomous positing of Americanization as referring to ‘white dominant mainstream culture’ and African American culture as outside of this mainstream and, therefore, Americanization’s subversive and oppressed Other, per se without the same hegemonic strivings, normally does not occur in scholarly and popular debates in this simplified binary opposition – yet, as an abstract matrix or implicit assumption this positing informs numerous accounts on African American culture as well as Americanization and America’s cultural influence in the world. This might be as convenient as it is misleading. It is convenient because the strategy of imagining an ‘other’ America allows for combining critical approaches towards the US (mainstream) with appreciation for its ‘other’ facets. It is also convenient because it splits stereotypical images and mythical notions of the USA onto (at least) two different projection screens which then appear to represent different faces of the US. These, however, can still be shaped by the same naturalized assumptions about America as, for example, representing future-oriented progress, unlimited opportunities, and innovation (albeit in a different guise). At the same time it is misleading because it veils that African American culture has essentially shaped the American ‘mainstream.’ It overlooks potentially hegemonic strivings within African American culture and the black diaspora as well as subversive potentials emerging from within Americanization. It allows for critically commenting on and analyzing American (foundational) myths while at the same time affirming them, albeit deferred to a different cultural setting, an ‘other’ America. In the following, I attempt to overcome or at least unsettle these simplified and simplifying positions by reading the reception of African American culture in West Germany as much more complexly related to Americanization – as an integral part of a plethora of Americanizations as well as existing at its margins or even in opposition to it; as oscillating between different positions and not easily to be located either inside or outside of the framework of Americanization. The African American women whose art and activism stand at the center of this book are in many ways also at the center of American cultural exports and global influence. Their work neither exists primarily outside structures of Americanization nor can it be fully assessed through an exclusive focus on their position in the black diaspora. Even though they are often perceived as representatives of an ‘other’ (read: not dominant/mainstream) America in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc., they function as agents of

(AFRICAN) AMERICANIZING GERMANY | 31

cultural exchange between (African) America and (West) Germany and their reception is enmeshed in discourses on (mythical) images of America, interrogations of Americanization(s), and renegotiations of transatlantic cultural relations. Approaching the multifaceted framework of Americanization, this chapter follows a two-part structure and develops a double perspective for the analysis of African American culture in postwar Germany: In a first step, it provides an overview of current debates on the issue of Americanization and summarizes the concept’s inherent problems in connection with its continuing power in popular and scholarly discourses. In a second step, it offers an alternative or addition to an often limited and limiting perspective of Americanization and proposes to conceptualize Americanizations always in the plural rather than as a generalizing (polemic) term without analytic promises. In this study, the cultural transfer between (African) America and (West) Germany is viewed through the lens of this double perspective. This reading does not deny the power of Americanization as a term but acknowledges the many problems which the concept entails for the analysis of cultural exchange. Examining concrete examples of (African) Americanizations in their specificity and mutuality and as distinct aspects of the multitude of Americanizations which could (and should) be analyzed each in its own right, I claim, avoids several of the pitfalls of employing Americanization as an overall analytical tool and provides a useful perspective to capture the processes of cultural transfer and exchange in postwar Germany in and beyond the framework of Americanization.

D EBATES

ON

A MERICANIZATION

The economic, political, ideological, social, and cultural Americanization1 of Germany, Europe, or even the world, has been a powerful and polarizing

1

Americanization is an imprecise term as it implicitly refers to US-Americanization. I nonetheless retain the term and use it as shorthand reference for USAmericanization, just as the terms American and America are used throughout this study as designating the United States of America (in correspondence to the discourses which my analysis relates to).

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notion in popular discourses throughout and beyond the 20th century. The different spheres of Americanization cannot be viewed in isolation from each other or, as Mel van Elteren asserts, “Americanization has no single motor force” (102). Yet, it is cultural Americanization which has particularly served as a linchpin for public and scholarly debates on US influence around the globe; to be more specific, it is American mass and/or popular culture that is usually (implicitly or explicitly) referred to in these often emotionally charged debates. In Winfried Fluck’s words, “when we discuss the problem of a possible Americanization […] we are not thinking of Ernest Hemingway or Saul Bellow or Toni Morrison, but of American mass or popular culture” (“California Blue” 224). From William T. Stead’s almost prophetic proclamation of an Americanization of the world2 as the “trend of the twentieth century” to polemic writings underlining the cultural imperialism thesis3 and promoting fears of homogenization, trivialization, and cultural decline, such as Gustav Sichelschmidt’s Deutschland – eine amerikanische Provinz (1996) or Rolf Winter’s Little America: Die Amerikanisierung der deutschen Republik (1995), to more enthusiastic accounts and analyses of American culture like Wolfram Knorr’s Monster, Movies, Macht und Massen (2000) or Claus Leggewie’s Amerikas Welt (2000), America and Americanization have been contested concepts in popular discourses. Americanization’s interconnectedness with modernization, globalization, or Westernization has equally been subject to scholarly research. Attempts to define the term and to differentiate it from related concepts abound, as do studies negotiating the consequences of and reasons for American culture’s ‘success’ (or, less frequently, ‘failure’) abroad. In general, scholarly works on Americanization have expressed serious doubts about the usefulness of the term because it is semantically and

2

For detailed accounts including earlier European negotiations of Americanism and Americanization see Elteren (2006) or Linke and Tanner (2006). William H. Marling even suggests that Stead was not prophetic at all because “[p]eople had been using Americanize as a verb for 120 years before Stead suffixed it” (195).

3

Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht states that “[c]ultural imperialism has proven to be an enormously popular and durable concept.” It has become fundamental to the research of historians and “has permeated many academic disciplines, including musicology, sports, sociology, and political science” (477).

(AFRICAN) AMERICANIZING GERMANY | 33

emotionally charged. It is, in fact, a “term burdened by its history” (Elteren 105) and “fraught with political baggage” (Fehrenbach and Poiger xiii). Scholars like Kaspar Maase, Reinhold Wagnleitner, Rob Kroes, Timothy Schroer, or Michael Ermarth have pointed out the term’s vagueness and lack of analytical clarity as well as its diffuse and multiple meanings. As Jon Roper asserts, Americanization “remains a loaded term” (15) and Axel Schildt even states that – at least with regard to Germany’s postwar decade – historians have abandoned the term as a descriptive category due to its powerful connotations in everyday use (“Zur so genannten” 25). However, I agree with Konrad H. Jarausch and Hannes Siegrist that it is exactly this loadedness of the term which allows for important conclusions about its historical impact (21). Lars Koch and Petra Tallafuss argue that Americanization has been turned into a solid analytic category through extensive scholarly work and definitions (10). However, it seems that the many (and even sometimes contradictory) problem-oriented approaches to the term attest to the continuing need for re-defining and re-negotiating Americanization rather than taking any of its meanings or its analytic value for granted.4 Elteren is to the point when he states that Americanization is “complicated but not so problematic that we should outright reject it” (167). I use the term Americanization not only fully aware of its potential elusiveness but exactly because of its ambiguities and multi-layered meanings. Therefore, instead of a neat working definition, I offer a cursory glance at recent attempts at defining precisely what Americanization means as well as a few preliminary remarks which, rather than reducing the complexities of Americanization, aim to showcase its most relevant aspects. Richard Pells summarizes Americanization5 as “the worldwide invasion of American movies, jazz, rock’n’roll, mass circulation magazines, best-

4

Elteren asserts that “the term continues to play a central role in many descriptions and discussions of specific change processes in local settings outside the United States that are in some way related (or at least attributed) to American influence” (1).

5

Even though Americanization may also refer to the processes of immigrants adapting to and adopting American culture, it is used in this study only in its second meaning, namely the “idea that the world is to be made over in the American image” (Roper 2).

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selling books, advertising, comic strips, theme parks, shopping malls, fast food, and television programs” (“Commentary” 495). However, he argues for a re-evaluation of the supposed threat posed by Americanization or globalization and points towards the European roots of many American cultural products.6 In addition, he claims that “cultural nationalism and international culture continue to coexist, however uneasily” (497). Pells’s optimistic assessment that “we are all free to decide what to embrace and what to ignore” (502), in my view, ignores the potential of manipulation, pre-selection, and processes of interpellation as well as the many factors influencing individual and collective choices. Yet, his notion that the cultural relationship between America and Europe is shaped by mutuality and that what is usually referred to as American culture is overall neither homogenous nor ‘originally’ American are useful for this study’s focus on African American culture and its reception in Germany. However, the transatlantic relationship in this context needs to be expanded to include Africa as a cultural reference point. Despite overestimating the freedom of choice, Pells’s approach points out the crucial role of the recipient and the fact that, beyond “Coca-Colonization” (Reinhold Wagnleitner) and “McDonaldization”7 (George Ritzer), aspects of “self-Americanization” (Winfried Fluck)

6

Pells points out that “the United States has been as much a recipient as a creator

7

McDonaldization “describes the rationalization of society – the places and

and exporter of modern culture” (“Commentary” 498). spaces where people live, work, and consume – using the fast-food restaurant as a paradigm” (Ritzer and Stillman 33-34). As George Ritzer and Todd Stillman explain, McDonaldization “is only temporarily a subset of Americanization” and more than just one sub-strand of Americanization; consequently the two terms need to be differentiated (41). Their (highly disputable) definition conceptualizes Americanization as a “powerful one-directional process that tends to overwhelm competing processes (e.g. Japanization) as well as the strength of local forces that might resist, modify and/or transform American models into hybrid forms. Moreover, the notion of Americanization is tied to a particular nation – the USA – but it has a different impact on many specific nations” (35). While the varying effects of Americanization in different settings (though not only national settings) need to be differentiated, this conception of the term seems to simplify the cultural transfer processes frequently captured as Americanization.

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or even “lustvolle Selbstamerikanisierung” (Reinhold Wagnleitner) have decisively shaped German responses to American culture. With regard to postwar Germany, Bernd Greiner even claims that the term Americanization describes the ways in which offers (in terms of politics, economics, or culture) from the USA have been received (rather than merely adopted or imitated) (12). Speaking of an American “offer” easily evokes notions of American culture as a self-service store for willing consumers or an outstretched helping hand for a disoriented German society (Greiner 20). Such notions, again, harbor the danger of underestimating hegemonic strivings on the part of the USA; but whether the American influence is strategic and manipulative or rather ‘innocent’ and unobtrusive, whether it is forcefully imposed or willingly accepted by the receiving culture – it is certainly true that “Americanization […] designates much more than just the mapping of influence of one country over another” (Gmünden 16). In fact, it seems that the cultural imperialism thesis has been “contested to the point that nothing is left of its critical charge.” Theories which emphasize “selective borrowing” and “active appropriation” on part of the recipient and foreground “indigenization, hybridization or creolization” have taken its place in contemporary approaches to Americanization (Elteren 1). They have demonstrated that what proponents of the cultural imperialism thesis often capture in the military metaphor of an ‘invasion’ or the imagery of ‘colonization’ entails more than one culture ‘forcing’ its influence onto another. Even if we stick to these conceptualizations, which imply the assertion of power, (epistemic) violence, and control, we might conclude that both invasion and colonization ultimately lead to the hybridization and interaction of cultures rather than working only in one direction. Victoria de Grazia’s phrase “irresistible empire” perfectly displays this tension between the seductive as well as inexorably imperialistic dimensions of American culture in Europe. Similarly, P. J. Ravault’s neologism “coerseduction” classifies cultural Americanization as including both seduction and coercion. Power relations as they are included in the imperialism

Ritzer and Stillman critically declare the “power of McDonaldization to homogenize” to be “limited” (39), and these limits as well as those of Americanization in general have to be taken into account to critique notions of onedirectional imperialist domination.

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argument ultimately have to be taken into account even if the focus is placed on local adaptations and “cultural mixing” (John Tomlinson) in order to avoid what Elteren calls “receptionitis” – the overemphasis of the active role of the recipient “at the expense of interest in the political economy and cultural constraints set by power inequalities” (118). Nonetheless, the analysis of the local might run the risk of losing track of the “bigger picture of Americanization” (Elteren 105). It is, therefore, imperative to link local forms of Americanization back to discursive and material circulations on a global scale. In addition, any approach toward Americanization has to take into account that the term describes a transformative process shaped by continuing (re)negotiations of what America signifies, what American culture symbolizes, and what is adapted and accepted as American cultural import. It is not only a process affecting the receiving culture or individual but rather a practice which equally alters the symbols, products, and discourses which are subject to the cultural transfer. Based on his optimistic notion of European audiences selecting freely from American cultural exports, Pells overstates the – basically valid – point when he claims that “[i]n this sense, Europe was not ‘Americanised’ over the past 40 years; instead, in its journey across the Atlantic, American culture was ‘Europeanised’” (“American Culture Abroad” 82). His claim, nonetheless, is a useful reminder that those things American which are imported into other cultural settings are not left unchanged by the transfer and reception processes. Discussions of Americanization, which continue to oscillate between attraction/desire and rejection/fear, are inextricably linked with discourses on modernity and globalization. Alexander Stephan and Jochen Vogt claim that it is increasingly difficult to differentiate both globalization and modernity from Americanization (10), and Greiner points out that particularly globalization and Americanization are only separated by fuzzy boundaries (18). Roger Rollin’s volume The Americanization of the Global Village (1989) already indicates the connection between Americanization and globalization in its title by borrowing Marshall McLuhan’s phrase “global village,” which describes the ever-growing interconnectedness of individuals in a globalized world of media-facilitated exchange. It emphasizes not only the significance of mass media (and popular culture) for processes of Americanization but also the fact that these processes are linked and maybe even facilitated by globalization. The title of Ulrich Beck, Natan Sznaider,

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and Rainer Winter’s volume Global America? equally points toward the entanglement of globalization and Americanization. Yet, the question mark draws attention to the limits of equating these two concepts and, in addition, implicitly contests the centrality of America in a global world. As Pells reminds us, there are instances in which global culture and American culture are used synonymously (“Double Crossings” 190). This synonymy is, of course, imprecise and conflates two phenomena which are related though by no means identical (Robertson 260). Johan Galtung holds the term Americanization to be “more descriptive” than globalization, but points out that “those terms only locate the process nationally/geographically and do not touch the other dimensions of gender/generation/race/class,” which he includes in his definition of globalization. In addition, Galtung criticizes that globalization is used as a “cover-up” by “a small group of people in a small group of countries who dominate the whole process” (277). He brings to the fore that in dealing with Americanization as well as those terms usually appearing in its discursive vicinity – like globalization – makes it imperative to address questions such as who uses/utilizes these terms and to what purpose. Americanization and globalization might only be seen as more or less synonymous if, for example, we regard American culture as a “superculture” (C.W.E. Bigsby) and globalization as an “effort to build a world culture sui generis” (Galtung 280). In general, Americanization can rather be seen as “a part, although by no means a small part, of a wider tendency toward globalization, an increasing interconnectedness of the world” (Hannerz 10) or an “important form of globalization” (Ritzer and Stillman 43). We may think of globalization as a phenomenon appearing in many places in an American guise (Ostendorf “Transatlantische” 27), and of “important ‘globalizers’” as American (Berger 6). For William H. Marling, American globalization “is not as American as we think it is” and at the same time “more [American] than we know” (viii). In analogy, one could also question how American Americanization appears at close inspection. Despite all proclamations of the dominance of American culture, “[g]lobalization […] has [also] created a situation in which an American popular culture-type of modern culture is no longer necessarily American” (Fluck, “California Blue” 231). Arjun Appadurai correctly states that “[g]lobalization does not necessarily or even frequently imply homogenization or Americanization, and to the extent that different societies appropriate the materials

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of modernity differently, there is still ample room for the deep study of specific geographies, histories, and languages.” (17)

Appadurai makes a connection to yet another buzzword intertwined with Americanization: the idea of modernity, which “in its many manifestations is at the heart of Americanization” (Elteren 110). With reference to Jean Baudrillard, Wagnleitner asserts that the USA has to be understood as the original version of modernity (2). For Baudrillard “[w]e are the dubbed or subtitled version” (76). His take on the transatlantic exchange processes holds that to the loss of both parties involved, there are “products which cannot be imported or exported” (79). This serves as a reminder that the success story of the reception of American culture in Europe also entails a history of rejection and refusals. It equally draws attention to those elements which cannot be transferred and, therefore, mark the boundaries of cultural flows. Modernity, for Baudrillard, is one of these things which “refuses to cross the ocean” (79) and he goes even further by stating that “today, all myths of modernity are American” (81). On the other hand, it can be claimed that “Americanization is just one facet of modernity and America only one of its centers” (Fehrenbach and Poiger xxv) and that Americanization “has been modernity’s foremost simplification” (Ermarth, “German Unification” 267). In conclusion, both globalization and modernity are superordinate concepts of which Americanization is just one possible manifestation. However, Americanization is essentially shaped by both concepts and is often constitutive of notions of modernity and globalization. Another term which frequently occurs in connection with Americanization is Westernization. Again, the two concepts are interrelated and have to be carefully differentiated. Anselm Doering-Manteuffel defines Americanization as a highly complex process in which American influences are adapted and received in another country’s economy, society, and culture. For him, Americanization signifies cultural transfer in a very broad sense but runs unidirectional, namely from the USA to other regions of the world (11). Westernization, in contrast, is neither one-dimensional nor one-directional but an ongoing process of intercultural exchange. As an analytic category it can productively complement Americanization. Westernization, in Doering-Manteuffel’s terms, describes the process leading to the establishment of a common value system in societies on both sides of the North

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Atlantic (12-15). In consequence, Frank Becker considers the USA to be one (though not the) representative of this system, and defines Westernization as the commitment to these values and norms (33). While my analyses draw on this very basic distinction between Americanization as a rather one-dimensional process of exporting American culture to other countries and Westernization as a multi-directional negotiation of values and norms in the Western world, I understand Americanization as including and being located in a network of cultural exchange processes. At first glance, it might appear to be exclusively one-directional, yet cultural transfer affects receivers, senders, media, and subjects of the exchange process alike (though not with the same intensity). Rob Kroes’s take on Americanization proves to be useful in this regard, even if he doubts the term’s analytical value: “[…] the word Americanisation is unduly alarmist. It reduces the complex processes of cultural influence, of borrowing, imitation and reception, to the stark binary of a zero-sum game. […] To the extent that the word Americanisation can serve any useful analytical purpose at all, it should rather be taken as a short-hand reference to what is essentially a black box in the simple diagram of cultural transmission and reception. If in this process there are obviously senders and receivers as well as modes and means of transformation, the black box is the semiotic dark room where messages undergo a process of translation, where they are being decoded and reencrypted, decontextualised and recontextualised, and made to fit the frames of reference of the receivers.” (“Americanisation” 303)

Clearly, this “black box” of Americanization can never be fully explained, and only with regard to specific instances of cultural transfer can the processes happening in the “semiotic dark room” be detected and analytically grasped. Americanization, rather than being polemically employed in an “alarmist” manner, needs to be examined in concrete instances where individual phenomena come into focus and has to be used to further develop an understanding of cultural exchange. Kroes suggests that Americanization has to be analyzed “in terms of its mediation and transformation” (“Americanisation” 304). Even though in Europe “America’s culture has become an unavoidable presence” there exists “a resilience to the old European cultures that refuses to be washed away so easily” by the “waves of American culture” (Kroes, “Americanisation” 313, 318, 317). Or, as Sznaider and

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Winter point out, “it is obvious that a differentiated theoretical and empirical analysis in local contexts can provide deeper insights into processes of Americanization” (4).

B EYOND THE G ERMAN “S ONDERFALL :” AMERICANIZATIONS IN THE P LURAL West Germany has played a special role in debates on and analyses of Americanization as the bulwark of the West during the Cold War and as the German “Sonderfall” of Americanization.8 In fact, it “seems to be the most ‘Americanized’ country in Europe” (Berger 11).9 Vice versa, Americanization has obtained a special place in German discourses. Mel van Elteren states that “[i]n Germany the debates about Americanization obtained a special character because of the United States’ grip on the American occupation zone in the immediate postwar period and deliberate attempt at ‘re-educating’ the German population, as well as the sustained presence of Americans and American institutions on U.S. army bases and their environs.” (34)

Though it has become scholarly consensus that notions of a “Zero Hour,” “Zero Point,” or “Kahlschlag” and Germany as a tabula rasa after World War II are hardly more than mythical ideas10 veiling essential continuities in (cultural) exchanges between Germany and the USA, it is necessary and useful to regard the end of World War II as a caesura in the processes of

8

Germany as a “Sonderfall” of Americanization is examined, for example, in Alexander Stephan and Jochen Vogt’s America on My Mind (2006) or Stephan’s Americanization and Anti-Americanism (2005).

9

Hansfried Kellner and Hans-Georg Soeffner hold that “[f]oreign visitors to the western part of the Federal Republic are frequently amazed by the degree to which Germany’s political, economic, and social cultures resemble those of the United States” (119).

10 Cf. for example Ermarth (“Amerikanisierung” 321), Fehrenbach and Poiger (xxiii), or Gmünden (29).

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transatlantic cultural exchange.11 Ralph Willett correctly draws attention to the fact that Coca Cola, Hollywood films, and jazz had been popular in Germany well before the beginning of World War II (12-13); clearly, the so-called Americanization of German everyday life and culture did not occur without precedents. However, as Gerd Gmünden holds, “while certain continuities between the 1920s and the late 1940s and 1950s exist, the latter period presents the problem of Americanization with added complexities” (23). William H. Marling claims that already after World War I “a new understanding of Americanization” developed when the remoteness of America and American culture was overcome by the presence of US soldiers. However, he also argues that “aside from a little jazz and film, Americans hadn’t left much of their culture behind between 1917 […] and 1932” (196). This cultural input was vital for establishing continuities in the German reception of American culture before and after World War II and was an important predecessor for the postwar period’s take on America and American cultural goods, which then started to arrive in an unprecedented amount. Similarly, Americanization itself was not a new topic in German discourses.12 In Western Europe in general, many topics and discursive elements persisted into the post-World War II era – from the anxieties evoked by Americanization to the positive dreams about America (Elteren 30). Americanization is always intertwined with underlying notions of America, which in Germany have been constantly negotiated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.13 What is identified as ‘American’ culture by selective and active recipients does not necessarily have its origins in the United States or can be filtered or mediated through different national and cultural contexts – a phenomenon aptly described by Elteren as “secondary appropriation” (168). This notion leads to a redefinition of Americanization

11 Bernd Greiner claims that it is only after World War II that negotiations of Americanization make sense and become meaningful (6). 12 For earlier German notions of and debates revolving around Americanization see, for example, Becker and Reinhardt-Becker, Ermarth (“Amerikanisierung” 317ff.), Schildt (“Zur so genannten” 26ff.), Elteren (16ff.), or Lüdtke, Marßolek, and von Saldern. 13 For a historical overview of America in the German imagination see for example Caesar (1997) or Nolan (2000).

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as “adaptation of cultural and discourse patterns of U.S. origin” (Androutsopoulos and Scholz 289) to include not only reworkings, reinventions, and recontextualizations of American discourses and cultural products but also the adaptation and appropriation of structures and materials considered to be American (whether they actually are or not). Also, debates on Americanization are almost always connected with the negotiation of national and cultural identities. The definition of a foreign American culture depends on a notion of a native national and/or cultural identity. Elteren even raises the question whether the “debate about Americanization is anything more than talk about national identity” (108). This is particularly important for the German postwar context because the loss of a national identity and the resulting “Orientierungsvakuum” [orientational vacuum] provided fertile ground for American culture and Westernization (Jarausch and Siegrist 11). After World War II, the official channels and re-education (or later reorientation) programs facilitated the reception of American culture in West Germany, and American popular and material culture that was not part of the official programs was also eagerly taken up by large groups of (West) Germans. Within this cultural setting and framework, African American culture became increasingly well-known and widely received in West Germany. While Josephine Baker, Jesse Owens, W.E.B. Du Bois, and other show stars, singers, athletes, and intellectuals can be regarded as important predecessors of later representatives of African American culture in Germany, I argue that with the altered framework for the reception of American culture after World War II, the reception of African Americans and African American culture also changed significantly. Jazz – which had been regarded as “Negermusik” and degenerate art by the Nazis14 – had been turned into a symbol of resistance during the Third Reich15 and gained popularity after the War, even if in the 1950s rock’n’roll and jazz (two terms which at

14 Already during the 1920s jazz had stirred public debate in Germany, and it had been attacked by conservatives well before the Nazis tried to ban it from German life and culture (Poiger, “Rock’n’Roll” 276). It was “principally as a cultural by-product of American involvement in the First World War” that jazz made its way into Europe (Roper 13). 15 Particularly during the 1940s American jazz “enabled young people in Germany to express their disaffiliation from Nazi militarism” (Willett 8).

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that time were primarily used synonymously) were hardly to be found on the playlists of German radio stations and could only be heard on American Forces Network (AFN), British Forces Network (BFN), or Radio Luxemburg (Kurme 201). In addition, the numerous African American GIs among the liberating and occupation troops were a visible black presence in West Germany which left its marks not only (though maybe most prominently) through the so-called “occupation babies” or “brown babies” as they call themselves. The fact that the experiences of African American GIs in Germany provided an invaluable impetus for the Civil Rights movement in the US confirms that the transatlantic (cultural) exchange has always been bidirectional.16 In total, I argue that African American culture has been of significance to postwar German culture until today and that the transatlantic exchange between African America and (West) Germany is a topic in its own right which is not fully grasped by subsuming it under Americanization or American cultural influence in general. While the transfer of African American culture to (West) Germany has to be investigated as a particular form of cultural exchange and cultural mobility, Americanizations during and after the postwar period and occupation years have set guiding parameters for this exchange. It is, however, possible to find specific strands of African Americanization within and beyond these channels. Heide Fehrenbach and Uta Poiger point out that “some of the most popular American cultural imports have been adapted from the cultures of various American racial and ethnic minorities, and have been employed by nations to confront and reformulate their own notions of racial difference. This is an understudied subject […].” (xv)

The amorphous, ambivalent, and multifaceted notion of Americanization has to be conceptualized always in the plural as Americanizations17 in order

16 See, for example, Maria Höhn’s essay “‘Ein Atemzug der Freiheit:’ Afro-amerikanische GIs, deutsche Frauen und die Grenzen der Demokratie (1945-1968)” (2005). 17 In a similar fashion, related concepts like modernity and globalization have already been conceptualized in the plural, cf. for example Eliezer Ben Rafael and

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to give justice not only to the diverse cultural baggage transported under this heading but also the different realms affected by it – even within one specific national setting like Germany. Maase suggests “Afro-Americanization” of popular culture as a more adequate albeit equally conspicuous term (compared to Americanization) for a description of the development in Europe. He thereby not only points towards the relevance of African American culture in transatlantic cultural transfer but also hints at the plurality of Americanizations (BRAVO 23) – a plurality which the term Afro-Americanization equally obscures in its potentially monolithic dimension and its privileging of African American cultural influences. Elteren correctly states that there is a “plurality of processes of Americanization” (3), and Fehrenbach and Poiger suggest that “Americanization can and should be retained as an analytical tool – one, however, in need of thorough contextualization” (xiv). Finally, Michael Ermarth claims that Americanization is too broad a field to be covered in-depth – a field which is ever-expanding and open to infinite interpretations (“Amerikanisierung” 317). Therefore, Americanization can just be captured within specific moments and concrete cases while a myriad of Americanizations will escape even the most detailed and wellresearched scholarly accounts. To stick with Kroes’s notion that serves as an epigraph for this chapter: If Americanization refers to an American cultural language which people can acquire and put to everyday use, then there is a whole array of dialects which need to be differentiated and analyzed in their own respect.

A MERICANIZATIONS

AFTER

1945

After World War II a “love affair” developed between US-American victors and defeated Germans which endured, according to Ralph Willett, until the time of the Vietnam War (2). He regards “the period of the Occupation, one marked by economic colonization, cultural imperialism, and the re-education programme” as “the prologue to a more developed Americanization” (14). The situation after 1945 provided if not for a completely new start

Yitzhak Sternberg’s volume which features a section entitled “Multiple Modernities,” and Peter L. Berger and Samuel P. Huntington’s Many Globalizations.

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then at least for altered conditions for the German reception of American culture. Jarausch and Siegrist capture this change adequately when they describe processes of Americanization18 as gaining a ‘new quality,’ intensity, and broader appeal at this time (11); and Schildt declares that in 1945 the basic framework for American influence on Germany changed dramatically (“Zur so genannten” 31). Doering-Manteuffel more generally speaks of a new foundation for the American presence in postwar Europe (compared to the time before 1939) (44). In his assessment, the USA appeared for the first time as a compact system after World War II (45). The cultural transfer termed Americanization can also be understood as a side-effect of the hegemonic role which the USA came to play at that time; consequently, phenomena of Americanization can be detected in every country in which US hegemony gained a foothold during the Cold War era (DoeringManteuffel 36). Germany, in this context, constitutes a “Sonderfall” due to its unconditional surrender, its prominent role in the Cold War, and because it needed (more desperately than any other European nation) to substitute an untenable national identity and a discredited history, culture, and language damaged by the Nazis (Stephan, “Culture Clash” 29-30). Yet, other countries were also increasingly affected by Americanization after World War II. The year 1945 was a turning point in US foreign policy because “American diplomats started imagining that the United States needed to sell the American way of life abroad” (Gienow-Hecht 467).19 The notion of a German-American “love affair” and stories of how the occupiers quickly turned into allies and friends are powerful and often romanticizing descriptions of the postwar decades; however, they obscure the

18 Jarausch and Siegrist point out that Americanization in postwar Germany was basically also the opposite of Sovietization (but of course nonetheless interdependent with and complementary to it) (13). 19 Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht identifies three successive phases in the “debate on American cultural transfer abroad since 1945:” the “cold warriors” pointing towards the lack of an aggressive foreign policy, followed by the “critics of cultural imperialism” and, finally, a “group of countercritics” (465). She concludes that today “a rather heterogeneous group of scholars argue that local resistance either modified or completely stymied imports as part of a global process” (466).

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fact that during the immediate postwar years and well into the 1950s, only few Germans were euphoric about the American cultural policy, and most rejected it outright (Stephan and Vogt 11). There have been American voices loudly declaring the cultural re-education and Americanization of Germany a success – even to the extent that American politicians have cited it (a bit overhastily) as a model case for the reconstruction of e.g. Afghanistan and Iraq (Stephan, “Culture Clash” 35).20 But the history of America’s influence on postwar Germany also has to be understood as a story of rejections, refusals, and failures. American cultural imports faced adaptations, reinterpretations, and resistances (Lüdtke, Marßolek, and von Saldern 26), and the postwar years can, counter to the official success story, even be seen as a chain of failures to attract Germans to dances, fashion, sports, films, and consumer goods from the USA (Maase, “Amerikanisierung” 223). Whether the occupation period and postwar decades are evaluated as a success or as a failure, they certainly provide a very specific setting for Americanizations. The power asymmetries could hardly be more obvious than between the American “liberators/invaders” (Elteren 34) and the defeated and occupied Germany. Petra Goedde notes that these are also reproduced in gendered terms: “[B]y casting postwar Germany in feminine terms, Americans and Germans avoided confronting the Nazi past. Postwar Germany shed its aggressive masculine identity and took on the new, if temporary, identity of a feminized, victimized, and most importantly pacific, client state.” (xxiii)

Goedde’s remarks also point toward the fact that debates on Americanization in postwar Germany almost always deal with issues of German

20 Condoleezza Rice, for example, stated in an interview on German TV channel ZDF in 2003: “[A]fter World War II […] the United States […] came back to Europe and helped to create a whole set of institutions […], to spearhead the Marshall Plan, and to contribute to the creation of a new kind of Germany that became an anchor for a democratic Europe. We’re now trying to do that, in a sense, in the Middle East, with Iraq and with the Palestinian state and with what we’ve done in Afghanistan” (cf. The White House).

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(national) identities as well. What Doering-Manteuffel terms “entankerte Gesellschaft” [uprooted society] provided fertile ground for American influences (36), even if Germany was by no means a tabula rasa but rather a densely painted board in 1945 (Schrenck-Notzing 17). Hansfried Kellner and Hans-Georg Soeffner describe how the postwar search for a new identity also affected the cultural sphere: “On the cultural level as well, the trauma of the Nazi past induced a quest for a new national self-understanding and an intensified search for cultural forms that could provide legitimate foundations and expressions of new cultural styles.” (122)

Schildt suggests, due to what he considers to be a one-sided transfer of mass culture, consumer goods, and liberal ideas from the USA to Europe during the two decades after World War II, to equate Westernization with Americanization as a general trend of modernity beyond the particular historical moment (“Zur so genannten” 30). I propose that the transfer of ideas, culture, and goods might not have been as one-sided as Schildt assumes and that as unequal as the exchange certainly was, it might be fruitful to conceptualize even the “occupation as a period of interaction and mutual transformation” (Fehrenbach 4). Yet, the entanglement of Westernization and Americanization was particularly strong during the immediate postwar years – even to the degree that analytical differentiation becomes almost impossible. An analysis of this period requires several differentiations especially within the framework of Americanization. First of all, Rolf Lundén draws attention to two – more or less obvious but necessary – distinctions which need to be taken into account when analyzing American influences: (1) “[P]resence is not the same thing as influence” and (2) there is “visible and invisible influence” (141). While his observations relate to Sweden, his suggestion that the ‘hidden’ influences have greater impact than the ‘foregrounded’ and ‘defamiliarized’ presences of American culture equally holds true for postwar Germany. As a second complication, it is essential to provide a double perspective which focuses on the offers and official programs of the hegemonic power as well as the perception and practices of Germans. Cultural transfer is only successful to the degree it can adapt to national circumstances (Schildt, “Zur so genannten” 31) – and the processes of adaptation, (re)interpretation, and selection on the part of German target groups are even more revealing about intercultural exchange

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in the American occupation zone (i.e. the primary area of American influence) than a mere look at the re-education and reorientation programs and their intended impact. In fact, documented and ‘real’ influences cannot be neatly differentiated from German perceptions and interpretations. German views of America changed dramatically with the increased American presence in their own country: “After 1945, the American occupation, the Marshall Plan, and the cold war fundamentally shifted the terrain on which Americanism and anti-Americanism battled. Germans no longer invented America from afar or on the basis of limited firsthand experience; America came to Germany.” (Nolan 18)

As a third differentiation, the ‘official’ channels of cultural diplomacy need to be viewed in relation to those informal and ‘unofficial’ forms of cultural transfer which were not part of the re-education programs but equally influential. Gmünden holds that “American reeducation taught Germans the values of democracy, but even more decisive was the influence of American popular culture in shaping an eagerness to identify with the United States” (22). The official programs of the American occupiers failed, for example, to reform the German educational system or its system of civil service (“Beamtentum”) but succeeded in creating a German democracy, which would become a strategically invaluable ally in the Cold War. Denazification, cultural programs disseminated via the media under allied control, American books, and 27 America Houses (plus reading-rooms and mobile informational centers) which had been established by 1950 can be counted as successes of the (German-)American pioneers in Germany (Stephan, “Culture Clash” 31). Influencing everyday life was vital in providing a foundation for the positive reception of re-education and reorientation programs and their ideological messages. Cultural transfer pertaining to everyday life was neither organized by the occupying forces nor within their range of direct control or influence (Doering-Manteuffel 35). Stephan and Vogt claim that even more than American cultural policy, American popular culture had a lasting impact on Germany, and that Hollywood films as well as popular music inevitably changed cultural practices and European notions of culture, particularly with regard to the diminishing distinction between high and low, popular and elite culture (12). Maase regards the official re-education and reorientation programs a “flop” when measured

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against their intended goals, and attests greater success to those initiatives of cultural foreign policy presented as offers, for example America Houses, youth clubs, exhibitions by the United States Information Agency (USIA), and student exchange programs; but the broadest resonance, in his view, was generated by commercial offers and those ‘unintended’ effects of the US-American presence like the AFN programs and individual personal contacts (“Amerikanisierung” 234). Personal contacts, which despite the initial fraternization ban soon occurred frequently, particularly between American soldiers and German “Fräuleins,” helped to promote American popular culture and the American way of life (Stephan, “Culture Clash” 32). In addition, these contacts were vital to establishing the idea of a “love affair” between Germans and Americans. As Goedde states, “[t]he personal interactions between American soldiers and German civilians bridged the divide that the war had created between the two countries” (xxii-xxiii). ‘Unofficial’ channels and personal contacts were also of particular significance for the reception of African American culture during the occupation period and the postwar decades.

3 African American Culture in (Postwar) Germany

One reason that New World black cultures appear ‘counter’ to European narratives of history is that Europe exorcized blackness in order to create its own invented traditions, empires, and fictions of superiority and racial purity. (TIFFANY PATTERSON AND ROBIN KELLEY 13) The Black diaspora in Europe is in large part, and always has been, dominated by the discussion of the Black diaspora in the United States. Josephine Baker is the most prominent example here, and Blacks in the American military are also known. So too, are African American cultural products in music (from jazz and soul to rap and hiphop) […]. (STEPHEN SMALL XXX)

When Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison became known in West Germany and their works began to circulate – more or less – broadly among German audiences, many Germans had already encountered African American culture and African Americans in person and

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in the media. Notions of blackness, African Americanness, and Americanness had been established in the collective imaginary before the first call for solidarity with Davis or the publication of Morrison’s first novel in German. These earlier notions and images contributed decisively to German discourses on these female African American writer-activists and reverberated (though not always explicitly) in appropriations, receptions, and debates of their art, thinking, and activism. Therefore, a historical detour is necessary to establish the backdrop against which these four writer-activists came to be viewed and to interrogate the framework for the reception of African American culture in postwar West Germany. This framework was highly affected by the new quality of Americanization but equally determined by the historical continuities of African American presences in Germany which defy the notion of a ‘new beginning’ after 1945 also with regard to the cultural exchanges between (West) Germany and African America. This chapter therefore examines three exemplary instances of intercultural contact with African American culture and its representatives in West Germany: the presence of black GIs after World War II, the reception of jazz from the days of the Weimar Republic to the postwar years, and the reactions to Josephine Baker whose iconic image is still enshrined in Germany’s collective and cultural memory. I do not intend to recount in detail the (cultural) history of Germany’s postwar era1 or to summarize the minutiae of cultural exchange between Germans and Americans after World War II; rather, I set out to identify main contact zones, specific moments of personal and mediated exchange between German and African American culture, and prevalent aspects of Germany’s encounter with African Americans and African American cultural products. Yet, a more general differentiation between subsequent phases of Americanization in postwar Germany is useful for the analysis of African American (cultural) presences and influences in the American occupation zone and beyond. Stephan distinguishes between two phases of

1

Several book-length studies and essay collections deal with European and German (cultural) history and American influences in diverse spheres between 1945 and 1965. See, for example, Clemens (1994), Diefendorf, Frohn, and Rupieper (1993), Duignan and Gann (1996), Ermarth (1993), Gehrz (2002), Goedde (2003), and L. Koch (2007).

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Americanization: a first phase determined by the cultural policy of the occupiers, German encounters with American popular culture, and local elites clinging to traditional values and German high culture, lasting from the end of World War II to the late 1950s; and a second phase determined by an ever more important international context, lasting from the second half of the 1950s until today (“Culture Clash” 49). In this second phase, the efforts of occupation officials to Americanize German culture have been gradually substituted by processes of Self-Americanization, which Stephan regards as part of a global amalgamation of art, commerce, modernization, and globalization led by the USA (“Culture Clash” 40). Focusing on two instances of German contact with African Americans (predominantly GIs) and African American culture (particularly music) this chapter is not limited to the occupation period or the first phase of Americanization. It exceeds this framework to incorporate continuities from earlier German encounters with (African) American culture and to look into the late 1950s and 1960s with particular attention to German discourses revolving around race. It thereby addresses the two main areas identified by Timothy Schroer as relevant in the German public imagination with regard to ‘race’ and its renegotiation after 1945: sexual relations between German women and African American men, and African American culture, particularly music (1). African American culture was only to a certain degree part of the official programs; encounters with African American soldiers and African American culture happened more along the lines of personal contact and unofficial channels of cultural exchange. It can therefore be easily assumed that the break between the two phases of Americanization might not have been as significant for intercultural exchanges between Germans and African Americans as it was for other strands of Americanization. Even though the reception of African American culture in West Germany often falls into the realm of “subversive Americanization” (Sabine Broeck), it was also part of the official agenda. For example, African American music was featured on the programs of America Houses, and African American soldiers in US uniforms were an official presence in Germany. As a third example of German contact with African American culture, this chapter features an overview of the German reception of Josephine Baker with a particular focus on the instances of iconization, exoticization, and appropriation. As the first African American female show star, dancer, and artist to become lastingly enshrined in German collective memory, her role in German discourses merits

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close examination. It provides a counterpart to the primarily male dominated areas of intercultural contact between African Americans and Germans through the military occupation and (to a lesser extent) jazz music. From female jazz icon to Civil Rights activist, Baker’s career lasted from the 1920s to the 1960s (and beyond), when German solidarity with the black liberation struggle as well as student protests generated a transnational network for which African American culture was of central importance.

A FRICAN A MERICAN S OLDIERS AND ‘R ACIAL ’ D ISCOURSES African American culture functioned as a linchpin of generational conflicts, and the African American presence after World War II influenced German discourses on race.2 “Maybe the deepest split between these children [the age group born between 1938 and 1947] and their parents was due to their polarized attitudes towards black Americans – or, as the older generation used to call them with at least strong racist undertones: Nigger. […] The gap between the generations with respect to the black Americans proves to be unbridgeable.” (Maase, Roll Over 9, 11)

Images of blackness and African American culture had been circulating in Germany already throughout the first half of the 20th century and provided a background against which the black presence after World War II came to be viewed – particularly through the eyes of older generations. Germans had earlier imagined “Blackness without Blacks” (Sander L. Gilman) and had developed an idea of blackness that was not subject to “external control” and “pure fiction” drawing on other traditions and creating a “mythic structure of blackness” (Gilman xi). Confrontations and direct contact with blacks occurred when a “complex myth of blackness [already] existed”

2

I focus on this younger generation’s experience of the postwar years and their (personal) encounters with African American and American culture because this generation will be of particular interest with regard to (student) protest culture and solidarity with Civil Rights/Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s.

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(xii). In the aftermath of World War I, the so-called “Black Horror on the Rhine” and the ensuing debates about the “otherness of the troops” that was perceived “in terms of blackness” was a crucial moment in German engagements with blackness and created a “mirage of blackness” in which anxieties were projected on an Other and externalized (Gilman xiii-xiv).3 Having always relied on the import of other cultures’ ideas of blackness, Germans turned towards the “American image of the Black” in order to “deal with the idea of Blackness” (Gilman xii).4 However, already during the occupation after World War I some Germans encountered African and African American soldiers and for them it was probably the first time they actually saw a black person: “Two months after the war, the sight of an African American infantryman in the occupied Rhineland was enough to assemble an awe-struck crowd of German civilians” (Little 179-80). Direct and mediated contact with African Americans existed before and even during the Third Reich: Josephine Baker and other African American musicians and show stars toured Europe and Germany during the 1920s, and successful African American athletes like boxer Joe Louis or track star Jesse Owens were no strangers to German audiences of the 1930s. One example which particularly attests to the continuities of intercultural contact which existed despite Nazi racism might be what William J. Baker calls the “political love story” between Germans and Jesse Owens. Owens was met with great enthusiasm by many Germans and found an “appreciative audience eager to applaud his every athletic achievement” which is also immortalized in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (Baker 168). For Germans, the “Jesse Owens myth [later] helped them to forget the Nazi past;” particularly his friendship with Lutz Long came to symbolize a Germany beyond the Nazi’s scorn for black people (Baker 172). In his blazing triumph at Berlin,

3

As Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse, and Yara-Colette Lemke-Muniz de Faria correctly claim, there has, however, also been “blackness with blacks” much earlier with the migration of colonial subjects to Germany between 1885 and 1918 (206).

4

African American soldiers were also employed in the US Army during World War I. According to Monroe H. Little’s sources, there were an estimated number of 400,000 African American troops serving in Western Europe in November 1918 (178).

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Owens – among many other African American athletes and medal winners – challenged Nazi notions of an ‘Aryan master race.’ In early 1936, Joe Louis’s defeat by Germany’s Max Schmeling in the box ring had provided input for Nazi propaganda when Joseph Goebbels “declared Schmeling’s triumph a victory for Hitler’s social policies” (Moore 19). Yet, such propaganda lost ground even prior to Louis’s 1938 victory over Schmeling in a rematch at New York City’s Yankee stadium, which was symbolically staged as a fight between a democratic USA and fascist Germany: When Owens excelled at the 1936 Olympic Games he became cherished and enshrined in Germany’s collective memory. Contemporary witness Robert Beyer (born 1929) writes in his recollections of the immediate postwar period: “Auf einem Bild aus meinem Sammelalbum von der Olympiade 1936 war der USWundersportler Jesse Owens zu sehen, ein Neger! Ob es unter den amerikanischen Soldaten auch Neger gibt?” 5 (96)

Of course, there were many African American soldiers among the victorious US forces, which constituted a visible black presence in postwar West Germany.6 The military attempted to “limit the presence, visibility, and role of African American soldiers in Germany in order to avoid arousing Germans’ racial antipathy” but also because of the racist belief in its own ranks that African Americans were not as capable as white soldiers (Schroer 4344). Yet, African American soldiers were stationed – more or less – all over the American occupation zone in the beginning; only later were they concentrated in a small number of locations (62). As Timothy Schroer holds, their blackness was “neither erased nor ignored” even though according to his sources “Germans often perceived African Americans as the most American of Americans” embodying “youthfulness, openness, generosity, and naiveté” (120). In Heide Fehrenbach’s words, the black GI “came to

5

“A picture from my collector’s album of the 1936 Olympic Games depicted the exceptional US athlete Jesse Owens – a Negro! I wonder if there are also Negroes among the American soldiers?”

6

African American soldiers “made up roughly 10 percent of the American army in Germany throughout the four years of military occupation” (Schroer 2).

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represent a kind of hyperversion of American materialism and sexuality whose potency – and appeal, it was feared – was enhanced by racial difference” (65). But the relations between African Americans and Germans in occupied Germany were “remarkably amicable” only on the surface and “in reality more troubled than they appeared” (Schroer 3). Contemporary witness Betty Qui (pseudonym, born in 1928) describes her memories of the African American soldiers and points out that an initial fear of the enemy was easily overcome – at least by younger Germans, for whom American soldiers became “ambassadors of a different world” promoting American consumer and popular culture (Höhn, GIs 226). “Dunkelhäutige Soldaten der 5. US Armee verteilen Süßigkeiten an die herumlungernden Mädchen und Buben. Die deutschen Kinder wissen nicht, was ‘candy bars’ (Zuckerriegel) sind. Sie freuen sich über Kaugummis und Erdnußbutter. Ihnen ist immer gesagt worden: ‘Wenn die Amis kommen, bringen sie euch alle um.’ Nun stehen sie hier fröhlich um die Panzer und dürfen sogar auf ihnen herumklettern. Die Neger lachen und spielen mit den Kleinen, die alle Scheu verloren haben.”7 (122)

This account features the image of the friendly black soldier distributing candy8 which became firmly established during that time and frequently

7

“Dark-skinned soldiers of the 5th US Army distribute candy among the loitering girls and boys. The German kids do not know what ‘candy bars’ are. They are happy about chewing gum and peanut butter. They have always been told: ‘If the Americans come they will kill you all.’ Now they are standing around the tanks cheerfully and are even allowed to climb around on them. The Negroes laugh and play with the little ones who have completely lost their timidity.”

8

This image stood in stark contrast to the Nazi propaganda efforts to incite fear and anxiety with regard to the Allied troops in general and African American soldiers in particular. After declaring war on the United States in 1941, the Nazis attempted more than ever to convince Germans of the inferiority of American culture, and when Allied bombings destroyed German cities and German troops were on the retreat in 1944, fears of the Allied troops were strategically and systematically fostered. Drawing on hostilities towards African Americans, rumors were spread “about German children lured with chocolate and then killed by African American soldiers” (Poiger, Jazz 28-29).

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occurs in autobiographies of this period (Maase, Roll Over 9-10). German children and youth were generally intrigued by American soldiers and their behavior; the friendly black GI who distributed chocolate from a tank or jeep was a particular object of fascination and quickly turned into a powerful topos (Doering-Manteuffel 8, 37). This at first glance positive image clearly entails an infantilization of African American soldiers; as Goedde has shown, the language used to describe the behavior of these soldiers “was infused with code words denoting crudeness (‘grinning’), infantilism (playful behavior – ‘just to amuse the kids’), and animalism (‘full-blooded’)” (65). In many postwar narrations, African American GIs connect easily with German children and such encounters are viewed as unproblematic. Their relations were “viewed through a lens of long-standing racial beliefs about blacks” because the assumed ‘simple’ and ‘childlike’ nature of African Americans made them appear to be “unthreatening playmates” for German children (Schroer 121). Many studies have demonstrated that discrimination against African Americans persisted in Germany throughout and beyond the occupation.9 Maria Höhn asserts that into the 1950s, “sideby-side with […] tolerance existed a profound unease and often even resentment over the presence of black GIs,” and for many Germans, this presence symbolized most visibly and disturbingly “just how unsettled their lives had become” (GIs 13, 86). As Schroer correctly states, “[a]lthough some Germans eagerly welcomed black soldiers, as well as the American jazz music that came along with the victorious occupying army, the majority of Germans reacted with dismay” (2). Peter Martin claims that the old stereotype of the raping savage was simply substituted by a new one, the gum-chewing lanky “Negro” in the jeep who is always friendly and helpful and distributes chocolate and Corned Beef (“…als wäre” 701). Younger Germans felt, in general, less threatened and perceived African American GIs with less suspicion and fear than their parents and grandparents, who still remembered the propaganda against the “Black Horror on the Rhine” and who had been exposed to Nazi ideology for many years. For many older Germans, as Höhn elaborates, the invasion of Germany by an American army including all-black units “must have seemed like a replay” –

9

See for example Goedde (2003), Höhn (2002), Poiger (2000), or Schroer (2007).

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particularly in Rhineland-Palatine (GIs 89). One contemporary witness describes the arrival of African American troops as follows: “Im Hof stehen fünf Lastwagen, ein Dutzend Jeeps und eine Unmenge Motorräder. Aus den Fahrzeugen klettern viele Neger. […] Ein Neger in khakifarbener Uniform schiebt die völlig verängstigte Trina beiseite und geht auf Tante Lu zu. Sie zieht ihren wattierten Morgenrock über der Brust enger. […] ‘Guten Tack, I am Charley’, grinst ein Offizier. Er reicht Tante Lu mit einem fröhlichen Lachen ein Schreiben. […] Aber Tante Lu bleibt in Panik vor den ‘Wilden’, wie sie sagt.” 10 (qtd. in Martin, “…als wäre” 700)

But it was not just older people who were scared by the African American presence. To Afro-German Helga Emde, who grew up during the postwar years and later became active in the Afro-German movement, initially the encounter with African American GIs was similarly threatening. She states that she “saw African American soldiers all over the streets and places, which scared [her]” (33). Emde explains her fear by the fact that she “had been taught that Black men were dangerous, bad and brutal” and that she felt threatened by them as she was not aware of her own blackness at that time (33-34). Her testimony not only reveals the isolation of Afro-Germans in a ‘white’ society but also attests to the fact that Afro-Germans themselves internalized white racist prejudices. Despite racist attitudes and behavior among the German population, many African American soldiers’ experience in Germany can be captured in Colin Powell’s phrase as “a breath of freedom” (53).11 Captain Armour

10 “There are five trucks, a dozen jeeps, and a vast quantity of motorbikes in the yard. Many Negroes disembark from the vehicles. […] One Negro in a khaki uniform pushes Trina, who is very scared, aside and walks toward Aunt Lu. She pulls her padded robe tight over her breast. […] ‘Guten Tack, I am Charley,’ the officer is grinning. With a cheerful smile he passes Aunt Lu a letter. […] But Aunt Lu continues to be afraid of the ‘savages’ as she says.” 11 Powell was stationed in Germany for two years (1958-1960). He states in his autobiography that “[f]or black GIs, especially those out of the South, Germany was a breath of freedom – they could go where they wanted, eat where they wanted, and date whom they wanted, just like other people” (53).

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G. McDaniel, a commander in the Tuskegee Air Force, who was captured by Germans during the final months of the war states: “Well, to tell you the truth, they treated me a damn sight better than my own army has. They treated me like an officer. The Germans even placed me in command of white troops, which is more than the United States Army ever did.” (qtd. in Little 185-86)

Of course, the fact that the African American captain was put in charge of white troops might also have been intended as a pointed insult towards these white troops by the German military and, thus, rather a sign of the strategic use of racism than a lack of racist tendencies in the German army. Nonetheless, this account indicates that there were instances in which African American soldiers/prisoners felt better treated by the enemy than by their own army, which, as other observers have noted, even extended better treatment to German POWs than to African American soldiers (Fehrenbach 22). As members of the victorious army, African American soldiers in Europe enjoyed a status and freedom that they could not have experienced in their home country. Black and white American soldiers alike discovered that on the other side of the Atlantic “the color line was largely absent” (Schroer 26). The experiences of black GIs abroad came to provide an invaluable and important impetus for the Civil Rights movement in the United States. The participation of African American soldiers in the military service exposed the discrepancy between ideology and ‘reality’ and the hypocrisy of a segregated and deeply racist military on a mission to democratize and denazify Germany. Therefore, African American GIs were viewed as fighting on two fronts and the rhetoric of a “double victory” to be won against racism at home and abroad testifies to the Civil Rights issues at stake in their participation in the war. Black leaders advanced the “Double V” campaign calling for “Democracy at Home and Democracy Abroad” and, as Maggi Morehouse states, “[m]any black leaders, government officials, and average citizens believed full participation in the war would bring enhanced rights to America’s black citizens after the enemy was defeated” (9). Alex Lubin claims that particularly interracial intimacy in Europe “challenged white military officials’ and soldiers’ abilities to control white female and black male sexuality abroad” and that “such intimate matters became central to civil rights organizing” and were taken up by the Nation-

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al Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as well as black magazines and newspapers (97). In order to deal with the obvious contradiction of fighting fascism and Nazi racism on the one hand and opposing interracial intimacy on the other, the War Department tolerated “black GI interracial intimacy” abroad but posed high obstacles to interracial marriage and war bride migration to the US (Lubin 99). Lubin’s research on African American responses to these matters reveals that there were many cases in which interracial relationships were hampered by military policy: “Sergeant William T. Malone was denied the right to marry his German fiancée because, according to his commanding officer, his interracial marriage signified his lack of maturity. […] [T]he […] officer undoubtedly thought that Malone had not considered the implication of antimiscegenation laws on his marriage. Yet such a statement also reveals how military policy relied on domestic race relations as a means to contain the explosive potential of international relations.” (Lubin 102)

Another German woman was simply told by the commanding officer of her African American fiancé: “You can’t marry a Negro” (Lubin 104). Germany provided a particularly contested ground for interracial intimacy since it was here that African Americans contributed to ending fascism and racism. Black magazines and newspapers detected a shift from early German racism towards black GIs to more positive and less racist attitudes documented in interracial romance and the ensuing notion of black men as “desirable, intelligent, and highly sought after” by (white) European women (11011).12 While Germany and Europe provided a setting which took center stage in some strands of the Civil Rights discourse, the experiences of African American GIs in Europe were not in all regards unique. In general, the large-scale contribution of black GIs to the war efforts in the Pacific as well as in Europe was believed by many to assure them a better social position

12 At several points in his study, Lubin suggests that this privileging of black male/white female relationships was also criticized from different angles. For example, he mentions three women who wrote to Ebony in 1947 criticizing “this focus on black GIs and German women” because “such coverage fed segregationists’ arguments” and “exposed black men’s infidelity” (119).

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and the rights of full citizenship after a victorious return. These hopes and expectations, however, were shattered when returning war veterans faced a segregated society still treating them as second-class citizens. “When the men returned to America they were not content to live within the constraints of a segregated society. In the nationwide movement for civil rights and black power, the black veterans of World War II became foot soldiers in the fight for equality.” (Morehouse 207)

Black GIs were seemingly altered by their war experiences in foreign countries and their interactions with other cultures and people beyond the war theaters and they became agents of change back in their own country. Beyond their experiences of “combat, foreign cuisine, distributing food to hungry [and thankful] civilians or witnessing evidence of the assimilation of people of African descent into everyday Europe” World War II shaped how they viewed themselves particularly in relation to whites (Little 188). Vice versa, European people and cultures were equally influenced by the presence of African American GIs. While African American soldiers encountered an astonishingly high degree of tolerance and respect among Germans, the occupied population was equally amazed at how well they were treated by the black GIs (Höhn, GIs 90). In Germany, as Little holds, the “continuous presence of African American military personnel” posed a challenge to German culture through the dissemination and influence of African American popular culture and also “altered the [notion of a] racially homogenous culture of German society” (192). While 1945 did not constitute a ‘Zero Hour’ in Germany in any sense including racist and racialized thinking, Germans had to renegotiate their concept of race after the dismantling of Nazi ideology. Their whiteness, which was now defined in opposition to African American soldiers as well as in analogy to white Americans, became a central element in this process (Schroer 2). The recasting or reformulation of race in postwar Germany was not “merely a national enterprise but an international one” and “racial understandings and policies” in West Germany developed in “constant dialogue with Americans” (Fehrenbach 13, 11). While African American soldiers had to endure the hardships of a ‘Jim Crow army,’ American officials sought to “convince Germans of the dignity of African Americans” and to insinuate that the US “offered a model for equitable treatment of

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racial minorities.” Public events were organized in order to convey this message; in 1948, for example, the head of the America House cultural exchange program in Bavaria addressed the German public in a radio speech in which he “condemned racial hatred as undemocratic” and Lieutenant Colonel Marcus Ray, the African American Adviser on Negro Affairs to General Lucius Clay, spoke on the subject of race relations and American blacks at most America Houses, delivering his speech in German (Schroer 37-39). The term Rasse [race] became taboo and gradually disappeared from German language use, but racialist thinking prevailed (Fehrenbach 7). Fehrenbach observes that by the mid-1950s West German public discourses had shifted their focus from Rasse to Anderssein [being different] (6). Similarly, Höhn argues that while the “language of eugenics disappeared, this did not mean that racial hierarchies ceased to matter” (GIs 13). Germans in general did not perceive their own identity as racially defined or determined (Poiger, Jazz 8). In the postwar years, they did not “give up on race as a concept” but rather “recast its meaning and contours” (Schroer 1) so that in Germany “whiteness has been reclaimed as an unmarked signifier of race and citizenship” (Linke 28). According to Uta Poiger, the “[d]ebates over American popular culture, and in particular its African American influences” show that many Germans “continued to define Germanness in racial terms” (Jazz 7). Yet, the fact that Germans were subordinated to African American soldiers challenged established racial hierarchies – “former racial subordinates now occupied a position of political superiority due to their membership in the Allied forces” (Fehrenbach 9). Many Germans actually regarded this as a “particularly pointed insult on German dignity” (Schroer 41). That Germans largely accepted African American soldiers in a position of relative power does not mean that racism disappeared or racial hierarchies became lastingly destabilized. Goedde concludes: “If anything, the traditional imperialist racial hierarchy became inverted as AfricanAmerican soldiers, just like their white counterparts, assumed a position of power over Germans and few Germans challenged the legitimacy of their power.” (208)

Relationships between black American soldiers and white German women took center stage in debates on race and interracial relations on both sides of the Atlantic (Fehrenbach 10). In general, fraternization between German

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women and American soldiers worried many Germans and “American posters and literature gave dire warnings to U.S. troops about contracting venereal diseases from German women.” Germans introduced several pejorative terms to label women entering into relationships with GIs: “Veronika,” “Amiliebchen,” or “soldiers’ brides” (Poiger, Jazz 35). “Fräulein” developed into a stereotype of young postwar women who indulged in hedonistic pleasures and amusements associated with infidelity, shame, and loss of honor. Contrary to the “Trümmerfrauen” [rubble women], the stereotype – certainly not the postwar reality – suggests that the “Fräuleins” did not contribute to the national project of rehabilitation (Brauerhoch 11).13 Yet, women engaging in (sexual) contact with American GIs can also be regarded, as Annette Brauerhoch asserts, as a specifically female appropriation of a different culture and a form of female rebellion or even “counter-culture” after 1945 (21). Fears of miscegenation and racial prejudices made the relationships between African American soldiers and German women a particularly heated issue of debate. The so-called “Negerliebchen” [Negro lovers] who were defined as “disreputable, un-German, and un-white” were usually regarded as representing the lowest elements in society, even though in fact, “[they] came from all social classes” (Schroer 7, 122). These women were viewed as exemplifying Germany’s moral decay and served as catalysts for German sentiments against American occupiers, black soldiers, and Jewish bar owners which could not be voiced directly (Brauerhoch 83). According to Schroer, venereal diseases had already carried diverse racial undertones in German discourses prior to their association with African American soldiers specifically after World War II (100). While in contemporaneous discourses the desire of African Americans for white women was practically taken for granted, white women’s motivations to (sexually) engage with African Americans needed explanation: Attempts at explanation included exoticized and stereotypical notions

13 While these two female stereotypes reveal that the years after World War II are often regarded as “the hour of the women,” the occupation also brought about a “crisis of German masculinity” (Brauerhoch 12). Male and female gender roles alike had to be renegotiated.

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of African Americans,14 economic hardship and the support the GIs were able to offer in terms of protection, consumer goods, and food, the absence of German men (many of whom obviously had died in the war or were still in captivity), rebellion against social norms, and, of course, love and the need for companionship (Schroer 119-47). In media coverage, black soldiers and their interracial relationships were viewed with scorn, and the reports are often deeply racist (Brauerhoch 204-05). The sexualization of the black body surfaces in debates on mutual and voluntary (sexual) relationships and even more significantly in those postwar narratives which feature the African American GI as rapist.15 Throughout recent German history black bodies have been “equated with the sensual, primitive, erotic:” from the sexualization by “a focus on the unclothed and exposed imperial subject” of the colonial era, to the commodification of the “European fascination with black nudity, as suggested by Josephine Baker’s spectacular dance routines,” beginning in the 1920s, to a continuing sexualization under Hitler “where blackness was equated with decadence, the dangers of miscegenation, and racial inferiority” (Linke 62). In the “cultural portrayal” of African American soldiers as “dangerous sexual predators” such racially charged iconographies resurfaced after 1945 (Linke 62-63). Sexual relations between African American GIs and white German women were frequently based on mutual consent, but rape cases were also reported. While the Russian occupiers were soon infamous for their brutal, violent, and frequent (mass) rapes of German women, and such criminal acts occurred in all occupation zones, in discourses on the African Amer-

14 Relationships based on the attraction of an exotic Other or the fetishization of the other ‘race’ did not necessarily destabilize established racial hierarchies. They could even contribute towards solidifying racial stereotypes as well as notions of black inferiority/white superiority. Relationships between black men and white women also “paradoxically reinscribed race as a biological factor” (Schroer 145). 15 While African American soldiers made up roughly ten percent of the American military forces between 1942 and 1946, they were clearly overrepresented in rape cases charged against American GIs in Europe. During that time there were 99 African Americans convicted of rape (compared to 58 white soldiers), of which 25 were executed (compared to four white convicts) (Schroer 29).

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ican rapist the issue of race again took center stage – most of all during the first months of the occupation before the focus of social policy and public attention shifted towards consensual relationships between African American GIs and German women (Fehrenbach 62). In accounts of rape by black soldiers, the female victims were generally coded ‘German’ (regarding their nationality and ethnicity) and “sustained attention to racialized rape occurred in spite of the fact that attacks were perpetrated by white Allied soldiers as well as white German men” (Fehrenbach 54-55). During 1945 and well into 1946, ‘miscegenation’ was recognized as a legitimate reason for the termination of a pregnancy which had resulted from rape (Fehrenbach 59). A rape victim describes her situation in the following words: “Nein, ich kann kein Kind von einem Schwarzen zur Welt bringen, denn ich fühle mich jetzt schon moralisch derart minderwertig herabgesetzt und wie würde das erst nachher werden, wenn ich so ein halbschwarzes Kind zur Welt brächte, ich würde mich als deutsche Mutter restlos ausgestoßen fühlen.”

16

(qtd. in Martin, “… als

wäre” 705)

In her account surfaces a strong and widely held belief in white superiority and the definition of Germanness in implicitly racial terms which would lead to the inevitable exclusion of a mother of a ‘half-black child.’ In fact, the brown babies posed another pertinent challenge to German conceptions of race, and the discourses and practices which regarded these children as a ‘problem’ attest to the weight of the issues at stake. Fatima El-Tayeb claims that even though the term Black German continues to be perceived as oxymoronic, the expression “Besatzungskinder” [occupation babies] quickly became part of German standard vocabulary (Schwarze Deutsche 208). Despite their comparatively small number (about 3,000 in 1950 and close to 5,000 by 1955) the biracial children were of “disproportionately great symbolic significance on both sides of the Atlantic” (Fehrenbach 2). They were

16 “No, I cannot give birth to a black man’s child. I already feel like I’ve been disparaged as morally inferior by this. And how would it be afterwards, if I were to bring a half-black child into this world? As a German mother, I would feel completely ostracized.”

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German citizens17 but nonetheless perceived as foreign. The public discussion on the fate and future of the “Mischlingskinder” [mixed-blood children], “farbige Besatzungskinder” [colored occupation babies] or “Negermischlingskinder” [Negro mixed-blood children] oscillated between pleas for integration and calls for separation (either abroad or in specific institutions in Germany) in order to not expose the children to German society’s racism. Interestingly enough, the fact that the brown babies were neither the first generation of biracial children nor the first ‘occupation children’ did not play a major role in these debates (Lemke Muniz de Faria 1213).18 The biracial children who were a visible result of the occupation of the Rhineland after World War I did not receive much media attention19 – quite contrary to the post-World War II ‘occupation babies.’ Their fate was of public interest and they were widely perceived as facing a very difficult future in Germany. Also, these children were of central importance for media coverage on interracial relationships. For example, in 1951, the German magazine Revue pointed towards the “tragic destiny” of biracial children: “Besonders tragisch ist das Schicksal der vielen tausend Mischlingskinder, der halfand-half-Babies, die als Hinterlassenschaft der zahlreichen Negersoldaten seit 1945 in Deutschland geboren wurden. Als Angehörige einer so sichtbar gekennzeichneten

17 Ultimately, all occupation children – black and white – were granted German citizenship – albeit “grudgingly” and only after “Allied Military Government officials made it clear that they would neither entertain paternity suits nor readily grant citizenship to their troops’ illegitimate offspring abroad” (Fehrenbach 66). 18 The occupation of the Rhineland after World War I brought about approximately 500 children born to German mothers whose fathers were among the French forces and came from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Madagascar, or Senegal (Lemke Muniz de Faria 13). Racist propaganda decried the occupation as the “Black Horror on the Rhine,” and the children were often called “Rheinlandbastarde” [Rhineland bastards]. The Nazi regime even ordered their sterilization in 1937. 19 Brauerhoch mentions two possible reasons for this lack of attention: first, the relatively small number of biracial children; second, the children could not be attributed to rape cases but rather represented the consensual sexual engagements between German women and black soldiers (198-99).

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Minderheit erwartete die kleinen Krausköpfe ein schweres Leben inmitten einer fremden und oft feindseligen Umwelt.”20 (qtd. in Brauerhoch 205)

These mixed-race children were not only at the center of media attention but also generated widespread interest by sociologists, pedagogues, and anthropologists as well as a special session of the German Bundestag on March 12, 1952 on their possible future (Brauerhoch 230). Among the issues at stake in the official debates on Afro-German children were not only “cost and care” – a matter of interest with regard to all illegitimate offspring of American soldiers – but equally “racial difference and national belonging” (Fehrenbach 77). They were subject to academic studies and, as Fehrenbach observes, were identified more by the color of their skin than their nationality; for example, a 1954/55 federal census collecting data on the biological father’s origins listed the four Allied countries plus a fifth category: “farbige Abstammung” [of colored parentage] (80). The distinction between ‘black’ and ‘white’ was ascribed central significance and in West Germany ‘race’ generally “became equated with blackness” and “blackness increasingly equated with African American origins,” which created a seemingly new and unique race problem embodied in the AfroGerman children (Fehrenbach 80). Fittingly, the America House in Wiesbaden was the venue of a two-day forum in 1952 which was held in order to further the exchange of information on these children, counter public (mis)conceptions, and to create solutions and guidelines for the successful integration of the children (Fehrenbach 93-94). Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria identifies three years as particularly important in the public debates on Afro-German children: 1946, the year in which the first (and also particularly many) brown babies were born, 1952, the year when this first generation entered school, and 1960, when they entered the job market (12). 1952 was also the year in which Robert A. Stemmle’s film Toxi became a box-office hit and made its protagonist Elfie Fiegert a star. Fiegert was identified with this role very much,

20 “The fate of the many thousand mixed-race children, those half-and-half-babies, who were born after 1945 as a legacy of the numerous Negro soldiers, is extremely tragic. As members of a visibly marked minority, these little nappyheads awaited a harsh life in a foreign and often hostile environment.”

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which confined her choices for later roles, and the film turned Toxi’s story into that of “all West German farbige Mischlingskinder” (Fehrenbach 130). As the first feature-length film to deal with the topic of black ‘occupation children’ in postwar West Germany, it relates the story of a little black girl and seeks to establish compassion for Afro-German children but equally subscribes to stereotypical notions of blacks as well as traditional genre features. Through its portrayal of a middle-class family and their different responses to the abandoned Toxi, whom they unexpectedly discover on their doorsteps, the film negotiates the possible solutions to the problem of these children – including their future as Heimkinder, adoption into German families, and emigration to the US. However, the actual integration into the German family – and by extension into German society at large – remains a half-hearted gesture without much promise. Brauerhoch suggests that the film successfully pleads for sympathy but lacks any consideration of the complex social realities (231). A contemporaneous portrait of Stemmle in the German magazine Der Spiegel comes to a similar conclusion: “Stemmle bringt seine Beobachtungen zum Thema farbige Besatzungskinder unter Verzicht auf tiefschürfende Problematik auf den einfacheren, rein menschlichen Nenner.” 21 (“Leute” 27)

In her reading of Toxi as a “highly ambivalent text,” Heide Fehrenbach points out that it “forsakes the principle of racial integration in favour of racial tolerance” but is nonetheless to be regarded a “banner moment in the cultural expression of postwar racial liberalism in West Germany” (124). Its success was vital to other films on the topic, including Der dunkle Stern (1955) directed by Hermann Kugelstadt, and introduced Toxi as a term into the German language soon to be established as shorthand to refer to an Afro-German child. Moreover, a documentary entitled Toxi lebt anders was produced four years later by the Süddeutscher Rundfunk which attempted to capture the social realities of ‘occupation children.’ While the documentary calls for tolerance and the integration of Afro-German children, its appeal does not extend to the mothers of these children whose portrayal, in

21 “Stemmle reduces his observations on the subject of colored occupation children to a simpler, purely human denominator than the profound problems he omits.”

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Brauerhoch’s reading, is still very much confined to the negative stereotype of the “Fräulein” (259). Despite the topos of the abandoned black child, which found its most prominent embodiment in Toxi, many German mothers did not send their mixed-race offspring to children’s homes or put them up for adoption, and in spite of “avid efforts devoted to international adoptions of black German children throughout the 1950s” most of them remained in Germany (Fehrenbach 168). These children are most visible signs and legacies of African American soldiers stationed in Germany during the postwar years. The GIs as well as their offspring made a lasting impression on the German collective imaginary: The first African American soldiers – to a certain degree – countered existing stereotypes while also facing racist attitudes among Germans; the topos of the friendly candy-distributing black GI became enshrined in memories of this era, and postwar German discourses on ‘race’ have been decisively shaped by transatlantic relationships between African American soldiers and white German women, who like their children have served as linchpins in that debate. In addition, without overestimating the influence of the German experience of African American soldiers on the Civil Rights movement, this experience undoubtedly attested to the reciprocity of the personal and cultural contact between Germans and Americans after 1945. (West) German solidarity with African Americans did not begin with the Civil Rights and Black Power campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s, but rather in these postwar years with the perceived commonality of oppression suffered by blacks in the US and the ‘Jim Crow army’ and by the German people occupied by Allied forces. Not least, these African American GIs represented American popular and material culture and consumerism which many Germans eagerly desired in the postwar years to fill the void of their lost (national) identity and culture, and as promises of a better future. Along these lines, African American culture was also increasingly received in West Germany.

J AZZ

IN

G ERMANY : A “C HECKERED H ISTORY ”

With the end of World War II, jazz music experienced a “renaissance in both Germanies” (Poiger, “Searching” 83) or, in other words, Germany experienced a “second wave” of jazz reception (Ostendorf, “Subversive” 55).

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While the term jazz is used vaguely in many contexts of its reception during the first wave following World War I as well as this second wave after 1945 and refers to a number of different styles and musical forms, it is relevant here particularly with regard to its implications and manifestations of African American culture and ‘authentically’ black music. My analyses focus on the phenomenon ‘jazz’ rather than the concrete music captured under this heading.22 In this chapter, I am not so much interested in the musical specificities or the usage of the term for diverse phenomena but above all its association with blackness and the debates on jazz as a specifically African American cultural product. I will, therefore, roughly sketch the development of German jazz reception with a particular emphasis on racialized discourses and the notions of African American culture conveyed and discussed in Germany; the German jazz scene is, consequently, not at the center of attention. Considering that the jazz reception after World War II was not without precedents, it is imperative to briefly address the respective periods before and during the Third Reich in order to allow for an examination of the continuities in this particular cultural transfer as well as the discontinuities and breaks constituted by the Nazis’ rise to power and the end of World War II. What Andrew Wright Hurley aptly phrases “jazz’s checkered history in Germany” may have begun earlier, but the first American performers did not appear on German stages prior to the mid-1920s, and even then the music did not become a “mainstream success” although it subsequently found a certain following (17-18). Horst Lange provides a periodization of German jazz history which comprises (1) the ragtime – a pre-stage to jazz – from 1900 to 1920, (2) the German ‘golden age of jazz’ between 1920 and 1931, (3) the years between 1932 and 1940, to which he ascribes the demise and illegalization of jazz, (4) the following three years which saw a revival of jazz and swing despite the Nazi regime and the war, (5) the “stillose Zeit” of the immediate postwar years, and, finally, (6) the age of modernism from 1950 until today (Jazz 13-14). For the purpose of this study, I structure my overview according to more roughly organized

22 Debates on what counts as ‘real jazz’ or ‘serious jazz’ and what is ‘popular music’ or ‘pseudo-jazz’ will not feature prominently in this chapter; rather, I am interested in what people perceived of as ‘jazz,’ American music, and, particularly, African American music.

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time periods: (1) the time after World War I, when jazz came to Germany – a bit belated but not too late as Lange holds (Jazz 18), (2) the Nazi era, and (3) post-World War II jazz reception. With the relative financial stability and economic prosperity which followed the introduction of the Rentenmark in 1923 more Germans could afford entertainment, and jazz moved into the “golden twenties.” Pianist Sam Wooding’s band was one of the first black orchestras to perform in Germany after World War I.23 In 1925 the appearance of black musicians was a sensation to the audience. It was further heightened by the setting: The orchestra performed not in little cafes or gloomy nightclubs but rather in established theaters like the Admirals-Palast in Berlin or the ThaliaTheater in Hamburg, where they accompanied the Chocolate Kiddies Revue (Lange, Jazz 32). The orchestra toured Germany several times between 1925, when it was part of the first African American revue (Chocolate Kiddies) in Berlin, and 1931, when Wooding’s final appearance was the “last performance of an African American jazz musician in Germany during the Weimar Republic;” in the meantime, however, Wooding and his music had become central to the German jazz experience (Wipplinger 316). In fact, the first performance of Wooding and his orchestra constituted a sensation not merely because of the black musicians but also because the music caused for a largely unprepared German audience what Jonathan Wipplinger calls an “aural shock.” Alfred Lion, founder of the record label Blue Note Records, experienced Berlin in the 1920s and Wooding’s performance first hand. He remembers: “[T]hen came Sam Wooding. For the first time, I saw colored musicians, and then this music! I was flabbergasted. Something so entirely new, it really grabbed me. I could not stand still. This beat! It went through my body to my boots.” (qtd. in Wipplinger 311)

23 Though not jazz artists, African American performers did appear on German stages much earlier in the 19th century. The German entertainment journal Der Artist “had already advertised more than one hundred African American performers in 1896” (Naumann 96).

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Berlin became the center of much cultural activity in the Weimar Republic and “constituted the focal point of jazz in Germany” (Weiner 475) during the 1920s, with many visiting jazz stars performing at several locales in the city. Since jazz arrived as an ‘American(ized)’ import, German jazz artists struggled hard to “acquire the right American touch” (Kater 16). German jazz lovers, nonetheless, favored American black musicians over German performers and particularly endorsed Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong (Kater 13). African American performers were “attractive exactly because they were exotic,” and their exoticization reinforced stereotypical images of African Americans as wild, primitive/authentic, or improvisational (Poiger, Jazz 16). Whereas jazz culture found a strong (though not necessarily very broad) following in a “liberal atmosphere,” racism persisted and the “public and private attitude toward blacks, including Afro-Americans” was highly ambivalent (Kater 18). Despite racist prejudices and stereotypes, it was already during this first wave of jazz reception that the music became strongly associated with democracy and embedded in discourses on Americanism/Americanization. In Michael Kater’s words: “Apart from its most immediate usefulness for recreation, many creative spirits of the Weimar Republic saw in jazz the essence of the era’s modernism, an influence toward greater quality and emancipation – in short, democracy for Germans. […] With its ring of modernism, jazz was as much a beneficiary of the postwar German passion for American accomplishments as it was its catalyst. To some it was the very incarnation of American vitalism.” (17)

Many (conservative) critics rejected the music because they worried about the American influence and the potential cultural decay which jazz symbolized to them;24 in this sense, jazz “fell under the same shadow of suspicion as did other American imports” and it was cast in a highly “ambiguous

24 Theodor W. Adorno is probably one of the best-known and most widely discussed German critics of jazz. In his essays on jazz written between 1933 and 1953, Adorno openly rejects jazz. However, as J. Bradford Robinson argues, what he meant by ‘jazz’ was by no means what we would now regard as jazz music, and his thoughts on jazz “must be read within the context of Weimar Germany’s commercial music scene as a whole” (1).

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position” in Germany at the beginning of the 1930s (Kater 25). Black performers seemed to confirm German notions of America as extremely modern and exceptionally primitive at the same time (Poiger, Jazz 16). Several reactionary voices established a connection between jazz, blacks, and Jews to fuel rejection of the music with anti-Semitism and racism. Jazz created a “moral panic” among many of its critics, which could be found throughout the political spectrum (Poiger, Jazz 21). Its sexual evocativeness as well as its being “an acoustic signal of national, social, racial, and sexual difference” furthered xenophobic opposition to jazz (Weiner 475). Even though jazz was performed by blacks and whites alike, there can, according to Marc Weiner, “be little doubt that both the white musicians performing jazz and the German audience receiving it perceived the music to be an acoustic emblem of the Black” (479). African American performers were met not only with enthusiasm by German audiences but also had to face considerable rejection during the Weimar years – particularly from nationalists. Yet, there were several reasons why they came to Germany: According to Christine Naumann, their stage appearances in Germany have to be viewed in the “European context of international show business” where cities like Berlin, Hamburg, or Dresden provided stops between other major European cultural centers like London or Paris (96). In addition, due to the German jazz enthusiasm there was a huge demand for African American performers who, in general, were better paid and found more artistic freedom in Europe than in the United States (96-97). Towards the end of the Weimar Republic there was a change in German music tastes facilitated by the depression but the economic situation also affected jazz musicians and the music business altogether. There was a turn towards more emotional, sentimental, or ‘traditional’ music and, as Kater holds, “the art of jazz in Germany was on the decline in more ways than one” (28). After the National Socialists’ rise to power, only few places survived where jazz and swing could be performed; however, particularly in Berlin, several clubs offered refuge for jazz fans, and the first German jazz or “hot” clubs were founded during the 1930s (Lange, Jazz 86). The ironic greeting “Swing Heil” is regarded by Lange as symbolic of the Swing era in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Swing might either refer to the last peak of classical jazz music, the dance style, or the lifestyle of young Germans outside the Hitlerjugend (HJ) and the Bund deutscher Mädel (BdM), and, in Lange’s view, experienced its heyday during the war years: It was always

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officially unwanted but never legally banned (“Vorwort” 7-8). Though no official ban was issued against swing/jazz, jazz fans were persecuted and faced harsh opposition. Bernd Polster has shown that racist rhetoric and rejection of jazz as degenerate art informed music journals, encyclopedias, and scholarly accounts already in the 1920s (“Es zittern” 11-14). In Nazi propaganda, these tendencies came into full bloom. Jazz was openly and widely decried,25 submitted to censorship, and finally banned – more or less successfully – from public broadcasting. The Nazi fight against jazz and swing ultimately showcased a decisive gap between ideological demand and everyday reality: Not only did the 1936 Olympics, which were utilized to demonstrate internationality and cosmopolitanism,26 provide a brief respite for jazz musicians and fans (only lax measurements were taken against the music during this time); but even beyond this phase some jazz and swing records could be bought and the music could be heard in German clubs (Krüger 38-39). In their propaganda, the Nazis “conveniently paired Jews with jazz” and campaigns usually targeted both ‘enemies’ at the same time (Kater 44). Jewish artist Benny Goodman was officially outlawed in 1937 and became a central target of Nazi propaganda. One year later “nonAryans” were generally banned from music and art (Lange, Jazz 106). Even earlier, classical singer Marian Anderson was not allowed to perform in Germany as part of her European tour (1935-1936) due to her skin color, and famous jazz artists such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Coleman Hawkins could not be heard live in Germany prior to 1945 for the same reason (Kater 30).27 In 1938, propaganda against swing increasingly

25 The polemics which circulated widely in public discourses and diverse media were linked “to the National Socialist disdain for all things of American origin” as well as their racial ideology discriminating “non-‘Aryans’ – in particular, blacks and Jews” (Kater 29). Jazz was targeted on at least two levels: with regard to its Americanness and its blackness – both of which were firmly established associations before the Nazi takeover. 26 This demonstration, of course, had its limits: It is well-known that Hitler “refused to shake Jesse Owens’s hand […] and turned his back on the celebration of other black winners. Goebbels joined Hitler in his open scorn” (Kater 30). 27 Despite all the efforts to ban jazz and black musicians, there were also always those who ‘fell through the cracks’ and did not come to the Nazis’ attention. For

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denounced it as “Nigger-Jazz” (Lange, Jazz 127). Despite many efforts, the influence of jazz and swing on German (jazz) music was largely beyond official control. Germans continued to listen to, practice, and appropriate jazz despite the risk of persecution. In fact, as Lange states, Germany was never completely cut off from jazz and swing (Jazz 109). Right before the beginning of the war, “Jazz had been placed on the index […] but neither could it be suppressed, nor could the regime leaders come up with an even vaguely viable equivalent” (Kater 56). For many, jazz became associated with anti-Nazism or even resistance as Hans Blüthner, who in the early 1930s was among the founders of one of the first German jazz clubs in Berlin, remembers. Asked whether there were Nazis among the jazz fans, he replied: “Nein. Das ist so eine Regel, möcht ich sagen, wer sich für Jazz interessiert, kann kein Nazi sein”28 (34). With the so-called “Swing-Heinis”29 or “swing youth,” a subversive subculture or counterculture developed which playfully subverted coerced forms of behavior in order to distinguish itself (Polster, “Treudeutsch” 132). This group was not just about entertainment and (silent) protest but also harbored political thoughts, although it did not engage in open resistance; according to Polster, it generally admired western democracies, imagined Great Britain and the US as havens of freedom, and many jazz fans actually considered emigrating to these countries after the war (“Treudeutsch” 137). Positive images of US democracy and (African) American culture were already established among this group prior to American re-education efforts or postwar Americanization. Nazi propaganda tried to not only control the unwanted and ‘degenerate’ music but also to establish a negative image of America; yet, it was not always successful. A propaganda film like Rund

example, some jazz records were not put on the index and some black musicians still performed during the late 1930s (Kater 70). 28 “No. I would say that’s a rule: someone who is interested in jazz cannot be a Nazi.” 29 The term Swing-Heinis was used pejoratively by the Nazis; some (young) people therefore rejected the label, while others embraced it and turned it into a positively connoted term.

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um die Freiheitsstatue [Around the Statue of Liberty] (1942)30 did not necessarily elicit the intended effect, as one contemporary witness, Günther Lust (born 1929), relates: “Wir mußten uns […] einen Film anschauen. ‘Rund um die Freiheitsstatue’ hieß der. Ein Hetzfilm über Amerika. Plötzlich zwischendurch wahnsinnige Szenen von Orchestern mit Negern. Wir war’n begeistert. Wir standen auf den Stühlen und johlten. Da haben sie den Film abgebrochen.”31 (166-67)

As this statement demonstrates, nonconformist behavior was not automatically politically motivated. In fact, the connections between fascism, jazz, and resistance are more complex than the simple equation of jazz with democracy, freedom, and antifascism reveals. Hurley argues for example that the swing youth’s refusal to join the HJ may have been politicized only in the process of persecution. He proposes that even jazz musicians were not immune against complicity with the system as the example of those playing “‘propaganda jazz’ for the Nazis”32 shows (50). The “ideal-type of a person” whose active involvement in jazz culture was based on an explicit opposition to National Socialism – “never existed in the flesh” (Kater 96). Even though after 1945 jazz was “again experienced as a highly potent symbol of liberty” and jazz musicians and fans felt “gratitude for a recaptured privilege” (Kater 203), critical voices and a widespread rejection

30 When the USA entered World War II in 1941, “previous stereotypical arguments against America and its degenerate Jewish-Negroid culture […] were magnified and systematically disseminated by Goebbels’s propaganda apparatus” (Kater 138). The film Rund um die Freiheitsstatue was part of this effort. 31 “We had to watch a film. It was called ‘Rund um die Freiheitsstatue;’ an America-baiting film. Suddenly in between there were incredible scenes of orchestras with Negroes. We were enthralled. We were standing on our seats and cheering. At that point they broke off the screening.” 32 Hurley refers to Kater’s research which has shown that jazz did develop in Germany during the Nazi period, the price for which was its “conversion into a tool of Fascist propaganda.” Despite his opposition to the music, Goebbels officially provided jazz for “certain segments of the population as well as the military” as a “tonic they needed in times of stress in order to function” (Kater 135).

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of jazz music lingered on; jazz critics even continued to draw on vocabulary from the Weimar and Nazi years (Poiger, Jazz 56). The efforts of jazz fans and American officials alike to establish it as a serious art form and entertainment did not immediately lead to a large-scale success. A majority of Germans disliked the music and strong opposition to jazz persisted well into the 1950s. Some jazz enthusiasts and experts like Joachim-Ernst Berendt took it as an “ideological hangover from National Socialist anti-jazz indoctrination” and turned the overcoming of this resentment almost into a moral duty (Hurley 20). As part of the re-education effort, GIs helped German youth to form jazz bands and offered them opportunities to listen to AFN. The music came to be understood as a symbol of racial integration. However, the broad reception of and enthusiasm for jazz among German youth was not intended by the military government.33 In the American occupation zone, the American military offered adolescents “opportunities for sports and entertainment.”34 The German Youth Activities (GYA) was sponsored by the Army and provided a range of activities and entertainment for German youth, including American films and music (Poiger, Jazz 39). It was also an attempt to “regain control over the process of interaction between Americans and Germans” because as early as July 1945, GIs had begun to informally support the organization of youth groups, sports activities, and other events (Goedde 137). Particularly because of the protests against racial segregation in the United States which threatened the country’s image as a liberating force and as an epitome of democracy did the official programs embrace African American culture. In his analysis of America House programs in the 1950s, Schildt identifies several items

33 The enthusiastic reception of jazz, which was not intended by official programs, as well as the failure of baseball to become a popular pastime for German youth demonstrate “that Americans could not dictate which aspects of American popular culture Germans would adopt or how they would integrate them into their own cultural framework” (Goedde 163). 34 German youth “served a dual purpose in [the] process of rehabilitation” because they were viewed as innocent victims of the Nazi regime rather than complicit enemies and thus were central to developing a post-wartime image of Germany beyond the fascist enemy state, and also because they promised great success in re-education as a very receptive target group (Goedde 127).

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which attempted to promote jazz as a serious art form. In addition, they served to acknowledge the cultural contribution of African Americans to American (popular) culture. Some contributions also pointed out that African Americans produced more than just jazz, for example: “Negerkomponisten schreiben Symphonien und Kammermusik” [Negro composers write symphonies and chamber music] (“USA als Kulturnation” 265). Even earlier, the programs of the America Houses had featured African American spirituals which were more positively received by a majority of Germans than jazz and were utilized to “convince Germans of the quality of African American music;” in 1949 an African American choir toured the American occupation zone, performing mostly at America Houses and bringing spirituals to a German audience (Schroer 159). In the 1950s, America Houses also became meeting places for jazz fans – e.g. in Berlin the New Jazz Circle organized lectures which regularly attracted as many as two hundred adolescents (Poiger, Jazz 146-47). Jazz clubs, concerts, and AFN broadcasts contributed to the prominent position of jazz in German cultural scenes and discourses – even though the music featured on AFN to many serious jazz fans consisted only of “pseudo-jazz,” and the term jazz was not at all used in a precise way (Lange, Jazz 145). Jazz became widely available not just in the American occupation zone but all across Germany and was perceived in “all occupation zones as a symbol of a more general liberation from Nazi oppression” (Poiger, Jazz 42). Jazz continued to pop up in political discourses as a tool in the democratization of Germany or as a ‘weapon’ in the Cold War. It was characterized and perceived as an art form which was essentially democratic and liberal and thereby served as a means to underline the distinction between the Nazi past and contemporaneous West Germany (Hurley 45); considering the associations jazz carried, it is not surprising that it was “cast as the ideal soundtrack to the postwar democratization and liberalization of West Germany” (Hurley 46). As Berndt Ostendorf has it, there was a “new musical freedom that this music carried as a promise,” and descriptions could often be found to rely on a “rhetoric of liberation.” He ascribes to jazz a “deep attraction” as well as a “subversive power” (“Subversive” 55, 56). One aspect that he lists among the reasons for this attraction is that “jazz was perceived as quintessentially American precisely by virtue of its incorporation of the African musical idiom” (61). However, what represented the music of democracy and freedom to some was to others the “soundtrack to

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Germans’ mental picture of postwar decadence: slatternly German women consorting with black GIs in a seedy club” (Schroer 180). Finally, in the 1950s, West Germany experienced an “increasingly liberal consensus attitude toward jazz and toward the consumption of American popular culture” (Hurley 43). When the US State Department began to sponsor jazz tours as part of its cultural-presence programs and as a ‘weapon’ in the Cold War, US officials believed that the “battle for hearts and minds in Western Europe had already been won;” programs for Western Europe did not include jazz because it was regarded as “already established, popular, and commercially viable” (Eschen 8). Yet, with the so-called Halbstarke, generational conflicts and clashes between mainstream and rebellious youth (counter)culture ensued, and since riots and outbreaks did also take place at and around jazz events,35 the controversies about jazz continued through the late 1950s. Rioting and other new forms of adolescent behavior were linked “to lower-class and African American culture” by critical observers, who worried about their rebellious potential, and Halbstarke were generally perceived as following American (role) models (Poiger, Jazz 83). Paradoxically, the hostility towards African American-influenced dance and music did not prevent Germans from being very critical of American racism at the same time (85). Based on this criticism, Germans could later fashion themselves as antiracist. The tendency to locate any ‘race problem’ safely on the other side of the Atlantic in the US and to deny racism in Germany still lingers on in contemporary efforts to come to terms with Germany’s colonial past and with any challenges to the equation of Germanness with whiteness. As Poiger suggests, commentaries that positioned Germans as having overcome racism and anti-Semitism and as valuing African American culture implicitly gestured toward “an alliance of sorts between Germans and African Americans” which helped Germans to “position themselves as victims,” because many of them “felt victimized by the occupation forces” (Jazz 88).

35 One of the first youth riots “occurred at an October 1955 Louis Armstrong concert in Hamburg, when fans vented their annoyance at the brevity of the concert and the cancellation of a second event by starting fights and causing property damage.” Similar behavior was reported at the first “Jazz at the Philharmonic” tour in 1953 (Hurley 35-36).

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In the early 1950s, many West Germans were concerned about American cultural influences (including jazz) and their effects on German reconstruction and adolescents. The critique of youth culture, its consumption of African American-influenced music such as jazz or rock, and its references to primitivism, reintroduced the vocabulary of Nazi propaganda and reinforced racial hierarchies (Poiger, Jazz 96). However, during the 1950s significant changes took place and the beginning of the Cold War altered the political climate so that finally, towards the end of the decade, jazz clubs were opened across West Germany by city officials, and “Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauß announced that jazz was a proper music for the West German army” (1). Jazz was no longer the main target of conservative concerns and rock’n’roll quickly took its place in this regard. The behavior of rock’n’roll fans stood in “marked contrast to the images of restrained and respectable jazz musicians and fans” (166). Like its predecessor, rock’n’roll was perceived as threatening because of its “associations with blackness and unbridled sexuality,” and critical voices employed almost the same arguments in their dismissal of this new American music that had been used to condemn jazz (167). Even the openly racist vocabulary and arguments from before 1945 reappeared in this context when rock’n’roll was disparaged as “Negro” or “nigger” music produced by Jews (176). Just as jazz and swing had been quickly linked to youth culture, rebellion, and resistance during the 1930s, rock’n’roll (especially Elvis Presley as its ultimate embodiment) evoked very similar reactions two decades later, whereas jazz at that point appeared nonthreatening and legitimate in contrast. Poiger argues that particularly for young German women it was a “radical act” to adopt “styles that carried connotations of blackness” and thereby challenge established (gender) norms (Jazz 181). Once again, in this context, what was perceived as black music was used as a means of social distinction for a young generation and coded as rebellious and potentially subversive. And like jazz, rock’n’roll at some point lost its threatening potential and became more broadly accepted by being stylistically tamed, depoliticized, and increasingly perceived as a ‘white’ cultural product. The main reasons for the much broader acceptance of jazz in West German society by the late 1950s and early 1960s have to be attributed more to its being intellectualized, ‘whitened,’ ‘deracialized,’ and desexualized rather than to its African American roots, democratic message, or liberating force, even though all of the latter also played a role. Lange claims that it

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was not the average jazz fan’s enthusiasm but the jazz experts’ and associations’ efforts that were crucial to jazz’s new image as (serious) music in Germany (Jazz 183). While Rasse [race] as a term and as a topic was taboo in postwar Germany, jazz, as Hurley argues, offered a venue for race to be discussed (60). Paradoxically, it came to symbolize on the one hand a “utopian vision of an integrated society in which race no longer mattered” – a notion which the US official agenda strongly supported – while on the other hand it relied heavily on racial essentialism and romanticization (Hurley 67). Jazz as well as rock’n’roll were subject to controversies because they were viewed as (at least influenced by) African American music which “undermined the respectability of German men and women” and countered the postwar efforts to reestablish gender roles (Poiger, Jazz 9). An important step towards the greater acceptability of jazz was its differentiation; while the term had been used to refer simply to American popular music in general, its definition was now narrowed down. Furthermore, ‘authentic’ jazz was dissociated from uncontrolled behavior because it was not a form of dance music. Joachim-Ernst Berendt was probably the “most influential person to shape positive reevaluations of jazz” (137-38). He published numerous books and articles on jazz, worked as a radio host and producer, and promoted ‘good’ jazz through all of these venues. While emphasizing its African elements Berendt “also claimed jazz as a white music” (140). He attempted to validate “jazz as the proper musical and intellectual expression of modernity” and to “champion the image of the intellectual male jazz fan” (142-43). Another factor fostering the acceptance of jazz was its role in discourses on West German identity. On the one hand, jazz and its promises and associations were central to establishing a West German identity distinct from the Nazi past; on the other hand, it was equally essential in distinguishing the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from the GDR. In the “vision of liberalism and pluralism” which West German authorities attempted to send out to their own citizens as well as to their Cold War enemies, the “cultural consumption of American jazz” was a vital part (7). Even rebellious male youths found more acceptance as their (mis)behavior was dissociated “from conservative indictments of racial degeneration and of working-class deviance” (116): During the early years of the Cold War, “West German liberals made the consumption of American and African American culture part of a German adolescent life-stage and thus in a sense ‘Germanized’ consumption” (136). Consuming American culture became a

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crucial element for Germany’s Western integration and jazz was turned into a Cold War ‘weapon’ for Americans and West Germans alike. From the beginning, the association of jazz with blackness and black music shaped the rhetoric of (conservative) jazz opponents and fuelled their rejection of the music which they read as a symbol of cultural decay. For jazz fans, racial exoticism and the blackness of jazz as a musical form were equally important and, in this case, were the cause of their attraction. Schroer correctly observes that jazz opponents as well as enthusiasts equally relied on the category ‘race’ and neither side did necessarily deny or diminish its significance (Poiger, Jazz 155). The term Neger-Jazz [Negro jazz] figured in German discourses well before and after the Nazi era (Lange, Jazz 19). Jazz aficionados sometimes may have been led to “extend a broader embrace for all things African American,” but complex “dynamics of attraction” also included racial exoticism (Schroer 166). Despite its being ‘whitened’ and intellectualized, jazz was still linked to blackness in the German collective imaginary. In general, issues of race, authenticity, blackness, and Americanness loomed large over debates on jazz, and these debates continued to have political undertones; Ostendorf points out that “[s]ince jazz arrived as a deeply racialized American import, there was a natural coalition between German jazz fans and Civil Rights activists” (“Subversive” 66). From being utilized by the Nazis to attack and defame US culture to being a sign of resistance during the Third Reich to being the music of liberation after World War II and later on a Cold War ‘weapon,’ jazz was in ambiguous ways bound up with politics in (West) Germany, and its meanings had been constantly renegotiated during the first half of the twentieth century until other (musical) phenomena took center stage. As the multiple meanings of jazz were hotly debated, so was its association with Americanness and the ‘blackness’ which this music – however narrowly or broadly defined – generally evoked. Jazz was neither the only form of African American music received in Germany during the first half of the 20th century nor the only cultural product associated with African Americanness. For example, African American spirituals were equally well-known and generally positively received because they were viewed as an “authentic expression of a black folk art” (Schroer 151). However, jazz can easily be regarded as the most controversial cultural phenomenon associated with ‘America’ and ‘blackness’ in the German imaginary. These (public) discussions reveal the range of German

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attitudes towards African American culture leading up to the postwar years which brought about changes in the reception of American culture in general and jazz in particular and bolstered its development towards broader acceptance, more wide-spread reception, and differentiation. They also reveal some continuities in African American cultural influences on Germany and draw attention to discursive figurations which resurface in later debates on cultural phenomena coded as ‘black’ or ‘African American’ – for example, rock’n’roll in the 1950s and 1960s or hip hop culture and rap music emerging in the 1970s and taking hold in Germany in the following decades.36 All of these cultural imports do not only stand at the center of (public) disputes on the alleged Americanization of German culture but were also associated particularly during their respective heydays with youth culture and youthfulness (bearing the promise of renewal) and countercultural subversion or resistance (though not actual rebellion). It appears as if throughout the 20th century several generations of German youths have relied on the imagined equivalences with African Americans in order to negotiate their collective and individual identities, their cultural and political affiliations, and their protest against societal restraints, parental control, or political agendas. In the process of each (musical) phenomenon’s development (which includes differentiation, integration into mainstream culture, and/or being ‘whitened’) and with the coming-of-age of its protagonists, the respective ‘rebellious’ cultural elements continually lost their threatening potential and became largely accepted as part of German popular culture. Of course, these tentatively formulated commonalities invite and require further substantial scholarly research and should not obscure the fact that swing, jazz, rock’n’roll, and hip hop have very different reception histories and cannot simply be reduced to following exactly the same parameters of transatlantic cultural transfer and appropriations by German audiences. Yet, they were all accompanied by specific iconographies fundamental to their resonance in (West) Germany, as the example of Josephine Baker demonstrates for jazz. As one of the first African American female performers to become a star in Europe as well as on a global scale, she seemed to

36 Rap music has also been deemed “die letzte Besatzermusik” as the title of the autobiography of the German rap group Die Fantastischen Vier (1999) suggests.

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personify all that was “jazz” in the 1920s and has left a lasting impression on Germany’s collective memory.

J AZZ I CON , S HOW S TAR , A CTIVIST : J OSEPHINE B AKER AND G ERMANY In the 1920s, during the early years of her career, Josephine Baker’s dance performances and her (in)famous banana skirt embodied what most European audiences thought of as “wilder Neger-Jazz” [wild Negro jazz] (Lange, Jazz 50). She even “indirectly acted as an ambassador for the music [i.e., jazz]” (Kater 9). Although she is mostly associated with Paris and the history of African Americans in France, Baker also became famous in Weimar Germany and gained a lasting iconicity. Her first visit to Germany took place during the early days of her European career with La Revue Nègre which had been a major success in Paris before coming to Berlin’s Nelson Theater in 1925. While it was praised in intellectual and liberal circles, many people and public voices regarded Baker’s performances as well as those of other African American musicians – even if they did not play jazz – as “verrückt” [crazy] or “verjudete Negerschau und Urwaldklamauk” [Jewified Negro show and jungle hubbub] (Lange, Jazz 50-51). African American performers during the Weimar years were generally “appreciated by […] German audiences as the authentic cultural link to the New World and as the exotic protagonist[s] of a paradise lost” (Naumann 100).37 They contributed to the cultural life, even though, as Christine Naumann claims, “[t]his is a fact that is almost forgotten today, with the exception of Josephine Baker” (103). Following the guest performance of La Revue Nègre, Baker was “heralded in Berlin as the incarnation of the primitive” (Nenno 145). She became the most famous black icon of the Weimar years and represented not only the exotic Other, playing with

37 In general, “[l]iterary figures, musicians, dancers, and singers – as long as they were African American and talented, they appealed to the European [in the interwar years]. Their ‘American-ness’ coupled with their blackness created a cultural fusion that was unique and irresistible to a European populace eager to fill a cultural void” (Habel 126).

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colonial fantasies and polarizing audiences with her erotic and exotic dance performances, but also embodied a new self-confident and independent woman (Vollhardt 237). Baker “represented both the New Woman and the New Negro” and her performances challenged established moral standards, social norms, and hierarchies with regard to gender and race alike (Scheper 85). However, she was never perceived as a seriously threatening presence because a ‘guest performance’ is per se temporally limited; Baker’s performances were confined to the limited space of the stage and specific social settings, and her blackness openly marked her as Other and clearly set her apart from the German audiences. Baker’s stardom notwithstanding, racial prejudices, stereotypes, and discrimination were not absent from her reception in Germany. Most obviously, she was targeted by members of the emerging right-wing movement – the so-called Brownshirts38 – but there were also more subtle forms of racism. As Kater puts it: “The German star cult around black personalities such as Josephine Baker really was an inverted form of racial prejudice: it was considered safe by good German burghers to flirt with this symbol of Eros as a manifestation of potential immorality, but the mere taste of temptation was satisfying enough. Notwithstanding the sensuality of all of Berlin’s lighter culture, La Baker was popular because she was an outsider who afforded audiences the titillating illusion of sin while never endangering the moral standard. For her, behind the façade of popularity, lurked the grim reality of rejection as a racial alien.” (18)

However, Baker described Berlin quite positively on her first visit: “The city had a jewel-like sparkle, especially at night, that didn’t exist in Paris. The vast cafés reminded me of ocean liners powered by the rhythms of their orchestras. There was music everywhere” (qtd. in Kater 3). Baker liked the German capital and later considered to permanently relocate to the city where she had celebrated her biggest successes in Germany in the

38 Ean Wood describes their protest against her performances: “[T]o them Joséphine – being not only decadent but also racially impure – was anathema. The Brownshirts, as the party members were then known, issued pamphlets which condemned her, but fortunately they were still then regarded as only a lunatic fringe” (96).

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1920s: Even though she stayed for less than two months in 1925/26, she became “one of the magic names in the haunted city – along with Greta Garbo, Lotte Lenya and Marlene Dietrich” (Haney 85). She achieved star status at a time when Berlin “conducted a love affair with things American, attempting to model itself as Europe’s most modern city […] and created an image of itself as the wildest, most sexually excessive city in the European landscape” (Nenno 146) – or, as Peter Jelavich states, Berlin “witnessed an Americanization of [its] popular entertainment” (169). Combining the modernity associated with America and the primitivism symbolized by her skin color, Baker fascinated German audiences. She appeared to them exotic and foreign but without the threatening potential of a black male ‘primitive’ sexuality as represented e.g. by the “Black Horror.” According to Lynn Haney, Baker was viewed as fitting the style of German Expressionism and also appealed to German Freikörperkultur [nudism] (88). Nancy Nenno asserts that “she not only engaged German fears and desires associated with the introduction of the primitive into the modern cityscape but also effectively came to embody all those contradictions of Berlin’s own modernity” (146). Count Harry Kessler’s description captures a major tenet of the reception of Baker in the 1920s when he calls La Révue Nègre a “mixture of jungle and skyscraper elements” – “[u]ltramodern and ultraprimitive” (282). Similar to many African American jazz musicians, Baker was perceived by European audiences as a foreign novelty and her blackness was not only subject to essentialist discourses on the black body but equally a marker of authenticity. While in the USA female African American performers powdered their skin in order to make it appear lighter and, thus, to be more attractive and acceptable for American audiences, they had to be prevented from doing so before performing for European spectators. The latter preferred “black performers with darker skin” and “believ[ed] that the authenticity of the primitive was legible on the surface of the body” (Nenno 147). In the popular perception, Baker became a “representative of all that was the opposite of European urban modernity” (150). As the “personification of the African-inspired jazz spirit” she carried the promise of renewal for modern civilization rather than posing a threat to it (154). Samir Dayal argues astutely that Baker embodied “blackness as a symptom of the modern European subject” and that, as blacks did in general, Baker “functioned as the original, incomplete germ of humanity against which the modern

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European could measure, humanize, or culturally regenerate himself” (37). She represented “the stranger within” for European audiences and allowed for them to imagine, desire, and discover their own ‘blackness,’ their “internal Africa,” which did not ultimately lead to a destabilization of racial boundaries but rather reaffirmed their whiteness (Dayal 41). During her first visit to Berlin, Baker “became a household word in the capital of the Weimar Republic” and was even offered a contract by Max Reinhardt (Nenno 150). At the time, Reinhardt had already established himself as maybe the most famous German director and certainly one of the most influential theater producers internationally. He had seen Shuffle Along in New York in 1924 and was fascinated by African American dance. He offered Baker a three-year contract to attend his acting school and become one of his protégées at the Deutsches Theater. However, Baker was already under contract with the Folies Bergère in Paris and, ultimately, rejected the offer (Haney 90-92). She participated in Berlin’s social life and met playwright Karl Gustav Vollmoeller and Count Harry Kessler39 – also known as the “Red Count” because of his slightly left-wing views – who chronicled the events in his diaries (Rose 85). In 1926, he saw Baker dance at “Vollmoeller’s harem” (Kessler 279): “Miss Baker was dancing a solo with brilliant artistic mimicry and purity of style, like an ancient Egyptian or other archaic figure performing an intricate series of movements without ever losing the basic pattern. […] Apparently, she does this for hours on end, without tiring and continually inventing new figures like a child, a happy child at play. […] A bewitching creature, but almost quite unerotic.” (279)

Despite his admiration for Baker’s dance, his description is trenchantly racist: Baker’s performance represents to him the style of an “ancient Egyptian figure,” i.e. an orientalized exotic Other but one that still belongs to a ‘civilized’ ‘high culture;’ he infantilizes her (“like a child”), and, finally,

39 Ian Buruma describes Kessler as “[a] publisher of fine, limited edition books, a diplomat, an art collector, a cosmopolitan aristocrat” (ix). Kessler was deeply involved in the social life and affairs of his time but observed it from a position that was always a bit removed from the center. As Buruma assesses, “[h]e was an insider who wrote with the sardonic eye of an outsider” (x).

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even dehumanizes her in his assessment that she is a “creature” and elsewhere compares her to a “beast of prey” (279). While he judges her as “almost quite unerotic” and thus does not openly sexualize her body, his description turns her into an object to satisfy his desire for the consumption of (avant-garde) modernist art and the pleasure he derives from it. Together with Vollmoeller and Reinhardt, Kessler made plans for a ballet based on the theme of the “Song of Solomon,” starring Baker as Shulamite and featuring music “half jazz and half Oriental, to be composed perhaps by Richard Strauss” (280). Their plans never materialized but they reveal how Baker (and jazz) represented an orientalized Other that was attractive because of its vagueness, elusiveness, and projection screen quality for European desires, anxieties, and fantasies. As a fashion icon Baker inspired new trends and it was a result of her fame that black models were allowed on German fashion show runways. In the popular press, her name was Germanified to “Josefine” and her projects and scandals were covered extensively (Nenno 150). She found imitators “on the German and on the African American side,” as Naumann observes: “The African American dancer Ruth Bayton was called ‘The Josephine Baker of Berlin’ because of her Berlin reputation. Like Josephine Baker, she posed in a banana costume and entertained her audiences in cafés, bars and theaters. The German comedian Ilse Bois did her grotesque dances and ironic comments on the jazz craze and its wild children ‘Afro’-hairstyled and banana-girded at the Kabarett der Komiker in Berlin.” (103)

Maybe most prominently, Baker’s life was appropriated by German director Josef von Sternberg in Blonde Venus (1932) starring Marlene Dietrich, a retelling in “almost perfectly symmetrical ‘reversal’ of the story of Dietrich’s much more famous contemporary Josephine Baker” (Ngai 149). This reversal is already indicated by the title of the film – Baker was also known as the “Black Venus.” Dietrich plays Helen Faraday/Jones, a white European who embarks on a journey across the Atlantic and then re-launches her career as a cabaret performer in the USA to support her sick husband. Her performances are successful particularly due to her primitivist stage acts, and, finally, Helen Jones becomes a star known as the “Blonde Venus.” She even returns to Paris, the basis of Baker’s worldwide stardom, for a comeback after her almost complete downfall which led her to a stereotypically

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depicted American South. This ‘reversed’ story of Baker’s life includes a racial reversion: Helen is ‘blackened’ through her name change (from Faraday to Jones), her assumed ability “to croon,” as well as her performance in a primitivist setting and in a Gorilla costume. Her ‘evolution’ when she removes the costume in the performance to appear in her glamorous Bakerstyle revue outfit and puts on a blonde wig – albeit a very curly one, which almost looks like an Afro – plays with stereotypical notions of blackness and whiteness. Ultimately, when Helen celebrates her comeback in Paris, she again relies on Baker’s iconography: She cross-dresses in a white tuxedo with a white top hat which causes her appearance to look conspicuously like Baker who turned towards gender-bending imagery in the 1930s and, for example, performed as bandleader in a black tuxedo with black top hat in 1932. Of course, not all of these parallels have to be read as more or less conscious allusions to Baker’s life and performances but might partially be due to the cultural influences and modernist trends which both Dietrich and Baker picked up on. However, as Sianne Ngai convincingly argues, it is almost impossible to conclude that “Sternberg and Dietrich [had] not […] been aware of the Black Venus prior to their collaboration on the story that would eventually be filmed and titled Blonde Venus” in light of Baker’s “iconicity and international celebrity” as well as the “intense reactions to Baker’s Berlin performance in 1928” (151). Baker allegedly complained about this appropriation by accusing Dietrich: “That German cow has copied me all my life” (qtd. in Ngai 155). The film appears “to simultaneously elevate and subordinate the story of Baker by generating it through negation and inversion” and is at the same time “a homage to and a parody of the life, career, and star-text of Josephine Baker” (Ngai 164, 166). While she was appropriated, imitated, and commodified by others, Baker exercised a certain degree of agency over her public persona, and was one of the major forces behind her successful commodification and marketing. In Berlin, for example, according to Ean Wood, she actively catered to her audience’s expectations when she posed for several photographers “appearing more naked than she ever had or would again, and frequently crouching in a deliberately animalistic manner. If the people of Berlin wanted a wild and free jungle nudist,” Baker would provide it for them (96). In general, Baker had a strong “market orientation” and “ability to merchandize herself” but nonetheless, as Dayal asserts, she was able to exercise a “subtly subversive agency” (36). Andrea Barnwell even claims

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that Baker “was always the principal agent of her reception, compelling her audience to examine the binary oppositions she created” (88) – and, I would add, deconstructed them as the elegant, ‘civilized’ diva engaging in the danse sauvage or as symbolizing American modernity and (African) primitivism at the same time. While Baker to a certain degree engaged in self-orientalization, her performances and performatives created a complexity beyond mere parody or deconstruction: Baker engaged with the horizon of expectations of her audiences, fashioning herself as “black, oriental, American – but with a difference” (Dayal 49). Being guided by a “situational pragmatism” (Dayal 49), Baker’s performances can be read in the tradition of African American “signifyin(g)” and the intertextuality it implies as well as in the vein of subtle subversive parody, which may or may not be detected by audiences, who might just as well enjoy the show without becoming seriously unsettled by it. To a certain extent, she “produced complexity within the limits of the historical spectacularization and commodification of the black female body” (Scheper 77). Baker’s performances were not limited to her stage appearances that actively catered to European desires and anxieties regarding the ‘primitive’ and (subversively) played with established clichés.40 Bennetta Jules-Rosette identifies five performative strategies of identity and image construction which Baker employed “[i]n complicity with her promoters and audiences” and which “emerged gradually and with varying degree of sophistication:” “(1) exoticizing race and gender; (2) reversing racial and cultural codes and meanings; (3) displaying difference through nudity, cross-dressing, song, and dance; (4) exploiting the image of difference; and (5) universalizing the outcomes to allow the performative message to reach a larger audience.” (49)

40 Michael Borshuk, for example, reads “parodic intentions behind […] Baker’s controversial early performances of the 1920s and 30s” (40). He claims that critics have often overlooked or ignored her “savvy for constructing her own image and […] the creative agency of her performances” in order to argue for a sell-out of her blackness merely for her personal gain (42). In contrast, Borshuk argues that Baker’s work “thrived on subversive repetition, on the appropriation of stereotypes and their reconfiguration” (54).

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Additionally, throughout her career she “famously staged [even] her private life for public consumption, performing a vast array of personae in many different locations: as star of stage and film, as modernist muse, femme fatale, primitive savage, [and later] international spy, transnational antiracist activist, and as an icon of motherhood” (Scheper 73). As Janet Lyon aptly points out, “the kaleidoscopic nature of her public life has left a fractured composite portrait. […] ‘Josephine Baker’ never coheres into a stable historical identity” (30) and it appears impossible to categorize her even within a very specific setting (like Weimar Germany) and historical timeframe (like the 1920s).41 During that decade, Baker’s beauty secrets were revealed to German readers in women’s magazines and, in time for Christmas 1926, a Baker doll arrived in the stores (Nenno 157). Baker herself returned to Germany as part of a major tour across Europe and South America between 1928 and 1930. She performed at the Theater des Westens in Berlin in 1928 where German audiences had the chance to view her in the infamous banana skirt which dominates her iconography until today; for example, the German version of Baker’s (auto)biography Joséphine (published in French in 1976) is entitled Ausgerechnet Bananen [Bananas – of all things!] and Dieter Kühn’s Josephine (1980) prominently features a page with a photograph of Baker in her banana skirt before the main text begins. Her plans to settle permanently in Berlin, which are underscored by her buying a house in Grunewald and launching a German Chez Joséphine,42 were short-lived (Nenno 157). Her new revue Bitte einsteigen (Joséphine) was antagonistically received and her theater booking which was originally scheduled for six months was put to an early end after which Baker left Berlin (Ngai 151). Baker admitted in one of her auto-

41 I agree with Bennetta Jules-Rosette that it is much more fruitful to explore the “constructed images and nested narratives that constitute her persona and the social strategies that she used to bring these images to life” than searching for the ‘true’ Baker (4-5). 42 During her tour, local night clubs in several cities were “taken over and renamed Chez Joséphine for the duration of her stay” (Wood 138). Therefore, this club opening alone would not be a sufficient argument for Baker’s actual plans to stay in Berlin. Whether or not her plans were serious, I think it is important to point out her attraction to the city which was in turn very much attracted to her.

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biographies that the show was “ugly, stupid, and pretentious” but denied any responsibility on her part for the failure (qtd. in Jules-Rosette 164). Musical conservatives and the growing Nazi movement protested against her appearance and Baker’s tremendous popularity in Germany did not secure the success of her new show in Berlin (Wood 150). Her tour through Europe, in general, was overshadowed by scandals and attempts by the political Right to put a stop to her performances. Protest took on various forms in many cities across Europe; but it was another German city, Munich, which officially issued a stage ban in 1929.43 During the Weimar years, Munich fashioned itself as the antithesis of the ‘red’ and ‘internationalist’ Berlin (Vollhardt 229). It was the place where the “Deutsche Notbund gegen die Schwarze Schmach” was founded in 1920 as an initiative to protest the black troops employed in the occupation of the Rhineland after World War I. In 1921, this organization was widely accepted, had local celebrities among its members, and was recognized by Bavarian and Reich authorities (234). Even though the propaganda diminished during the 1920s, the topos of the “Black Horror” survived (236). In spring 1929, Baker was scheduled to perform at the Deutsches Theater in Munich. When almost all preparations were complete – the contract signed, the guest performance announced – a stage ban was issued by the Munich police and Baker was forbidden to perform because her appearance was allegedly an offense to common decency, a corruption of public morals, and a disruption of public safety and order (237). As the only city to actually ban Baker’s performance, Munich was viewed by many liberal thinkers as provincial, anti-modern, and culturally insignificant (239). Phyllis Rose describes the situation Baker had to face in Europe in the late 1920s: “In the hostility which Baker provoked […], economic frustration, moral indignation, resistance to cultural innovation, xenophobia, all mixed with racism. Once again, […] she embodied the jazz age and people reacted to her not so much as an individual but as a cultural symbol.” (124)

As cultural symbol and media icon Baker became a “floating signifier” “for just about any kind of racial, ethnic, or national otherness” (Ngai 166) or, at

43 In addition to Berlin, Baker also appeared on stage in Hamburg (Wood 151).

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least, a “slippery signifier in the racial and sexual spectacles of Jazz Age popular culture” (Borshuk 55). On the other hand, her early performances on stage and screen44 can be read as playing with very specific notions of modernism (and its obsession with the primitive), the tradition of blackface minstrelsy, and ideas of ‘blackness.’ Nonetheless, Baker had a “chameleon quality” (Borshuk 42) and “has always been treated as an enigmatic figure by cultural critics” (Lyon 29). Lyon sees a major reason for this reception of “Baker-as-enigma” in her key relations to two sets of institutions, namely “her synecdochic relation to […] the institutions of modernism […] and […] the social and political institutions of white Western modernity” with its “racial contradictions” (30). Baker herself certainly added to the elusive character of her public persona in that she constantly created and recreated her own master-narrative. She published several (co-authored) autobiographies, made contradicting statements about her biography, and shaped her public perception carefully though not always coherently. However mysterious Baker was perceived and received in the 1920s and beyond, in Germany she has mainly been remembered as the embodiment of the jazz age and iconographically as a dancer and performer. This iconography dominates her image until today and overshadows her (later) career and public persona, which even in cultural history and criticism have been largely neglected.45 Matthew Pratt Guterl observed in 2009: “As a historical subject, Baker resists any easy approach. Recognizable but relatively unknown or misunderstood, she appears – usually as a casual reference – across the widest spectrum of cultural and historical narratives. […] it is remarkable how little sustained attention has been given to Baker’s life and political practice.” (40)

44 Between 1927 and 1940, Baker appeared in several short film clips and starred in four feature films: La Sirène des Tropiques (1927), Zouzou (1934), Princess Tam-Tam (1935), and Fausse Alerte (1940). For a useful analysis of the filmic narratives in the context of Baker’s career and their continuing appeal see JulesRosette (2007). Her excellent study also includes a chronology of Baker’s life. 45 Jules-Rosette asserts that several studies on “Baker’s life as performer end with the peak of her early career in 1935” and fail to “connect the early erotic images and rise to fame to the evolving narrative of moral transcendence” (183).

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Considering that she can be regarded as a model figure of the “Black Atlantic,” an interesting case study for transnational perspectives on Cold War black protest, and for visions of cosmopolitanism, it is astonishing that Baker does not appear prominently in any of these flourishing fields (Guterl 40). She “became an iconic international figure, la Joséphine or la Baker, moving through the transatlantic cultural circuits that helped define popular female stage and screen performers in the early twentieth century” (Scheper 74). In the 1920s, Baker represented US-American culture for European audiences, while for American audiences she often appeared to represent European modernism. In both contexts, she was frequently understood as the embodiment of a ‘primitive’ culture lost to modern Western societies and projected onto Africa or the Orient. Born in St. Louis, Baker was an American citizen before acquiring French citizenship in 1937. In one of her signature songs, “J’ai deux amours,” Baker addresses her double affiliation to her home country as well as to the French capital Paris. Her international orientation and cosmopolitan worldview culminated in her purchase of “Les Milandes” – which Jules-Rosette regards as a “touristic simulation of Baker’s multiple private and public images, her idyllic narrative, and her life” (35) – a château accommodating her and her twelve adopted children of different national, cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds known as the “Rainbow Tribe.” Over the years, Les Milandes46 also became a tourist attraction with its own flags, postage stamps, and a wax museum, the “Jorama,” depicting key scenes of Baker’s life and career. In fact, Baker was building a “little world of her own, where all races would be received as equal” (Wood 270). Her ‘experiment,’ however, failed because she was not able to raise enough money to sustain it. This story of loss and downfall counters the Cinderella- or rags-to-riches-narratives that had dominated her early career and life. But her forceful eviction from the property in 1969 also generated another (almost) iconic media image of Baker on the doorsteps of her château: poor, worn-out, and broke – a stark contrast to the glamorous and divaesque images of her early career. The rescue of Baker and her family by Princess Grace of Monaco, in turn, fits smoothly in the

46 Les Milandes was the “totalizing symbol of the successes and struggles of Josephine Baker’s later life” just as the equally ideologically loaded “banana skirt was for her youth” (Jules-Rosette 36).

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fairy-tale-like narratives of Baker’s life and career and her “ideal of universal brotherhood” represented by the Rainbow Tribe (Jules-Rosette 191). Furthermore, Baker took interest in political matters; according to Haney, it was the Reichskristallnacht [The Night of the Broken Glass, Nov. 9-10, 1938] which “radicalized [Baker], who remembered the stormtroopers hurling ammonia bombs at her and shouting ‘Go back to Africa’ when she had performed in Germany and Eastern Europe in the late 1920s” (215).47 She joined the French resistance against the Nazis and “deployed her divadom as a political weapon, given that it provided her with both a cover and the privilege of mobility” (Scheper 83). Early on, she refused to perform in German-occupied France. Baker served as a spy, wrote letters to the French troops, and later entertained the Allied soldiers; she raised money for the Free French and was a member of the Ladies’ Auxiliary for the French air force. During this time, Baker distanced herself from Germany. She visited Buchenwald concentration camp after its liberation (Wood 243), but Germany no longer played a seminal role for her career – even though, during one of her comeback tours, she returned to Berlin in 1968. Baker’s life as activist can be structured into four political roles which she assumed in succession and interconnection: “(1) the spokeswoman; (2) the warrior and spy; (3) the militant and martyr; and (4) the head of family and state. These roles were interconnected across four stages of her political career, and each built on the other, creating her total political persona.” (Jules-Rosette 215)

During her early career, Baker’s political consciousness was raised through her international tours in the late 1920s and her return to the US which turned her into a spokeswoman for equality and civil rights. Throughout the war years, she was active as a soldier and spy for the French counterintelligence and resistance forces and later as a martyr-like “militant for justice in her battles against racism and segregation.” Finally, at Les Milandes, Baker fashioned herself as head of state and family – a role for which the martyr

47 According to Ean Woods, Baker joined the International League against Racism and anti-Semitism after the Reichskristallnacht, which might have affected her personally because she was at the time married to Jewish Jean Lion (212-13).

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motif continued to be relevant (Jules-Rosette 215). Her matriarchal regime where “Josephine was the boss” once again challenged patriarchy and established gender roles (190). Throughout her career, Baker spoke out against fascism and racism alike. As Jeanne Scheper puts it: “[A]s a vocal critic of racial discrimination, Baker spoke out internationally about the lives of African Americans and other people of color in the US. […] Later she would draw explicit connections between fascism, apartheid, and racism in different national contexts. […] Using the moral authority of a global perspective and the publicity machine of a star, Baker was able to shame America for its racism.” (83)

As a child and during several visits to the USA, Baker experienced American racism first hand. During her stay in the mid-1930s, she “learned that she would never be as welcome in her home country as she had been in France” and that in American society her status would be determined by her skin color rather than her success or personality (Wood 201). While she celebrated great successes in the USA after World War II, Baker became active in the struggle for racial equality: She refused to accept segregation, fought for blacks to be among their audiences when she performed at white establishments, and opposed racial discrimination directed against her and others alike. During a US tour with her white husband Jo Bouillon in the late 1940s, the interracial couple was faced with hostility, racism, and segregation. A later event, the so-called “Stork club incident,” particularly attests to Baker’s protest and created a media echo with far-ranging consequences for her. On October 16, 1951, during another tour of the US,48 Baker was refused service at the well-known Stork club and sought to protest and publicize this act of discrimination. Baker called upon another patron of the club, conservative journalist Walter Winchell from the Daily Mirror, as a witness and expected his support (Jules-Rosette 224). Winchell however “retorted with a blistering media attack” and denounced Baker as a communist sympathizer, accusing her of being anti-American. He sent this information to J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and, ultimately, “triggered FBI surveillance of Baker’s activities over

48 Baker announced this tour as primarily politically motivated and categorically refused to perform for segregated audiences (Jules-Rosette 221).

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a seventeen-year period” (Jules-Rosette 70). Moreover, his accusations led to the termination of Baker’s US contracts; they limited her possibilities to work both in the US and internationally and caused great trouble for Baker and her friends (224-25). But, of course, his attack was not the only opposition Baker encountered; the State Department and the FBI were interested in silencing Baker’s criticism of US race relations and found support even among African Americans – perhaps most prominently in congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (225).49 Baker engaged in political activities beyond demanding integrated audiences at her performances. She supported the case of Willie McGee, a young black man convicted of raping a white woman in Mississippi and executed in 1951. Moreover, she “defended the integration of housing in Cicero, Illinois, amid a violent riot and supported the Trenton Six,” a group of African American men accused of murdering a white shopkeeper in New Jersey. Baker was also well aware of the problematic representations of African Americans in the media and wrote a protest letter to the National Association of Radio and Television in which she objected to the association’s hiring practices and “the use of racial stereotypes in the media” (Jules-Rosette 222). Baker “was welcomed by African Americans [at that time] because she declared her readiness to fight for the Civil Rights Movement and boycotted performances for segregated audiences” (Dayal 49). She was even named “Most Outstanding Woman of the Year” by the NAACP in 1951. Baker participated in the March on Washington (1963) where she appeared in her French air force uniform and gave a short speech. In the same year, she gave a charity concert for several Civil Rights organizations – the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) (Dayal 49). Though Baker was allegedly proud to be part of the movement, her participation may not have been completely selfless, as it helped her to gain renewed publicity and to raise money for Les Milandes and her Rainbow

49 Mary Dudziak, who regards Baker a victim of Cold War politics, points out that since Baker was no longer a US citizen at the time, the US government could not resort to its standard measures taken against Civil Rights activists like withdrawing a passport to prevent the person from traveling internationally. Thus, Baker was a threat to and a “special problem for the government” (546).

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Tribe (Wood 285-88). Jules-Rosette describes Baker’s speech at the March on Washington as paradigmatic for her political activism: It relied on her personal story framed by the Cinderella motif, France as safe haven – a “fairyland place” (Baker qtd. in Jules-Rosette 237) –, and the depiction of its heroine as an outspoken crusader for justice and equality. The speech “recapitulated the terms of her own idiosyncratic battle against racism, which, while it was encouraging and uplifting, was also somewhat marginal to the discourse of the collective civil rights struggle” (Jules-Rosette 237). Even though she was involved in the Civil Rights movement and became a heroic figure for a new generation of African Americans, Baker could not identify with the radical agenda of the emerging Black Power movement; she was “increasingly out of sympathy with [these] new crusading attitudes evolving” (Wood 305). Already during her early career, objections had been raised in the US that she “had removed herself from the black community, and had become a sort of ersatz white” (Wood 172).50 Against this backdrop, Baker’s creation of her utopian family at Les Milandes as an “ultimate embrace of domesticity as the locus of her politics in the 1950s” (Dudziak 569) appears, at first glance, to be a retreat into the domestic sphere and a turn away from activism; not the least because this community was made possible by its clearly demarcated boundaries and separation from the outside world and the stereotypical ‘casting’ of children adopted as representatives of different races and cultures in their ‘purest’ form. Les Milandes was a “commune,” a “royal home” for the children, and a tourist site; it can be viewed as a “postnational dream, a utopian fairy tale, and a sort of colony” (Guterl 46). Baker’s construction of an autonomous (familial) realm in which diverse races, cultures, and religions could peacefully live together poses a striking contrast to the growing international solidarity with the American Civil Rights and Black Power movements and the radicalization and transnationalization of the black freedom struggle. Guterl points out that the “ascendant, seriously held utopian politics” underlying Baker’s life at Les Milandes and particularly “her reinvention of mother-

50 When Baker was asked to be the “Queen of the Colonies” at the Colonial Exposition in 1931, The New York World-Telegram commented on her straightened hair, “running the headline: ‘Queen, Where Is Yo’ Kink?’” (Wood 172).

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hood,” differs significantly from both the “radical traditions” of Black Power and “the bourgeois integrationism” of the Civil Rights movement (39). He regards her concept of motherhood as “radical” and revolutionary and calls for rethinking the meaning of radicalism and for finding a definition to accommodate Baker’s activism as “an equally important provocation” alongside the tremendous upheavals of the black freedom struggle in the 1950s and 1960s (50). Against this backdrop, it might not be as far-fetched as it could otherwise appear to forge a connection between Josephine Baker and one of the major female icons of Black Power: Angela Davis. As different as the two women, their careers, public (and private) lives, and political courses are, several rather abstract parallels can be found, which, of course, should not obscure the concrete differences in their (her)stories. Both women became African American icons and heroic figures of (almost) global relevance and both are connected to the tradition of black feminism as well as the transnational black liberation struggle. Both were outspoken against inequality and racial discrimination but found their political activism often overshadowed by their iconicity and status in popular culture, and both became largely ‘frozen’ images in the collective memory, confined to the heyday of their popularity (the 1920s and early 1970s respectively). Moreover, both women struggled for control over their image to counter the public persona created by others. Wolfgang Leppmann in his book The Roaring Twenties: Amerikas wilde Jahre (1992) subtitles his chapter on Baker with the slogan “Black is Beautiful” (209) – a phrase which would become inextricably associated with Davis in the early 1970s. To understand the cultural processes at work in the West German reception of Davis, it is an essential prerequisite to (re)construct earlier German encounters with African American/black culture which figured into (public) negotiations of Civil Rights and Black Power. Josephine Baker, jazz music, and black GIs in postwar Germany are among those cultural historical precedents of the rejection, solidarity, and desire that shaped West German responses to the black liberation struggle in the 1960s and 1970s.

4 Transatlantic Political Protests and Countercultures: Angela Davis

Der Kampf des BLACK POWER ist ein Teil des Kampfes aller Unterdrückten und Ausgebeuteten. Ihr Widerstandskampf ist auch unser Widerstand. (BERLIN-KOMITEE: BLACK POWER, 1968, CF. SCHRÖDER) [Davis] symbolisiert Unterdrückung in vielfacher Form: als Frau, als Schwarze, als Kommunistin, als Intellektuelle. (OSKAR NEGT, ANGELA DAVIS SOLIDARITÄTSKOMITEE 17) No revolutionary can claim [her] life for [herself]. The life of the revolutionary belongs to the struggle. (H. RAP BROWN, QTD. IN VAN DEBURG, NEW 3)

Angela Davis became one of the most iconic and contested figures in the international reception of the Black Power movement and generated an unprecedented wave of attention in numerous countries around the world. In both West and East Germany, she figured prominently in solidarity campaigns with the black liberation struggle as well as in the mainstream

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media. A comparative analysis of the two German states’ approaches to Black Power in general and Davis in particular remains a desideratum at this point and would in itself merit a book-length study. As far as the current research indicates, the reception of Davis has been guided by different parameters in the FRG and the GDR. I can only offer a few observations on Davis’s relationship to East Germany before zooming in on West German solidarity with Davis, on representations of Davis in the media, and on Davis’s own (counter)narrative. The connection between Davis and the GDR can be readily established along the political and ideological lines of communism; and it has also entered the contested terrain of German collective memories of this period. “There are as many collective memories and stories as there are communities,” and within the reunified Germany different narratives have vied for authority and control over interpretations of German history, culture, and identity (Arnold-de Simine 9). In West Germany, solidarity with Davis has, by and large, been coded as countercultural and associated with protest and political activism outside or in opposition to the dominant culture, whereas solidarity in the GDR certainly included moments of ‘prescription’ as the government mobilized and to some degree controlled activism for Davis as a fellow communist and a heroine of an ‘other’ America. According to Bettina Aptheker, “[i]n the Socialist countries solidarity with Angela Davis was the watchword. Letters by the tens of thousands – especially from the people of the German Democratic Republic with their special knowledge of the fascist oppression and resistance to it – flooded the Marin County jail.” (29)

Time magazine even reported an “Angelamania” having broken out in East Germany (C. Barnwell, Dialogics 119). In her preface to Klaus Steiniger’s Angela Davis: Eine Frau schreibt Geschichte, which was (re)published in 2010, Davis recalls the campaign “Eine Million Rosen für Angela” [One Million Roses for Angela] and affirms that she was particularly moved by the solidarity in the GDR (10). This campaign was started by members of the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) and resulted in the publication of an appeal in the newspaper Junge Welt to support Davis, including pre-printed postcards which could be sent to California as demonstration of solidarity and as encouragement. She became honorary citizen of the city of Magdeburg in 1972, and the photos of her meeting Erich Honecker and attending

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the Jugend-Weltfestspiele in East Berlin one year later became central to her iconography in and beyond the GDR. Roughly at the same time, she allegedly declined an invitation to West Germany; yet, Davis had close and deep ties to the FRG on multiple levels: The two years she spent in Frankfurt am Main (1965-1967) were formative for her thinking and activism. As she relates in her autobiography, Herbert Marcuse – “the great intellectual patron of New Left movements all over the world” (Varon 18) – was one of her most important mentors, and during her two years in West Germany she also studied with Theodor W. Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt school, who became important “ideology provider[s]” for the student protest movement (Langguth 27). While in Frankfurt, Davis made several trips to the GDR, but she particularly came into close contact with the student revolts in the Federal Republic (Davis, Angela Davis 142-43). In an interview with Lisa Lowe, Davis remembers that at that time, “student activism was on the rise in Germany […] [and] the German Socialist Student Organization gained in membership and influence” (314). She further recalls how her studies with Adorno and Marcuse allowed her “to think early on about the relationship between theory and practice, between intellectual work and activist work” (313). Ultimately, “Germany for Angela Davis was […] a training ground, where she received a theoretical training in what can broadly be termed a philosophy of liberation” (Hopkins, “Black Prussians” 77). Davis left Germany in 1967 feeling – as she claims – strongly obliged to participate in the black liberation struggle “at home”1 and it was, fittingly, a media image of the Black Panthers that she describes as the ‘trigger’ for her return: “[…] the image of the leather-jacketed, black bereted warriors standing with guns at the entrance to the California legislature. (I saw that image in a German newspaper

1

Davis states in her autobiography: “I had thought mine was the perfect dilemma: the struggle at home versus the need to remain in Frankfurt until the completion of my doctorate […]. But each day it was becoming clearer to me that my ability to accomplish anything was directly dependent on my ability to contribute something concrete to the struggle. […] I felt it would be impossible for me to stay in Germany any longer” (145).

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[…].) That image, which would eventually become so problematic for me, called me home.” (“Black Nationalism” 290)

When she herself was turned into a cause célèbre around 1970, it was her soon-to-be-iconic media image that traveled back across the Atlantic to be widely received and appropriated in both Germanies. Davis generated international media attention at the height of the Black Power era when she was accused of being involved in the violent attempt to free the so-called “Soledad Brothers” at Marin County courthouse at San Rafael, California in 1970. She became a most wanted fugitive, a political prisoner with worldwide support, and, ultimately, an icon of Black Power activism. Davis openly promoted the cause of George L. Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John W. Clutchette, three African American convicts charged with the murder of John V. Mills, a white prison guard, who had walked free after a grand jury ruling called his killing three African American prisoners “justifiable homicide” without hearing any of the African American convicts who had witnessed the incident (Aptheker 5). While Davis was involved in solidarity activities for the Soledad Brothers, she developed a relationship and special bond with George Jackson. They wrote each other frequently, a fact which would be assigned central significance during her trial when their letters were used by the prosecution to present love and passion as potential motives for Davis’s alleged crimes.2 On August 7, 1970 heavily armed Jonathan Jackson stormed a Marin County courtroom and took several hostages. His actions were viewed as part of a larger conspiracy to free his brother George and his fellow inmates, though some accounts like Aptheker’s The Morning Breaks hold that his goal was to free James McClain, who was on trial that day, together with Ruchell Magee and William Christmas, who served as witnesses in his case. The attempt failed, causing the deaths of Superior Court Judge Harold Haley, two African American prisoners, and Jonathan Jackson. George Jackson was killed only several days later at San Quentin by a guard in an alleged escape

2

Bettina Aptheker, a close friend of Angela Davis, describes the letters between Jackson and Davis as “passionately political – argumentative, probative, incisive” and actually affirms that “[s]ometime that spring or summer [of 1970] they fell in love with each other” (11).

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attempt. Some of the weapons used in the Marin County courthouse incident were registered in Davis’s name, and since Jonathan had also worked closely with her, the connection was quickly made and an arrest warrant issued. Davis, charged with aiding and abetting in homicide, kidnapping, and conspiracy, tried to escape jurisdiction and was put on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list on August 18, 1970, and was deemed “armed and dangerous.” Throughout her flight, capture, and arrest in New York City on October 13, 1970, as well as her imprisonment, trial and, finally, acquittal in 1972, Davis elicited varied responses in mainstream media as well as solidarity movements around the globe. This was particularly the case because Davis was not only a young and attractive black woman but also a lecturer in philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) working on her dissertation. With her middle-class background, her excellent education in the US and Europe, and her scholarly expertise, Davis did not fit the image of the “dangerous terrorist” that President Nixon allegedly claimed her to be (Aptheker xi). She was associated with the Black Panther Party and the (all black) Che-Lumumba Club of the US Communist Party in Los Angeles. Earlier, she had garnered nationwide media interest by taking action against UCLA in October 1969 for being fired primarily because of her communist ties. By turning Davis into a symbol with multiple and even contradicting meanings and (re-)appropriating her public persona in diverse contexts, the West German public did not only passively receive but rather actively construct and invent Davis as an intellectual, activist, prisoner, fugitive, hero, fashion icon, and communist – to name just some of the labels that have been attached to her. The processes of translation, the forms of epistemic appropriation, and the interpretations through (re)contextualization might be most illuminating about the agents involved in that labeling. They were, however, also influenced by Davis’s self-fashioning.3 In fact, David “enact-

3

Self-fashioning is understood here as a process that “occurs at the point of encounter between an authority and an alien” (Greenblatt, Renaissance 9). This understanding assumes “that what is produced in this encounter partakes of both the authority and the alien that is marked for attack, and hence that any achieved identity always contains within itself the signs of its own subversion or loss” (9).

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[ed] a revolutionary performance for both U.S. and international audiences” (K. Brown 116). These reciprocal processes need to be analyzed from both angles. The struggle to label her indicates that Davis as symbol and as public persona was never easy to pigeon-hole; rather, it exposes the problematic of preconceived categories. For example, she was often viewed in connection with the Black Panthers even though as a female (and feminist) activist she hardly fit into their self-fashioned masculine-chauvinistic tradition, and later distanced herself from the Black Panthers and affiliated herself with the US Communist Party. Kimberly N. Brown even argues that Davis’s “rise to fame (or infamy) in the late 1960s and early 1970s marks a reconfiguration of the image of the African American revolutionary to include women” (115). As the powerful icon she became in West Germany, Davis came to signify almost anything – from a fashion idol to the figurehead of violent revolts, to the hero of peaceful revolutionary activism. This chapter analyzes the structures, discourses, and subjects dominating West German re- and perceptions of Davis in the media and on the streets with a particular focus on the time of her legal trial and on the interdependence of self-fashioning and processes of symbolic appropriation. The meanings of ‘Angela Davis’ as symbol, as political figure, and as a focal point of larger (political) campaigns and agendas were heavily contested. The diverse appropriations of her case have to be interpreted within the broader cultural and historical framework of Inter-German relations, the counterculture and student protest movement of the “global sixties” and a long “1968,” the New Left, the transatlantic connections between West Germany and the USA, the West German reception of African American culture, the history of African American culture in (West) Germany in general and the reception of the Civil Rights and Black Power movement(s) in particular. Naturally, these numerous cultural, social, and historical contexts cannot be covered in detail in this chapter; my analyses can only touch upon these complex fields. Alongside the core questions of this chapter – how Davis was received and perceived in West Germany, which agendas were connected to her case, and how she represented herself – many other topics come into view as the Davis case was utilized to debate, propagate, and

Self-fashioning “is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile” and “always, though not exclusively, in language” (9).

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interrogate national and domestic issues comprising politics, society, and culture in West Germany. An in-depth examination of broader contexts including the development of the New Left or the significance and meanings of ‘black liberation’ in West Germany and their specific connections to (German) constructions of Black Power, African American culture, and the black liberation struggle, however, is beyond the scope of this chapter. In the following, I focus primarily on the different facets of the ambiguous symbol ‘Angela Davis’ in their interplay and offer a tentative overview of how Davis was constructed, adapted, appropriated, and, ultimately, remembered in West Germany.

C ONTESTED A PPROPRIATIONS : B LACK P OWER IN W EST G ERMANY The West German reception of Angela Davis and her case was shaped by the transatlantic and transnational dimension of Black Power and the West German engagement with the black liberation struggle at large. When Davis made the headlines, West German narratives on the Black Power movement had already been formed in a variety of discourses, and the ‘discursive events’ of Davis’s arrest and trial were submitted to the rules of these formations and at the same time caused an irruption into the discursive structures. The cultural transfer of Black Power was filtered and facilitated via mass media reports, German publications of core texts of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements,4 and personal transatlantic

4

These include Bernward Vesper’s Black Power: Ursachen des Guerilla-Kampfes in den Vereinigten Staaten (1967), Michael Schneider’s Malcolm X: Schwarze Gewalt. Reden (1968), Alex Haley’s Malcolm X: Der schwarze Tribun. Eine Autobiographie (1966), Leroi Jones’s Ausweg in den Hass: Vom Liberalismus zur Black Power (1967), Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power: Die Politik der Befreiung in Amerika (1968), and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Wohin führt unser Weg: Chaos oder Gemeinschaft (1968). Moreover, texts that were central to the Black Power movement were also important for the protest movement in West Germany. For example, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of

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connections. For example, Karl-Dietrich (KD) Wolff, chairman of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) from 1967 to 1968 and central agent of Black Power solidarity in Europe, met Bobby Seale, one of the co-founders of the Black Panther Party (BPP), during a lecture tour through the USA. On the one hand, Black Power solidarity to some extent introduced issues of race into German protest culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Maria Höhn explains the effects of the introduction of race as a critical category into German discourses: “German newspaper coverage, for example, no longer argued, as was often the norm in the 1950s and early 1960s, that racism against black GIs was an imported ‘American problem’ […]. Instead, newspapers stressed that the prejudices against black GIs had deep roots in German history. This shift in media coverage also meant that the discrimination against ‘Gastarbeiter’ or foreign students of color received more attention as well.” (“Black Panther” 229)

On the other hand, it strengthened the bond between protest movements on both sides of the Atlantic. According to Martin Klimke, “[s]olidarity campaigns with African American GIs stationed in West Germany, visits by representatives of the Black Panther Party to the Federal Republic, and a rapid increase of German literature on Black Power further challenged the official transatlantic relationship between the Federal Republic and the United States, as well as America’s image in West Germany.” (Other Alliance 107)

Black radicalism and particularly the Black Panthers generated public interest, and several social and political groups appropriated ideologies, practices, discourses, and iconographies from Black Power activism for a range of purposes and reasons. In general, the most vigorous solidarity activists and commentators of the Black Power movement and, consequently, its major influence can be located in a radically leftist environment, the New Left in general, student protest culture, and youth groups of labor unions and political parties (particularly though not exclusively the West German

the Earth appeared in a German translation in 1968 and became a bestseller among leftist youth (Langguth 48).

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Communist Party, KPD), and in its most radical form in the Red Army Faction (RAF), which used the example of the Black Panthers to justify their own militancy, violence, and terrorism. The solidarity activism in West Germany aimed at supporting the black freedom struggle but equally instrumentalized this struggle for achieving other international and domestic political goals. Klimke correctly observes that the “iconography, protest methods, and ethics” of the Civil Rights movement provided a “rich source of inspiration” for Western activists, particularly with regard to ideas about civil disobedience; the Black Power movement then “motivated student protesters to take a firmer and even militant stance against an establishment that appeared unwilling to compromise […], [and] directed the students’ attention to the Third World liberation movements and the legacies of European colonialist policies.” (Other Alliance 4)

Despite the global network, transnational interactions, and transatlantic exchanges between activists, there were, of course, pervasive “national and regional idiosyncrasies” (Klimke, Other Alliance 5). Such West German idiosyncrasies in the solidarity movement, particularly as they concern Davis, are of more interest to this project than an overarching, causal historical narrative; Höhn’s proclamation of a shift in West German media discourses on ‘race’ caused by Black Power turns out to be valid only to some degree, as the tendency to externalize race and racism to the US continues to surface in documents and media reports in the 1970s and in following decades. Also, the image of America and the transatlantic relations that Klimke sees challenged by the exchanges between protest culture and Black Power activism did not develop in a continuous and progressive way; rather, the struggle over which side of America should be celebrated or condemned figures in solidarity as well as mainstream discourses. The perception of race and the image of America in these discourses are discussed in greater detail below. Klimke and Höhn have contributed decisively to the scholarship on Black Power in (West) Germany from a historical perspective; and it is, in fact, in the field of (cultural) history that much of the critical work on this topic has been produced so far. Moritz Ege’s study on West German “AfroAmericanophilia” constitutes one of the few exceptions. While I draw on historical insights, my aim is not to reconstruct a coherent history of events,

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campaigns, and activities related to Black Power and West Germany or to establish a precise chronology of solidarity with Davis. Rather, I am interested in the discursive formations that shaped Davis as cultural icon in specific instances and will therefore read selected archival documents as well as historical accounts of the era as they construct Black Power in general and Davis in particular. Numerous factors were most likely involved in drawing West Germans to participate in solidarity demonstrations and other forms of activism related to Black Power. These can be analytically distinguished and located on different levels, but this is not to suggest that they are mutually exclusive; overlaps and combinations of motivational forces are rather more likely than any single factor figuring as the one and only reason to become active: Calls for solidarity with the Black Panthers and Davis often occurred in the context of international political agendas (like anti-imperialism, protests against the Vietnam War, or the international class struggle) as well as domestic political concerns (particularly right-wing political forces in the CDU/CSU and/or the curtailment of democratic rights in West Germany). Also, ethical challenges of Vergangenheitsbewältigung figured prominently as young protesters participated not only in a revolt against their parents and grandparents but also raised questions about Germany’s Nazi legacy and accused older generations of evading a confrontation with their past. What Ege has termed “Afro-Americanophilia” in 1960s and 1970s West Germany equally characterized the appeal of Black Power coded as subversive, countercultural, and revolutionary. A desire to ‘become black,’ to identify with black liberation and other struggles against oppression combined with imagined equivalences between African American activists and West German protesters as well as the appeal of the fashion and lifestyle associated with the movement all played a role in Black Power’s appeal. According to Höhn and Klimke, West German students could connect to African American activists not only through the “shared struggle against the war in Vietnam or a general anti-imperialist ideology” but also a “deep disillusionment […] with the United States” (115). Even though West German youths had, in general, welcomed the ‘American way of life’ and grew up under the influence of American culture (which they largely embraced), they opposed American politics, particularly with the escalation of the Vietnam War. The ambivalent attitude towards America also figures in protests against the US military presence in West Germany which were combined

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with support for black GIs. Höhn describes the relationship between African American GIs in Germany and German student radicals which emerged at the end of the 1960s as “a most unusual political alliance” (“Black Panther” 215).5 West German alliances with Black Power were politically motivated and culturally shaped. They were not limited to political and economic matters but extended into the cultural realm of aesthetics, lifestyle, and fashion. According to Detlef Siegfried, “rebellious young West Germans used blues music, long hair, and an identification with the Black Panthers to recreate themselves as ‘white negroes,’ thus symbolically merging themselves with the subjects of postcolonial liberation movements.” (192)

Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver became central figures in West German (re)appropriations of the black liberation struggle alongside Davis. Calls for solidarity with these individuals tended to be contextualized within a global struggle against oppression, Third Worldism, and anti-Americanism (particularly in relation to the Vietnam War, American imperialism, and racism), but were also frequently connected to specifically German concerns. Solidarity for Davis was supported through a pre-existing discursive formation on Black Power in West Germany, a transatlantic network of cultural exchange, which furthered the transfer of icons, images, ideas, and ideologies, as well as an established infrastructure for the organization of protest. The West German SDS6 was a crucial agent in the solidarity for the

5

Centered in the greater Frankfurt area the collaboration between members of the Black Panthers solidarity committee and Black Panther activists working on the GI underground newspaper Voice of the Lumpen (founded in 1970) lasted only from 1969 to 1972. However, during that period “the collaborators engaged in an extensive campaign to educate the German public about the struggle of the Black Panthers in the US and to expose the connection between American racism and imperialism in the Third World” (Höhn, “Black Panther” 215).

6

The SDS and its cooperation with the American Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is itself an example of the multifaceted transatlantic connections between activists on both sides of the Atlantic. From German SDS member Michael Vester’s influence on the American SDS’s Port Huron Statement in

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Black Panthers. The 1967 Detroit riots7 prompted the organization to officially claim solidarity with Black Power. Klimke regards this as a foundational moment for West German solidarity with Black Power and a decisive turn away from the support for peaceful resistance as epitomized by Martin Luther King, Jr. (“Black Power” 565). Black Power came to be viewed as a model for anti-imperialist struggles in highly industrialized societies in general but it was also supported as a political cause in its own right by solidarity committees across West Germany. Black Power ideology became integrated into the German student movement’s political agenda of anti-imperialism and “[i]n contrast to solidarity with other Third World liberation movements, Black Power became a very concrete reference point and chance for practiced solidarity” (Klimke, Other Alliance 118). Höhn explains that SDS members were drawn to the Black Panthers because they “expressed most clearly the sort of revolutionary stance that radical German students aspired to develop” (“Black Panther” 217). It is a telling detail that many activist groups uncritically practiced ‘American’ forms of protest like teach-ins and sit-ins while at the same time articulating a sharp critique of American capitalism, imperialism, and politics. Anti-American politics were combined with pro-American forms of protest (Kraushaar 257-58). This highly ambivalent relationship to America is also evident in the discursive strategy to claim heroes of the Black Power movement like Angela Davis as representatives of an ‘other’ America in opposition to the imperialist and capitalist USA. This strategy partly resolves the contradictory stance towards the US and imagines an ‘other’ (read: better) America but it is also problematic in its unequivocal alignment of ‘black’ with an ‘other’ America in opposition to the hegemonic white culture which runs the risk of reaffirming this dichotomy.

1962 to the adoption of American protest ideas by the German SDS, the New Left emerged in and from a transatlantic network of interactions and exchanges. For a further discussion of these developments see Klimke, Other Alliance, chaps. 1 and 2. 7

The 1967 Detroit riots broke out after a police raid of an unlicensed bar on the city’s west side. They lasted for five days and became one of the most violent escalations in the history of US race riots.

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The Black Panther Solidarity Committee, which was founded in November 1969 and was “made up of just fifteen people from the Socialist Club in Frankfurt, became a model for other such committees founded in numerous German cities” (Höhn, “Black Panther” 219). Solidarity with the Black Panthers became institutionalized and the committee’s first activities focused on the ‘correction’ of the public image of the Black Panthers in West Germany – an agenda which was further substantiated by Wolff’s launch of the publishing house Roter Stern [Red Star]8 (Klimke, Other Alliance 120-21). The founding document of the committee, published in the radically left magazine Agit 883 in 1969, defined its main tasks as (1) educating the public about the Black Panther Party and its agenda, (2) agitation and propaganda among American GIs in Germany, and (3) material support for the BPP (“Black Power”). The fact that with Eldridge Cleaver’s exile and the creation of a branch of the Black Panther Party in Algiers, Algeria, the BPP began to establish an international presence and transnational networks also fueled European solidarity. West Germany, for example, could be viewed as another “arena” for a “worldwide revolt” (Klimke, Other Alliance 122). On the one hand, German student protesters searched for connections between their own situation and that of Black Power activists and imagined equivalences or constructed parallels even though their situation was in many ways not at all comparable to the African American freedom struggle in the US;9 on the other hand participants

8

Wolff engaged in many activities and also founded a study group in Frankfurt called “Red Panthers” (Klimke, Other Alliance 121).

9

One example for this parallelization is Wolff’s account of the “Senghor Trial” in which he and two other SDS members (Günter Amendt and Hans-Jürgen Krahl) were charged with disturbing the award ceremonies for the peace prize at the 1969 Frankfurt Book Fair. Leópold Sédar Senghor received the prize but about 2000 demonstrators opposed this decision due to Senghor’s “brutal treatment of domestic opposition” and proposed an “alternative award [to] be given to a revolutionary from the African or American liberation movements” (Klimke, Other Alliance 119). Wolff not only used the trial as a stage for demonstrating solidarity with Black Power and Bobby Seale (by rising from the seat and raising a clenched fist) but also pointed out striking parallels to the trial of the “Chicago 8:” the suppression of the right to assemble, (im)partiality of the

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of race riots and particularly the Black Panthers served as a projection screen for their own aspirations “[s]ince a revolutionary subject was hardly to be found in West Germany” and “[i]n essence, blacks were seen as already potential revolutionaries, by virtue of their marginalization by white majority societies and colonial powers” (Siegfried 201). The solidarity activists sought allies to promote their agenda. They situated their support for the Black Panthers within a conglomerate of international and domestic discourses. A letter from the committee dating from October 22, 1970 ends with the demands: “Neben der verstärkten Agitation um die Forderungen ‘Freiheit für Bobby Seale!’ ‘Freie Einreise für Eldridge Cleaver!’ muß deshalb auch verlangt werden: ‘Yankee Go Home!’ ‘Sofortiger Abzug der US-Imperialisten aus Westdeutschland!’”10 (cf. Schröder)

Beyond the call for solidarity with Seale and Cleaver the list of demands also features a domestic agenda: It criticizes West Germany for denying entry to well-known Black Power activists11 and opposes the continuing military presence of the US in West Germany, which again became an issue of debate in connection with a shooting at Ramstein airbase.12 The letter

courts, and the means to acquire evidence (119). Wolff was, however, also aware of the differences between these contexts, for example, when he stated that (in contrast to the Chicago 8) “[they] were still allowed to argue politically in front of the court” (qtd. in Klimke, Other Alliance 119). 10 “Besides an intensified agitation for the claims / ‘Freedom for Bobby Seale!’ / ‘Free entry for Eldridge Cleaver!’ / therefore has to be demanded: / ‘Yankee Go Home!’ / ‘Immediate withdrawal of the US-imperialists from West Germany!’” 11 For example, plans for a lecture tour of Albert Howard could not be realized because West Germany’s minister of the interior, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, advised border police to deny entry to the BPP’s minister of information. Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver were denied entry in 1970 (Klimke, Other Alliance 124). 12 Four people, apparently of African American descent, tried to enter the airbase; when they refused to identify themselves or leave their car shots were fired, one

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from the committee also suggests that West Germany were an ‘external colony’ of the US. This idea emerges as a fairly common strand of the different forms of Black Power solidarity and constitutes an analogy to the conceptualization of the black population as an ‘internal colony’ of the US, which established the link to Third World liberation movements and decolonization. The focus on the domestic component of the struggle was identified by Cleaver in an interview with Stefan Aust as the most important task of the radical left in Western Europe: namely, to counter and, ultimately, bring down the repressive regimes in their own countries (qtd. in Klimke, “Black Power” 571). The means to achieve this were an issue of heated, serious, and urgent debate among German activists. West German approaches to the Black Panthers as well as Davis were not only caught between different political and cultural agendas – from ‘serious’ political concerns, domestic and international, to a mere fashion statement, but were also enmeshed in debates about violence and, ultimately, West German terrorism of the 1970s. While some connections between peaceful student protest and leftist terrorism in West Germany can easily be established, the movement of 1968 is not adequately captured in this vein. Both student protesters as well as Black Power activists have frequently suffered from general and generalized associations with terrorism and armed resistance and should not be reduced to violent radicalism. Simplifying conflations of all forms of activism and protest in the dominant discourse have also affected how Davis was perceived in West Germany and call for a differentiated analysis. In West German media discourses, particularly the RAF was assigned a symbolic significance far exceeding its actual relevance as it was turned into the most prominent terrorist group in West Germany (Varon 3).13 Members of different groups of the New Left –

guard was wounded, and the four fled. Later, two former GIs who had spread Black Power information at airbases were arrested and tried at Zweibrücken. Ramstein 2 became a central reference point for the solidarity movements in West Germany (Klimke, Other Alliance 123). 13 Jeremy Varon asserts that this perception was also part of the RAF’s selffashioning: “The RAF’s violence was by design symbolic, insofar as it meant primarily to convey a spirit of resistance, which the RAF hoped would spread; its bombs were to ‘detonate also in the consciousness of the masses’” (199).

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and also many activists involved in solidarity for Davis – were compelled to distance themselves from RAF activities and to engage with or rather intervene in this discourse but in doing so, of course, drew additional attention to this small fraction of the Left which had turned towards violence and terrorism. This entails the risk of solidifying its disproportionate prominence in the German collective imaginary, but I consider it necessary to examine the linkages between Black Power (reception) and West German terrorism (particularly the RAF) in detail in order to not only assess and expose the existing connections but rather to demonstrate their limits and to distinguish the terrorist discourse from the majority of (peaceful) leftist activism. The RAF utilized Black Power ideology in its most militant dimensions and appropriated symbols and cultural signs of the Black Panthers but was even more affected by other influences; in fact, Germany’s National Socialist past was highly relevant in this context, as Jeremy Varon confirms: “West German terrorism was a tortured form of Vergangenheitsbewältigung – a symptom of Germany’s difficulty in confronting and working through its Nazi past” (15).14 With regard to Black Power, particularly the case of the Soledad Brothers, the Attica prison riots in New York, and the writings of George Jackson were assigned central significance: The RAF formed a commando “George Jackson” in 1985 which was responsible for an attack on the US airbase in Frankfurt. This fairly late example of the RAF’s appropriation of Black Power was preceded by a growing interest in African American prisoners and Black Power especially after the first wave of arrests (Klimke, “Black Power” 577). Already in a first short declaration entitled “Die rote Armee aufbauen!” [Building Up the Red Army] published in Agit 883 (May 22, 1970), the RAF declared the vision of nonviolent resistance as symbolized by Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. an unrealistic dream and called for armed resistance. The cover of the same magazine prominently featured a Black Panther quote, which echoes Che Guevara’s famous call to “create two, three, many Vietnams:”

14 Similarly, Karin Bauer claims that “[Ulrike] Meinhof and many of her generation, the heightened sense of moral responsibility to act arose from Germany’s failure to oppose National Socialism. Germany’s fascist past remained the central historical reference point for Meinhof’s early and later writing” (176).

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“Wir glauben an die bewaffnete Revolution, eine permanente Revolution und die Schaffung so vieler Vietnams wie erforderlich, um den US-Rassismus und Imperialismus überall in der Welt zu besiegen.”15

Their founding manifesto published in the next issue of Agit 883 (June 5, 1970) also entitled “Die rote Armee aufbauen!” displays not only at its center the Russian Kalashnikov which would soon achieve iconic status but also a black panther integrated in its heading and literally looming large over the text. Early on, RAF writings can be read in the context of Black Power: Their 1971 “Das Konzept Stadtguerilla” [The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla] quotes Stokley Carmichael and Cleaver to support their own ideology (ID Verlag 44, 48). As Karin Bauer observes, the document “ends with a quote from Black Panther Information Minister Eldridge Cleaver, which later was famously cited by Holger Meins: ‘Either you are part of the problem or part of the solution’” (184). At the same time, this communiqué criticizes the BPP for its presumed weaknesses: “Das Schicksal der Black Panther Partei […] dürfte auf jener Fehleinschätzung basieren, die den tatsächlichen Widerspruch zwischen Verfassung und Verfassungswirklichkeit […] nicht realisiert. Die nicht realisiert, […] daß es […] notwendig ist, die Legalität gleichzeitig für den politischen Kampf und die Organisation von Illegalität auszunutzen und daß es falsch ist, auf die Illegalisierung als Schicksalsschlag durch das System zu warten, weil Illegalisierung dann gleich Zerschlagung ist und das dann die Rechnung ist, die aufgeht.”16 (ID Verlag 48)

15 “We believe in an armed revolution, a permanent revolution, and the creation of as many Vietnams as necessary to defeat US racism and imperialism all over the world.” 16 “The fate of the Black Panther Party […] might be based on that misjudgment which does not realize […] the actual contradiction between the constitution and its realization; which does not recognize […] that it is […] necessary to take advantage of legality for the political struggle and for the organization of illegality at the same time and that it is a mistake to await illegalization by the system as a stroke of fate because then illegalization equals destruction.”

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The same document, which “show[s] the marks of [Ulrike] Meinhof’s authorship” (Bauer 183), propagates the national and international dimensions of the RAF’s actions and fashions the organization as part of a larger movement. Connections between RAF terrorists, student protesters, and Black Power solidarity activists can not only be found on the level of symbolic and ideological appropriation but also in terms of personal interconnections;17 for example, Gudrun Ensslin supported Bernward Vesper’s efforts to publish works related to Black Power and black nationalism in West Germany before she joined the RAF (Klimke, Other Alliance 115).18 The efforts of different leftist groups to counter their potential association with terrorism also figured in the discussion of the Angela Davis case. The single most important event in the campaigns for Davis was the solidarity congress “Am Beispiel Angela Davis” which took place in Frankfurt, June 3-4, 1972.19 It can be viewed as the culmination of solidarity activities for Davis in West Germany and illustrates the urgency and pressure created in West German discourses to address the question of peaceful or violent resistance. Many speakers at the congress, which took place just shortly after the RAF’s “Mai-Offensive” [May offensive], did not only proclaim their solidarity with Davis but apparently also felt the need to distance themselves from the RAF in the same breath. Particularly Oskar Negt used his speech to criticize the acts of the Baader-Meinhof group (as the first

17 These connections should not obscure that there were many others which could also be explored. Once the SDS was dissolved there were many groups taking different directions. Gerd Langguth lists eight tendencies (ranging from anarchists to Trotskyites and SED-oriented groups), among which terrorism is just one (110-11). The RAF was only one of several terrorist groups emerging in West Germany in the 1970s, although the most prominent one. 18 Other examples include Johannes Weinreich, Hans-Joachim Klein, and Winfried Böse, members of the Black Panther Solidarity Committee, who in the spring of 1971 “went underground and joined the armed struggle that would be responsible for violent attacks against US installations and US military personnel” (Höhn, “Black Panther” 232). 19 The proceedings have been published by the Angela Davis Solidaritätskomitee as Am Beispiel Angela Davis: Der Kongreß in Frankfurt. Reden, Referate, Diskussionsprotokolle (1972).

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generation of the RAF is commonly known) as a form of terrorism counterproductive to the goals of the New Left, and doomed to fail (Angela Davis Solidaritätskomitee 23). Negt pointed out the impossibility of an urban guerrilla to achieve any socialist objectives in the FRG and exposed what he regarded as the RAF’s misinterpretation or misadaptation of this concept. He held that while they might have intended to expose the contradictions of capitalism they in fact only further obscured them because they had fallen prey to a misleading ideology (25). These negotiations attest to a specific instance of the struggles over the prerogative of interpreting the symbol ‘Angela Davis.’ The general demand for freedom of all political prisoners which revolved around the solidarity with Davis and the black liberation struggle could be interpreted to include RAF terrorists (already imprisoned or still hiding underground), who would later also actively fashion themselves as political prisoners (in part certainly inspired by Black Power activists and prisoners).20 The fact that the Angela Davis Solidaritätskomitee had to distance itself from RAF activities in 1972 is not only indicative of the pressure exercised by the mainstream discourse which conflated different strands of the New Left and gave disproportionate attention to a small radical fraction, but also reveals one discursive formation in which the symbolic appropriations of the black liberation struggle were contested. The RAF, on the other hand, criticized the forms of solidarity with Davis: “Die Leute wollen ‘Freiheit für Angela Davis’ – aber den Kampf mit der Härte führen wie der Vietcong, wie der Schwarze September – das nicht – so verzweifelt über das System, ihrer eigenen Sache so sicher sind sie denn doch nicht, daß ihnen das ’ne Sache aufgeben und Tod wert wäre. Kommt Negt, sagt, braucht ihr auch nicht, wir machen das schon – sind sie erleichtert, Beifall.”21 (ID Verlag 162-63)

20 The solidarity congress took place just a few days after Andreas Baader, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe had been arrested in Frankfurt on June 1, 1972. Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof were arrested later in June (Langguth 129). 21 “People want ‘Freedom for Angela Davis’ but don’t want to fight with the rigor of the Vietcong, of the ‘Schwarzer September’ – not that – they are distraught about the system, yet not sure enough of their own cause that they would really

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The RAF affirmed its own uncompromising agenda and at the same time ridiculed other forms of protest. It rendered the protesters on behalf of Davis mere bystanders to a debate (or rather lip service) provided by intellectual icons of the student protest movement like Negt. Despite obvious and deepseated differences in their respective takes on the black liberation struggle between peaceful solidarity activists on the one hand, and the RAF on the other, there were discursive continuities and overlappings regarding the specific topics of interest, global and transnational dimensions, and symbolic appropriations. Even though activists propagating “Freiheit für Angela Davis” attempted to dissociate their protest and thereby also Davis’s case and cause from the RAF, connections were explored (and exploited) not only in public discourse but also in scholarly works. Johanna Meyer-Lenz’s essay “Angela Davis und Ulrike Meinhof: Ein biografischer Vergleich im Kontext unterschiedlicher Protestkulturen” analyzes the similarities between the two iconic figures who are examined as radicals with different affiliations and ideologies. The different contexts of protest culture revolved, for example, around the notion of ‘resistance’ which “[i]n contrast to the American context and its intellectual tradition of civil disobedience, […] in the Federal Republic first and foremost invoked resistance against National Socialism – a resistance that could not be divorced from violent means” (Bauer 180). Parallels could be found, for example, in the way in which both states dealt with the perceived internal threat: J. Edgar Hoover regarded the Black Panthers the “number one threat to the internal security of the nation” (Van Deburg, New 159), and to the West German government, the RAF “was an intolerable threat and had to be eliminated at all costs” (Varon 254). Meyer-Lenz discovers parallels between Davis and Meinhof which illuminate the transnational dimension of protest culture in the long “1968” as well as possible connections between two of its major female protagonists, who became internationally known as fugitives and political prisoners. Both women came from a Christian middle-class background; both enjoyed an academic education in the field of literature, language, and philosophy, and both were crucial figures in the student protest movement of 1968 and the radicalized protest of the Black

give up something for it or risk death. Enter Negt, who says you don’t have to, we’ll do it for you – they are relieved, applause.”

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Panthers or the RAF respectively. While both were stigmatized as terrorists, extremists, and outlaws, Davis always fought against being perceived in this fashion, whereas Meinhof eventually embraced this image (MeyerLenz 315-16). Gender and race in both cases shaped their political identities and their careers in the academia and journalism (317). Meinhof became a public voice in the political discourse of the leftist student movement of the early 1960s as columnist for the magazine konkret, so that “[b]y 1967, her columns were eagerly read by young radicals seeking inspiration, insight, and a language in which to frame their rebellion” (Varon 41). According to Meyer-Lenz, the topics dominating her writing were the repression of the National Socialist past, the politics of Franz-Josef Strauß, chairman of the Bavarian CSU, the manipulation of public opinion through intentional misinformation by politicians and the media, decolonization, and the Vietnam War (322). All of these topics also figured prominently in calls for solidarity with Davis. As for both Davis and Meinhof the political was first and foremost universal, they did not construct their political identities primarily based on gender (Meyer-Lenz 327). For Davis, ‘gender’ as a critical category did not figure as prominently as ‘race’ and ‘class’ in her 1960s and 1970s activism; it did so only later, in the late 1970s/early 1980s (MeyerLenz 320). Nonetheless, in the reception of Davis in West Germany in the early 1970s, her public identity as female political prisoner and Black Power activist was fundamental, and gender solidarity was a significant aspect in West Germany’s stance on the Davis case. These parallels further locate the symbolic persona Davis in close connection to the RAF and affirm Meinhof’s iconic status as female intellectual ‘radical.’ Certainly, Meinhof’s and Davis’s roles as public intellectuals were decisive for their broad resonance and the public perception of the movements they came to represent.22 Bauer’s description of Meinhof as

22 The representativeness of both figures (again) reveals the limits of this comparison: Davis identified with different groups and changed her affiliations more than once so that she can neither be correctly described as a Black Panther, nor member of the Che-Lumumba-Club, nor member of the Communist Party exclusively. Though always outspoken about the issues that she engaged with, she never actively sought fame but rather presented herself as a victim of circumstances accidentally leading to her international prominence. Meinhof, on the

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“a spokeswoman for the marginalized groups of society, such as foreign workers, low-income parents, and institutionalized youth” (176) reminds one of Davis’s activism. However, emphasizing these (structural) analogies runs the risk of obscuring fundamental differences between the protest cultures and the two female heroines. The Black Power movement in general served as a reference point for Meinhof’s writings. Even though not identifying him by name, Meinhof echoes Dale A. Smith, a SNCC activist and speaker at the 1968 Vietnam Congress in Berlin, in “From Protest to Resistance.”23 Bauer convincingly interprets these references to Smith: “Leaving Smith nameless enhanced his status as representative voice of Black Power and emphasized the collective nature of his ideas. At the same time, by identifying Smith as a black man (Schwarzen) and by denying him a name and an individual identity, Meinhof seemed to exploit rhetorically an identity politics of race embraced by segments of the German left that romanticized the struggles of the ‘Other’ – be it in Vietnam, Cuba, South America, or the US.” (178)

Her reading points towards a decisive undercurrent in many appropriations of Black Power ideology and iconography: romanticization. The idealization and romantic glorification of the struggle of Others served as a powerful strategy in many West German solidarity campaigns. In Meinhof’s essay, another familiar discursive structure of New Left intellectual rhetoric appears: that of claiming an ‘other’ America while condemning the USA. While Meinhof and the RAF utilized the US-based Black Power movement for their purposes, the “United States was the focal point of the [RAF’s] outrage” and they targeted West Germany primarily “by virtue of its alliance with America” (Varon 68).

other hand, did fashion herself as public intellectual, sought public recognition, and is identified with the organization she herself co-founded: the RAF. 23 Despite this appropriation, Smith’s and Meinhof’s ideologies were to some degree fundamentally different: “For Smith, breaking the law came as a result of the need to resist. For Meinhof, arguing from the point of Gesinnungsethik, it was the illegal act itself and not its consequences that could be described as progressive” (Bauer 179).

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The RAF and West German terrorism constituted a minor though symbolically relevant arena in which Davis and her case were negotiated within the framework of Black Power. Therefore, I will in the following zoom in on solidarity activities for Davis, whose major agents not only propagated primarily peaceful means of protest but also entered into the struggle over the prerogative of interpretation of Black Power icons like Angela Davis with other groups, in different discursive formations, and not least the mainstream media. I read the solidarity activities as cultural texts and contextualize them within the West German reception of Black Power and African American culture in general; ultimately, the West German protesters’ take on Davis is complicated through a close examination of (print) media discourses on her (public) persona and, finally, Davis’s own recollections and interpretations of the events and activities revolving around her case. My analysis investigates the legacy of Davis (and by deduction to a certain degree) Black Power in West Germany and attempts to assess whether the Angela Davis solidarity movement might be correctly listed among Niels Seibert’s Vergessene Proteste [Forgotten Protests] and if the weekly Die Zeit which had called her “Heldin von gestern” [yesterday’s heroine] in the 1980s already has been proven right (Luyken).

B ECOMING B LACK , B ECOMING A CTIVE : “F REIHEIT FÜR A NGELA D AVIS !” It is obvious that Davis did not fit into any of the established categories of earlier images of African Americans that had circulated in (West) Germany – be it show diva, musician, athlete, black GI, or Black Panther activist. Rather, she introduced the figure of the “revolutionary diva” (Kimberly N. Brown) – a fact that certainly contributed to the broad public interest in her case. While the solidarity movement(s) understood her symbolic image to be connected to larger socio-political issues, many activities were dedicated specifically to Davis. Her mentor Herbert Marcuse publicly called for solidarity with Davis in November 1970, and KD Wolff together with his fellow activist Daniel Cohn-Bendit founded an Angela Davis Solidarity Committee in Frankfurt am Main. They actually

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“planned a whole series of events and demonstrations for the last week of November 1970 to raise awareness of Angela Davis’ plight and to call for solidarity with her and Bobby Seale. Eldridge Cleaver was to be the key speaker, but the German Foreign Ministry, after calling Cleaver a “common criminal,” rejected the Solidarity Committee’s request to allow Cleaver to travel from Algiers to Germany. […] [Cleaver’s] wife was to speak in his stead at the Angela Davis teach-in scheduled for 24 November at Frankfurt University.” (Höhn, “Black Panther” 222)

Frankfurt along with West Berlin became one of the centers of solidarity activities which culminated in the 1972 solidarity congress. According to its organizers, the congress gathered about 10,000 people in Frankfurt (Angela Davis Solidaritätskomitee 214). The great number of participants attests not only to Davis’s vital role as a figure of identification for the fragmented and diverging branches of the New Left but also to her powerful resonances as a symbolic cultural and political figure. The title “Am Beispiel Angela Davis” [The Example of Angela Davis] already indicates that the event was not primarily concerned with Davis but relied on her as an iconic figure that could serve as focal point for debating multiple issues and connecting diverse topics. This is further underpinned by the front page of the conference program which displays only one photo of Davis in the lower left corner and, in addition, includes images of the Attica prison riots, the Black Panthers faced by ‘security personnel,’ and the rebellion at Rahway prison. The quote by Davis featured on this cover reads: “Ich werde erst wirklich frei sein, wenn alle politischen Gefangenen und alle schwarzen Amerikaner befreit sind”24 – she thus ties her (personal) freedom to the plight and liberation of all political prisoners and all black Americans (“Am Beispiel Angela Davis”). The description of the conference confirms that the Angela Davis case is not treated as an individual case but as illustrative of the repression of revolutionary forces, US imperialism, and the lessons to be learned thereof. The congress featured four work/study groups which dealt with the following topics: “Violence in US History,” “Police, Justice, Prisons in the USA,” “American Capitalism, Minorities, and Anti-Capitalist Alternatives,” “Imperialism and Domestic American Effects – Domestic

24 “I will be really free only when all political prisoners and all black Americans will have been freed.”

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American Opposition.” The titles indicate that the situation in the US is prioritized; however, the descriptions of these thematic clusters also emphasize the aim to compare the American situation to that of West Germany (“Am Beispiel Angela Davis”). The conference proceedings offer an overview of the main concerns and topics of the solidarity congress: investigations into the economic, political, and historical contexts of the Davis case, US imperialism, the Vietnam War and solidarity with Indochina, the New Left’s identity and role in Western Europe and Germany, the question of violence (in connection with the then recent RAF bombings but also in connection to US politics and society), and a critique of capitalism. Most contributions and discussions do not focus on Davis’s case, which rather serves as connecting theme throughout the volume. While Davis was exonerated of all charges shortly after the congress, the publication of its proceedings served as a reminder that the struggle and the need for solidarity and activism did not end with her acquittal; yet, the Angela Davis Solidaritätskomitee officially ended its work with the publication of the collection of speeches, discussions, protocols, and reports from the Frankfurt congress. The editors regard Davis primarily as a symbol illustrating the “total collapse of the western ideology of a ‘democratic America,’” and they counter the notion that Davis’s release signifies a change in the American (judicial) system or attests to its fairness and viability (7). They strongly advocate against personalizing Davis’s case and call for facing the still virulent problem: “Neither the prisons nor the racist structure of a capitalist society […] have vanished with the acquittal of Angela Davis” (7). Many contributions center on the situation in the US and thereby risk turning the problems addressed ultimately into American problems – albeit with world-wide reverberations due to America’s hegemonic position. Johannes Agnoli explicitly warns of the dangers inherent in limiting the focus to the US and overlooking repression ‘at home:’ It might be convenient and opportunistic to call for solidarity with a far-away country without facing the challenges in Western Europe. Agnoli writes about the possible future of the committee:

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“Die Solidarisierung mit Angela Davis bleibt nur dann keine Flucht, keine bequeme Moral, wenn wir dieses Komitee auch zu einem Solidaritätskomitee für die Verfolgten in Westeuropa ausbauen.”25 (111)

While he calls for redirecting attention from Angela Davis back to Western Europe, most aspects like racism, capitalism, anti-communism, violence, and imperialism are discussed primarily with a focus on the US. This stance is, of course, in line with the main interests of the congress but also locates these problems ‘safely’ on the other side of the Atlantic. The risk of losing sight of the urgency and significance of domestic problems by conceptualizing them as ‘American’ is present throughout the solidarity campaigns: Of course, the primarily white German students and activists identifying with an African American (political) prisoner did so comparatively risk-free without having to fear immediate and fatal consequences. In some cases, a “preposterous self-blackening” might even have constituted a form of “imaginary ersatz-suffering” without any “sustained interest in antiracist cooperation beyond the particular receptive moment” (Broeck, “Erotics” 128, 129). Yet, there are examples, most prominently the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg and the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke, which attest to the fact that German protesters did take a very ‘real’ risk. Yet, it was undoubtedly on a different (and much smaller) scale when compared to that of (African American) activists in the US. The solidarity campaigns in West Germany were highly politicized, and frequently made connections to the German situation and specific domestic concerns; for example, discussions at the congress focused on the FRG’s complicity in the international imperialist system. Ursula Schmiederer explains that a discussion of USAmerican imperialism also means talking about the FRG which is part of this international system as well (153); Brigitte Heinrich sketches West Germany’s development into an imperialist power from its early days as an ‘American colony,’ the consequences of which included the erosion of bourgeois democracy, the centralization of state agencies, and a weakened and intimidated proletariat and progressive intelligentsia (169).

25 “Only if we expand this committee into a solidarity committee for the persecuted in Western Europe does solidarity with Angela Davis not turn into an escape, a convenient moral.”

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The focus on America in this volume as well as in the solidarity campaign, however, reveals the ambivalent image of ‘America’ in the German collective imaginary and the struggles over its interpretation. For most activists the US became the epitome of capitalism, imperialism, and repression, and particularly due to the escalation of the Vietnam War it was acknowledged neither as liberatory power nor as (potential) ally. They attempted to counter Cold War politics of Western alignment and a dedication to the US which dominated mainstream discourses. The contributions in Am Beispiel Angela Davis also expose the discrepancy between American foundational myths of freedom, democracy, and equality, and American realities. The USA are still viewed as progressive, as a model for West Germany, and an indicator for the directions West German politics and society might take but, from the perspective of the speakers/authors, the situation in the US allowed only for a very dark vision of a possible German future. For example, Wolfgang Abendroth claimed that an incident like the Davis case might not yet be possible in the FRG but the path had already been cleared (Angela Davis Solidaritätskomitee 28-29). Even earlier, the solidarity movement had not only identified the USA as a nightmare example of where West Germany might be headed but at the same time looked towards America for solutions and models to counter this development. The “Komitee Aktionseinheit gegen das Rechtskartell” claimed that the oppression of socialist forces in the USA could be read as an indicator of what might happen in West Germany but also stated that they could and should learn from the experiences of their American comrades (“Liebe Genossen!”). The strong connection between solidarity with Davis and the opposition to the Vietnam War is evidenced by several speakers like Abendroth, but also Marcuse or Negt, who had been among the participants of the congress “Vietnam – Analyse eines Exempels” [Vietnam – Analysis of an Example] which had taken place in Frankfurt am Main in May 1966. This continuity shows that solidarity with Davis was connected to the emergence of the student movement, the formation of the New Left, and West German protest- and counterculture. These developments served as a framework for and offered a vantage point from which to assess and approach the Davis case. Consequently, Davis’s plight was situated within a variety of (already existing or developing) narratives and histories of West German student protest, Black Panther solidarity, Third Worldism, or, more generally, the

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New Left. The solidarity movements’ demand “Freiheit für Angela Davis” [Freedom for Angela Davis] was therefore frequently flanked by calls for solidarity with the Black Panthers or communist ideology, and positioned in the larger context of commitment to all political prisoners and oppressed people of the world. Similar cases involving black political prisoners (e.g. Huey Newton, Bobby Seale) served as precursors and/or reference points for the solidarity with Davis and her case was in parts written into (and shaped by) these already existing narratives. Yet, Jürgen Schröder points out that solidarity with Davis and with the Black Panthers increasingly diverged into two more or less different but not unconnected movements. For example, the documentation of the Angela Davis Solidarity Congress did not prioritize (or better: no longer prioritized) her connection to the Black Panthers but rather connected her case to other concerns and groups (which does not mean that the BPP as a revolutionary force with historical and cultural significance was ignored in the debates). Two years earlier, in 1970, the Berlin-based “Komitee Aktionseinheit gegen das Rechtskartell,” for example, printed the following demands on their leaflets: “Freiheit für Angela Davis, Bobby Seale und Erica (sic!) Huggins! Hände weg von der KPDUSA, der Black Panther Party und Young Lords Party!”26 (“Gemeinsam”)

The call “Freiheit für Angela Davis” is directly linked to the release of BPP co-founder Seale and Black Panther leader Ericka Huggins. These demands further connect the BPP to the US branch of the Communist Party and the efforts of the Young Lords Party, which not only fought for the rights of Puerto Ricans (in the US as well as in Puerto Rico) but also instigated a Puerto Rican cultural renaissance. Like the BPP, the Young Lords faced strong opposition by the government and (conservative) mainstream propaganda. On another leaflet issued in 1972 by the “Initiativgruppe Angela Davis am John F. Kennedy-Institut,” the list of demands centers more on

26 “Freedom for Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, and Erica Huggins! / Hands off the Communist Party of the USA, the Black Panther Party, and the Young Lords Party!”

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Davis herself but also includes the Black Panthers and the fight against counterrevolutionary forces: “Bekämpft die internationale Konterrevolution! Solidarisiert Euch mit Angela Davis, den Black Panthers und dem Kampf der unterdrückten schwarzen Minderheit in den USA! Verhindert den Justizmord an Angela Davis!”27

In both examples, the Black Panthers are highly relevant for contextualizing solidarity with Davis. Generally speaking, the explicit propagation of solidarity with Davis can often be found in the framework of anti-imperialistic (or even anti-American) rhetoric, demands for the freedom of all political prisoners (particularly of African American activists), and socialist (or communist) agendas. In addition to these (potentially) transnational agendas, connections between solidarity with Davis and domestic concerns are repeatedly established. Specific socio-political agendas of national relevance are thus linked with a larger movement and gain an aura of global significance and international radicalism. On the basis of imagined equivalences and identifications, Davis’s cause could further be claimed to be relevant to West German activists and citizens. One appeal by several activist groups28 makes demands which situate solidarity with Davis in an international setting and connect it to domestic concerns: “Solidarität für Angela Davis, das ist Kampf gegen den amerikanischen Imperialismus. Kampf gegen den schmutzigen Krieg in Vietnam. Kampf gegen Rassismus und Unterdrückung. Solidarität mit Angela Davis, das ist Kampf gegen alle volksfeindlichen Regime […].

27 “Fight the international counterrevolution! / Show solidarity with Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, and the struggle of the oppressed black minority in the United States! / Prevent the judicial murder of Angela Davis!” 28 Initiativ-Ausschuß “Freiheit für Angela Davis,” Arbeiter-Initiative Ruhr-Westfalen “Freiheit für Angela Davis,” Solidaritäts-Ausschuß Essen, SolidaritätsKomitee Dortmund “Freiheit für Angela Davis,” and others.

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Solidarität mit Angela Davis, das ist aber auch Kampf für mehr Demokratie im eigenen Land. Das ist Kampf gegen Berufsverbote, gegen Antikommunismus, gegen die Rechtskräfte um [Franz-Josef] Strauß und [Rainer] Barzel.”29 (qtd. in Schröder)

This link between an international agenda and concrete domestic issues has a double effect and constitutes a form of “strategic framing:” First, it gives the opposition against right-wing CDU and CSU politicians and the fight against occupational bans and anti-communism in Germany a greater context and meaning; second, it suggests that everyone can become active for Davis by getting involved in a political struggle “at home.” Clearly, the goal is not limited to the liberation of Davis but to use her case as a starting point for a more encompassing political program on different levels from opposition against CDU/CSU to the abstract fight against all regimes hostile to their peoples. These three pamphlets exemplify that, despite many common strands in the solidarity activism, support for Davis did not necessarily mean the same thing to all groups using the slogan “Freiheit für Angela Davis;” there were a range of purposes towards which it was directed. It is, therefore, imperative to take a close look at the protagonists of the West German solidarity movements. Based on my research, I would provisionally identify several groups central to the solidarity movement as a whole:30 (1) Professors, students, (public) intellectuals constitute a first group of solidarity activists. Several student groups formed to support Davis, and numerous professors and (public) intellectuals signed an appeal demanding “Freiheit für Angela Davis.” Among them were Josef Beuys, Ernst Bloch, Oskar Negt, Günter Wallraff, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger

29 “Solidarity for Angela Davis means fighting against American imperialism; fighting against the dirty war in Vietnam; fighting against racism and oppression. Solidarity with Angela Davis means fighting against all regimes hostile to their peoples […]. But solidarity with Angela Davis also means fighting for more democracy in one’s own country. It means fighting against occupational bans, against anti-Communism, against the right-wing forces around [FranzJosef] Strauß and [Rainer] Barzel.” 30 The differentiation is made here for analytical clarity. Of course, these groups overlap and this categorization cannot give justice to all the different strands of the solidarity movement.

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– to name just a few prominent examples. In this context, questions of academic freedom and freedom of opinion were central issues associated with her case.31 While still imprisoned, Davis was officially invited to the Free University at Berlin (FU Berlin) as a guest professor – a decision which sparked a public debate about academic freedom and the political influence on higher education in the FRG. This debate had a specifically West German dimension as it related to the drafting and, ultimately, enactment of the Radikalenerlass (1972). This occupational ban was designed to keep “Verfassungsfeinde” [enemies of the constitution] out of civil service, particularly targeted and affected (radical) left intellectuals, and constituted a decisive curtailment of democratic rights. (2) Leftist groups and labor unions seemed to identify primarily with Davis’s communist ties and/or socialist ideology, even though the individual appropriations of Davis and processes of identification with her case among the different strands of the New Left still await a more detailed analysis which I cannot provide within the scope of my study. (3) Youth groups of several political parties (Jusos, Jungdemokraten, and others) and labor unions as well as other youth organizations participated in solidarity activities. For example, in DüsseldorfMettmann a youth initiative called “Rettet Angela Davis” [Save Angela Davis] was formed out of different youth groups (SDAJ, Judos, Jusos, labor unions). (4) Women constitute a fourth group of supporters because gender solidarity played a significant role in the reception of the Davis case in West Germany, even though it did not figure prominently in Davis’s own thinking at the time. The fight against oppression which Davis embodied could be interpreted as including feminist issues and the struggle for women’s rights. One example for the specific appeal of her case to women supporters is the women and children’s demonstration which took place in Frankfurt am Main on March 13, 1971 and was organized by several women’s initiatives and individual women (“Freiheit für Angela Davis”). The range of protest activities included demonstrations, teach-ins, lectures,

31 In this context, it has been particularly relevant that prior to her alleged involvement in the San Rafael shootout Davis had been fired from her teaching position at UCLA due to her political affiliation with the Communist Party. This case had already sparked debates about politics in/and the classroom and academic freedom in the United States and beyond.

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film screenings, distribution of pamphlets, collection of signatures, calls for financial contributions for Davis’s defense as well as calls for letters to be sent to Davis or to persons involved in her case, like Judge Richard E. Arnason or Attorney General Evelle Younger. While activists drew from a shared repertoire of protest strategies, different groups nevertheless foregrounded different aspects of Davis’s public personality (intellectualism, communism, blackness, femaleness). In many ways, however, it was the combination of all facets of her persona which served to stylize her into an icon within the leftist milieu. She “represented not only youth, intellectualism, and revolutionary consciousness of class and race, but also the feminine ‘black beauty’ ideal that had emerged in the 1960s,” and Davis’s persona provided “the precise combination of race, class and gender that stimulated the sentiments of West German leftists” (Siegfried 203). Politics (domestic, American, or international) were of crucial significance for the German reception of her case, and Davis almost immediately came to be represented as a political prisoner – or at least a highly politicized prisoner. Yet, within and beyond the solidarity movement, factors other than social and political goals came into play. Major aspects were the association of African American culture in general and Black Power in particular with attributes such as ‘coolness’ or ‘subversiveness’ and its (presumed) countercultural affinity. Ege’s concept of “Afro-Americanophilia” provides a productive frame to describe this larger ‘cultural theme’ which contributed to the enthusiasm for Davis and set the tone for the reception of Black Power: “[Afro-Americanophilia means] an, at first glance, amorphous but nonetheless very real ‘cultural theme,’ namely the appreciative appropriation and perception of cultural forms coded as Black and, at the same time, – though to a different degree – refers to the analogous relationship to Black persons or at least their representations.” (11-12)

In his analyses of the period from 1967 to 1975, Ege detects Afro-Americanophilia in diverse cultural fields (e.g. advertising, pop music, solidarity activism, and political theory) and establishes it as a larger phenomenon in which also solidarity with Davis has to be located. “Becoming black” at that time primarily referred to African Americans and African American culture and relied on an association and even partial conflation of blackness

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and Americanness which had already been established to a certain degree through interactions with African American GIs during the occupation years. “Becoming black” then, according to Ege, can be understood as the appropriation of African American culture, including the imaginary and symbolic identification with blacks (12). While certainly not everybody involved in solidarity activism for Davis would qualify as ‘Afro-Americanophile,’ identification with African Americans and particularly Black Power activists was a decisive component in the complex matrix of solidarity agendas and motivations. Davis also became a fashion icon whose style was admired, imitated, and appropriated. ‘Becoming black’ was significantly defined through a specific “habitus” (Pierre Bourdieu) which included dress codes, language, and a way of life. Additionally, “German activists’ affinity with the African American cause also stemmed from a deep fascination with the ‘authentic,’ which white Germans, more generally, saw represented in their concepts of blackness and black culture” (Höhn and Klimke 18). Whiteness came to be regarded “the epitome of reason and conformity,” blackness signified “emotionality, fulfillment, freedom, and empowerment” (18). For the US, Van Deburg stresses that Black Power “almost always is revealed to be more popular in its cultural aspects than it was as a political enthusiasm” and elaborates that “[d]istinctive hair styles, clothing, cuisine, and music won endorsement from a wide range of age groups within black America” (New 17) – and this broad cultural appeal extended to white Germans. It challenged (white) American cultural hegemony and served as the central element in their narratives of liberation. Despite the differences between Black Power in the US and its reception in West Germany, in both cases it was appropriated as a means of (individual and collective) empowerment and as a radical movement against oppression. Ultimately, even the German version of ‘becoming black’ may have had its inspiration in the Black Power movement’s consciousness-raising, which emphasized a psychological “Negro-to-Black conversion” as basis for the revolution (Van Deburg, New 55). In fact, many aspects of German solidarity with Black Power and Angela Davis partially reflect aspects of the black liberation struggle in the US – for example, its focus on the Vietnam War, Third Worldism, and educational reform. German protesters drew on the agenda, ethics, and demands of the black liberation struggle, but partially adapted it to suit their own interests. Yet, their solidarity with the African American

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freedom struggle implied to a certain degree the imagination of an equal and symmetrical relationship between German protesters and African Americans. In general, solidarity might refer, “first and foremost, to the status of intersubjectivity, in which a number of persons are bound together, whether by the facts of their existing needs or their interpretations of their own interests, into definite relations” (Pensky 9). German activists took it for granted that their support was needed to achieve the end of oppression of African Americans in the US. On the other hand, they could use this solidarity to add weight to their (additional) domestic and global agendas. Solidarity with the African American liberation struggle was not just imagined as solidarity with an oppressed group but rather as being in solidarity in an oppressed group which means to “resist oppression by sticking together” (Pensky 9-10). Activists relied on the imagination of symmetrical solidarity based on lateral and equal relations (as expressed in the familial metaphor of brotherhood/sisterhood) with a communal fight against oppression, and on asymmetrical solidarity in which, for example, those who could afford it gave money to support Davis, and those who were comparatively ‘free’ worked towards the liberation of political prisoners. The (political) solidarity with Davis can thus only be captured as a complex phenomenon in which communality, belonging, equality, and inclusion as well as inequalities in power, privilege, and exclusion were significant mechanisms. Davis even became a female “culture hero,” a “real-life individual whose deeds acquire heroic dimensions through popular-cultural portrayals” (Van Deburg, Black 2). The West German reception of Davis was by no means limited to counterculture, youth culture, and popular culture, but it had strong reverberations in all of these fields. The 1972 songs by John Lennon (“Angela”), the Rolling Stones (“Sweet Black Angel”), and German singer/songwriter Franz Josef Degenhardt (“Angela Davis”) illustrate the general pop cultural appeal of Davis. Degenhardt’s song critically and cynically recounts the events leading to Davis’s trial and represents the case as a racist fabrication. This is particularly evident in its refrain: “Na, sagt ihr, alles wirklich nicht schön. Aber was hat das mit Angela Davis zu tun?

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Weiter hören, sag ich, weiter sehn!”32 However, Degenhardt, who was one of the voices of the German movement of 1968, portrays Davis not primarily as a hero but rather as a victim of (political) circumstances and a racist judicial system in the US. In his German version of the song “Here’s to You” (originally written by Ennio Morricone and performed by Joan Baez) called “Sacco und Vanzetti,” Degenhardt expands the original lyrics and places Davis’s struggle in the tradition of the “working class heroes” Ferdinando “Nicola” Sacco and Bartolomeo “Bart” Vanzetti. The two Italian immigrants were sentenced to death in 1927 in a controversial trial which instigated an international solidarity campaign. The solidarity campaign, however, could not prevent what was regarded even then as the judicial murder of two inconvenient anarchists. Degenhardt’s representation of Davis is very much in line with the solidarity movement’s approach to counter the personalization of her case and to emphasize the larger contexts of Davis’s trial. While there is a tendency to counter the myth of Davis as heroine, the fact that she serves as focal point and symbolic visual image for multiple strands of the solidarity discourse still turns her into an iconic figure. For Van Deburg, culture heroes of the Black Power era were “standard-bearers for the modern-day heroic” and as such “offered their followers both entertainment and ego enhancement;” they became a “source of in-group identity and provided an avenue for intergroup understanding” (Black 22). Davis did not exactly match Van Deburg’s masculinist definition of the modern-day hero (epitomized by John F. Kennedy) built on “movie star looks and appeal,” “sportsmanlike competitiveness,” “the ability to maintain an aura of the humane, virtuous Everyman while remaining a most uncommon man,” and “physical courage and a penchant for risk-taking” (Black 7). However, she became a modern-day heroine in the sense that she combined elements of the mass-marketed celebrity with those of traditional heroism. Also, her good looks and her position as both “everywoman” and outstanding person are frequently emphasized in the solidarity campaigns and even more so in the media, which play a central role in the making of the modern-day heroine. For West German supporters, Davis was not only

32 “Well, you say, that’s really not nice. But what’s this got to do with Angela Davis? Keep on listening and you’ll see!”

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a source for unification and combined efforts of different groups but also served as a projection screen for their own radical aspirations. As Van Deburg holds, a hero “provides at least a partial image of a group’s most cherished values” and is “capable of providing direction – of leading the group into new and uncharted areas of experience;” ultimately, the hero “stimulates us to do better, to reach our potential – and beyond” (Black 3). Davis fulfilled these functions for West German activists and served as a “cultural bridge between the races” (2). The different aspects of Davis’s public persona, which encompass fashion icon, culture heroine, and political symbol, cannot be viewed separately but rather are parts of a complex image-formation in German discourses. Ellen Diedrich retrospectively asserts Davis’s significance for women but also merges political and fashion aspects of her image: “Wir, die Frauen der 68er Bewegung, hatten: die Schwester Che Guevaras, später die Witwen von Allende, Mao Tse Tung und eine Frau auf den Plakaten, eine schwarze Frau mit großer Afro-Mähne, eine, die ‘Black ist beautiful!’ weltweit bekannt machte – Angela Davis.”33

This statement demonstrates the importance of a female role model for the revolutionary forces and particularly for “wanna-be”-radicals of the 1960s and 1970s: While other exemplary female figures are defined merely through their relationship to male heroes of the counterculture, Davis stands out as an icon in her own right. Yet, she is defined not by her political thinking and activism but her appearance and attributes – the epitome of the slogan “Black is beautiful!” Furthermore, Diedrich’s statement draws attention to the fact that Davis was a ‘mediated’ presence – a woman on the posters – and attests to the power and significance of her visual image. That she is identified through her “Afro” hairdo emphasizes the importance of style but also links her to other Black Power activists as this hairstyle was central to the iconography of criminalized African Americans and came to

33 “We, the women of the movement of ’68, had: Che Guevara’s sister, later Allende’s and Mao Zedong’s widows, and one woman on the posters, a black woman with a big natural, a woman who made “Black is Beautiful!” known worldwide – Angela Davis.”

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be coded as prominent bodily symbol of resistant blackness (Mackert and Meyer-Lenz 267). As Mackert and Meyer-Lenz insinuate, Davis turned her hairstyle into an emblem of resistance against white western beauty standards. She thus became part of an iconography of international anti-American leftist protest movements which reached mythic proportions (268). Though Davis was seen by women (and men) of the movement of ’68 in Europe as an icon of resistant black female youthfulness and as a victim of a state apparatus which represented imperialistic power politics, this image began to fade from view in the 1980s when student protests turned towards new issues like nuclear energy and environmentalism (Mackert and Meyer-Lenz 276). The political stakes involved in the Davis case seemed, in fact, to have been relegated to a specific historical moment of the recent past. Davis reflects on this development: “[I]t is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo” (“Afro Images” 37). In the same context, she refers to a “recent article in the New York Times Magazine [24 Oct. 1993] that listed [her] as one of the fifty most influential fashion (read: hairstyle) trendsetters over the last century” (37). Davis is critically aware of this reductive notion of her public persona, “[b]ut it is not merely the reduction of historical politics to contemporary fashion that infuriates me,” she further writes in retrospect, “there is also the danger that this historical memory may become ahistorical and apolitical” (“Afro Images” 38). However, Davis also continues to be associated with political matters and activism – most prominently with the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, her critique of the “prison-industrial complex,” and her support for the Occupy movement.

A NGELA D AVIS

IN

W EST G ERMAN (P RINT ) M EDIA

Several recent German publications attempt to keep the (political and cultural) legacy of Davis’s case alive and counter the idea that Davis might in fact be ‘yesterday’s heroine’ without any contemporary significance. Klaus Steiniger’s Angela Davis: Eine Frau schreibt Geschichte (2010) recounts the details of her trial which Steiniger had covered in the 1970s as the first foreign correspondent of the GDR. In 2005, Atlantik published a new extended edition of Walter Kaufmann’s Unterwegs zu Angela Davis

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(originally issued in East Germany in 1973) assessing her continuing significance and her historical role for the extra-parliamentary opposition in West Germany as well as the socialist forces in the GDR. A call for solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal included in this edition illustrates continuities and parallels between Davis’s case and Abu-Jamal’s plight, and testifies to the persistence of issues like racism, the incarceration of political prisoners, and the capitalist system. The appeal was drafted and signed by a group of people who had already supported Davis, now the main spokesperson in the ongoing international campaign to “Free Mumia,” in the 1970s and who place solidarity with Abu-Jamal in the tradition of German support (East and West) for Davis. The title of the appeal not only calls to free Mumia but also claims the solidarity activists’ contribution to the success of the “Free Angela Davis”-campaign: “Vor 30 Jahren haben wir Angela Davis befreit, heute fordern wir: Freiheit für Mumia Abu-Jamal” [Thirty years ago, we liberated Angela Davis, today we demand: Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal] (224-27). In 2010, the volume Angela Davis, edited by Willi Baer, Carmen Bitsch, and Karl-Heinz Dellwo, appeared in Laika publishing’s series Bibliothek des Widerstands. It recounts historical and social contexts of Davis’s case in short excerpts of historical documents, brief essays, and filmic material (the volume comes with a DVD featuring Yolande DuLuart’s Portrait of a Revolutionary and Christel Priemer and Ingeborg Weber’s Angela Davis – eine Legende lebt). It clearly strives to make knowledge about Davis’s case accessible to a broader public and includes a call for solidarity with Ruchell Magee, who is still imprisoned and whose case serves as an example that some of the problems tackled by the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s are still unsolved. Beyond these leftist publications, Davis sometimes is mentioned in contemporary German mainstream newspapers and magazines. A look at the weekly magazine Der Spiegel reveals the contexts in which her name still comes up. In his essay “Wir sind alle Amerikaner” [We are all Americans] Cordt Schnibben recalls typing his first leaflet demanding “Freiheit für Angela Davis” as a personal memory of an important encounter with the USA (132). Davis also appears in an article on Herbert Marcuse’s funeral ceremony in 2003 (Smoltczyk); she is mentioned in a contribution on Fidel Castro as one of his supporters from the American Left (Widman, “Vom Paria” 169) and in a report on the situation of African Americans in Washington (Widman, “Muttertag” 160); she is further mentioned for her

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activism for political prisoners, oppressed minorities, and the Third World (“Wie erfinderisch”), and for her style and looks. Most recently, Davis was mentioned in the German media in the context of the documentary film The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 which was released in Germany in 2011 and broadcast on Arte in April 2012, and as a prominent supporter of the Occupy movement, particularly when she visited the Occupy camp in Berlin on November 18, 2011. However, Davis no longer makes the headlines as she did during the time of her trial, which received considerable media attention and news coverage in West Germany.34 The political and legal aspects of the trial were the focus of many articles, but Davis as cultural icon and as public persona equally received much attention. Even when Davis’s case was the main topic, (inter)national political issues were also implicitly or explicitly invoked in the news coverage. Yet, Davis’s looks and fashion were often major aspects in reports on her persona and case. In 1978, a short article in Der Spiegel considered it newsworthy that Davis had her hair cut and, thus, parted with her “ideologischer Überbau” [ideological superstructure] (“Angela Davis”). Earlier she had been entitled the “most prominent carrier” of the “Afro-Look” (“neue Ära”). As an early article on her case in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) points out, Davis was regarded as the personification of “black is beautiful!” (“Nun jagen sie”). At the same time, she was turned into an “international icon of Black resistance against racism and oppression,” as Meyer-Lenz und Mackert argue (257). They even take their argument one step further claiming that “the Afro hairdo, femininity, and youthfulness” were “coded as characteristics of Black subversive socialist and communist radicalism” (257). In the context of Afro-Americanophilia at the time and as part of the heightened media attention directed towards Black Power and race relations in the US, Davis appears to be a perfect icon to merge, combine, and negotiate both (intersecting) lines of interest. West German (print) media closely followed her case, which was depicted as highly political, and even as a litmus test for the US judicial

34 While my analyses in this chapter focus on print media (i.e. newspapers, magazines), Davis’s case, of course, was equally (re)presented in the news on TV and radio; documentaries and reports can be found on the programs of several West German public TV and radio stations.

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system. At the same time the media catered to the German public’s interest by personalizing the trial to a certain degree – a fact that was heavily criticized by solidarity activists who claimed Davis as the representative of a larger movement and regarded the case to be a political frame-up directed against a revolutionary leader. The title of Regina Nadelson’s book Who Is Angela Davis? could well have served as a headline for several interviews, personal portraits, and biographical sketches which appeared in German magazines and newspapers, demonstrating that Davis was hard to categorize, if nothing else. In Nadelson’s words, “[s]tereotypes did not suit her” (4). Sabine Broeck’s analysis of articles on Davis in the German magazine Stern has exposed the “erosion of discursive control […] in the bizarre and quite helpless narrative strategies of containment” (“Erotics” 135). A similar struggle for discursive control over the “incomprehensible Amazon” as which Davis appeared in Stern features (Broeck, “Erotics” 136) is obvious in another example from the daily newspaper FAZ: In October 1970, it featured a page-long article entitled “Wunderkind, Philosophin, Rebellin” [Wunderkind, Philosopher, Revolutionary] presenting Davis’s history and development through the eyes of her friends and teachers. The article appeared in the paper’s supplement under the rubric “Die Frau” [Woman]. This frame, once again, attests to the significance of women’s solidarity and Davis’s gender since the editors apparently regarded this rubric as the most adequate context for this piece on Davis’s persona. The same portrayal presented Davis at the intersection of intellectual life in the ivory tower and revolutionary activism. These two worlds were also depicted as divided by the ‘color line’ where white European intellectual traditions met with the black liberation struggle in the persona of Angela Davis. Such media portraits reveal the constant struggle to reconcile the image of the brilliant intellectual and rational philosopher with that of the allegedly violent criminal and activist. In the same article, another central question of many portraits was voiced: Could Davis – coming from a black middle class background and being educated at the centers of the Western intellectual elite – really be involved in terrorist acts and violent crimes? A search for possible reasons underlay many of these investigations into Davis’s biographical background which joined what Marc Olden calls the “‘why-andwhere-did-she-go-wrong’-chant” (79). The media portrayals of Davis (in the US but also in other Western countries) were also decisively shaped by

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the remnants of the McCarthy era and Cold War politics. As Cherron A. Barnwell points out with regard to US news coverage: “Davis may have been young, black, brilliant, and beautiful, but being a Communist meant that she had abandoned middle-class American values socially prescribed and thus expected of educated black people. Thus, the media circumscribed Davis in a spectrum of ‘good girl gone bad’ images, representing her as having fallen prey to a dark side.” (“Prison Abolitionist” 309)

Barnwell asserts that when Davis fled jurisdiction, “[m]edia images of her changed from black militant Communist to criminal-fugitive” (310). In West Germany, the tendency towards criminalization and an outright condemnation of Black Power activists (including Davis) was mainly present in the yellow press. Articles from the more liberal spectrum of the German press offered a more nuanced and differentiated picture. They struggled to bring together the different aspects of Davis’s persona: intellectual, middleclass, ‘black and beautiful’ woman and potential criminal and radical terrorist. As a woman, Davis challenged the wide-spread image of the male and masculine Black Power activist (epitomized in the iconic image of the Black Panthers) and also of the general association of criminal-fugitive and dangerous terrorist with masculinity and maleness. Between 1970 and 1972, her photograph became a familiar presence in West German newspapers, as articles on her case were often accompanied by images – or, following Roland Barthes’s admonition that even the seemingly objective “press photograph is a message” constituting not a reduction but rather an amplification of the ‘text,’ the numerous images of Davis can be said to be accompanied by texts (in the narrow sense of the word) (15, 25-26). The visual representations of Davis also offered assurance to the reader with regards to the sensationalist “good girl gone bad”-narrative: Presenting her as a rather petite, well-dressed woman (though often portrayed with a focus on her huge Afro and a wide-open mouth) might also suggest that Davis must certainly be wrongly accused of such horrible crimes. For example, the photographs of her arrest showed Davis in handcuffs, framed by FBI agents. She wears a wig with straight hair, neatly tied back behind her head, glasses, a satin blouse and a short skirt. She appears fragile in comparison to the FBI agents surrounding her – an appearance that does not correspond to the stereotypical notion of a dangerous criminal

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created by the media while she was underground.35 The image represents Davis as a potentially dangerous criminal (affirmed by the handcuffs and FBI agents) while her appearance at the same time runs counter to exactly this notion. This image was featured in several international and West German newspapers and magazines but it was not always represented in the same way. The FAZ, for example, included only the image section focusing on the handcuffed Davis, with the FBI agents being only represented indexically through their white hands grasping her arms (Oct. 15, 1970, 6).36 The caption reads: “In Handschellen, von FBI-Agenten abgeführt: Angela DAVIS” [In Handcuffs, Walked Off by FBI Agents: Angela DAVIS]. In the accompanying article, “Angela Davis festgenommen,” the arrest by the FBI is reported as a success for the agency, the events leading up to the arrest are recounted once again, and speculations on Davis’s whereabouts during the last two months are made: maybe a “ghetto” in the East, possibly Cuba, likely Canada (6). From the moment of her arrest until her acquittal, the West German press frequently reported on the trial and its protagonist. How the seemingly contradictory facets of Davis’s public persona came to weigh on individual articles and reports also related to the question of guilt. West German (print) media represented the whole spectrum from outright condemning her as a murderer (e.g. Bild am Sonntag) to portraying her as potential victim of a public witch-hunt by the US government (e.g. Der Spiegel). Yet, whatever the (implied) verdict, the idolization and iconization of Davis loomed large over the news coverage on her trial. Der Spiegel labeled her “Jeanne D’Arc of Birmingham” and “militant Madonna with the Afro-look,” evoking images of religious icons familiar to German

35 Artist Carrie Mae Weems has (re-)staged this scene (albeit with a different setting) in a 2008 photograph entitled “The Capture of Angela” as part of her Constructing History series. 36 Newsweek even further reduced this image for its cover story on Davis. On the front page of its issue from October, 26, 1970, Davis appears in handcuffs but without the white hands grasping her. In the background of this color image is a portrait of Davis in black and white, her Afro literally looming large over the magazine cover; both the magazine’s title and the headline “Angela Davis: Black Revolutionary” are framed by her Afro.

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readerships and generally associated with braveness, martyrdom, resistance and revolution. In addition, these comparisons painted a dramatic picture of Davis’s struggle and contributed to her image as a revolutionary figure of mythic proportions. Overall, the news coverage reflected the same tension which came to take center stage in the court room – between personalizing the case into an individual’s struggle and turning it into a political case of national (if not international) relevance. The prosecution argued that Davis had been motivated to participate in the liberation attempt at San Rafael by her love for George Jackson. The defense countered this strategy by making Davis appear the victim of a political conspiracy. Klaus Bölling, reporting on the trial for the weekly Die Zeit, described these attempts in his article “Bloß eine ‘Schwarze Love Story’?” [Just a “Black Love Story?”]: Prosecutor Albert Harris tried to dismantle Davis as heroine of the trial by establishing “passion” as main motivation for her alleged crime and tried to depoliticize the lawsuit through his “love story theory” (6). Describing the atmosphere in the courtroom, Bölling held that the pressure created by a ‘global’ public observing the case seemed to weigh heavily on jurors and judge alike and might, in fact, bring about a comparatively fair trial (6). He emphasized the responsibility of media worldwide to cover the trial. Even though news coverage often focused on Davis, the case was generally viewed as political; the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), for example, described the case as negotiating “America’s problems in a tiny room” (Borch 3). The headline represents the lawsuit as racialized: “Eine weiße Jury richtet über das schwarze Idol” [A white jury judges the black idol]. In the subtitle the trial is deemed to be of “national importance.” Yet, contrary to the solidarity discourse this article does not promote any international relevance of the trial. Rather, the problems negotiated in the courtroom are presented as exclusively US-American. Herbert von Borch mentions a number of intersecting issues which politicized the Davis case, including racial conflict, violent resistance, communism, capitalism, and the quality of the judicial system. From the perspective of West German readers, these problems seemed to be relatively safely contained in the “tiny room” across the Atlantic without any immediate relevance for their own lives. However, this article clearly portrayed the case in its political dimension (though limited to the US) and did not personalize it. In contrast, an article published some weeks later in the FAZ refers to Davis as the “star of the trial without airs

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and graces” (Lietzmann, “Star” 5). It devotes more than one paragraph to a scrupulously precise description of Davis’s looks: “Ihre Schlankheit wirkt betont durch die Konsequenz mit der sie sich nach dem modischen Geschmack ihrer Generation kleidet, in eigentümlicher Mischung aus Sorgfalt und Lässigkeit. Ihr mächtiger Afro-Haarschnitt lastet über dem feingeschnittenen Gesicht, in das die Stahlbrille große Kreise zeichnet, die sich in riesigen pendelnden Ohrgehängen wiederholen. Über dem schwarzen Lederrock oder einem bodenlangen gelben Wollrock, manchmal auch Minirock zum hohen Absatz, trägt sie gebrochen matte Farben, Purpur, Mattgrün, Violett, und immer ein wollenes lila Schultertuch, das sie wie frierend um sich zieht.”37 (Lietzmann, “Star” 5)

In this paragraph, many familiar aspects and elements of Davis’s iconography (re)surface. Her appearance is prioritized over her (political) activism and the trial itself. Davis is characterized through her fashionable dress, her symbolic Afro, and her feminine but unostentatious attire: (mini) skirt, high heels, and quiet colors. To the reporter, she appears to be isolated and disconnected; the long and ornate description of her appearance largely renders it the carefully staged performance of a “star,” albeit one “without airs and graces.” The description of her behavior and dress connotes ‘coolness,’ ‘trendiness,’ ‘femininity’ and only through her hairdo a bit of ‘radicality’ which weighs heavily on her otherwise fashionable but discreet appearance. Nonetheless, Davis’s persona did not dominate news reports alone; the political and social relevance of the trial as well as the actual events in the courtroom also figured prominently, and several articles by the author of the above-quoted report, FAZ journalist Sabine Lietzmann, attest to this fact (cf., for example, “Anklage” and “Schüsse”). In this vein, not just her case

37 “Her slenderness seems heightened by her clothes which she consistently wears according to the fashion of her generation with a peculiar mixture of diligence and nonchalance. Her mighty Afro weighs on the delicate face on which her steel glasses draw big circles which are repeated in the huge pendants dangling from her ears. Over her black leather skirt or her full-length yellow woolen skirt, sometimes even a mini-skirt and high heels, she wears mute colors, purple, faint green, violet, and always a lilac woolen scarf wrapped around her as if she were freezing.”

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but also Davis herself came to be viewed as representative of America (or, at least, black America). To claim Davis as representative of America, of course, ran counter to the approach of the solidarity movement, of the GDR’s official support, and of leftist media, where anti-capitalism or antiAmericanism merged with sympathy or support for Davis as heroine of an ‘other’ America.38 Also, it relegated the social and political problems involved in the case to the US and promoted the externalization of racism as an essentially American phenomenon. The following two examples demonstrate how far the media’s identification of Davis’s trial with the United States in general – or at least with an essentially American problem – reached: The German newscast Tagesschau from 5 June 1972 commented on the acquittal of Davis with the line “Freispruch für Amerika” [Acquittal for America] (qtd. in Angela Davis Solidaritätskomitee 7). In the SZ, Heiko Flottau called her acquittal a “Sieg für die Linke und das Recht” [Victory for the (political) Left and for Justice] and claimed it as proof that the US judicial system can manage political trials (3). The public persona Angela Davis was not only created through her American nationality but also shaped by her ethnic and racial identity. The West German press frequently pointed out her trial’s role in exposing America’s race issues, Davis’s activism, and her connection to the black community. The Black Panthers and other activists of the black freedom struggle provided subtexts for the media coverage on the Davis case. A 1972 article in the FAZ hails Davis as “Schwester des schwarzen Jedermanns” [Sister of the Black Everyman], a (culture) hero for a young generation of African Americans, and a warning for white America (Lietzmann, “Jedermanns”). Susan Drucker and Robert S. Cathcart suggest viewing the modern-day hero “as communication phenomenon” (5) and thereby assign the media central significance in constructing heroic figures. They affirm that “[i]n our contemporary mass media culture the hero is invariably a contemporary figure. He or she is both made and unmade by the same agency – media attention” (7). Davis was not only idolized by the solidarity campaigns but also became a medially constructed heroine. While not all strands of the print media followed

38 Cf. Steiniger’s Free Angela Davis: Hero of the Other America, E. Diedrich’s speech, or the appeal issued by several initiatives – quoted above – which termed her a “symbol for the other, the democratic America” (qtd. in Schröder).

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such an approach, they nonetheless turned Davis into a person of public interest, a celebrity, and potentially even a heroine. Yet, once the trial was over, she quickly faded from public view and media interest in her persona declined considerably. Davis’s books garnered some media attention, though not necessarily favorable reviews. The German translation of If They Come in the Morning, authorized by Davis, was published as Materialien zur Rassenjustiz as early as 1972, and her Autobiography came out in Germany in 1975. Both books were generally categorized as political writing but were criticized for several reasons. If They Come in the Morning was found by one reviewer to be “one-sided,” featuring an untrue biographical sketch, and lacking the necessary framework and information on the larger contexts of her trial (Musulin). Davis’s autobiography was located by another critic in the tradition of Civil Rights literature and life writing of African American activists but, ultimately, she claimed that the German edition could be interpreted as an “assault on Davis” due to the translation’s lack of precision and of explanatory background information. This reviewer even held that the autobiography damaged the myth built around Davis (Venzky). While this statement is disputable, it is striking that in both cases the reviewers criticized the lack of additional information which German audiences would need in order to fully grasp Davis’s story. Just like her symbolic image, it seems, her texts are transplanted into West German culture without the necessary processes of translation and explanation. Even though such causalities are unavoidably speculative, I suggest that this lack could be one reason why multiple and contradictory meanings were assigned to Davis, her case, and her writings in West German discourses. Where there was no ‘original’ context readily available, the symbolic visual and verbal texts could certainly be more freely recontextualized, appropriated, and negotiated. Or, to put it more polemically: Single aspects like lifestyle and fashion elements, radicalism, or political attitude could be separately taken up and voided of the ballast of larger contexts and issues without the danger of immediate consequences because of the geographical and socio-cultural distance. This is not to say that there was no in-depth engagement with the political and social topics at stake – yet, it was up to the individual recipient whether to pick up on single aspects of the solidarity movement or to delve into all of its pertinent issues. The symbol ‘Angela Davis’ was certainly powerful beyond any particular context. It

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was used and instrumentalized in media and solidarity discourses in West Germany as well as in many other countries worldwide, as the West German media frequently emphasized. The numerous letters to the editors provoked by several articles shows that the public interest in Davis went beyond individual groups and the solidarity movement, and encompassed the whole political spectrum. In the process of active reception, appropriation, (re)contextualization, and negotiation of Davis and her trial, a public persona was construed, invented, and creatively shaped into a contested and powerful symbol.

A NGELA D AVIS ’ S S ELF -R EPRESENTATION AND C OUNTERNARRATIVE Angela Davis has intensively reflected on the way she has been represented publicly. At the time when solidarity campaigns mobilized people around the globe to support her cause and media extensively focused on her persona and her trial, Davis herself was in jail and only to a certain degree able to speak for herself and participate in the image-making process. However, particularly in retrospect, Davis tried to counter public narratives of her story by presenting her own version in her autobiography and by commenting on the creation of her public persona. With regard to the first wave of public attention she received, Davis identifies two major tendencies in (media) representations, both of which, in her opinion, misrepresented her: “On the one hand, I was portrayed as a conspiratorial and monstrous Communist (that is, anti-American) whose unruly natural hairdo symbolized Black militancy (that is, antiwhiteness). […] On the other hand, sympathetic portrayals tended to interpret the image – almost inevitably one with my mouth wide open – as that of a charismatic and raucous revolutionary ready to lead the masses into battle. Since I considered myself neither monstrous nor charismatic, I felt fundamentally betrayed on both accounts: violated on the first account and deficient on the second.” (“Afro Images” 39)

While the media, activists, and audiences played a crucial role in creating Davis’s image(s), her own representational strategies equally contributed to her public persona even if she describes her situation during the heyday of

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her media presence as one that “left her with little or no agency” (“Afro Images” 39). Some aspects of her identity which she fashioned and created (often in explicit opposition to media portrayals) through her writings, speeches, and actions have revised and renegotiated but sometimes also affirmed public perceptions of ‘Angela Davis.’ Therefore, Davis’s self-representations in the form of her life writing, her activism and theory, as well as her public appearances and speeches have to be seen in interaction and connection with the representations of her in mainstream discourses. Obviously, this relationship was a circular one with both strands constantly and mutually influencing each other in a dynamic process of exchange.39 In 1994, Davis described her anger at being perceived as a fashion icon only, particularly in regard to her trial being used in an ad campaign to sell revolutionary chic: “[T]he particular history of my legal case is emptied of all content so that it can serve as a commodified backdrop for advertising” (“Afro Images” 43). In her autobiography, Davis attempts to put forward a counternarrative to dominant media accounts of the events and to create a counterimage to her identity as it has been constructed verbally and visually in the media. In her preface, she emphatically asserts that her book is intended as a “political autobiography” and not as a “personal ‘adventure’” (xvi). As Cherron Barnwell states, “[t]o communalize her history, Davis also hints to a selfcharacterization that will highlight how her sense of ‘belonging to a community’ constructs her persona” (Dialogics 99). Davis challenges some public notions of her that had been well established; as Barnwell has it, Davis “attempts to set the record straight, and thereby presents a Self that counters the media propagandized images of her” (103). In her autobiography, she emphasizes the political and social significance of her story: Rather than primarily fashioning herself as representative of America, black America, or even African American women, she constitutes a “community of humans – a community of struggle against poverty and racism” as essential to the construction of her persona and personality (Angela Davis xvi). She “vigorous[ly] attempts […] to downplay her uniqueness” (Perkins 8),

39 The West German discourses can also be related to public discourses in other European countries. However, a comparative study of international solidarities with Davis lies beyond the scope of this study and remains a desideratum.

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and this effort to reconstruct a communal narrative within the personal and individual(istic) genre of the autobiography links her endeavor to the African American slave narrative.40 The authors of these narratives equally strove to relate stories as “witnessing not only of their own circumstances, but of a reality shared by many others as well” (26). As Janice Chernekoff holds, Davis “implicitly argues that her political work and writing are an extension of the actions and words of slave narrative authors” (40). Consequently, there are many references to the African American literary tradition in her autobiography. These references add weight to Davis’s personal story and create a specific genealogy of African American fugitives and revolutionaries in which Davis locates her story. This becomes particularly evident in her narrative of flight. It is positioned at the very beginning of her autobiography and is thus very prominently placed; it also serves as a means for Davis to try “to free herself from the criminal-fugitive image” (C. Barnwell, “Prison Abolitionist” 314). Davis explicitly writes herself into the African American literary tradition which begins with the fugitive slave narratives41 and can be “thematically situated along the currents of

40 Robert Stepto provides a useful differentiation of distinct phases of the slave narrative (the “eclectic narrative,” the “integrated narrative,” the “generic narrative” and the “authenticating narrative”) and claims that “a slave narrative is not necessarily an autobiography” (6). He distinguishes between autobiography and memoir: “[A] memoir refers specifically to an author’s recollections of his public life, far more than to his rendering of personal history as literary form or metaphor” (28). Davis’s story may be regarded a memoir in this sense, but I retain the term political autobiography in accordance with her own terminology. 41 According to Karin Schmidli, slave narratives written by men differ from those authored by women. The latter do not focus as much on “the slave’s ‘heroic escape’” as on “the support they received from their mothers, grandmothers, other relatives, fellow slaves, and even white women, on their way to freedom.” Rather than emphasizing the “slave’s solitary journey to freedom” they “focus more on the woman slave’s specific trials in slavery.” The climax of women’s slave narratives is not “the slave’s escape” but “the reunion of loved ones” (174). For Davis’s narration these differentiations are of minor importance; she utilizes elements of female and male slave narratives without adopting the formulaic, rigid structures or relying on a particular strand of the slave narrative.

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survival, protest and resistance, and radicalism” (Perkins 22). She locates her flight within the historical dimension of the black liberation struggle, refers back to the days of slavery, and alludes to the Underground Railroad: “Thousands of my ancestors had waited, as I had done, for nightfall to cover their steps, had leaned on one true friend to help them, had felt, as I did, the very teeth of the dogs at their heels. It was simple. I had to be worthy of them.” (5-6)

Determined to elude the FBI and the police, Davis finds a first hiding place in Los Angeles in the house of a couple “sympathetic to the movement” (7). The couple is referred to by their first names only and Davis’s autobiography entails numerous “strategic silences” (Perkins 19) which value the interests of the political movement and its supporters over a detailed account of all events. These silences were also crucial to slave narratives and abolitionist discourses. Frederick Douglass’s critique of those “public declarations” which turned the Underground Railroad into an “upperground railroad” (416) and his advice to be careful about what to reveal publicly in order not to prevent other slaves from using the same routes and means to escape is a prominent early plea for strategic silences in the interest of the larger movement (416-17). Just as the Underground Railroad can be understood, as Katherine McKittrick suggests, as a “geography that both white and non-white communities desire to map and therefore know” (99), the FBI, the media, and the public desired to map Davis’s routes and know her whereabouts. McKittrick claims that the “underground” in general is “a black geography that reframes spatial knowledge,” which is not shaped by geographic ignorance but rather by a “radically different sense of place” (102). The “geographies of slavery” basically rendered “a black sense of place virtually impossible under Eurocentric geographic arrangements” (103); similarly, Davis describes her perception of place as being altered once she is underground. She is careful about which information to share with her readers and she even justifies her strategic silences when she writes, for example, with regard to her time in prison: “Unfortunately, I cannot describe the sympathetic officers by name. My words might mean the loss of their jobs” (43). Davis claims to have consciously decided against leaving the country while she was underground and affirms that being close to the movement was one of her major concerns; consequently, in her narration of flight,

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there is no ‘promised land’ for her to reach. This aspect constitutes one of the striking differences between her tale of flight and those by many fugitive slaves who at least initially envisioned a safe haven either in the Northern States or Canada, even though their illusions were often destroyed by the racism they encountered in the North.42 It also differs from the life stories of many other Black Power activists like Eldridge Cleaver or Assata Shakur, who took refuge in countries like Cuba or Algeria and thus became exiles. However, Davis’s story is characterized by many parallels to the formulaic fugitive slave narrative, not the least of which are its political impetus and propagandistic style, which utilizes self-fashioning as a strategic rhetorical device, and its emphasis on the strife for freedom and claim to equality. Like the slave narrative, her text is “meant to bear witness to a reality beyond [her] own personal circumstances” (Perkins 22). Furthermore, she emphasizes the isolation she experienced by not being able to contact any of her friends or family, describes how she had to rely on a network of sympathizers to escape, disguise herself, travel mainly at night, and explains how she constantly tried to be(come) invisible in order to not attract attention. Her choosing the genre of the autobiography and the declaration of her writing as political and communal fit into this tradition because, as Maria Diedrich has pointed out, the authors of slave narratives endowed their respective narrative voice with a representative function pluralizing their autobiographical “I” into a “we” (26). Most importantly, however, Davis uses these parallels to counter the FBI’s media-supported discursive strategy of turning her into not only a fugitive but also a criminal. Life writing is utilized by activists as a “tool for advancing political struggle” but in addition also as a means to gain “control over their own public images” (Perkins xii, xiii). For Davis, positioning herself within the tradition of heroic African American fugitive slaves and the black freedom struggle is an important means to counter her media image of the dangerous fugitive-criminal. As Paul Finkelman states, fugitive slaves have often been conceived of as “brave human beings seeking freedom” (xi) and Diedrich

42 Another major difference can be detected in the audience(s) addressed by slave narratives and Black Power autobiographies like Davis’s which “[a]nticipating an appreciable Black as well as White readership, [did not fashion] their works […] primarily as an appeal to the moral conscience of Whites” (Perkins 29).

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lists individual heroism and the exceptional character of the protagonists of slave narratives as one of the main reasons for the genre’s popularity in the 19th century (44-45).43 Particularly African American women authors “tried to create and invent heroines who would refute the black woman’s negative and stereotyped image” (Schmidli 180). At the time when she was writing her autobiography, Davis had only recently begun to “recognize the fundamental importance of developing gender analyses” (Davis, “Introduction” 28), but she actively reclaimed an African American literary tradition. Similarly, in her activism for the abolition of prisons and her work on the prison-industrial complex, Davis reveals an “unbroken continuum between the slavery Douglass experienced in the nineteenth century, the racist terrorism she survived growing up in segregated Alabama, and today’s interconnected problems of economic and political subjugation, prisons, capital punishment, police brutality, and the women, immigrants, and communities of people of color most impacted by them.” (Ruggiero 18)

Greg Ruggiero, who (re-)published Davis’s “Lectures on Liberation” in 2010 together with a new edition of Douglass’s slave narrative calls Douglass and Davis “two of the most important abolitionist intellectuals in U.S. history” (10). Davis serves as editor of this new critical edition of Douglass’s text which also takes a prominent place in her lectures included in the book. The lectures were held at the UCLA in the fall of 1969 and had originally been published as a pamphlet (including a letter of support) by the New York Committee to Free Angela Davis during her imprisonment (Ruggiero 10-11). It was introduced as a “vindication of academic freedom and democratic education” and “the work of an excellent teacher and a truly fine scholar” (qtd. in Ruggiero 11). While this particular piece of Davis’s writings has not been translated into German, it is indicative of the major

43 Of course, perceptions of the fugitive slave figure differed strongly between the Northerners and the Southerners during and beyond the time of slavery. However, retrospectively and from the perspective of those ex-slaves who became masters of their own story the notion of the brave freedom-seeking human being dominates over e.g. the notion of escaped human “property.”

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tensions in the creation of Davis’s public persona: The published lectures were based on notes, they were published and sold by a solidarity committee (in order to support Davis’s legal defense), and were framed by the statement from her colleagues at UCLA. Davis’s thinking, speech, and activism are mediated to a large degree, even though it might at first glance appear as if these texts would be, in fact, ‘her words.’ In the new edition, she embraces this representation of herself as intellectual and activist in an African American tradition and solidifies her position in a continuum of the black liberation struggle and her devotion to a communal effort rather than individualized cause. Her efforts are not merely part of her continuing struggle for control over her own image but they are also a claim for control over the historical record of the Black Power era in its transnational framework and its visual and verbal repertoire as it has entered the collective memory of, among others, US and West German cultures. Consequently, Davis sought to “set the record straight” not only through her writings but also by attempting to exercise control over her visual representations. Davis explains that even the cover photograph of her autobiography is to a certain degree the product of her resistance against clichéd notions and stereotyped images of the Black Power era as well as her dominant public image. She writes: “[…] the first question he [photographer Philippe Halsman] asked us was whether we brought the leather jacket. He assumed, it turned out, that he was to re-create with his camera a symbolic visual representation of Black militancy: leather jacket […], Afro hairdo, and raised fist. We had to persuade him to photograph me in a less predictable posture.” (“Afro Images” 41)

This photograph was also on the cover of the German edition of her autobiography Mein Herz wollte Freiheit: eine Autobiographie and while it does not recreate any stereotypical image of Black Power it adds to the personalized framing of the book, rather than emphasizing the political or communal dimension Davis tried to promote. The back cover of the German edition shows four photographs of Davis (which were also included in the US edition of her book) recounting her personal development from 15 months old child to young girl (together with her sister Fania), to college student. These photographs have a double effect: On the one hand, they feed the tendency to personalize the story by making visible the person

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behind the events, on the other hand, they refute the media images of Davis as (potential) criminal and fugitive, (aggressive) political activist, and (stereotypical) Black Power advocate. In total, Davis has embraced representations of her as an intellectual and a political prisoner and criticized her status as a fashion icon – particularly because this facet of her public persona is often deprived of its political and historical context. Insufficient contextualization and lack of information on its political, social, and cultural meaning in West German discourses may have contributed to the fact that much of the political protest connected with the Davis case vanished from public discourses after the trial and also that Davis was soon firmly captured in the historical moment of the 1960s and 1970s and remembered as a cultural and fashion icon rather than as a political activist, theorist, and public intellectual. This process was likely fostered by Davis’s decision not to visit West Germany after her acquittal and to align herself with the GDR. For East Germany in the 1980s the headline in Die Zeit would not have held true to the same extent that it correctly described the West German interest in Davis. In her autobiography, Davis clearly delineates her opinions concerning the two Germanies. She describes her time in Frankfurt am Main in the 1960s also in terms of the racism she encountered and detects remnants of the Nazi era because “in West Germany […] there had been no determined campaign to attack the fascist and racist attitudes” (138). However, she was involved in the “rearguard of S.D.S.” and impressed by West German student protest as well as the GDR which she visited several times (144). Nonetheless, her early activism was directed first and foremost towards the black liberation struggle in the US and the West German reception similarly centered on the (African) American dimensions of her trial and activism. Davis’s continuing work, particularly with regard to the US prison system and the “prison industrial complex,” shows that many concerns of the 1970s have not lost their relevance. Even if the symbolic figure ‘Angela Davis’ might be confined largely to the countercultural and fashion paradigm of a bygone era, the issues that culminated in her case continue to resonate and still demand attention – an attention that is also historically informed and, therefore, necessarily features Davis’s story and her political activism of the 1970s. The different (and in parts irreconcilable) narrativizations, emplotments, and utilizations of her case and activism in West Germany expose the contested grounds on which political solidarity with

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the black liberation struggle, (counter)cultural transatlantic exchange, and renegotiations of West Germany’s relationship to (African) America took place. In a synchronic perspective, Davis is revealed as an ambiguous icon, appropriated and adopted into West German cultural and political contexts, embraced by countercultural activists and solidarity movements, and ambivalently debated in the larger West German public and media. Her image in particular destabilized stereotypical notions of blackness, and the Black Power era in general led to a broader negotiation of race and racism mainly with a focus on the US and specifically American ‘problems’ but also extending to West Germany. Davis was perceived as black American (although aspects like gender and class equally shaped the identity politics of her reception) and surrounding her persona, notions of blackness as well as Americanness were negotiated and appeared as ambivalent concepts in the West German imaginary. Protagonists of solidarity activities and the New Left in West Germany may have been culturally and politically ‘Americanized’ and heavily influenced by the relationship between the US and West Germany during the postwar years but still criticized American politics and imperialism. They may have looked towards the US for glimpses into the future of a capitalist society but never questioned the notion of America’s role as potential model for West Germany’s future. They may have been ‘African Americanized’ in their desire to ‘become black’ and in their embrace of African American culture and the black liberation struggle but, nonetheless, detached this appropriation of African American cultural imports from the US and Americanization as cultural imperialism. West German media relegated the problems of, for example, racism and political imprisonment, which shaped the Davis case, mainly to the US and seldom considered their significance for West Germany. Davis’s acquittal then appeared as a success of the American judicial system rather than of an international class struggle or fight against racism and oppression. The West German reception of Angela Davis, by and large, was not just a significant moment in transnational protest, solidarity, and counterculture but also part of the continuous and ambiguous negotiations of (West) Germany’s relationship with America in general and African America in particular. Hence, in a diachronic perspective, the postwar interrogations of race and racism in US and West German societies, (cultural) Americanizations of West Germany, and African American cultural influences on German cultures still informed the reception of Davis and were renegoti-

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ated during the Black Power era. The iconic image of the Black Power activist was added to a West German repertoire of (stereo)typical African American images, Davis brought African American femaleness and intellectualism to the fore (countering, among other things, exoticised notions of the black female body), and African American culture as representative of an ‘other’ America and coded as ‘subversive’ and ‘cool’ entered not only into (West) German youth, protest, and counterculture but also into the West German mainstream in which Afro-Americanophilia surfaced as a (re)new(ed) appreciative appropriation of African American culture in the 1960s and 1970s. While ‘race’ was more prominently interrogated in West German public discourse and gender also began to play a role, they did not yet figure as central issues. By the time Audre Lorde came to Germany in the 1980s this situation had changed considerably. Her presence was vital to the emergence of an Afro-German movement and the development of Afro-German communities, in which women took the lead. The (West) German reception of Lorde directed the focus more towards race and racism in Germany, and international black solidarity, Germany as a diasporic space, and women’s solidarity took center stage.

5 Visions of (Global) Sisterhood and Black Solidarity: Audre Lorde

Black is beautiful but currently going out of style, yet I am still Black. The women’s movement may be going out of style soon too, because that is the american way. But I am not going to stop being a woman. (LORDE, “SELF-DEFINITION”157)

In 1976, Audre Lorde observed that “black is beautiful,” a slogan which had been personified in Angela Davis as icon of the Black Power movement only a few years before, was “going out of style.” She realized that international interest in the African American liberation struggle (or at least its attributes and protagonists), or Afro-Americanophilia, would vanish (as fashions and styles usually do) though the main issues of Black Power would continue to be relevant just as the women’s movement might eventually fade from view without having solved the intricate problems it addresses. Lorde’s art and activism engaged in these continuing struggles particularly with an eye on the concerns of black women. Lorde “brought the perspective of a Black lesbian radicalized within the civil rights movement, the black power movement, the second wave of U.S. women’s movement, and the gay and lesbian movement. She was among the first black feminists […] to position lesbianism as a legitimate and powerful standpoint from which to enunciate a radical and progressive politics of struggle. This accounted, in part, for the rockstar following and iconic status she enjoyed during her lifetime.” (Byrd 12)

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Of course, a multiplicity of reasons contributed to Lorde’s “iconic status” which was not limited to the US. In fact, Lorde also became a highly symbolic and influential figure in (West) Germany, particularly for AfroGermans and white feminists. Lorde first came to Germany in 1984 as a guest professor at the Free University of Berlin, where she taught a poetry workshop, a class on black American women poets, and a seminar entitled “The Poet as Outsider.” Dagmar Schultz had met the self-proclaimed “Black, Lesbian, Mother, Warrior, Poet”1 at the 1980 World Conference on Women in Copenhagen, Denmark and had invited Lorde to teach at the Free University Berlin (“Vorwort” Auf Leben und Tod 7). It took four years until Lorde finally came to Germany but during this time Schultz did not remain inactive in her efforts to introduce Lorde to German audiences. Schultz’s activism in (West) Germany was prefigured by her experiences in the 1960s USA. In “Witnessing Whiteness – Ein persönliches Zeugnis,” she explains how she became critically aware of her own ‘whiteness’ and the workings of racism but also the possibilities of cooperation between black and white activists during that time (516-17). Schultz participated in Civil Rights activism and began to realize that racism and sexism were connected (519). When she returned to Berlin in 1973, she noticed how West Germany’s feminist activism and the women’s movement revolved around white middle-class intellectual women and excluded black, Jewish, or working-class women (521). Schultz observed what Ruth Frankenberg argued in her seminal study The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters (1993), namely that “race shapes white women’s lives” (1). In 1981, Schultz attended the annual conference of the National Women’s Studies Association entitled “Women Respond to Racism” and listened to Lorde’s as well as Adrienne Rich’s keynote lectures which prompted her to publish Macht und Sinnlichkeit2 – a selection/collection of Rich’s and Lorde’s work

1

As Marion Kraft states in her preface to Die Quelle unserer Macht, Audre Lorde usually introduced herself with the words “I am a Black, Lesbian, Mother, Warrior, Poet” to her international audiences (9).

2

Macht und Sinnlichkeit was published in 1983 by sub rosa Verlag, Berlin and was not only the first German language publication of Lorde’s writings but also

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in German (Schultz, “Vorwort” Macht 6).3 The volume was, according to Schultz, intended to instigate discussions about racism and anti-Semitism in the women’s movement (“Witnessing” 522). Schultz describes her experience of listening to the two lectures: “I listened to their speeches with a renewed feeling of acuteness and own responsibility and decided to edit a book that would possibly stimulate discussions about racism and anti-Semitism more intensely among women. The problem of white racism in the USA, which is mentioned in some of these texts, might initially appear distant to German Women readers. However, if we turn towards our own field of experiences with anti-Semitism and the increasing xenophobia in our country we will not be able to reject the feeling of being appealed.” (“Vorwort” Macht 10)

This personal account hints at some crucial aspects of Lorde’s reception in (West) Germany. First, the publication and marketing of her works in Germany target a female audience. In fact, Lorde’s ideas and activism resonated most widely in feminist and Afro-German discourses. She became particularly influential for Afro-German women and their development of collective and individual identities and communities. It is also decisive that Lorde was first introduced to a German readership together with a white author grouped by their identities as outspoken lesbian writers. In addition, it was a white woman – Dagmar Schultz – who initiated the first publication of Lorde’s works and her first visit to West Germany. Lorde’s work and activism at times easily crossed the racial boundary potentially separating women by promoting sisterhood ‘across the color line’ and appreciating

“the first German language publication on the US debate on racism within the feminist movement” (El-Tayeb, “If” 74). 3

Alexis de Veaux’s account of these events differs slightly from Schultz’s description. Lorde’s biographer claims that Lorde and Schultz first met at the 1981 NWSA convention. Schultz was impressed and deeply moved; she wrote a letter to Lorde in which she invited her to teach at the Free University and asked her for permission to translate some of her works into German. Lorde did not answer this letter but replied to a second one, accepted the invitation and agreed to have some of her works published in German (265-66). Veaux also adds that Lorde and the FU had financial issues over her guest professorship (327).

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differences among women. Lorde also intervened into German (feminist) discourses particularly with regard to racism. Lorde’s impact proved Schultz right in her intuition that the “warrior poet” had something to say to German women. This chapter examines Lorde’s specific influence (1) on discourses within the Afro-German community4 as a catalyst for an Afro-German movement and the formation of Afro-German identities, (2) within the feminist movement as an advocate of gender solidarity and anti-racism as well as (3) on German society and culture at large, for example as one of the voices claiming Germany as part of the black diaspora and as diasporic space. In contrast to African American writer-activists and ‘revolutionary divas’ like Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, Lorde hardly received any large-scale attention in German mainstream media. When, as part of my research for this study, I sent out inquiries to various (public) radio stations regarding material they might have in their archives on these four women, they usually found several pieces on Davis, Morrison, and Walker, but none on Lorde. Lorde gave interviews to German journalists and sometimes appeared in newspapers (primarily in taz and Der Tagesspiegel) but she did not receive major media attention.5 Yet, Lorde featured prominently in (independent) women’s magazines, feminist and lesbian journals, and publications of Afro-German organizations, and the articles, reviews, and publications of her works published there demonstrate her seminal role for these communities.6 Her actual presence and personal

4

Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay points out that “to speak of the African-German community may be a misnomer. Although there are 300,000 African Germans, there is no community of African Germans equivalent to the African-American communities of North Philadelphia, Detroit, or Harlem. However, there is, in a sense, a community of culture, or a psychological attachment to community, based upon the similarity of experiences” (ix). It is in this sense that I speak of an Afro-German community.

5

Some interviews conducted and/or published in Germany are collected in Conversations with Audre Lorde edited by Joan Wylie Hall.

6

Examples include the ISD’s afro look, the Bielefeld-based women’s journal Tarantel, or Frau ohne Herz: feministische Lesbenzeitschrift as well as other small magazines which published reviews of, or excerpts from Lorde’s writings.

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interactions with Germans contributed to Lorde’s importance for AfroGermans and women in particular much more than her mediated image or her published writings. In the same way that Lorde transformed many lives directly and indirectly, her work was influenced by her numerous visits to Germany, during which she developed personal friendships with several German women. Therefore, my analysis, first of all, examines how (West) Germany figures in Lorde’s thinking and writing and how her art and activism relate to her experiences in Germany. In this context, I also point out some tenets in Lorde’s thinking that were crucial to the development of Afro-German communities and (individual and collective) identities: for example, Lorde’s notion that art, life, and activism are inextricably intertwined, her belief in the empowering potential of differences, or her validation of the importance of breaking silences. In a next step, I examine Lorde’s function in this development with a particular focus on the significance of personal interactions. This includes the question of the more general function of African American culture as a role model or a source of inspiration for Afro-Germans. Though it evolved as a distinct and important movement in its own right, the Afro-German movement was influenced by transatlantic cultural exchanges that might be understood as specific forms of African Americanization in (West) Germany. The development of AfroGerman organizations, collectivities, and identities has contributed significantly to bringing issues such as racism, race, Germany’s colonial legacy, and national identity into German (mainstream) discourses and under scholarly and public scrutiny. The acts of claiming an Afro-German identity, of positioning black people as integral parts of German society, and of identifying racism as a German problem, necessitate a reconceptualization of Germany as a diasporic space. While the term Afro-German draws attention to the connections between Afro-Germans and other members of a (global) black diaspora, it also requires the location of Germany on the map of the black diaspora, a project for which Lorde’s work is usually viewed as having provided a vital impulse. Ultimately, her interactions with Germany and the development of Afro-German collectivities raise the question of gender solidarity ‘beyond the color line.’ The final part of this chapter will therefore also address this issue by closely examining how Afro-German and white women have worked together, how Lorde envisioned not only black solidarity but also global sisterhood, and how, in this context, solidarity has been practiced along the lines of gender and race. It combines the analysis

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of an expanded and revised black diasporic landscape which includes Germany with some first thoughts on the implications of viewing the diasporic experience as inherently gendered.

A UDRE L ORDE ’ S A RT

AND

A CTIVISM

Audre Lorde defined a very broad audience for her work: “My audience is every single person who can use the work I do” (Kraft, “The Creative Use” 152). Contrary to this claim, Lorde, like other lesbian authors such as Alice Walker, has often been wrongfully regarded as a separatist in her emphasis on women (Christian 789). Margaret Mills Harper, for example, holds that “[t]he characteristic stance of the American poet [Lorde] was separatist and combative” (185). In line with other critics, I propose that Lorde’s work can be read in a more complex light than merely regarding it as the manifestation of an ‘angry black woman’ (though anger was central to her work). I contend that, at close inspection, it emerges as challenging rather than combative and counter-divisive rather than separatist. These characteristics made her work accessible and relevant not exclusively to one specific group like women, black women, or lesbians and enabled it to resonate in different places, contexts, and discourses. In fact, Lorde held that women and above all black women were of particular importance for her and that she “[thinks] of [her] responsibility in terms of women because there are many voices for men” (Tate 104).7 More precisely, she claimed to write primarily “for those women who do not speak, who do not have verbalization because they, we, are so terrified” (“My Words” 161). Lorde sought to empower herself and others by speaking out and breaking silences; she always expected people and particularly women not only to listen but rather to answer to her call. She did not address women as a passive audience but

7

This focus correlates with the fact that she privileged mother-daughter relationships in her (autobiographical) writings. As Carmen Birkle has observed, Lorde, as a mother of both a son and a daughter, has hardly ever made her son the focus of her poetry, while her daughter (or daughters in general) figure prominently (184). Similarly, the relationship to her own mother plays a significant role both in Zami and in her poetry.

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wanted to dialogue with her “sisters” and tried to encourage them to raise their voices, which also bears witness to the fact that her art and social activism were inextricably intertwined. What is more, she frequently “asked members of the dominant communities to assume a responsibility for active listening” and for striving to overcome differences which might work to separate the audience from the speaker (Olson 448). Her writings were not only tied to her own experiences but also to her activism. She wanted women to respond to her ideas and she had a “need to hear their reaction to her work” (J. Hall ix). It was characteristic of her rhetoric to rely on what Lester Olson calls the technique of “confrontational consciousness-raising” (466). With its inclusive, rather than exclusionary approach, its activist stance and interactive openness, as well as its merging of art, life, and activism, Lorde’s radical poetics furthered the exchange and critical dialogue with her readers/listeners, especially with women and people of the black diaspora. Lexi Rudnitsky identifies “two theoretical assumptions that motivate much of Lorde’s writing: 1) that poetry is of primary importance, and 2) that conventional markers of identity are inadequate” (473). Margaret B. McDowell, in her study on Lorde, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Margaret Walker, regards all four women as “author-critics” but Lorde is the only one she views as “primarily a poet” (23). Carmen Birkle claims that for Lorde “poetry served two particular functions: on a personal level, she found expression of feelings otherwise hidden and allowed her poems to influence her life; on a political level, her poems were means to criticize social conditions […] and to stimulate and motivate political action.” (228)

Poetry, for Lorde, was also “the most economical” art form because it “is the most secret, […] requires the least physical labor, the least material, and [it] […] can be done in shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper” (“Age” 116). As poetry is a necessary prerequisite for survival and means for social change, language is a specifically powerful tool. It is a “site of struggle” as it can be both a “tool of domination and […] a vehicle for self-definition, community building, and resistance” and thus requires particular scrutiny (Olson 452, 453). Lorde saw the potential in poetry “to create a new language, which would, in turn, make possible a

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new social order” (Rudnitsky 473). As Pamela Annas holds for the woman poet in general: To “accept without question the language she is given” means to accept “a set of patriarchal, capitalist, racist, heterosexist assumptions which are built into the language and which, at the least, deny her an identity of her own” (10). Particularly for women “poetry is not a luxury” as Lorde’s well-known aphorism states. Rather, it becomes a possibility to “name the nameless so it can be thought” (“Poetry Is Not” 37). Poetry emerges as a knowledge generator and a motor of liberation. It partly debunks the white hegemonic European modes of knowledge production and their exclusionary practices and becomes a liberatory practice: “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each one of us – the poet – whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of this freedom.” (“Poetry Is Not” 38)

Lorde countered white patriarchy and rational thinking in the spirit of Western Enlightenment with a matrilineal black tradition that redefines liberation and claims emotion as a revolutionary tool and a means of knowledge production. And she concluded that any future liberation, innovation, and change might only come from this resource of power and knowledge because “there are no new ideas” but “only new ways of making them felt” (“Poetry Is Not” 39). Alexis Shotwell explains that Lorde conceived of poetry as an “agent for combining feeling and thinking” (26). Lorde’s poetics and also her idea of “the erotic” make a claim for taking tacit knowledge or, in Shotwell’s terminology, “implicit understanding” seriously and for using its potential for “personal and political transformation” (Shotwell ix). In “The Uses of the Erotic,” Lorde argues that oppression has led, for women, to a “suppression of the erotic as a source of power and information within [their] lives” (53). Hence the erotic8 constitutes a source which should be rediscovered by women and used for their empowerment; it is an

8

Lorde specified her understanding of the erotic: “[…] I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (“Uses of the Erotic” 55).

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alternative form of knowledge and a source of creativity, community, and social change.9 Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, Lorde expected her “own work to influence, support, educate, or change [her] readers” and she considered “literature to be an instrument of power” (McDowell 20; cf. also Lorde “Poet as Teacher”). She claimed to speak the “truth” as she saw it but never in any absolute terms: “I really feel if what I have to say is wrong, then there will be some woman who will stand up and say Audre Lorde was in error. But my words will be there, something for her to bounce off, something to incite thought, activity.” (Evans 263)

The major objective of Lorde’s work was to provide impulses for critical discussions, and poetry was her key mode of achieving this goal. However, Lorde neither compromised her multiple yet integrated identities (though she certainly employed them strategically) nor her primary concern for black women. The “I” of her speeches, writings, and poems, which is most often actually a “we,” is never easy to categorizes or pinpoint.10 As Lorde’s autobiographical text Zami: A New Spelling of My Name implies, identity is “an endless process of negotiating differences, of assuming and calling into question subsequent identifications” (Kley 137). Lorde’s poetry cannot be separated from her personality. She hoped “that as many people as possible can deal with my work and with who I am, that they will find something in my work which can be of use to them in their lives. But

9

Alice Walker, for example, “buil[t] upon Lorde’s revelations on the erotic in […] The Color Purple” and “reveal[ed] the ways in which the erotic can be the source of an empowering self-knowledge and liberation from the most debased forms of desire” (Byrd 17). Sharon Barnes affirms that “Lorde’s theory of the erotic […] creates an ethic of speech, community, and activism that affirms key elements of Alice Walker’s 1983 definition of womanism” (201).

10 Lorde defies easy categorization: “My critics have always wanted to cast me in a particular light. People do. It’s easier to deal with a poet, certainly with a Black woman poet, when you categorize her, narrow her so that she can fulfill your expectations. But I have always felt that I cannot be categorized. It has been my weakness and my strength” (“My Words” 160-61).

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if they do not, cannot, then we are all the losers. But then, perhaps their children will. But […] it has been very necessary and very generative for me to deal with all these aspects of who I am […]. I am not one piece of myself.” (“My Words” 162)

This quote reveals how much she expected from her audiences in terms of active listening and interaction with her work. In Lorde’s understanding, her poetry was intertwined with her life and activism; thus, it was also part and parcel of her fractured identity. Poetry is an act of self-actualization and a means to make a difference in ‘reality.’ In Lorde’s words, “[i]t makes you happen” and it is “not only dream and vision, it is the skeleton architect of our life” (“Poetry Makes” 184, 186). Lorde further stated: “[T]he question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. […] Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me […]” (“My Words” 164). Just as she inevitably connected art with activism, Lorde refused to draw a strict boundary between her life and her profession as a writer: “I cannot separate my life and my poetry. I write my living and I live my work” (“Self-Definition” 156). Lorde adhered to the feminist dictum that ‘the personal is political;’ one might even say that, for her, “the political is not only personal, it is lyrical” (Walk 828). Life, art, and activism emerged as interwoven aspects in her thinking. Her journal was a major basis for her poetry, basically the “raw material” for many of her poems and, as Lorde contended, art is “not living. It is a use of living” (“My Words” 165, 166) – and poetry specifically is a means to speak out. “For Lorde, ending silence is the first and most important step in ending both the political oppression as well as the psychological oppression of black women. Lorde provides a model for coming to speech – even in the face of fear, even in the face of fatigue, even in the absence of memory, even in the absence of feeling.” (Steele, We 29)

After she was diagnosed with cancer, Lorde advanced this notion with intensified urgency; because death constitutes the “final silence” voicing her observations, concerns, and demands gained significance (“Transformation” 41). Lorde concluded: “My silences did not protect me. Your silence will not protect you” (41). She used her own experience as an example to give advice to and to admonish her audience. Of course, this experience was also one infused with fear because the “transformation of silence into

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language and action is an act of self-revelation” (42). It is not difference but silence that is, for Lorde, a means of immobilization (44). In line with her call for breaking silences, Lorde always made a strong case for self-definition on an individual as well as collective level: “[I]f I, Audre Lorde, do not define myself, the outer world certainly will, and […] probably will define each one of us to our detriment, singly or in groups” (“Self-Definition” 156). In her self-fashioning, Lorde attempted to embrace all facets of her fragmented (yet whole) identity.11 She believed that prioritizing single identity markers and allowing others to use an individual part of your self has tremendously detrimental effects because it means “[d]eath to you as a woman, death to you as a poet, death to you as a human being” (157). Even though many aspects of her identity subjected her to oppression, marginalization, and exclusion, suppressing these elements, for Lorde, was not a healthy or useful option (“There is” 219). Lorde ultimately affirms, in her essay of the same title, that “[t]here is no hierarchy of oppression” (220). This thesis, which is a characteristic feature of her theoretical work, did not only pave the way for “the emergence, some years later, of Deborah King’s theory of multiple jeopardy and Kimberlee Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality” (Byrd 29). In fact, in this regard, Lorde and other women of color theorists took on a leading role as they “were the first to advance frameworks for understanding the intersection in women’s lives of gender, sexuality, race, and class as well as visions of multiracial coalition work” (Frankenberg 8). Lorde’s resistance against the hierarchization of oppression also made it possible for her to relate to other oppressed people with an appreciative rather than dismissive stance towards differences, which opened up the possibility of empowering alliances as well as multiple and changing affiliations. The conceptualization of difference appears as “a hallmark of Lorde’s writings” (Byrd 24). She regards diverse mechanisms of oppression such as racism, sexism, and

11 Lorde deliberately emphasized select aspects in her public self-identifications in order to provoke reactions. In an interview she stated: “I am a Black, Lesbian, Feminist, warrior, poet, mother doing my work. I underline these things, but they are just some of the ingredients of who I am. There are many others. I pluck these out because, for various reasons, they are aspects of myself about which a lot of people have had a lot to say, one way or another” (Rowell 195).

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homophobia as inseparable and does not grant the possibility that different forms of oppression could “be ranked, numbered, or prioritized” (Byrd 28). Lorde notes in “Difference and Survival” that there are “few patterns for relating across differences as equals” and if differences are not actively claimed they “are used against us in the service of separation and confusion, for we view them only in opposition to each other, dominant/ subordinate, good/bad, superior/inferior” (202). Her theory12 of difference does not deny ‘real’ differences in terms of race, age, sex, or class. Lorde holds that these differences are not in themselves reason for divisions or responsible for the loss of commonalities but “it is our refusal to examine the distortions which arise from their misnaming, and from the illegitimate usage of those differences which can be made when we do not claim them nor define them for ourselves” (202). Differences need not simply be “tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which […] creativity can spark like a dialectic” (Lorde, “Master’s” 111). Chinosole uses the terms “nonpolarized duality” and “creative irreconcilability” to grasp Lorde’s affirmation of difference (138). The “house of […] difference” that Lorde envisioned stands in direct contrast to the “master’s house” which – as the title of one of her speeches reveals – will never be dismantled by the master’s tools (“Difference” 203). She pleaded for a radical social transformation from “conquer and divide” to “define and empower” and called on women to realize this change (“Master’s” 112). Ultimately, she exposed what she termed the “mythical norm” – which in the US would be “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure” – that has to be unmasked as a means of power and oppression (“Age” 116).

12 Despite the significance of her theoretical texts for (black) feminist thinking, Lorde once said “that she doesn’t write theory. ‘I am a poet,’ she said” (Bereano 7). She destabilized the assumed opposition between poetry (or more generally literature and art) and theory (or more generally scholarship, knowledge, and science). For her, poetry was a means of knowledge-production. She also unsettled the dichotomy between body and mind, between rational and emotional, and invited reflections on the limitations of what is regarded as ‘theory.’ For example, William Major pointed out that The Cancer Journals “is a work of theory, but it has a body” and thus “it makes little sense to separate the two” (53-54).

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Lorde’s writings show traits of an essentialist conception of identity and categories of difference which she regarded as a given, for instance, race, sex/gender, and self, but I argue that it is possible to regard this as a form of “strategic essentialism” as put forward (though later abandoned) by postcolonial critic and theorist Gayatri Spivak (Danius, Jonsson, and Spivak 35).13 Lorde uses essentialist notions in her work as a means to achieve political goals. Lorde’s approach is in line with Spivak’s (deconstructivist) notion of strategic essentialism which she observes, for example, in the Subaltern Studies group and their intervention through a history written from below as a “strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (205). Brenda Carr claims that Lorde at the “intersection of multiple oppressions […] risks essentialism to affirm her own speaking and call other black lesbian women’s voices from silence” (138). In other words, her political agenda to strengthen black women’s voices and to intervene into hegemonic discourses submits her essentialist concepts to a strategic purpose of re-writing white (American) master-narratives. As Rudolph Byrd affirms, Lorde has made a significant contribution to black feminist thinking in terms of “a new critical social theory that provides us with the grammar and vocabulary to describe and define difference and the complex nature of oppression” (21).14 She positioned “lesbianism as a legitimate and powerful standpoint” and was “a national figure in the gay and lesbian movement” and, in addition to fighting heterosexism and homophobia, she claimed the erotic as a source of power (Byrd 12, 15, 17). Lorde’s public engagement with cancer and women’s health furthered a “greater national awareness” of these topics in the US (21). The Cancer Journals document her “illness experience as a function of certain social practices, such as medical intervention and the cult of beauty, that she would attempt to understand, oppose, and disrupt” (Major 45). Through the

13 Spivak explains in an interview that she dismissed this phrase because it became a “union ticket for essentialism” but has not abandoned the general idea of strategic essentialism (Danius, Jonsson, and Spivak 35). 14 However, Lorde’s theoretical work was not at all limited to black feminist thinking but extended into different academic spheres. This is also indicated by her nomination for an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Osnabrück, which, of course, underlines the relevance of her work in the German context.

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publication of these personal experiences Lorde “turns the private material of daily life into a political tool that encourages public discussion” (Wu 246). Similarly, through her refusal to wear a prosthesis, Lorde made visible the contours of her post-mastectomy body as the sign of her illness. As Cynthia Wu argues, in both cases, she “turns the tendency towards the private” and secrecy (of diary-writing and of using a prosthesis) “on its head” (254). Lorde claims control over her body and her usage of military metaphors “posits the person with cancer as the agential soldier” (Wu 259). In general, Lorde’s texts interpellate her readers/listeners as active and potentially activist subjects endowed with a certain degree of power which she encouraged them to use to their advantage. This is, I argue, one of the numerous aspects in Lorde’s thinking, writing, and activism that lend themselves readily to forge connections across national, racial, and gender divides. Several other characteristics of her art and activism emerge as invaluable preconditions for Lorde’s vital role for Afro-Germans and German feminists: specifically, her proto-intersectional approach, her embrace of differences, her openness in terms of possible alliances, solidarities, and coalitions as well as her outspokenness against all forms of oppression. She thought that activism had to be inclusive and comprehensive in the sense that “there is no single-issue struggle because we don’t live single-issue lives” (“Learning” 138). According to Jennifer Michaels, Lorde’s affirmative views on difference and “multiple parts of identity” particularly “resonated with Afro-German women because they had experienced difference as negative when they were growing up” (27). Along with her radical critique of white feminist racism, white feminist complicity in patriarchal and racist power structures, and homophobia she also extended an invitation to those she criticized: “We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt” (“Uses of Anger” 133). Aimee Carrillo Rowe holds in her 2008 study Power Lines that the “critique of white feminism […] is compulsory” and that “it arises not from a space of separation from, but from an impetus towards connection. That is, the absence of such critiques signals a process of subalternization, whereas their presence is a function of alliance.” (177)

Lorde’s openness to interracial dialogue, cooperation, and alliances is reflected in the Afro-German movement which was primarily advanced by

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Afro-German women but also involved white women from the start. Yet, Lorde also emphasized the connections between women of African descent particularly. With regard to African American women she states: “We are African women and we know, in our blood’s telling, the tenderness with which our foremothers held each other. It is that connection which we are seeking. […] We know the possibilities of support and connection for which we all yearn, and about which we dream so often. […] But connections between Black women are not automatic by the virtue of our similarities, and the possibilities of genuine communication between us are not easily achieved.” (“Eye to Eye” 152-53)

This early call for unity, self-respect, and care among black American women in order to build up communal bonds would become even more encompassing with Lorde’s growing awareness of people of African descent in other countries (like Germany). Her emphasis on black (women’s) solidarity figured in the process of positioning Germany as part of the black diaspora. Lorde has been criticized frequently for “not writing in a voice that specifically marks her discourse as African American”15 (Heacock 171) but, I argue, this quality might have contributed to making her work relevant for a broad range of readers of different nationalities, sexes and sexualities, races, and ages, and to her influential position as writer/activist/theorist on an international scale. Lorde was interested in meeting women of the African diaspora and she claimed that when she came to Berlin in 1984, it was “one of [her] aims […] to meet Black German women” (“Showing” 67). Meeting these women did not only “[serve] as a catalyst for events that would radically change Afro-German history” and the development of Afro-German women’s communities (El-Tayeb, “If” 74), but also made a strong impression on Lorde herself. As she writes in her journal which has been published as “A Burst of Light,” she enjoyed her stay in Berlin,16 was excited by meeting

15 This is, according to Maureen C. Heacock, one of the reasons why Lorde is usually not associated with, anthologized as part of, or read as proponent of Black Arts, even though her “work corresponds very well with this period” (166). 16 As Alexis de Veaux writes, the trip to Germany was also important for Lorde, who had been diagnosed with a liver tumor, on a very personal level, since it

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black German women and was especially happy that her classes attracted a growing number of black women. Lorde mentions the pleasure she derived from working with Afro-German women on becoming self-aware and developing a collective identity. Traveling through Europe, meeting AfroEuropean, and especially Afro-German women was central to Lorde’s appraisal and development of her own work. Her journal entry of June 10, 1984 reads: “For the first time I really feel that my writing has a substance and stature that will survive me. I have done good work” (61). Because of her interest in Afro-German women, personal friendships as well as her cancer treatment in Berlin Lorde kept coming back to Germany every year (with the exception of 1985) until her death. Germany and Afro-German women remained an issue for Lorde and became part of her writing, activism, and thinking. Some of her poetry engages more or less explicitly with her experiences in Germany; for example, “This Urn Contains Earth from German Concentration Camps” deals with “the Holocaust and Germany’s lack of confrontation with its Nazi past” (Michaels 22), and “Berlin is Hard on Colored Girls” addresses the situation of black women in Germany. In her poem “East Berlin,” which is collected in the posthumously published The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, the voice explicitly states that “[i]t feels dangerous now to be Black in Berlin” and mentions an “Afro-German woman stomped to death / by skinheads in Alexanderplatz” (50). The poem demonstrates its author’s familiarity with the political and social developments in Germany, which increasingly saw violent racist excesses after its reunification, as well as her concern for Afro-German women. She also documented her experiences in Germany in “A Burst of Light” and other lectures and publications and she got actively involved in German discourses on racism and feminism. Michaels correctly holds that Lorde “proved herself a perceptive and outspoken commentator on events in Germany” (22). For example, in 1988, Lorde described Berlin as a “very calm city” but also “an extremely white city” and she observed that in contrast to the US or Britain the whiteness of Berlin “encourage[d] a certain smug assumption” (Parmer and Kay 171). Because there were so few black people, there was “little question of in-

helped her “to allay her depression,” in which she feared to slide at that time (340).

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teraction” and blacks were often objectified (e.g. stared at with hostility or mere curiosity), as Lorde said. She pointed out that Berlin was, in fact, a segregated city with a white population that was “isolated from Black people” and that “defend[ed] that separation” (171, 171-72). According to Lorde, white Berliners “are interested in dealing with racism in America, and in England, but are much less prepared to deal with racism in terms of their Turkish and Middle Eastern workers who are the ‘Black people’ of Germany. That would bring racism too close to home.” (Parmar and Kay 172)

Two examples particularly attest to Lorde’s involvement in German culture and society: First, Lorde noticed the isolation in which most Afro-German women lived in the early 1980s and actively encouraged them to establish communities. This was especially important for Afro-German women who were not only isolated but hardly noticed in a country which repressed its colonial past and – at best – ignored the existence of a black population. Lorde was older than most of the Afro-German women active in the movement at that time and due to her political and activist experience Lorde could take on the role of mentor, elder, and guide. Second, during her last summer in Germany in 1992, Lorde together with her partner Gloria Joseph condemned the pogrom in Rostock in a letter to Chancellor Helmut Kohl which was published in several German newspapers. They questioned the meaning of the developments in Germany for the “international community of people of color” and pointed towards the damage that this incident might have inflicted on the public image of Germany (Schultz, “Audre Lorde – ihr Kampf” 172). Lorde’s concern for people of African descent in Germany (and the world) was not diminished by her struggle against cancer, of which she died the same year. She tried not to allow her illness to interfere with her political activism, and this attitude certainly contributed to the respect and appreciation with which (Afro-German) women viewed her and her work.17 However, just as the voice of her above-mentioned poem,

17 Lorde was an activist throughout her life in numerous countries and contexts. Among other things, she was involved in the founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, and in the establishment of the Women’s Coalition at St.

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Lorde herself did no longer feel safe in Germany. In 1990, she wrote about a poetry reading in Dresden: “For the first time in six years I am afraid as I read my poetry in Germany” (“Showing” 71). As early as 1986, Lorde had drawn attention to German racism: “Even here [West Germany], she [Lorde] says, she has occasionally encountered racism. Her impression is that the people in the Federal Republic do not intend to be racist, but they are not working hard enough at overcoming the remnants of racism.” (Nolte, “Law” 145)

In her contribution to the 1992 edition of Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte, Lorde explains her concern about the developments in Germany with regard to racism and violence but also her vision of a “global feminism” and a changed German nation at the center of Europe, in which Afro-Germans play a central role: “Reunified, [Germany] will once again represent a powerful force in European affairs. Historically, this force has not always been a peaceful one. A new Germany’s potential power, and their relative part in influencing its direction, are part of the destiny of African-Germans, as the political positions of the United States are part of the destiny of African-Americans.”18 (235)

She also draws a parallel between African Americans and Afro-Germans, indicating that there are issues to which both groups can relate. Recognizing such connections constitutes, for Lorde, the necessary prerequisite for a global feminism, and she calls for American and African American women alike to realize that “[they] are not alone in [their] world situation” (“Showing” 71). Lorde herself developed “deep bonds with Afro-German women and with other women’s communities in Germany” and encouraged the transatlantic dialogue between women in general and women of African descent in particular (J. Hall xv). Her own connections with Afro-European

Croix on Virgin Islands. Lorde was active for SISA (Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa) and CAFRA (Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action). 18 This translation is taken from Lorde, “Showing” (70).

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women played a crucial role for “the globalization of her consciousness of women of color” and contributed to her continuing role as an advocate for gender and black solidarity across national borders (Veaux 340). With regard to Afro-German women’s history and present situation, Lorde stated that clearly “[their] war is the same” and positioned them within an “international community of people of color” (“Showing” 68, 69). Consequently, she supported several developments: the emergence of Afro-German communities, a sensitization of white German feminists to their complicity in racism and oppression, and, not the least, the negotiation of Germany’s position within the black diaspora. Lorde’s work did not resonate as widely in mainstream mass media as that of other African American women writers (e.g. Alice Walker or Toni Morrison), but her words and actions resonated deeply in the feminist and Afro-German movements and established a lasting legacy in Germany.

A FRO -G ERMAN I DENTITIES , W OMEN ’ S C OMMUNITIES , AND L ORDE ’ S L EGACY IN G ERMANY Lorde’s work reached (out to) German and Afro-German women and influenced German discourses on issues such as feminism, identity, ethnicity, sexuality, and racism. In order to exercise this influence, Lorde had to enable her cultural work to cross language, cultural, national, and racial boundaries. Her literal crossing of the Atlantic and actual presence in Germany certainly fostered this process and, according to contemporary witnesses, meeting her personally constituted a significant, fascinating, and possibly even life-altering event for many. Lorde inspired her students at the Free University to move beyond close readings and structural analyses by taking into account the emotional potential of the works and their own affective reactions towards the poems. Schultz describes how thousands of people throughout Europe were fascinated by Lorde’s lectures and readings, her charisma as well as her poetry and her political thinking (“Vorwort” Auf Leben und Tod 10, 8). For Lorde’s impact on German culture and society her presence in the country was fundamental because it allowed for a direct and relatively unmediated dialogue and added weight to her messages. This is particularly true for her role in the development of AfroGerman women’s communities. Schultz, in this context, speaks about the

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importance of Lorde’s presence rather than her work or her mediated images (“Vorwort” Auf Leben und Tod 8), and Stefanie Kron highlights Lorde’s active involvement by crediting her as a major initiator of this movement (114). Ria Cheatom, in a conversation with Nicola Lauré alSamarai and other activists, describes how Lorde encouraged Afro-German women to recognize each other. She recalls a reading in Stuttgart which many white women attended and where also some black women were among the audience. However, these black women did not know each other and sat scattered across the room. After the reading, Lorde asked the white women to leave the room (Lauré al-Samarai et al.351). Cheatom states: “Plötzlich sah ich die anderen Schwarzen Frauen, auch solche, die ich vielleicht nicht auf den ersten Blick erkannt hätte, die aber geblieben waren. Audre ermunterte uns, aufeinander zuzugehen und den Raum nicht eher zu verlassen, bevor nicht eine mit der anderen gesprochen hätte. […] Das war ein phänomenaler Moment in meinem Leben.”19 (Lauré al-Samarai et al. 351)

Though Lorde’s lectures, readings, and meetings with her audience were a vital part of her work, the publication of her writings in German was necessary for addressing a larger German public. The publication history of her works in Germany also shows the intended primary audience addressed by the publishing houses and allows for speculations about the discourses which Lorde, in fact, influenced the most. Of course, as Marion Kraft states in her preface to Die Quelle unserer Macht, translating her writings culturally and linguistically is not an easy task (12). Renate Stendhal would probably agree with this notion because Macht und Sinnlichkeit includes her “Anmerkungen der Übersetzerin” [Translator’s Notes] in order to sensitize the German readership for the problems of translation.20 There are several means by which the publishers

19 “Suddenly I saw the other Black women, even those whom I would not have recognized at first sight but who had stayed. Audre encouraged us to approach one another and to not leave the room before one had talked to the other. […] This was a phenomenal moment in my life.” 20 Stendhal primarily discusses the terms power and anger, for which German equivalents are particularly hard to find. In her notes, she also thanks Lorde for

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of Lorde’s work tried to enhance its accessibility and to pave the way for a broad reception of her work in Germany. However, according to West Berlin author Traude Bührmann: “Female authors like Audre Lorde […] are, in fact, nominally known to many; however, it seems they are hardly ever read. That is they are virtually not sold at all over here.” (qtd. in Morrien 10)

Gender solidarity was important for marketing strategies of Lorde’s works. Most of her writings were published by Orlanda (formerly sub rosa) Frauenverlag [Women’s Press] and primarily addressed a female audience. In 1990, Lorde described the feminist publishing house as the “only voice bringing up issues of women and anti-Semitism in the German Women’s Movement” (“Letter” 8). Orlanda not only kept up Lorde’s focus on women and particularly black women but also her activism. For example, in 1987, the publishing house hired its first Afro-German staff member and its leadership has since turned into an ‘integrated’ team after realizing that they could not possibly go on publishing books on anti-Semitism or racism while, at the same time, having an all-white management (Schultz, “Witnessing” 524). The first edition of Auf Leben und Tod: Krebstagebuch, the German version of The Cancer Journals, includes a German woman’s personal record of dealing with breast cancer. Waltraut Ruf’s testimony supports the impression that Lorde’s book is relevant for women regardless of nationality, sexuality, or ethnicity, and she explicitly states that Lorde has found the words which speak to every woman (103). Also, the German edition includes a list of self-help and support groups and its readers are encouraged to contact the publishing house, which promises that every letter will be answered. Even books like Auf Leben und Tod that have been taken up by a larger German publishing house (Fischer) have been marketed almost exclusively as women’s literature. In the Fischer edition of Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, the original subtitle is substituted by Ein Leben unter Frauen [A Life among Women], emphasizing the aspect of women’s communities

her anger and her impatience with which she pursued her educational work informing white female ‘ignoramuses’ about racism (13).

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over the personal account of Lorde. Moreover, the blurb states that “Audre Lordes Autobiographie ist ein kämpferisches Zeugnis für die Sache der Frauen” [Audre Lorde’s autobiography is a warrior’s testimony for the women’s cause]. Additionally, Auf Leben und Tod (first published in Germany in 1984) opened up a venue for discussing breast cancer, a topic which had largely been off-limits before (Ruf 104). Schultz retrospectively asserts in her preface to its 2000 edition that Auf Leben und Tod was the first book in Germany to openly deal with breast cancer (5).21 Kraft hopes that blacks, white women, and men would use Lorde’s oeuvre to better understand themselves, their life conditions, and the power of language but, in Germany, Lorde’s works mainly circulated within feminist and black discourses (“Vorwort” 13). Lorde describes one of her German audiences at a reading in Dresden as consisting mainly of “white women, and young Afro-German men and women” (“Showing” 70) and Felicitas Hoppe in her much disputed article about Lorde’s commemoration in Berlin emphasizes the fact that, in the end, even one man showed up (15). It seems that particularly for white women, Lorde and her work posed a challenge or even elicited guilt. Liliane Studer, in 1989, reflected on her meeting with Lorde for the Swiss women’s magazine Emanzipation and addressed her own discomfort and anxiety. She stated that she experienced a strange feeling of guilt because she was a white middle-class heterosexual woman who lived in one of the world’s wealthiest countries (8). While she realized that her initial reaction was unnecessary and even nonsensical, she further pointed out the need for all women to “think, reflect, act” (8). Similarly, in the same year, Mechthild Bausch and Marlies Rademacher declared their article on a reading of Lorde’s in Hamburg a response to her challenging question posed to the audience: “What is your work?” They

21 Lorde remembered an episode that shows how difficult the confrontation with this topic was for German women at that time: “I have a lot of respect for someone like Ms. X, a woman I met in Germany, when I said something about cancer. The look on her face was just, yuck, why did you mention it! […] And I mentioned then, of course, my book, The Cancer Journals. But she did say that is one thing I have a terrible fear of. […] And I said something about, well, that’s why I wrote it, to help get over that fear” (Schultz, “Audre Lorde on Her Cancer Illness” 136).

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affirmed that Lorde was less known in West Germany than other African American women writers and regarded her writings “[o]bwohl pointiert […] manchmal banal” [sometimes banal (…) though pointed]. Bausch and Rademacher summarized their experience of the reading in the concluding lines of their article: “Das ist, als ob eine Hexe aus einem Shakespeare-Drama leibhaftig rezitiert. Auch wenn Audre Lorde vielleicht keine Hexen und keine Shakespeare-Dramen mag.”22 Lorde’s difference is contained in the white western tradition of a Shakespeare drama but she still is marked as Other and outsider through the comparison to a witch. Through this (highly problematic, but equally telling) simile, the authors reveal their struggle to translate their experience of Lorde’s reading into an adequate language and to transport the gist of the atmosphere to the readers. They preempt objections to their comparison with a smug dismissal of Lorde’s possible dislike of witches and of Shakespeare. Their article reveals their inability to deal with her work and her writings as well as her performance and presence. Lorde openly addressed racism in Germany, for example, when she voiced her opinion that Germans did not work hard enough to overcome racism; or when she articulated her feeling of denigration upon viewing advertisements for the sweets called “Negerküsse,” [Negro’s Kisses] and “Mohrenköpfe” [Moor’s Heads]23 and counters the notion that these would be innocent terms without an (underlying) racist agenda (Ahrens 23). Lorde’s interventions offered a critical view on German race relations, racism, and an informed outsider’s view of German society and culture. Lorde’s work and activism, however, became most important where it could travel along lines of gender and black solidarity: Setting racism on the feminist agenda was crucial for Afro-German women’s development of self-definitions, collective and individual identities, and communities as well as relation to feminist discourses. Cheatom claims that Lorde “was the best that could have happened to us” and calls her the “mother of the movement” (Lauré al-Samarai et al. 351).

22 “It is as if a witch would recite a Shakespeare drama in person. Even though Audre Lorde might like neither witches nor Shakespeare’s dramas.” 23 Because of the racist connotations of these two terms, these sweets are now primarily called “Schaumküsse” [Foam Kisses] or “Schokoküsse” [Chocolate Kisses] or referred to by brand names like Dickmann’s.

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Together with black German women, Lorde coined the term AfroGerman in analogy to Afro-American. This moment “was not the birth of a black German consciousness,” but it “symbolises the central role that US activism had for Afro-Germans” (El-Tayeb, “If” 66). The term was quickly established and the editors of Farbe bekennen describe its (intended) meaning in the following words: “By the term ‘Afro-German’ we mean all those who wish to refer to themselves as such, regardless of whether they have one or two black parents. Just as with the similar name ‘Black Germans,’ our intent is not to exclude on the basis of origin or skin color. […] More important, we want to propose ‘Afro-German’ in opposition to more commonly used names like ‘half-breed,’ ‘mulatto,’ or ‘colored,’ as an attempt to define ourselves instead of being defined by others.”24 (10)

Introducing Black German or Afro-German not only means substituting older, negatively connoted terms with new ones but also symbolizes the growing agency of Afro-Germans and their claim to self-determination and self-definition. It demonstrates the power of language and of breaking silences that Lorde propagated. In fact, renaming also figures prominently in Lorde’s oeuvre, perhaps most evidently in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. According to Pamela Annas, the “literature of the dispossessed” in general is characterized by the process of renaming, which follows five stages from (1) the acceptance of the definition of self by the dominant culture to (2) the awareness of two definitions of self (“dual consciousness”) to (3) the first step towards renaming, namely, unnaming to (4) the actual redefinition and renaming of the self and, eventually, to the point when (5) the “renamed self renames the world” (11-12). This process occurs in Lorde’s writing but can, more or less, be applied to the renaming of Afro-German women (and men) who, ultimately, create their own name, their own view of themselves and of their world. Additionally, it is decisive and certainly in line with Lorde’s agenda that it is women who take these important steps towards a ‘conscious’ black German identity and community. These women took the lead towards a new Afro-German self-

24 This translation is taken from the 1992 English edition of Farbe bekennen which is entitled Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out (cf. xxii-xxiii).

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understanding and their claim to self-definition has entered public discourse with the terms afrodeutsch and Afrodeutsche which are listed in the German dictionary Duden as of 2006 (“Afrodeutsch”); however, Afro-German is frequently replaced by black German which de-emphasizes the connection to Africa, or Afro-European, which, of course, highlights the European identity in combination with Africa and the African diaspora.25 Karin Obermeier assesses the meaning of this neologism: “The adoption of the neologism ‘Afro-German’ acknowledges possible relationships to various African traditions and particularly to the Afro-American movement to achieve a cultural and political identity within a dominant white culture. And as women, these Afro-Germans are struggling under the double oppression(s) of race and gender.” (173)

The term acknowledges the influence of the African American movement and establishes connections with other members of the African diaspora. It is a visible and verbal sign for the development of (transnational) diasporic identities, which can be seen, as Carmen Faymonville suggests, as a logical consequence of the fact that black Germans are excluded from mainstream culture and, therefore, turn towards and rediscover their connection to the “more than three quarters of the world’s population who are regarded neither ‘white’ nor ‘western’” (366). Faymonville points out that in a country which deliberately ignores its increasing transnationalization and clings to a monocultural and homogenous self-image this tendency can provide vital impulses for a reconfiguration of “nation spaces” (366). This act of

25 I primarily use the term Afro-German, which seems to have been prevalent in the early years of the Afro-German movement, to underline its connection to African American. However, I mostly use the term black diaspora instead of African diaspora (which is only employed in contexts that especially emphasize the interconnections with Africa or that refer exclusively to the diasporic communities which resulted from the transatlantic slave trade). I am aware of the potentially essentialist notion implied in black diaspora, but I still regard it as more inclusive than African diaspora which presumes a connection to Africa and privileges black diasporic narratives including Africa as homeland, place of return, or imaginary space.

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naming constitutes a politically and symbolically relevant step as it combines a claim to Germanness with the belonging to the African diaspora. The terms black Germans and Afro-Europeans emphasize slightly different alliances, affiliations, and potential solidarities; nonetheless, all of these terms claim a form of double belonging to Europe/Germany as well as to an African diaspora. This dual affiliation unsettles not only white hegemony in Europe and unmasks the implicit whiteness of terms like ‘European’ or ‘German’ but also marks Europe/Germany as a diasporic space, locating it on the map of the African diaspora. It is a crucial intervention towards a critical whiteness, a renegotiation of (trans)national identities, and the constitution of a black voice – or rather, multiple black voices joining a common call. Gisela Fremgen’s edited volume …und wenn du noch dazu schwarz bist: Berichte schwarzer Frauen in der Bundesrepublik (1984), which appeared two years before Farbe bekennen, further confirms that black women were at the forefront of an emerging Afro-German movement. Both publications relied on a “documentary approach to expose discrimination” (Hopkins, “Race” 11). However, as Leroy Hopkins observes, while the women in …und wenn du noch dazu schwarz bist mainly described their “confrontations with discrimination,” the black women speaking out in Farbe bekennen additionally express their “determination to overcome it” (“Race” 11). Farbe bekennen provides “a unique combination of personal histories, poems, group discussions, and scholarly texts” (Obermeier 172), and it is particularly “linked to feminism in general and US black feminists in particular” (El-Tayeb, “If” 76). Its publication counts as a milestone in Afro-German history. Working on the book for the Afro-German editors meant beginning to build a network, to contact other Afro-German women, and to discuss their experiences.26 Until then, as they state in their preface, these women had largely been isolated and used to dealing with their heritage and their identity on their own (9). Its publication furthered the development of a network between Afro-German women and also was a first

26 As Afro-Germans, they share a common experience. Katharina Oguntoye and May Opitz briefly delineate this experience: “Our essential commonality is that we are black and have experienced a major part of our socialization in confrontation with West German society” (xxii).

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major appearance before the public – drawing attention to a long-ignored part of German history and society as well as to German racism. It additionally constitutes a first approach towards rewriting German history from the perspective of black Germans and understanding the – at best – marginalized situation of Afro-Germans through historical, theoretical, and personal reflections. The fact that the group of editors also included a white woman (Dagmar Schultz) productively complicates the meaning and implications of this publication. It attests to the necessity and possibilities for women to work together ‘across the color line’ in order to achieve their (political) goals. That this was painful for white feminists becomes clear in Schultz’s account of white women’s encounters with Afro-Germans at readings of Farbe bekennen. She writes: “Sie fühlen sich angegriffen, brechen in Tränen aus, und werden oft eilends von einer ganzen Gruppe weißer Frauen getröstet. Die Flucht in den Opferstatus ist scheinbar der einfachere Weg.”27 (“Witnessing” 524)

It appears to be easier for white women to resort to their own status as victims rather than to actually confront their complicity in racism, oppression, and (epistemic) violence. Their reaction evades the potential to critically deal with whiteness as a “location of structural advantage, of race privilege,” as a “standpoint,” and as a “set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed” (Frankenberg 1). Aimee Rowe asserts that often “feminist efforts to build inclusive and transformative alliances […] fail” and that “[w]hen it becomes easier to turn away than to touch the blemished interface between us, isolation and anger, pain and defensiveness keep us from our own healing” (2). Symbolically, Farbe bekennen opens up possibilities of a critical dialogue about whiteness, feminism, and racism for all women. The project was based in Berlin but its effects did reach “beyond the Berlin group of black women, influencing the first national meeting of

27 “They feel offended, burst into tears, and often hurriedly receive consolation from a whole group of white women. The escape into victimhood apparently constitutes the easier way out.”

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black Germans, which took place in Wiesbaden in 1985” (El-Tayeb, “If” 75). This meeting was significant for Afro-Germans, as Helga Emde explains in her article “I Too Am German – An Afro-German Perspective,” whose title also references the African American tradition as it alludes to Langston Hughes’s poem “I, too,” which ends with the claim “I, too, am America” (275). She states that the meeting was a “historical moment” and describes it as “overwhelming” and “breathtaking” (40). Emde was not only active in the ISD but also involved in the book project Farbe bekennen. Audre Lorde’s contribution to this project is acknowledged by her greeting included in the volume which addresses Afro-German women as part of the African diaspora and recognizes their important work. However, throughout Farbe bekennen Afro-German women speak for themselves. Their volume “breaks many silences: the silence of isolation, the silence of non- or misidentification, the silence of self-denial” (Obermeier 172). Obermeier also links it to the (West) German history of the American occupation and postwar (African) Americanizations: “The so-called ‘children of the occupation’ (‘Besatzungskinder’) have grown up and – for the first time – are speaking out against their (un)official status as a ‘special problem’ (‘Sonderproblem’).” (172)

Farbe bekennen has to be read within the context of postwar German history but also has developed a lasting legacy of its own. The multiple effects of the book can be seen on different discursive levels through the introduction of new terms, perspectives, and topics and through new participants (or discourse subjects), primarily Afro-German women. Within the public debate about Afro-German identity it can also be read as part of a counterdiscourse to the dominant paradigm that defines Germany not explicitly but inevitably as ‘white’ and Germanness as largely constituted through ‘whiteness.’ In Michelle Wright’s terminology, black Germans are frequently misrecognized as “Other-from-Without” rather than viewed as “Other-fromWithin” (as are African Americans in the US). They are viewed as blacks in Germany rather than as black Germans and perceived as foreigners even though they share the same language and culture. Wright points out: “As many authors in Farbe bekennen complain, too many white Germans are either resistant or incapable of imagining someone who is both Black and

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German” (“Other-from-Within” 298). Farbe bekennen, which was also Wright’s first encounter with Afro-German history, had numerous, practical and visible effects for Afro-Germans. In the mid-1980s, the ISD (Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland e.V.) as well as ADEFRA (Schwarze deutsche Frauen/Schwarze Frauen in Deutschland e.V.) were founded. They provided forums for exchange among Afro-Germans, not the least through their respective publications afro look and Afrekete,28 and established themselves as significant institutions in Germany. In 1992 several ISD groups already existed in German cities (today, the ISD website lists more than ten active groups) and ADEFRA celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006.29 Since 1985 the ISD organizes the annual Black History Month in Berlin, which is yet another sign of the indebtedness of Afro-German activism to an African American tradition. Lorde’s influence was, for example, acknowledged as she was invited to the third anniversary of ISD Berlin as honorary guest (Oguntoye 18). Yet, as Hopkins correctly claims such evidence of African American influences on Afro-Germans is “indicative not of a desire to imitate but rather the need to identify culturally with Blackness” and it shows that a “diasporic consciousness lies at the center of what is emerging as Afro-German expressive culture” (“Race” 15, 21). The editors of Farbe bekennen estimated the influence of their project in the early 1990s: May Opitz and Katharina Oguntoye pointed out that it had contributed to a change in German social conditions but Afro-German self-articulation and agency continued to be necessary (10, 12). In fact, Afro-Germans had become more visible in German society and Afro-German communities had been developed. Yet, racism in its open and subtle forms had continued and the lack of social recognition and integration still constituted a major problem. Schultz also addressed developments in the

28 The magazine afro look originally appeared as Onkel Tom’s Faust [Uncle Tom’s Fist] but after the first edition, the title instigated so much protest and debate that it was changed to afro look. Afrekete refers to the divine African trickster figure and also recalls Lorde’s prominent use of this figure in Zami. For an analysis of Lorde’s references to Afrekete in Zami see Kley (122-25). 29 For a detailed account of the development of Afro-German communities see Part II in TheBlackBook: Deutschlands Häutungen published by AntiDiskriminierungsBüro Köln and cyberNomads.

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white women’s movement: As Afro-German women confronted their white ‘sisters’ and dialogues across racial boundaries became possible, racism and anti-Semitism appeared on the feminist agenda (14). She additionally emphasized the importance of Lorde’s lectures and readings where white women had the chance to discuss with the African American author (14), who was perceived by the Afro-German communities as “one of their most inspiring leaders and organizers” (Wright, Becoming Black 196). In 2005, Schultz again looked back to evaluate the legacy of the 1980s and 1990s: “Die Bündnispolitik, um die Schwarze und weiße Frauen in den 1980er und 1990er Jahren gerungen haben, ist in Deutschland auf organisatorischer Ebene nur ansatzweise verwirklicht. Eine wachsende Anzahl weißer Frauen hat aber gelernt, dass weiß nicht die Norm ist. Dieses Verständnis kann hoffentlich zur Entwicklung einer internationalen, interkulturellen Frauenbewegung auf globaler und lokaler Ebene beitragen.”30 (“Witnessing” 526)

Lorde’s input enriched the lives and critical thinking of many white women but it was essential to the Afro-German movement and especially AfroGerman women; however, Afro-German women’s own initiatives and the general zeitgeist were equally important factors. Eleonore Wiedenroth-Coulibaly affirms that the isolated black Germans had nothing to lose; the “time was ripe” and black Germans created new spaces in order to connect with each other almost simultaneously at different places of the FRG (404). For example, when Lorde first visited Germany in 1984, Fremgen had already published …und wenn du dazu noch schwarz bist. Even earlier, in 1973, Karin Thimm and Du Rell Echols had published Schwarze in Deutschland: Protokolle. Lorde’s influence apparently met with an already emerging black consciousness. Ekpenyong Ani states that many women followed Lorde’s call in Farbe bekennen and began to build networks of which ADEFRA was one of the first (145). She aptly describes Lorde’s role for

30 “The coalition politics black and white women fought for in the 1980s and 1990s are only rudimentarily realized on an organizational level in Germany. An increasing number of white women has, however, understood that white is not the norm. This insight can hopefully contribute to the development of an international intercultural women’s movement on a global and local level.”

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this movement: Her call reached Germany at a time when black consciousness and feminist concerns were emerging and made it possible for her voice to resonate with far-reaching effects. And, in fact, women and feminist issues were crucial for the Afro-German movement at that time (ElTayeb, “If” 66). Lorde’s activism and Farbe bekennen have developed a continuing legacy in German and maybe even European discourses about ethnicity, race, and gender.31 For example, Ika Hügel, Dagmar Schultz, May Ayim et al. have edited a book on racism, anti-Semitism, and class oppression in order to initiate further discussions among women which might then, as the editors hope, lead to coalitions enabling political activism and interventions (13). In Entfernte Verbindungen: Rassismus, Antisemitismus, Klassenunterdrückung, they acknowledge Lorde’s influence as they dedicate the collection to the writer-activist and her legacy and preface it with an epigraph by Lorde. However, they take the title from May Ayim’s poem “entfernte verbindungen” which is also included in the volume (cf. 15-16). Thereby, the political, scholarly, and literary activism of Afro-German women takes center stage. TheBlackBook, which assembles texts and essays dealing with the Afro-German past and present historically, theoretically, and practically, was published in 2004 and its editors locate it in the tradition of publications like Farbe bekennen (9).32 Also, for Stefanie Kron this book was her first encounter with Afro-German history and literature, which ultimately led to the publication of her study on Afro-German women’s writing (9).

31 Already in 1989, Karin Obermeier constituted that “[i]nterestingly, Audre Lorde and other Afro-American women writers have reached a wide audience among feminists and American Studies scholars in the FRG. Yet this reception is often characterized by a perceived lack of relevancy for the German context – issues of racism tend to be treated from a position of privilege and seen as confined to US society” (179). 32 The title of the book also links it to the African American (literary) tradition as it alludes to The Black Book (1974) edited by Middleton A. Harris, Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith with the support of Toni Morrison, who was at that time an editor at Random House. The book provided a unique documentation of the African American experience.

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Kron and Michaels point out that Afro-German women writers were especially influenced by Lorde. Michaels explains that Lorde “inspired May Ayim, Helga Emde, Ika Hügel-Marshall, and others to write” and her poetics “shaped the content and form chosen by Afro-German writers” (21, 30). Her inspiration manifests itself in the choice of autobiographical forms, the depiction of individual and collective experiences as, for example, in the case of Ika Hügel or the preference for poetry, which Lorde regarded the most democratic literary genre, and politically engaged literature as, for example, in the case of May Ayim (Michaels 31-32). The numerous autobiographies by Afro-German male and female authors have been essential in the assertion of a black German identity and in raising an awareness of Afro-German realities in German society. The genre of the autobiography lends itself readily to making claims of self-identification, self-definition, and (national) belonging and to create accounts which might be regarded as ‘authentic’ (yet subjective) testimonies by their readership. Afro-German autobiographies reflect on the situation of Afro-Germans and, more importantly, establish the Afro-German subject as speaking subject, as an authority and active agent in the process of creating his/her (life) narration. Hügel-Marshall, for example, relates in Daheim unterwegs: Ein deutsches Leben (1998)33 not only her coming-of-age as a “Besatzungskind,” her ‘discovery’ of other Afro-Germans when she was already in her late thirties, and her search for her father in the US; she also reflects on the role that Lorde played in her life and in the lives of Afro-Germans in general.34 She describes her first encounter with Lorde: “Sie legte den Arm um mich, drückte mich liebevoll und sprach mich mit meinem Namen an. Ich war völlig überrascht, nicht nur über die herzliche Begrüßung und ihre warme Ausstrahlung – die wärmste, die ich jemals von einem Menschen gespürt

33 The book was published in English as Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany in 2001. 34 Alexandra E. Lindhout points to another connection of Hügel-Marshall’s book to the African American literary tradition when she claims that her autobiography “reminds the reader of early African-American life writings, namely slave narratives” because it is “a clear denunciation of German discrimination and a declaration of war against racism in Germany and the world” (87).

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hatte –, sondern auch darüber, daß sie meinen Namen wußte. Audre Lorde hatte Fotos von unserem ersten afro-deutschen Treffen in München gesehen. Sie hatte sich nach jeder von uns erkundigt und sich jeden einzelnen Namen gemerkt. Ich war mehr als begeistert.”35 (95-96)

This experience is representative of many Afro-German women’s first meetings with Lorde. Michaels concludes that “Lorde’s impact on AfroGerman women was deep and lasting, and her work remains a legacy for them” – and, I would add, for Germany at large (35). The Afro-German movement in general was influenced by African American culture even as it has successfully rediscovered and written its own history, created its own narratives, (foundational) myths, and iconic figures, and as Afro-Germans have begun to develop their own identities and political agendas. Lorde’s symbolic position in this discourse is frequently acknowledged and not the least becomes evident in the numerous obituaries following her death in 1992, which appeared in the German press ranging from newspapers to independent magazines. Obituaries are in Arthur Asa Berger’s terminology “hyperreductionist microbiographies” and their size and location within a newspaper and, of course, the newspaper(s) in which they appear “are signifiers of the deceased person’s importance” (172). Many of the obituaries for Lorde were placed by Orlanda Frauenverlag and its members in, for example, Der Tagesspiegel (Nov. 22, 1992), Frankfurter Rundschau (Nov. 21, 1992), and taz (Nov. 23, 1992); several others were also signed by activists and scholars including Ayim, Campt, and Oguntoye (taz, Nov. 23, 1992) or issued by women’s and Afro-German organizations like “Frauen und Lesben der Berliner Frauenbewegung” [Women and Lesbians of the Berlin Women’s Movement] (taz, Nov. 25, 1992), “die Frauen aus den Frauenbuchläden” [the Women of Women’s

35 “She put her arms around me and hugged me and said my name. I was stunned, not just by her heartfelt greeting and radiating warmth, the likes of which I’d never felt from any other person, but also that she knew my name. It turned out she’d seen pictures from the first Afro-German conference held in Munich. She had asked the name of each participant and remembered all of them. I was delighted by her spontaneous warmth and felt an immediate connection to her” (This translation is taken from Hügel-Marshall, Invisible 94-95).

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Bookstores], and Afro-German organizations like ADEFRA, HSF (Interkulturelle Initiative Schwarzer Frauen), ISD, and MACHUBAs Schwestern (video and film production) (taz, Nov. 28, 1992). The individuals and groups who made their mourning of Lorde’s death public represent her main audiences in Germany, i.e. women and Afro-Germans. Der Tagesspiegel published an article on Lorde’s death as late as in January 1993 with the comment that it only now became publicly known that Lorde had died of cancer in November 1992 (Nolte, “Kämpferin” IV). This not only hints at the lack of interest in Lorde in the mainstream media but also at the target audience for this information because the article appears in the rubric “Frauen” [Women]. Shortly after her death, a memorial ceremony in honor of Lorde’s life and work took place in Berlin. Ten years later an event celebrating and commemorating Lorde was (co-)organized by Orlanda Frauenverlag and held at the Planetarium am Insulaner on December 6, 2002.36 These events secure her place in the collective imaginary and seek to establish her legacy in the German cultural memory. Dagmar Schultz’s film Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984-1992, which premiered at the 2012 Berlinale, further solidifies Lorde’s iconic status and draws attention to the connections between the poet and Germany. Schultz also regards the impulses from Lorde’s work and the encounters between white and AfroGermans as central steps towards a critical understanding of whiteness: “In der Konfrontation mit Audre Lorde und mit Schwarzen Deutschen kann das Weißsein nicht mehr in dieser Weise unsichtbar bleiben, und Weiße sind gefordert, sich Gedanken zu machen, wie sie die Macht und Privilegien, die ihnen durch ihre Hautfarbe zukommen, nutzen können. Dies ist eine der nachhaltigsten Lehren, die ich aus den Worten und Werken von Audre Lorde gezogen habe.”37 (“Witnessing” 524)

36 This event (entitled “Macht und Sinnlichkeit” after the first selection of Lorde’s poems in German) included readings, a concert, and a photo exhibition (cf. “Macht und Sinnlichkeit”). 37 “In the encounter with Audre Lorde and with Black Germans whiteness cannot remain invisible in the same way and whites are required to consider how they might use the power and privileges they enjoy because of the color of their skin.

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In other words, Lorde directed attention to what Adrienne Rich has termed “white solipsism” in order to describe the presumed universality of a white perspective and the impossibility of colorblindness. White solipsism means “[t]o think, imagine, and speak as if whiteness described the world” (299); it is a “tunnel vision” rather than a “consciously held belief” (306). Rich also calls for women to overcome guilt, which leads to paralysis, and to confront racism not as a monolithic entity but rather in its multifaceted forms (306). She states that “[w]e cannot hope to define a feminist culture, a gynecentric vision, on racist terms, because a part of ourselves will remain forever unknown to us” (308). Lorde’s importance for Afro-Germans and Afro-German women specifically has to be viewed against the background of her postulation of black and gender solidarity as well as her acknowledgment of “these women as part of a worldwide black Diaspora” (El-Tayeb, “If” 74). Kraft claims that Lorde’s poetical oeuvre at large draws a picture of women of the African diaspora, their oppression as well as their resistance, and that Africa as a cultural center constitutes a major motif within her poems (“Vorwort” 12). Lorde’s interactions with Afro-Germans have to be understood within this context of the African diaspora(s). Lorde’s vision of global sisterhood and black solidarity moves beyond national/istic paradigms. Her relationships with Afro-German women constitute one element of her work’s and activism’s circulation within the black Atlantic, which, due to Germany’s colonial past, its long-lasting repression of this history, and its still prevalent racism, met with particular national and cultural circumstances but also exceeded them. In Paul Gilroy’s words, “intermediate concepts” like the “idea of the diaspora” are important because “they break the dogmatic focus on discrete national dynamics which has characterised so much modern Euro-American cultural thought” (6). Lorde refers to her “Black German sisters” and acknowledges their nationality as a part of their identity and specificity within the African diaspora. In turn, she emphasizes gender and race/ethnicity which allow for solidarity beyond national and cultural differences. Her reaching out to black communities outside the United States also underlines that “the black Diaspora experience is not identical with the

This is one of the most enduring lessons I have learned from the words and works of Audre Lorde.”

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black presence in the Americas” and has to be viewed not only within the boundaries of one nation but also within at least the culture of the black Atlantic (El-Tayeb, “If” 76). As Gilroy states, “[s]triving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness” (1). This statement reflects one aspect of Lorde’s implicit understanding of the African diaspora: The term double consciousness has been coined by W.E.B. Du Bois with regard to African America but can equally be applied to Afro-Europeans without assuming that their experiences necessarily resemble those of African Americans. The “two-ness” of African Americans which Du Bois attests to the “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideas in one dark body” (9) similarly applies to AfroGermans and Afro-Europeans whose identities and histories are shaped by both a German or European affiliation and the black or African diaspora. Ultimately, however, it is not only this two-ness that specifies the AfroGerman experience but a complex web of multiple affiliations in which cultural, national, sexual, and gender identities are contested and intersect in multiple ways.

T HE B LACK D IASPORA , G ERMANY ,

AND

G ENDER

Audre Lorde’s and Afro-German women’s activism has helped to make the experience of black Germans visible and to publicly discuss racism and the history of black presences in Germany. In this sense, it has contributed to a growing awareness that German culture and society are affected by the African/black diaspora as well as multiple (often forgotten or repressed) connections to slavery and colonialism. Tina Campt asserts with regard to Showing Our Colors that “these Afro-German women’s individual and collective strategies of everyday resistance force one to rethink and redefine the dominant conception of German cultural identity” (“Afro-German” 110). This conception, as Campt elaborates, “[…] posits an intrinsic opposition between ‘blackness’ (or ethnicity) and ‘Germanness.’ One effect of such homogeneous conception of German identity is the conflation of ‘German’ with ‘white,’ by implication rendering German cultural identity a form of ‘racial’ identity.” (“Afro-German” 113)

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One major consequence of locating Germany within the black diaspora and of accounting for Afro-German histories and realities, then, has to be a redefinition of Germanness, a serious attempt to overcome the perceived oxymoronic nature of ‘black Germanness.’ This entails a critique and, ultimately, revision of Germany as culturally and ethnically homogenous and as a community imagined as white. While the dominant understanding of Germanness has relegated Afro-Germans to the margins of German culture and society they were nonetheless “permeated by it” and their particular position “between traditional conceptions of black and white racial identifications” led “to their developing a cultural and ideological ‘agility’” – “a capacity for movement among a variety of cultural and ethnic identifications” (Campt, “Afro-German” 115). Their position has become not just one of disadvantage or victimhood but one that is endowed with a certain degree of power and advantages. Afro-German women (and men) speaking out and claiming their place in Germany have begun to unsettle simple and simplified notions of Germanness; and they have contributed to uncovering the racial component inherent in many definitions of German. The foundation of the ISD in the mid-1980s challenged and countered two grand delusions of the Federal Republic: (1) that Germany was not an immigration country and (2) that racism did not exist in Germany (Zinflou 227). In 2003, Faymonville has similarly argued that “20th-century global migration has fostered the creation and maintenance of transnational diasporas in all western societies” but goes on to say that “in other migrant and settler societies” scholars have begun to pay attention to these diasporas, while in German discourses postcolonial “bears little identification value” (366). The personal narratives of Afro-Germans and the long history of blacks in Germany, which has only been (re)discovered in recent decades, additionally require a re-writing of German history including an open negotiation of the colonial past as well as contemporary racism. Black Germans, as Faymonville holds, have been “forced even more than [for example] their British neighbors to seek transnational identification across Europe and the globe, most often to English-speaking countries” (367). Lorde perceived Afro-Germans and Afro-Europeans not only as subjects in specific socio-cultural and political settings but also in their connection to a global black diaspora. Katharina Oguntoye assured the readers of afro look in 1989:

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“Sie [Lorde] sagte mir, sie habe großes Vertrauen in uns junge Afro-Europäer. Sie glaubt, daß wir etwas bewegen werden und mit Sicherheit einen wichtigen Beitrag für alle Schwarzen in der weltweiten Diaspora leisten können.”38 (18)

Additionally, Lorde called for the different communities of the African diaspora to recognize each other and to show solidarity while at the same time respecting differences. Particularly African American women, in her view, have a responsibility in this regard. Lorde said that even though she is to a certain degree disempowered in her country, she has some power that in part derives from her being “a citizen of the most powerful country in the world” and as such has “a responsibility as an African American to make cause with, make contact with […] other members of the African Diaspora, and to speak out of the power [she has] as an American as well” (Pache and Dackweiler 166). She points out the differences within the black diaspora in terms of power and the role of nationality and citizenship in this context. The hegemony of the US becomes a strategic or rather tactical tool for African Americans for forging connections within the global black diaspora. However, this subtle rhetoric of American exceptionalism might become complicit in creating an African American ‘master-narrative,’ superseding other narratives of the black diaspora which are not linked to the transatlantic slave trade and/or the USA. Black internationalism and transnational black solidarity are certainly not new phenomena and have been studied extensively as, for example, Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and Brent Hayes Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora demonstrate. Edwards suggests that the use of the very term diaspora “implies neither that it offers the comfort of abstraction, an easy recourse to origins, nor that it provides a foolproof anti-essentialism: instead, it forces us to articulate discourses of cultural and political linkage only through and across difference in full view of the risks that it endeavors.” (13)

38 “She [Lorde] told me that she had great confidence in us young Afro-Europeans. She believes that we will make a difference and will certainly be able to make a contribution significant for all blacks in the worldwide diaspora.”

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He places décalage and translation at the center of diasporic discourses and contends that “articulations of the diaspora demand to be approached this way, through their décalage” (15).39 Following his proposition, the question of what happens in the gap, in the translation between African American and Afro-German articulations of diaspora, and how it affects and interacts with the more general (though not comfortably abstract) conceptualization of the black diaspora takes on central importance. Diaspora, which is frequently defined in contrast or even counter to the nation as inherently transnational or supranational, also needs to be reinterpreted in the light of ‘black Germanness.’ Michael Hanchard, for instance, states that “[e]mbedded in the tale of the diaspora is a symbolic revolt against the nation-state” (40). Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur claim that “diaspora forces us to rethink the rubrics of nation and nationalism, while refiguring the relations of citizens and nation-states” and that it “offers myriad, dislocated sites of contestation to the hegemonic, homogenizing forces of globalization” (7). Yet, it does not only present an “alternative paradigm for national […] identification” (Braziel and Mannur 8), but also changes the parameters of identification and definitions of the national. In fact, as Braziel and Mannur also hold, the “boundaries […] like those of nation/diaspora […] are no longer so clearly distinguishable” (11). The idea of “diaspora in/and stasis” (Tina Campt) or Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of “cultural mobility” affirm the necessity to account for moments of rootedness and settlement in connection to mobility, transnationality, and diaspora. In so doing, Afro-Germans appear no longer as transitory and temporary subjects of and in the German nation as imagined community. Drawing attention to the moments of “diaspora in stasis” and to “rootedness” then turns out to be an intervention that is inevitable in order to overcome a simplifying binary in which Afro-Germans are conceived of as belonging primarily to a diaspora on the supra- and transnational level while Germanness is defined on the national level, with diasporic people only figuring as

39 In “The Uses of Diaspora,” Edwards elaborates on the meaning of décalage and explains that it “indicates the reestablishment of a prior unevenness or diversity; it alludes to the taking away of something that was added in the first place” and it is “the kernel of precisely that which cannot be transferred or exchanged, the received biases that refuse to pass over when one crosses the water” (65).

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transitory subjects. Any theory or definition of diaspora which is primarily or exclusively tied to mobility, transnationality, and routes runs the risk of concealing those moments of nationality and national belonging, of rootedness and settlement, which could provide a useful impulse to locate AfroGermans and blacks at the center of Germany and Germanness. Therefore, diaspora has to be understood as entailing movement and stasis, mobility and stability/settlement, roots and routes as well as mobility and immobility. This conceptualization of diaspora might contribute to the much needed revision of German identities and allows for taking into account the specifically national dimensions of diasporic realities and identities. Lorde’s participation in the Atlantic cultural traffic and her seminal role for AfroGerman women foregrounds yet another important aspect of the African or black diaspora which has received scarce theoretical and analytical attention: gender. In “Unfinished Migrations,” Tiffany Patterson and Robin Kelley draw attention to the fact that “the ways in which diaspora is used metaphorically has also elided gender” (28). Sandra Gunning, Tera Hunter, and Michele Mitchell confirm this notion: “[…] the use of gender as a category of analysis remains something of a challenge for African Diaspora studies. […] too many studies past and present have addressed the experience of black masculinity as a collective identity without a self-conscious assessment of the continual transformation of gender roles and sexuality within a black diasporic framework.” (2-3)

Lorde’s transatlantic cultural work and the Afro-German movement both attest to the fact that gender has to be taken into account in theories and analyses of African diaspora(s). In fact, as Stephen Small holds: “one does not and cannot define, conceptualize, theorize, or research the Black Diaspora in Europe without bringing gender ideologies and the experiences of Black women to the foreground” (xxviii). The formation of the AfroGerman movement (and Lorde’s contribution to it) has initially been intertwined with feminism and women’s issues. Afro-Germans have become visible as an active group within the African diaspora through the activism of women. But this does not mean that “their male counterparts have been inactive” even though “the lion’s share of the creative work has been by women” (Hopkins, “Race” 15). Lorde’s writings envision a matrilineal

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genealogy; for example, her “biomythography” Zami tells “the complex history of reclaiming […] mother roots” (Steele, “Remembering” 87). For Chinosole, Zami is “a pinnacle in the poetic expression of the matrilineal diaspora” (135). One might even say that drawing on Lorde’s activism, cultural work, and cooperation Afro-German women actually developed a matrilineal tradition: Black women were the driving force behind the AfroGerman movement, they made the first steps towards publicly dealing with their identities, histories, and lived realities, and they founded an organization for black German women: ADEFRA e.V. A close look at the history of ADEFRA reveals that among Afro-German women particularly AfroGerman lesbians were active in the movement. In the beginning, it was even discussed whether the organization should be named ADEFRA [Afrodeutsche Frauen] or ADELE [Afrodeutsche Lesben] and the debate whether it was primarily a women’s or a lesbian’s association shaped its development (Lauré al-Samarai et al. 348, 353). Similarly, Ekpenyong Ani asserts that lesbians have always been the most active members of ADEFRA (Lauré al-Samarai et al. 353). Therefore, homophobia and heteronormativity have been on the agenda of the Afro-German movement from the beginning – and, of course, these topics were also central to Lorde’s thinking and activism. In addition to bringing sexual differences and discrimination within and beyond the black diaspora to the fore, the German community of the black diaspora intrinsically resists being conceptualized along the parameters of black masculinity by prioritizing the black female experience. It equally defies a conceptualization within the framework of heteronormativity as it makes the black lesbian experience paramount.40 Chinosole’s concept of the “matrilineal diaspora” offers an alternative to the male-dominated narratives of the black diaspora. She defines it as “the capacity to survive and aspire, to be contrary and self-affirming across continents and generations. It names the strength and beauty we pass on as friends and lovers from foremothers to mothers and daughters allowing us to survive radical cul-

40 Katja Kinder has voiced her concern that the seminal role of women might be subsumed under a male-dominated historical narrative of the Afro-German movement and has affirmed the need to deal with women’s (and particularly lesbian women’s) involvement and activism (Lauré al-Samarai et al. 354).

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tural changes and be empowered through differences. Matrilineal diaspora defines the links among Black women worldwide, enabling us to experience distinct but related cultures while retaining a special sense of home as the locus of self-definition and power.” (135)

Obviously, this working definition is indebted to Lorde’s thinking and captures her vision of a matrilineal diaspora in its emphasis on survival, appreciation of difference, and a global connection between women of the black diaspora. Yet, the attempt to rethink cultural representations of the black diaspora along the lines of matrilineality has some theoretical problems of its own. Chinosole focuses on the black diaspora as a “dispersal” that has its origin in the transatlantic slave trade (136), yet there are many diasporic paths and routes that cannot be subsumed under this narrative, for example the stories of African immigrants who come to Europe voluntarily in hope of a better life and future than they can expect in their respective home countries. It also prioritizes the African American experience within the black diaspora and therefore risks establishing a hegemonic masternarrative which denies the heterogeneity of black diasporic realities and stories. While Lorde might arguably but productively be located as “part of the same historical continuum as the runaway slave” and be regarded a “recent by-product of the Atlantic slave trade,” the same continuity does not apply to most European black diasporic identities (Chinosole 137). Rather, it becomes necessary to account for the “new African diasporas” which are no longer rooted in slavery (Koser 3). Chinosole views the “theme of survival through adaptation and cultural improvisation” as a main link between authors of slave narratives and African American writers like Lorde (138). This observation complicates her emphasis on the “lineal” and continuous because it has to be read against changes, adaptations, and improvisations. It emerges as a strategy to counter the isolation and division of black women through a common and communal narrative as well as a tradition specifically shaped by female experience and knowledge. The construction of a ‘home’ poses a problem for adequately capturing the diverse patterns of affiliation, coalitions, and belonging in the black diaspora but it serves the strategic purpose of creating a collective identity. Chinosole’s analysis of “Lorde’s diaspora” as “matrilineal or woman-centered” reveals it as a complex and multi-layered concept:

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“[It] means that mythical and legendary connection to African women, the legendary and historical connection to the women in the Caribbean, and her autobiographical connection to her mother and the Black women she grew up with in her community.” (Chinosole 140)

It includes a personal dimension as well as connections to African women and women in the Caribbean. These connections are “mythical” and “legendary” – they are not based exclusively on historically verifiable facts but rather are imagined in a narrative that relates a search for origin and belonging. As a theme in Lorde’s writings, matrilineal diaspora means the projection of contrariness (in the sense of “internal cultural contradictions”) on a global scale and emerges as a “futuristic vision” as it celebrates difference (Chinosole 147). The diasporic path of Audre Lorde, the Afro-German movement, and their transatlantic interactions emerge as woman-centered experiences and narratives of the black diaspora. Yet, they cannot be generalized towards a theory of the African or black diaspora at large. Since, as Braziel and Mannur remark, “[t]heorizations of diaspora need not, and should not, be divorced from historical and cultural specificity,” this particular diasporic community can sharpen the focus on gender within discourses about African diasporas (3). Obviously, the interactions between Lorde and AfroGerman women cannot be viewed outside their historical and socio-cultural framework but they also remind us that dialogues within the African/black diaspora, which is itself fractured by nationality, ethnicity, culture, religion, gender, sexuality etc., require translation and mediation. The focus on specific settings is crucial because, as Jacqueline Brown claims, “[d]iaspora is invoked – sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically – as a form of kinship consisting of Black folks across time and space” (205). Braziel and Mannur speak of the fact that “[d]iaspora does not […] transcend differences of race, class, gender, and sexuality” and that it cannot “stand alone as an epistemological or historical category of analysis, separate and distinct from these interrelated categories” (5). Patterson and Kelley similarly hold that “specific historical contexts determine the relative importance of each of [the constituent] elements” of diaspora (15). Following William Safran, they establish that these elements include

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“dispersal from a homeland, often by violent forces, the making of a memory and a vision of that homeland, marginalization in the new location, a commitment to the maintenance/restoration of the homeland, and desire for return and a continuing relationship and identity with the homeland that shapes the consciousness and solidarity of the group.” (15)

Patterson and Kelley, however, resist proposing a “rigid definition” (15). Re-thinking the black diaspora by including Afro-German perspectives and experiences shows that the homeland might not be more important than the “[d]ecentered, lateral connections […] [a]nd a shared, ongoing history of displacement, suffering, adaptation, or resistance” (Clifford 249-50). In the interplay between African America and Afro-Germany specific modes, hierarchies, and conditions of (cultural) exchange and coalition (politics) emerge which pertain also to the concept of the diaspora. Afro-German history provides a specific example out of many black diasporic experiences and perspectives which cannot neatly be subsumed under a single umbrella definition of the black diaspora but require an ongoing negotiation of its meanings. Furthermore, paying attention to different diasporic people and places, specific (inter)actions, experiences, and exchanges within the black diaspora, and particular locations and locales of the diaspora is particularly important as “[t]he association of diaspora with worldwide Black kinship, as it were, can actually render certain kinds of Black subjects, experiences, histories, and identities invisible. Black Europe’s recent inclusion into the African diasporic framework sets it up to represent the newest item in a global catalogue that aspires to exhaustiveness. The danger is that the newly included entity might be made to fit into an already existing structure rather than presenting new challenges to it.” (J. Brown 201)

However, the development of Afro-German identities and the role of AfroGerman women therein indicate that parts of the European black diaspora defy being incorporated into an existing African diasporic framework and rather require reconceptualizations of this framework. In this case, “[t]he interactive relations between black communities worldwide are reflected in the profound influence that African decolonisation struggles and the US black

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liberation movement had on the development of an Afro-German sense of identity.” (El-Tayeb, “If” 66)

This statement illuminates yet another aspect pertinent to the dialogue between African America and Afro-Germany: its relation to Africa which often serves as reference point (yet, not always in the sense of a homeland). However, this dialogue seems to privilege the common experiences of oppression, marginalization, and resistance over a historical or mythical point of origin or return. And it is this common diasporic experience which is understood as shaped by race/ethnicity and gender alike. Patterson and Kelley call for an incorporation of these differences in a conceptualization of diaspora as “both a process and a condition” and point out that “the African diaspora itself exists within the context of global race and gender hierarchies which are formulated and reconstituted across national boundaries and along several lines” – namely legal, cultural, economic, imperial, and social lines (20). They further hold that “[d]iaspora has always been employed (invoked) in such a way as to hide the differences and discontinuities” and that the “experiences of those located in the United States, for example, have often come to stand for those not in the U.S. or used as the standard of comparison” (20). In Lorde’s approach to the black diaspora, the US serves as a reference point and standard of comparison but she clearly points towards the interconnections between different “power lines” (Aimee C. Rowe) with a particular focus on race and gender. Racism, in Lorde’s understanding, has then to be recognized as a “feminist issue” because “racism, sexism, homophobia, elitism, ageism have their root in the same inability to accept difference in a structure that depends for its survival upon profit” (Pache and Dackweiler 167). In 1987, Lorde predicts that the white feminist movement is doomed to fail (both in the US and in Germany) if white women “cannot accept the challenges of racism, anti-Semitism, and all kinds of unacceptable differences” (167). Consequently, the focus on the intersectionality of gender and race should not obscure numerous other aspects like religion, sexuality, or nationality, which make the African diaspora (or rather African diasporas) multi-facetted and heterogeneous. Lorde’s excitement about meeting Afro-European women from such different countries as Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Britain was fuelled by her interest in examining how their “struggles conform and the ways in which [their]

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struggles diverge” from that of African Americans (169). She stated in an interview: “Most of all, as an African American woman, I am interested in how much I can learn from my sisters, in other words, how much I do not know as an African American. There are many, many differences – those I am learning. I cannot take the position of an expert, I must go to the Afro-German woman and say, ‘In what way does your experience differ from mine?’ One of the differences that is most obvious that I see is that there are so many more of us in the United States of America, that as African American women we have had a history of recognition of each other, from slavery on, and therefore we have a pool to draw from. I think the Afro-German women have existed in a terrible isolation from each other for so long, and have not had the words sometimes even to identify themselves. They are acquiring this. The effects of tremendous isolation and separation present very different problems. We need to see, and we do, that our oppressor is the same with very different faces.” (Pache and Dackweiler 169-70).

Several hallmarks of Lorde’s conception of diaspora and solidarity among black women can be extrapolated from this passage. At first, she makes clear that as an African American she claims neither leadership nor the role of an expert. Lorde demonstrates an awareness of her limited view of the African diasporic experience and the need to listen to and learn about other black women’s struggles. Yet, she readily diagnoses the lack of a tradition and a history of mutual recognition of Afro-German women as a major difference to African American women in addition to the fact that there are (proportionately and absolutely) less Afro-German than African American women. In her account, it seems as if Afro-German women “acquiring this” – meaning identifying themselves and creating a history and tradition for themselves – are several steps behind African American women. Indirectly, these women and Lorde herself might then function not as experts but as role models. They might have to struggle with different problems but they have realized that their oppressor is the same. Hence, Lorde differentiates between black women’s individual narratives and the specific problems black women have to cope with, but at the same time emphasizes the common struggle against oppression. Her notion of black women and/in the diaspora is characterized by this simultaneous affirmation of communality and heterogeneity as well as the need for dialogue and exchange.

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Hopkins has explored the possible parallels in the Afro-German and African American experiences. He lists the “comparable temporal frame of reference” of both diasporic experiences among these parallels and views the 1980s Afro-German movement’s actions and goals as “reminiscent of the process which African Americans initiated beginning in the late eighteenth century in an attempt to define themselves in a largely hostile and inimical environment” (“Inventing” 37, 39). In his assessment, the program of the ISD brings to mind the agenda of “African Americans in the nineteenth century” who created historical research and publications that “establish[ed] their legitimacy and basic humanity;” the “search for historical roots and a bicultural identity unite the African-German and AfricanAmerican experience” (44, 46). The publications of …und wenn Du noch dazu schwarz bist and Farbe bekennen constituted, according to Hopkins, “literary event[s] comparable to the publication of the slave narratives” in the US (“Inventing” 40). He argues that “the search for a voice, a separate, and distinct identity, is a characteristic shared by the Afro-Germans and African Americans” (42). Hopkins concludes that the “awareness of a global context of the African experience […] position[s] them [Afro-Germans] to both contribute to and learn from the African-American struggle for identity” (49). While the possible contributions of Afro-Germans to the global black diaspora are acknowledged, the African American experience functions as a role model – a function that particularly Audre Lorde fulfilled. Consequently, she places a huge responsibility on African Americans: “We, as African Americans, need to […] make contact with our brothers and sisters in Europe. We need to begin to ask some very essential questions about where do our strengths and our differences intersect. We need to do this as people in the African Diaspora, and we need to know this as the ‘hyphenated people’ upon whom, I believe, hope for the world’s future rests. That is a consciousness that continues, when I am in other places, but it is highlighted when I am operating in Europe.” (Rowell 189)

Despite their differences, African Americans and Afro-Europeans can connect as members of an international community of people of color, according to Lorde’s vision. This passage emphasizes not only how crucial Lorde’s experiences in Europe had been for her thinking and activism but

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also that she regards the ‘hyphenated people’ as the hope for the world’s future. This, of course, also demands the inclusion of Germany in particular and Europe in general into the conceptualization of the African diaspora. The inclusion of Germany and the Afro-German movement into the “other archetypal diaspora” alongside the Jewish (Alexander and Knowles 8) cannot follow a simple ‘add-on approach;’ rather it requires a rethinking of the African/black diaspora and a new understanding of Germany as a diasporic nation. This can make the diaspora experience as Stuart Hall defines it – and as it suits Lorde’s vision to a certain degree – become part of German history and experience; for Hall, the diaspora experience “is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity” (244). In a sense, this also holds true for the solidarity between women as Lorde postulates it. The author encouraged women of the African diaspora to consciously deal with every part of their identity and to recognize each other not despite but through their differences. Joan Wylie Hall situates Lorde’s interactions with Afro-German women in the context of Lorde’s “sense of responsibility toward the Black Diaspora” which “extended to women of African descent in Germany” (ix). In return, Lorde’s conception of the black diaspora was altered by her meeting and discussing with Afro-European women. However, considering Lorde’s vision of global sisterhood, one could also invert J. Hall’s causality to hold that Lorde’s sense of responsibility towards feminist or womanist concerns extended to black and white women in Germany. Just as she perceived of her own identity as fractured but whole, Lorde’s notion of the African diaspora and a global community of women never assumes homogeneity but celebrates difference and hybridity. Her ‘sisterly’ interactions with Afro-German women exemplarily attest to the diversity of African diasporic experiences and show that these experiences are necessarily gendered. In fact, “[f]or Lorde gender becomes the location of unity capable of bridging differences: shattering the silence surrounding gender oppression and naming the means by which women are kept divided becomes the strategy for building that bridge.” (Richardson 140)

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This statement, of course, raises the question how gender can become not only a “location of unity” within the black diaspora but also for women with different ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds and identities. Again, Lorde’s engagement with Afro-German and white German women can serve as an entry point to imagine how gender/feminist solidarity ‘across the color line’ could be enacted. The exchanges between African America, Afro-Germany, and white Germany allow not only for a necessary (re-)conceptualization of Germany as a diasporic place and a (re-)investigation of the African/black diaspora as structured along the lines of gender but also for some tentative insights into the possibilities and limits of transnational and transracial feminism. As Aimee Rowe has argued, “[t]ransracial feminist alliances are expansive. They provide the basis for shared experience and meaning from which we are excluded if we stay within our own racial ranks” and “[t]ransnational feminist alliances are not automatic. Solidarity cannot be assumed, but must be fought for” (4). Neither transnational nor transracial alliances can be established without struggle and active engagement. In the German context, transracial dialogue requires white feminists to critically confront whiteness and racism. Schultz points out that, in the encounter with Lorde, she learned that the conscious engagement with her whiteness was a precondition for their mutual trust and close friendship (“Witnessing” 523). A critical awareness of whiteness as the usually unnamed marker of a yet equally racialized identity appears to be an indispensable prerequisite for dialogues between feminists of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Only then can racism be addressed as a mode of oppression implied in and inherent to (white) feminism. As Ruth Frankenberg has elaborated: “For when white people […] look at racism, we tend to view it as an issue that people of color face and have to struggle with, but not as an issue that generally involves or implicates us. […] With this view, white women can see antiracist work as an act of compassion for an ‘other,’ an optional, extra project, but not one intimately and organically linked to our own lives. Racism can, in short, be conceived as something external to us rather than as a system that shapes our daily experiences and sense of self.” (6)

Rowe affirms this very point with a different accentuation when she contends that “we must understand whiteness as a mode of belonging in order

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to dismantle the force of its privileging and marginalizing tendencies” (38). She proposes a “politics of relation,” which describes us “as a function of where we place our bodies and with whom we build our affective ties;” thereby she strives towards “a relational notion of the subject, a coalitional subject” (3). This politics of relation then moves toward a theorization of “experience and agency as collective processes” (10). It “offers a frame to foreground the conditions under which our affective investments emerge, as well as the fissures and fault lines that constitute feminist difference. For such a frame to render visible, or otherwise tangible, the relational practices conducive of transracial feminist alliance, it must provide a relational approach to the politics of speaking and listening.” (11-12)

In her account, who we love is not only political but also “who we are becoming” (3). What she terms “differential belonging” brings to attention “the multiple paths we may travel in our circle of belonging” and it “is not to be bound by the regulatory practices of any particular group nor by the need to remain consistent or pure, but rather to take a risk and move in the direction of multiple others. As in becoming other” (44). Lorde, among other black feminists, prefigured some hallmarks of the theoretical ruminations into the conditions for transracial feminist alliances and the interconnections between race and feminism which are crucial to Frankenberg’s and Aimee Rowe’s (empirical) scholarship. She called for and to a certain degree brought about a critical reflection of whiteness in the feminist movement at a time when Frankenberg’s seminal study of whiteness as social construct was taking shape. Though published in 1993, Frankenberg’s book “emerged out of the 1980s, the decade in which white feminist women like [herself] could no longer fail to notice the critique of white feminist racism by feminist/radical women of color” (2). Lorde’s work countered a male genealogy by privileging the affective relationship to the foremothers and emphasizing feeling rather than rationality as a means to freedom; a notion of which Rowe’s approach towards the politics of love and the centrality of affective ties and (be)longings is slightly reminiscent. And, ultimately, her black feminist thinking, writing, and, most of all, activist practice in fact harbored the potential to cross ‘color lines.’ Angela Davis has described this impact:

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“Through her life, she galvanized alliances among individuals and groups who were not expected to discover points of convergence. Thus her legacy is claimed by poets, writers, scholars and activists, by working-class people and women and men of all racial backgrounds.” (qtd. in Guy-Sheftall 256)

With regard to Germany, her legacy is primarily claimed by black Germans and feminists. The potential of transracial alliances not only poses the question of the (pre)conditions and possibilities of coalitions between white and black women but also raises the issue of the relations between different diasporic or (im)migrant groups in Germany. While Lorde underpinned the connection of Afro-Germans to the African diaspora, for her the ‘Black people’ of Germany are the “Turkish and Middle Eastern workers” (Parmar and Kay 172). The common experience of oppression and exclusion (rather than African origins) appears to be the major constituent of a black diaspora as Lorde presupposes it here. Eleonore Wiedenroth-Coulibaly, who has been active in the Afro-German movement, also suggests a modification of the term diaspora to account for German realities. In her view, diaspora is neither based on a homeland nor does it automatically presuppose a forced migration. She argues that people who are excluded and devalued as ethnic Other in a society, who claim a space at its margins and strive towards its center, also form a diaspora as they turn towards each other (405). Her conceptualization of diaspora can be linked to Campt’s “diaspora in stasis” as well as to Lorde’s model of difference as productive force. WiedenrothCoulibaly contends that the people of such a diaspora make themselves ‘at home’ with an intention to stay. She explicates: “Eine solche Diaspora basiert auf gemeinsamen wirtschaftlichen, gesellschaftlichen, politischen und/oder kulturellen Erfahrungen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Die Erfahrungen müssen dabei nicht kollektiv, sondern können individuell und durchaus unterschiedlich erlebt werden. Es bleibt die (aufgezwungene) Gemeinsamkeit erlebter Aus- und Abgrenzung.”41 (405)

41 “Such a diaspora is based on common economic, social, political, and/or cultural experiences, past and present. These experiences do not have to be collective but

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This understanding of diaspora is rather inclusive as it prioritizes common experiences (over, for example, a common homeland, origin, or tradition) and acknowledges differences and individual experiences. For Lorde, the African heritage played an essential role in the definition of the black diaspora. Even though Lorde did not consider Africa as a homeland for herself, in her poetry, “[t]he connection to her African heritage was […] possible through a global community of women […], based on mythic mother figures […], and through the redefinition of white Western master narratives” (Birkle 194). Lorde, in fact, considered the “pitfalls in defining Black as a political position” and, in “A Burst of Light” suggests to use the term African diaspora rather than black diaspora in order to avoid glossing over the differences between black experiences – a danger that she sees inherent in black as a term and as a political position because it implies similarities and de-emphasizes difference (67). In my view, the danger of homogenizing, generalizing, and limiting perceptions of the black diaspora can be harbored in both terms to a similar degree; while I share Lorde’s notion that black is more of an umbrella term than African I take this assumption to a different conclusion, namely that speaking of a black diaspora implies a more inclusive and open approach compared to an African diaspora. Audre Lorde’s interactions with Germans and the Afro-German movement reveal that on the one hand it is necessary to rediscover Germany as a diasporic space, i.e. a country which is shaped by (im)migration, traversed by multiple diasporic paths, and permanently inhabited by Germans whose identity is built around national belonging as well as a belonging to a diaspora; on the other hand, it draws attention to the need to account for an oft-forgotten colonial past and to (re-)discover Germany not only as a diasporic but also as a postcolonial space, as the editors of the 2007 volume re/visionen Kien Nghi Ha, Nicola Lauré al-Samarai, and Sheila Mysorekar propose in their introduction (15). In order to conceptualize Germany as postcolonial, they suggest a “people of color”-approach, which – though it is not universally and transhistorically applicable – allows for a productive acknowledgement of difference and multiple belongings by exceeding ideas of ‘blackness.’ Its sensitivity to differences facilitates a dialogue and allows

can be experienced individually and indeed differently. The (coerced) commonality which remains is the experience of exclusion and isolation.”

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for powerful solidarities and alliances (14). The editors of re/visionen call for a shift in perspective; their volume presents different perspectives of people of color which disrupt German ‘white solipsism’ (14-15). Contemporary scholarship and literature on as well as art and activism in Germany by people of color (and by whites) such as re/visionen or TheBlackBook continue implicitly and explicitly a project that was influenced by Lorde’s interventions and anti-racist feminist activism in and beyond (West) Germany. In this sense, the Afro-German movement and the approaches towards Germany as diasporic/postcolonial space have taken some of their cues from (African) America. Lorde made it clear that despite being in many ways oppressed, as an American she also spoke from a position of power within the black diaspora. The transatlantic exchanges influencing the Afro-German movement and the German women’s movement can be productively viewed through a double perspective of Diaspora Studies and African Americanization. They can be established as a subversive form of cultural transfer and transformation in the sense that they unsettle dominant German conceptions as well as feminist assumptions prevalent at that time; but they also have a (potential) hegemonic element as they claim a greater centrality for the African American experience. While, of course, Afro-German identities, cultural productions, and political activism have taken on a dynamic of their own and developed a distinct agenda and format, they are indebted to a significant degree to African American influences as particularly the iconization of Audre Lorde evinces. The forms of African Americanization that I have analyzed in Lorde’s reception and influence, however, are not limited to the Afro-German and/ or feminist movement but rather have a lasting impact on Germany at large. They locate Germany in the black diaspora, critically investigate feminism, whiteness, and racism, and draw attention to a chapter of African American-German interactions which continues to be marginalized in recent publications on this subject. For example, Anke Ortlepp and Larry Greene’s Germans and African Americans (2011) and Maria Diedrich and Jürgen Heinrichs’s From Black to Schwarz (2010) constitute seminal additions to the field, yet, Lorde only occurs as a marginal figure in both volumes. Lorde rather looms large in German feminist, Afro-German, and people of color discourses and her literature has received substantial academic attention. Her theoretical, literary, and activist legacy in Germany, however, as I have shown, opens up another dimension of her work that pertains to

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Germany, Diaspora Studies, the interconnections of race, gender, and sexuality, and to different modes of oppression as well as cultural mobility across the Atlantic and within the black diaspora.

6 Transatlantic Travels via Celluloid and the Literary Circuit: Alice Walker and Toni Morrison

Narrative has never been merely entertainment for me. It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge. (TONI MORRISON, “NOBEL” 7) Art is the mirror, perhaps the only one, in which we can see our true collective face. We must honor its sacred function. We must let art help us. (ALICE WALKER, SAME RIVER 13)

Around the same time that the Afro-German movement emerged in the 1980s, African American women writers gained increasing visibility in West Germany. Anne Adams assesses the situation in the following terms: “In the 1980s black women writers are appearing not only in university seminars, in ‘American,’ they are – the novelists among them, at least – also in bookstores (and through the help of Steven Spielberg in the movies), in German translation. Beyond the pantheon of the four male writers mentioned above [Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin], German readers are now exposed to black women writers such as Gayle Jones, Ntozake Shange, Paule Marshall, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and […] Toni Morrison.” (191-92)

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Adams anticipates that book circulation figures will change through the German release of the film The Color Purple but holds that up to that point Morrison’s work has had “the greatest circulation in that market” with all of her books being published in German (192). Morrison appears as the “most thoroughly read, studied, and critiqued black woman writer among German reading audiences” (192). Particularly after the release of the Spielberg film, Alice Walker received similar attention and it seems safe to assume that Walker and Morrison continue to be among the best-known African American women writers in Germany today. In her seminal 1998 essay, Anne Koenen contends that “the German media – with very few exceptions – only discusses black women’s literature, and here only the two most prominent figures, Toni Morrison and, to a lesser extent, Alice Walker” (94). Their literature is consequently not presented as part of a multicultural canon but rather is “reduced to a polarized duality of white versus black” (94). Compared to Audre Lorde and Angela Davis, who were re- and perceived as writers but even more prominently as (political) activists, Walker and Morrison are mainly (re)presented to their audiences as fiction writers. They were introduced at a time when, according to Adams, German audiences had been exposed to African American works only within the limited framework of “the socio-political writings of the 1970s” whose significance was enhanced by international media coverage that focused on African Americans primarily with regard to “the social and political issues and events around race relations” (192). It fits well with this picture that Davis’s activism was comparatively broadly received in West Germany as long as she could clearly be connected to the socio-political events of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, while Lorde’s work, which could not be captured in this framework, received less attention in mainstream (media) discourses. Almost parallel to Lorde’s activism in West Germany and the publication of her works in German, Walker and Morrison were brought to the attention of (West) German audiences and met with considerable media, scholarly, and public interest. In the case of both Morrison and Walker, very specific (cultural) events led to an increased attention towards their personae and their works in Germany: the release of Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Walker’s epistolary novel The Color Purple in 1986 and the Nobel Prize in Literature for Morrison in 1993 respectively. Koenen concludes that these two events – rather than the publication of the two authors’ novels – evoked media atten-

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tion and “led to a peak of critical interest” (95).1 My analyses in this chapter deal with these two events individually, examining on the one hand how The Color Purple was received in (West) Germany and how the film affected Walker’s popularity as a writer, and on the other hand German reactions to Morrison’s Nobel Prize and its impact on the reception of her writings and her persona. More than two decades after its release the film The Color Purple continues to be one of the (few) texts representing African American women’s culture that is popular in Germany.2 Critics and supporters of Americanization alike have frequently viewed Hollywood as the epitome of American popular culture and as a harmful intrusion or welcome addition to the German cultural scene respectively.3 Therefore, my analysis of German reactions to the film is particularly concerned with the underlying notions of Americanness, moments of exoticization and romanticization, negotiations of race and racism (again, primarily viewed as American phenomena in this context), and the dynamics between the mainstream framework (Hollywood film) and the ethnic and cultural minority represented therein. The latter point is of particular interest considering that “The Color Purple seemed an unlikely choice for mainstream Hollywood fare, since it deals with issues Hollywood had tended to ignore” (Woll 192). Additionally, I briefly address the adaptation process as a significant element in the reception of Walker’s oeuvre which gained popularity through the film version of The Color Purple. The book was published in 1982 and won the Pulitzer Prize the same year as well as the National Book Award in 1983. The novel’s immediate critical success can be explained by its literary and

1

Bazié observes that the German press covered Morrison’s Nobel Prize less extensively and enthusiastically than the French and British print media (150).

2

The film has, of course, been most prominently discussed in West Germany at the time of its cinematic release but it has also been released on video and DVD and there are frequent reruns on German television; for example, on kabel 1 on June 13, 2011 and on October 28, 2012.

3

Even though American films were widely available particularly after World War II, German audiences from 1925 to 1971 preferred German over American films and it is only in the 1970s that “this trend reversed itself: German films [then] underwent a process of Americanisation” (Garncarz, “Hollywood” 95).

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aesthetic merits but its popular success might also be attributed to the fact that it appeared “at a moment ripe for its reception, as [it] was in tune with the projects of African American and feminist critics” (Terry 60). The film’s production and release, for Walker, constituted “one of [her] life’s most complex public events” (Same River 23).4 Jacqueline Bobo points out that the novel and the film “have become most interchangeable in many people’s minds” and that “many people’s perception of the novel is based upon what they have seen or heard about the film” (332). The novel was first published in German by Rowohlt in 1984, two years before the release of the film, and has since been re-issued in numerous editions. Rowohlt is also the main publisher of Morrison’s novels in Germany. As Koenen has observed, media interest in these novels slowly increased well before Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize: While there are hardly any reviews of Sula (1980) and The Bluest Eye (1979) in the German press, there is a slight increase in the coverage of Song of Solomon (1979) and Tar Baby (1983), and a growing critical interest in the media after the publication of Beloved in 1989 (95). According to Adams, two factors particularly led to an increase in public interest and in sales: first, Morrison’s actual presence in Germany during a two-week promotional tour shortly after the German edition of Tar Baby had been published, and second, the issuing of her books in paperback (192-93). In the early years of the German reception of black women’s literature “some reviews are brief and confine themselves to plot summaries, yet the more prestigious and influential newspapers […] like Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung […] also published more detailed analyses” but even those ignored the African American context (Koenen 96). Both Morrison’s and Walker’s works have been positioned in reviews within a white ‘mainstream’ tradition and “nearly all reviews are blind to gender as an essential part of Morrison’s and Walker’s work” (97). These reviews, however, do not admit to any lack of knowledge regarding the African American cultural context of the novels; they elide difference through a “forceful integration into white paradigms”

4

While this event increased Walker’s popularity and caused a wider dissemination of the story told in The Color Purple, it also led to Walker being “accused of having ‘sold out’ to white patriarchy, thereby effecting the kind of cultural imperialism that the novel was attempting to resist” (Terry 59).

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and ignore “multiculturalism and multiplicity […] in favor of a secure position of white male hegemony” (97, 98). This “recuperation of black literature for white culture,” according to Koenen, “involves a familiarizing political and rhetorical strategy that constitutes a rejection of multiculturalism in setting up parameters that are entirely confined in white culture. […] One might argue that this strategy is only intended to familiarize readers with black women’s literature; […] [b]ut the dangers far outweigh any possible advantages of this strategy.” (100)

Ultimately, this strategy leads to what Koenen calls “the Germanification of black women’s literature” and appears to be based on the assumption that “German readers cannot be bothered with perspectives from another culture” (101). Not only is the tradition of (black) women’s writing completely overlooked and disregarded in this scheme; moreover, the white male tradition or, more generally, “white culture and literature can again be celebrated as a source of creativity, myths, and influential, if not exclusive, interpretations of reality” (103). Yet, Koenen also observes a development in the reception of Morrison’s works in the 1990s as German writings on the African American author and her oeuvre are more “closely based on interviews or show a familiarity with the issues of ethnic literatures” (104). The major reasons for these changes might be found in “the elevation of Morrison as a writer through the Nobel Prize and the willingness to listen (specifically to listen to Morrison herself)” which led to a growing “awareness that the voices of black women writers are neither marginal nor irrelevant” (104). In Koenen’s chronology the early stage of the reception of African American women’s literature is characterized by the “reviewers only hear[ing] what they want and expect to hear” and not realizing that this literature might challenge “our understanding of American culture” (107). In the second stage, many reviewers became aware of “the relevance of the new perspectives that have emerged” and their approaches are most successful for Koenen “when they let the voices speak for themselves (as in interviews with Morrison)” (107). However, there continued to be “other reactions” that “dismiss reflections on difference as irrelevant and imply that only an exaggerated sense of political correctness would elevate writers who insist on a discussion of power and difference to importance” (107).

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I take Koenen’s pointed and acute observations as a starting point for this chapter in order to focus on selected newspaper reports on Morrison’s Nobel Prize and to analyze critical reviews and discussions of her novels in the aftermath of this event. My analyses specifically expose strategies of familiarization, universalization, and ultimately “Germanification” which are used in these debates and offer a close look at the labels that are attached to Morrison as an American, black, and female author. Several of the strategies of recuperation utilized in dealing with Morrison’s oeuvre can also be found in the critical discussions of The Color Purple at the time of the film’s release. These structural and strategic similarities might appear striking considering that in one case the debate centers on American popular culture and Hollywood’s film industry (and its threat of Americanization) while in the other case it revolves around the Nobel Prize, ‘high’ culture, and world literature. Yet, in both cases, (West) German viewers and/or readers are confronted with African American women’s cultural productions which are, at decisive moments, presented within the framework of rather ‘white’ (and male-dominated) cultural institutions, namely Hollywood and the Nobel Foundation. The film project The Color Purple as well as Morrison’s oeuvre challenge (West) German audiences and represent an Otherness or Foreignness that needs to be mediated and in the process is often contained within ‘white’ mainstream discourses in order to make it intelligible for the (general) public.

A FRICAN A MERICAN W OMEN ’ S C ULTURES B IG S CREEN : T HE C OLOR P URPLE

ON THE

Steven Spielberg’s 1985 Die Farbe Lila [The Color Purple] opened at (West) German cinemas the same year that the milestone volume in AfroGerman history, Farbe bekennen, was published. The collection by and about Afro-German women met with mixed reactions particularly among white women because it confronted German readers with the “Other-fromWithin,” unsettled their notions of whiteness, Germanness, and feminism, and laid the foundation for Afro-German communities and identities. The Color Purple on the other hand, which presents a story far removed from its contemporary white German audience in terms of time and space, was

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moderately well received by German viewers and was also embraced by some German (film) critics. In the US, the film was controversially discussed. Barbara Tepa Lupack observes that “[c]ritics noted the importance of the film but nonetheless found much to fault” but they “were almost unanimous in their praise for the excellent cast, especially the women” (468, 469). “Despite its artistic shortcomings,” the film was a success at the box office and with regard to video rentals and sales (Lupack 469). Although The Color Purple was nominated for eleven Academy Awards in 1986 it ultimately did not receive a single Oscar; the “big winner of that year was Out of Africa […], which won many of the awards for which The Color Purple had been nominated” (Woll 191). Its popularity nonetheless revealed that there was a “market for black stories, even stories of black feminism, among both white and black audiences” (Lupack 470). The film initially garnered mixed responses and particularly strong objections from “African-American opinion makers” who complained about Walker and the film alike (Woll 198). The major controversies, as Lester Friedman summarizes, revolved on the one hand around the potentially racist portrayal of black men in the film and on the other hand around the alterations made in the film that for some “distort Walker’s literary vision” (298). According to Allen Woll, the film has garnered more positive reviews in recent years and “[t]here is no question […] that the film’s merits are considerable” (201). Bobo maintains that it “has been constructed as controversial by the media coverage of the protests against it, as have the novel, and, by extension, Alice Walker” (333). At first glance, the responses in (white) West Germany do not appear to differ decisively from the US mainstream: The film was successful and some critics and journalists discussed it rather favorably while others criticized it harshly. However, it did not instigate any controversy comparable to the heated debates in the US, even though the American controversies are usually mentioned in West German reviews. In 1986, the magazine Der Spiegel featured a review of the film as well as an article on Walker in its feature section. In his piece on the film entitled “Ein Spielberg für Erwachsene” [A Spielberg for Adults], Hellmuth Karasek locates The Color Purple in a tradition of (Hollywood) melodramas of the South,

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particularly the highly successful and popular Gone with the Wind (1939).5 He even labels Spielberg’s film a “schwarzes ‘Vom Winde verweht’” – a black Gone with the Wind (160).6 In this context, Karasek reiterates a narrative of progress and success of Hollywood representations of African Americans as he refers to the few stereotypical roles available to African American actors at the time of Victor Fleming’s epic film (like Hattie McDaniel’s role as Mammy) and contrasts these with Spielberg’s primarily black cast (158). What is to a certain degree new and shocking about The Color Purple, according to Karasek, is its focus on the time of the Great Depression and on a black social class that is affected by impoverishment (158-59). Karasek assumes that Spielberg wanted to criticize the chauvinism of black men and dismisses African American protest against the film, because in his opinion Spielberg’s film in that regard is beyond reproach (160). Rather, he claims that the director turns a “zutiefst deprimierenden Stoff” [deeply depressing material], a “hoffnungslos elende Story” [hopelessly miserable story] into a “buntes, pralles, kräftiges, im Grunde optimistisches Melodram” [colorful, blazing, powerful, in its essence optimistic melodrama] (160). Karasek summarizes: “‘Die Farbe Lila’ wird mit jenem Technicolor-Pinsel aufgetragen, der alles in ein Licht taucht, das Zuschauer zwar zu Tränen bewegt, sie aber zum Schluß überzeugt von der Überlebenskraft des Menschen nach Hause schickt.”7 (160)

5

Like The Color Purple, Gone with the Wind was based on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same title (by Margaret Mitchell, published in 1936). The novel was not only adapted for the screen but also found literary sequels like Alice Randall’s parody The Wind Done Gone (2001), which re-writes and reimagines the story from the perspective of a slave.

6

The blurb on the back cover of the 2003 German DVD special edition of Die Farbe Lila similarly promises a “Südstaaten-Epos, vergleichbar mit ‘Vom Winde verweht’” [Southern epic comparable to Gone with the Wind].

7

“‘The Color Purple’ is applied with a Technicolor brush which despite painting everything in a tone that moves the viewers to tears finally sends them home reassured of the survival skills of mankind.”

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This review, symptomatically, reveals how The Color Purple is primarily received in Germany: as a Hollywood blockbuster steeped in the tradition of epic American movies. Only in a second step is it read as a cultural text about African American women, their experiences and traditions. The film, of course, adheres to many classical Hollywood conventions in terms of its epic narration, cinematic style, and melodramatic tone, but a close look at the adaptation process and Walker’s involvement in it exposes certain complexities regarding its relationship to African American women’s culture past and present. The film increased Walker’s publicity and contributed decisively to her national and international reputation as a writer and activist, about which German readers could learn in an article on Walker accompanying Karasek’s review in Der Spiegel. The article “Sanfte Utopie” also informs about Walker’s career, her literary works, her focus on the situation of African American women, and her feminist project. It maintains that authors such as Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Gayle Jones, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker focus on the double oppression of African American women and promote a specifically black feminism (as white feminists do not share the same experiences) and reveals that for Walker, writing and narrating stories is a means of survival (162). This, of course, is also reminiscent of Audre Lorde’s black feminist thinking and her assertion that “poetry is not a luxury,” which are not mentioned in the article. The appeal of the book’s story to the American readership is, however, explained by the contemporaneous situation of African American women for which the “sanfte feministische Utopie” [bland feminist utopia] offers an escapist vision (162).8 This article attests to the fact that the promotion of Walker’s writings and particularly The Color Purple was decisively furthered by the film as well as the reviews of Spielberg’s version of the story. In this case, the readers could immediately continue reading to learn more about the African American author, her works, and the literary model for the Hollywood blockbuster. However, the two separate articles on Walker and her literary work (as affected by the film release) on the one hand and on the movie on the other

8

The same article also reports that moralists in the US strongly objected to the book and labeled it “lesbische Pornographie” [lesbian pornography] (“Sanfte Utopie” 162).

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also suggest that the film is not primarily read as an extension of Walker’s oeuvre but rather as an independent cultural text which relates to her writings but cannot be considered to be a part of it. Similarly, Joachim Riedl in Die Zeit maintains that Walker had intended a “schwarzes feministisches Epos” [black feminist epos] even though her book has primarily been read by white women; but Spielberg’s film is an almost totally different matter (42). Riedl even points out that Spielberg’s characters merely wear a “Mohrenmaske” [moor’s mask] and are placed in a setting full of folkloristic details (42). In such a reading, the story appears to be a universal one that happens to be transplanted into a rather exotic mise-en-scène uncommon for a Hollywood film – The Color Purple is represented as a moralistic fairy tale in blackface which in its universality is familiar but appears in a new disguise and hence is potentially exciting for white Western audiences. This assessment almost seems to confirm a major concern that had accompanied the filmmaking process, namely that “[m]angled by Hollywood, The Color Purple could become an expensive and embarrassing minstrel show” (Featherstone 183). However, the observation that there might be a blackface quality to the film does not lead to severe criticism but rather to a defense of Spielberg (and by extension Hollywood): Like Karasek, Riedl rebuts potential reproaches against the (gifted) “Märchenerzähler” [storyteller] Spielberg (42). The protagonist Miss Celie emerges, in his view, not as a potentially womanist character, a symbol of African American strength and survival, or an African American mother, but rather as “Schwester der Alice aus dem Wunderland und womöglich auch eine entfernte Kusine der heiligen Johanna der Schlachthöfe” [sister of Alice in wonderland and possibly even a distant cousin of Saint Joan of the stockyards] (Riedl 42). This assertion not only places Celie in a specifically European tradition by establishing a (however distant) relationship to Bertolt Brecht’s play Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe (1931) but also situates her story in the fantastic tradition of Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). In addition, the prominent references to the German fairy tale “Die Sterntaler” [The Star Money] collected by the Brothers Grimm relegate The Color Purple even further to the realm of fairy tales and fantastic stories in a Western tradition. This repositioning of the narration, which is in parts set up in the Spielberg adaptation and advanced in the reviews, has a double effect: It removes the story from the African American tradition and its focus on African American women and

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thereby situates it closer to the white (German) audiences. According to Riedl, the cinema as such and this film in particular fulfills a specific function through its moralistic appeal and its chastening of the audience as it provides a moment of catharsis to its viewers (42). Riedl further contends: “[Spielberg] erzählt Märchen für moderne Erwachsene, für Großstadtkinder, die in der lärmenden Geschäftigkeit des Erwerbslebens bedürftig geworden sind nach dem Seelentrost, wie er ihn in ‘Die Farbe Lila’ […] anbietet. […] Spielbergs Märchen sind nichts weiter als Parabeln, die lehren, daß einfache moralische Prinzipien […] als ordnende Kraft menschlichen Zusammenlebens obsiegen werden. Er ist davon so überzeugt, wie die großen Aufklärer und gleichzeitig erfüllt von ebenso naiver Gläubigkeit, wie die Dichter der Mysterienspiele.”9 (42)

Spielberg is installed almost in a direct lineage from the authors of mystery plays to Shakespeare, who is referenced in the following paragraph, from the philosophers of the Enlightenment to the great (European) storytellers. The story of suffering (and redemption) of the African American characters in The Color Purple provides catharsis and offers the viewers comfort and assurance only in terms of their own moral standards and a general human benevolence. The suffering of African American women is, in a sense, exploited by Spielberg’s film to entertain, chasten, and comfort white viewers who can enjoy watching the film without being burdened by the social critique and political impetus of Walker’s narration. At least for German audiences, as Riedl infers, the fairy tale world of The Color Purple contains the ‘realities’ of racism, segregation, violence, and suffering within a mythic structure with a happy ending and thereby offers consolation rather than

9

“[Spielberg] tells fairy tales for modern adults, for urban children, who through the tumultuous bustle of their working lives have become needy of the kind of balm for the soul that ‘The Color Purple’ offers. […] Spielberg’s fairy tales are nothing more than parables which teach that simple moral principles […] will prevail as structuring principles of communal life. He is as convinced of this as the great philosophers of the Enlightenment and at the same time he is filled with the naïve faith of the poets of mystery plays.”

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reason for concern (42).10 For Riedl, the unusual setting and the black characters might be questionable in the US where racial discrimination continues to have an effect, but he implicitly justifies the choice of setting and characters as a strategy of ‘good’ storytelling (42). The fact that the controversies surrounding the film are represented as confined to the US, again, exemplifies the familiar tendency in German mainstream discourses after 1945 to regard ‘race’ as an American problem hardly of any concern to Germans. Both film reviews address The Color Purple in a similar vein as reviews of black women’s literature address their topic. Koenen has shown that in the “early period (until about 1989/90) of dealing with black women’s literature” reviews “[…] demonstrate an urge to deny the uniqueness and validity of a nonwhite American cultural and literary tradition. Part of that denial may stem from a lack of knowledge about black women’s literature and black culture, but it is remarkable that the reviewers obviously feel comfortable in their state of ignorance. The idea emerges that this is a strange and distant culture we are dealing with.” (96)

Her observation equally holds true for several articles in German newspapers and magazines on the film The Color Purple which emphasize the universality and fairy tale quality of the story on the one hand and struggle to connect it to a white Western tradition on the other. The reviewers who discussed the film in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) as well as in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) are more explicit in their critique and find comparatively less excuses or justifications for Spielberg’s adaptation. Eva-Maria Lenz, similar to Riedl and Karasek, emphasizes the fairy tale quality of The Color Purple. However, she criticizes the film’s one-dimensional characters, shallow treatment of religion, and pseudo-documentary elements which undermine the fairy tale character

10 The two German reviews discussed here are, in general, similar to the first reviews in the US which did not yet consider black people’s responses. Bobo reveals that “[t]he reviewers talked about the film as being ‘universal’ and a ‘must see’ film about family relationships […]. The tone is patronizing and condescending” (335).

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of the story (23). Lenz disapproves of the simplified and dichotomous portrayal of black men and women, the film’s repetitiveness, and the complete neglect of economic hardship and racial discrimination. Yet, she seems to attribute several of the film’s flaws to Spielberg’s sticking too close to the original when she writes that “[i]m Banne seiner Vorlage, Alice Walkers Roman gleichen Titels, macht sich der Erfolgsregisseur ein feministisches Credo zu eigen, dem er ein gut Teil seiner Einbildungs- und Zauberkraft opfert.”11 (23)

Contrary to Karasek, Lenz does not even regard the film as a successful tearjerker and contends: “[D]ie Tränen [fließen] zwar reichlich auf der Leinwand, doch kaum davor” [tears are running abundantly on screen but hardly in front of it]. She also disagrees with the notion that the film might be a “Spielberg for adults” when she asks if the (happy) ending is “redemption” or “regression” and concludes that Spielberg (re)turns towards the “Kinderland” [children’s world] (23). Even though Lenz regards his directing as “[r]hythmisch raffiniert und effektsicher” [rhythmically ingenious and masterful in its use of effects], her critique is almost devastating and does not attempt to familiarize the German audience with the story and its cultural setting. The title of her review “Paradies in Schwarz” [Paradise in Black] however reiterates the theme of a universal story/motif in a specifically black version. SZ writer Peter Buchka heaps scorn on the film;12 he classifies The Color Purple as a “Neger-Melodram” [Negro melodrama] and harshly criticizes it for its sensationalism and exaggerations as well as for its reductionism and neglect of lesbianism (37). Ultimately, Buchka’s critique heads for the question “[f]ür wie blöd […] hält uns dieser Spielberg eigentlich?”

11 “[s]pellbound by his source material, Alice Walker’s novel of the same title, the successful director appropriates a feminist credo and thereby sacrifices a significant part of his imagination and magic.” 12 Like most of his colleagues he clearly locates the film in the Spielberg oeuvre; the title of his piece, “Unheimliche Begegnung der ersten Art” [Close Encounter of the First Kind] clearly alludes to Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

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[How stupid does this Spielberg think we are?]; and immediately provides an answer: While Spielberg does not take his audience for fools he could not break with his established filmmaking approach and consequently had to fail in directing The Color Purple: “Aber man macht wohl nicht ungestraft zehn Jahre lang Filme, in denen die Effekte wichtiger sind als die Menschen, ohne daß sich solche Sehweisen allmählich verinnerlichen.”13 (37)

While Spielberg might be a gifted Hollywood director in the sense that he is capable of creating effects with the “Riesenspielzeug” [gigantic toys] provided by the “Riesenstudios” [gigantic studios], he cannot adequately deal with the material of Walker’s novel (37). In contrast to Riedl and Karasek, neither Lenz nor Buchka find a convincing universal appeal in Spielberg’s The Color Purple and both do not attempt to establish its relevance or significance. Rather, they declare the film a failure – even as a Hollywood tearjerker or sentimental melodrama. All reviewers, of course, refer to the novel on which Spielberg’s film is based and pass their judgment also with an eye to the source material. For Karasek the depressing content of the novel is transformed into a loud and colorful Hollywood epos, for Riedl the film is a totally different matter than the book, and both Lenz’s and Buchka’s critiques rely in part on the reductions and simplifications of the Spielberg version. As is the nature of any adaptation, Spielberg’s film establishes numerous alterations to the story told in Walker’s novel, most of them (potentially simplifying) reductions. Major changes include the reduction of the African subplot, a reshaping of the letters (as Lupack points out, in order to avoid continuous voice-over narrations), the insertion of original scenes to reveal Celie’s “odyssey from silence to self-assertion,” and a reduction of the sexual and lesbian scenes (Lupack 462-64).14 In Bobo’s words, “[t]here is, of

13 “However, one does hardly get away with ten years of making movies which emphasize effects over people without gradually internalizing this kind of approach.” 14 For a more complete overview of the alterations and changes made in the film and a comparison between the story as it is told in the novel and the story of the

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course, a significant difference between the novel and the film, one being the work of a black woman, the other a mainstream media product constructed by a white male” (332). While Walker agreed that Spielberg should direct the film (a choice that was ardently supported by producer Quincy Jones) it was also arranged that she “would work on the screenplay and confer on the film” (Woll 193). It was written into the contract that Walker would be involved and that “half the people involved in the production, apart from the predominantly black cast, would be blacks, women and/or people of the Third World” (Featherstone 183). Successful as Spielberg was in terms of making money with his films that were primarily “audience pleasers,” he still “seemed an odd and controversial choice at the time” as he had neither attempted to deal with the African American experience before nor had he focused on character development in his earlier films (Woll 193-94). Ultimately, the “broader debate over The Color Purple is about the authority of black women writers to set the agenda for imagemaking in fiction and film” (Bobo 334). Walker herself had written a screenplay based on The Color Purple that was, however, not used for the film.15 Woll apparently finds her adaptation to be largely ‘true’ to the literary original as it used “the major themes and characters of the novel, and it was more complex in structure than the film. More characters made their way into her screenplay than appeared in the final version, and scenes retained the complexity of the novel. Furthermore, her screenplay was heavily descriptive […]. Rather than being a strictly chronological narrative, the script presents a series of flashbacks as Celie reflects on ‘her colorful, beautifully appliquéd quilt’ for visions of her complex past.” (196)

film see Lupack 456-70, Allen Woll’s chapter “The Color Purple: Translating the African American Novel for Hollywood,” or Joan Digby’s essay “From Walker to Spielberg: Transformations of The Color Purple.” 15 The script which is entitled “Watch for Me in the Sunset, or The Color Purple” has been published as part of Walker’s reflections on the making of The Color Purple in The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult. It is placed at the center of the book and thus “functions as yet another response to, or voice in dialogue with, both Spielberg’s movie version and the many public reactions that the film evoked” (Sievers 132).

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In his view “[t]he filmed version of the novel simplified the storyline, conflated characters and scenes, and, in general, enforced a chronological narrative” (196). Similarly, Joan Digby emphasizes the process of transformation from the novel to the “mass-audience Hollywood film” which necessarily entails a reduction of the “dense plotting of Walker’s barely 250-page novel” (161). The final film version, contemporary adaptation theory suggests, has to be judged and analyzed on its own rather than on the basis of a ‘fidelity discourse’ judging the adaptation according to its ‘truthfulness’ to or in comparison to the literary original (cf. for example Hutcheon, Leitch, or Stam). The script written by Menno Meyjes in cooperation with Spielberg was approved by Walker, who remained involved in the process of making the film (Woll 197, Friedman 294). According to Friedman, the collaboration between “the black feminist writer and the white Jewish filmmaker” was characterized by “affection, warmth, and mutual respect” (294). The fact that Walker dedicated her book about the making of the film, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, not only to her family but also to Spielberg and Quincy Jones underscores this point. She also stated as early as 1984 in a journal entry with regard to Jones and Spielberg that “[w]hatever happens or doesn’t. Love is the way to feel” (Same River 19).16 For Spielberg, Walker functioned as “interpreter, as guide, who helped him cross over from his culture to her own experiences” (Friedman 294). The author’s initial reaction to the film mirrored to a certain degree the general reception in the US: Walker saw many flaws and was very critical of the final product. However, she subsequently “warmed to the film as an adaptation not a transcription” (Friedman 296). Her initial feeling about the film was “terrible” and she thought it looked “slick, sanitized and apolitical” (Same River 160). Friedman offers a comprehensive

16 The book, which can also be read as a “work of self-representation in the confessional tradition,” also includes passages which suggest, according to Jill Terry, that Walker has been “damaged by her association with Hollywood” and with Spielberg and that literature is the medium which “performs the ‘sacred function’” (68). Hence, The Same River Twice represents an ambiguous and conflicting relationship between Walker (and her works) and Spielberg (and his Hollywood version of The Color Purple).

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list of Walker’s concerns regarding the film which correspond with many responses by film critics: “(1) the de-emphasis of Shug’s bisexuality; (2) the lack of fullness in Harpo’s character and his frequent falls through various roofs; (3) the ‘bluntness’ of Celie’s erroneous statement about being raped and impregnated by the man she supposes is her father; (4) the falseness of Shug pretending not to understand why Celie can’t speak up when left alone with Mister; (5) the absurdity of Mister not knowing where the butter is kept or how to start a fire; (6) the lack of forgiveness for Mister; (7) the avoidance of an erotic, sensuous relationship between Shug and Celie; (8) the characters being overly well dressed; (9) the distortion, at times, of folk speech; (10) the sentimentality of the carved heart in the tree and the imposition of Oliver Twist into the story; and (11) the misinformation present in the African scenes about the location of the village, the sanctification ceremony, and the placement of the rubber plantation.” (296)

However, initially “Walker’s public response to the completed film was cautious,” as executive producer Peter Guber had warned her “that she might be shocked when she saw it and it was almost a decade before she could contemplate her experience with the film” (Woll 197). Walker’s concerns center on issues of African American culture and ethnicity as well as gender and sexuality and reveal how the Hollywood film made by a white male director has contained and/or changed many of the aspects she deemed to be essential to her novel. Her criticism implies, among other things, that bi- and homosexuality are avoided (1, 7), that African and African American cultural contexts are misunderstood and misrepresented (9, 11) and even superimposed by white cultural models (10), and that both female and male characters, are not represented adequately (2-6, 8). In The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, Walker provides her own as well as other perspectives on the making of the film through journal entries, newspaper articles, essays, letters, and not the least her own script.17 The book can be described, as Stefanie Sievers suggests, as a

17 It is in fact “surprising” that Walker’s account of the events, which had at the time been so heatedly and controversially debated, “has been met with virtual silence” (Terry 59).

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“verbal patchwork in its assemblage of short, distinct texts” (130), or, in Kate Fitzsimmons’s words, as something “a bit like an expressionist painting or a jazz score” (20). In this text, “river” and “labyrinth” constitute the “leading metaphors” and underline the “overall emphasis on process rather than product” and the “openendedness” and “uncontrollability” of the project (Sievers 131, 142). The book is intended “as a record of the process, which [Walker] consider[s] especially useful for women, anyone who is fascinated by film, and people of color” (Same River 31); its subtitle indicates the struggle entailed in this process but also hints at the difficulties as being rather useful, productive, and something to be ‘honored.’ The title also alludes to the saying that “you cannot step into the same river twice” and suggests that the film and the book The Color Purple necessarily turned out to be different projects. Walker points out that her initial criticism was overcome also by the positive reception of the film. She reflects on her own responses to the film describing the “headache [she] got the first time [she] saw it” and the ‘magical’ change at the premiere in New York City which together with the “packed theatre of enthusiastic viewers all sobbing and guffawing” contributed to her more positive assessment (Same River 21). Walker connects the process of working on the film and dealing with the reactions to both novel and movie to her personal life and particularly her mother. As Walker claims, the novel was written in “a way that would not intimidate […] readers like her [Walker’s mother], with only a grade school education and a lifetime of reading the Bible, newspapers and magazine articles” (Same River 24). The film then, in her view, made the story accessible to a broader audience. Again using the example of her own mother, Walker recalls that she “was less frightened of movies than of books; seeing the characters of The Color Purple in the familiar way she’d always seen movie characters soothed her, as did feeling the overwhelming acceptance of the movie by the people in the audience.” (Same River 29)

While the audience of her book might be limited, she believed in the global and far-ranging influence of (Hollywood) film: “‘So much of my constituency just doesn’t read, […] people in other countries, in Africa, who can’t read English. I knew that people in my hometown [Eatonton,

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Georgia] might not read the book. But I knew they would see the film.… I wanted it to be there, to appear in the villages.’” (Dworkin 174)

In her view, the film enables her work to reach rural and remote areas and less literate audiences as well as to cross geographical distance in addition to cultural and language barriers.18 Even though she openly addresses her reservations towards the film, Walker deliberately embraces it for its positive effects, including the larger dissemination of her political agenda.19 She “had been glad to see how the issues of incest and domestic violence were opened up by the book, and more widely by the film;” Walker affirms that “[i]n letters and on visits women and men from all over the world have expressed to [her] the power and transformation they’ve received from both” (Same River 41). Walker was involved in the making of the film on different levels and in numerous functions from the very beginning and actively contributed, conferred, and commented on the developments, albeit from the difficult position of the “author-turned-consultant” (Sievers 131). The struggles and negotiations between ‘white’ Hollywood and the political and aesthetic agenda of the black feminist author are well documented. For example, she sent notes to Spielberg and Meyjes with regard to the script in April 1985 and, among other things, stated: “As much as I like Albert on his horse, to end with him on his horse seems too John Wayne-ish, and makes it seem he’s more responsible and in control of the happiness he is observing than he is. It sets him apart, when by now he really isn’t, and in doing so, sets him above. The feeling of the people is circle, not hierarchy. […] But basically, this is a reunited family, and no one would be off on his horse at this thrilling time. Except John Wayne. And need I say, us ain’t he?” (Same River 143)

18 Walker regards movies “the most powerful medium for change on earth” but also a “powerful medium for institutionalizing complacency, oppression and reaction” (Same River 282). 19 Jill Terry confirms that the controversial debate about the film contributed to this effect as it “dramatically increased audience numbers and these have probably far outnumbered the novel’s readership” (66).

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The question ending this note with its purposeful use of black vernacular pointedly exposes the (almost irreconcilable) differences between a John Wayne-ish individualism (“he”) and African American communality (“us”) as well as between African American (women’s) culture and dominant white (Hollywood) iconography, and draws attention to some of the tensions occurring during the making of the film. Walker rejects the suggestion of Albert on his horse on the basis of two argumentative strands: On the one hand, referring to John Wayne, one of the paradigmatic icons of classical Hollywood cinema, she refutes the imposition of a loaded image of white Hollywood on the story of The Color Purple; on the other hand, she argues that the image does not make sense on the intradiegetic level as it insinuates a structure and position of the character which does not reflect the developments in the story.20 Her recommendations, suggestions, and interventions did not always lead to the intended change and, as Walker put it, there even “are telling moments in the film when the censor’s knife scars the scene” (Same River 220). Nonetheless, the film’s success and popularity were significant for promoting Walker’s work and vision, for a general interest in the story of The Color Purple, its thematic concerns and its protagonists, as well as its actors and actresses. Most prominently, Whoopi Goldberg’s performance as Celie, which Bambi Haggins has termed Goldberg’s “landmark one-woman show,” paved the way for the “crossover diva” to win substantial and lasting financial, popular, and critical success within US and international mainstream cinema (Haggins 315). The film was also important for the career of Oprah Winfrey (who played Sofia): “For the mass American audience media-heroes like Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey are folk-heroines whose roles in fiction have validated their political credentials. Though The Color Purple was criticized by its detractors as a sanitized white version of a black text, the heroines created by the film became role-models of

20 While Walker objected to this “John Wayne-ish” representation of Mister in the end of the film, the final scene of The Color Purple ultimately lends itself to a reading in which it appears to “[belittle] the rugged strength of the male image drawn from the ‘Western’ genre thereby negating black male superiority or even the possibility of gender equality” (Terry 67).

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black and feminist self-imagining who now have a national, multi-racial following for their continued exploration of controversial issues. Thus The Color Purple […] turned out to be a ‘populist’ film that transformed Alice Walker’s characters, by transference, into living myths.” (Digby 173-74)

On the other hand, the casting of these two “popular media celebrities” has fed into “charges of their ‘acting up’ to white culture” and consequently into the larger controversies surrounding the film (Terry 65). The process of adapting the story of The Color Purple from the novel to the screenplay and, ultimately, to the screen is complicated and conflicting due to its multiple steps and creative agents, including the actors and actresses. For West German audiences specifically, another adaptation was pertinent: The Color Purple became Die Farbe Lila as it was translated and dubbed for German viewers. Germany belongs to the countries which are “traditional dubbers” (Whitman-Linsen 18),21 and audiences expect and are used to hearing American actors speak German on screen. Hence, the rather expensive and time-consuming process of dubbing (compared to e.g. subtitling) virtually is a necessity in order to market and distribute a foreign film in Germany. As Josephine Dries points out, the “vast majority in dubbing countries [such as Germany] has grown up with dubbing and does not want to see this changed. Broadcasters and film distributors do not want to, nor can they, take the risk of losing viewers because of a change to cheaper subtitling” (10). Wolfgang Maier confirms that commercially oriented productions targeting a broad (mainstream) audience are usually dubbed (57). Original and subtitled versions are seldom screened in German cinemas, though, of course, today they are quite easily accessible on DVDs, which

21 The postwar years and the American occupation are central catalysts for this development. The heyday of dubbing began after World War II and was significantly furthered through the role of film for reeducation programs, the German demand for foreign films, and the efforts of the US film industry to establish dominance over the German market. Dubbing paradoxically became not only a means of American cultural imperialism (as it made the films accessible and understandable for the majority of Germans) but also an opposition to this imperialism as it was viewed as a form of Germanization (Bräutigam 13-14).

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usually include the ‘original’ audio track.22 Due to its dominance in cinemas and on TV, “[d]ubbing has the power to represent and misrepresent, distort, sway, and in general make a tremendous contribution (positive or negative) to America’s image abroad” (Whitman-Linsen 11). Even though there are a number of studies on the theory and practice of dubbing,23 it is still a relatively uncharted field in terms of the scholarly attention it has received so far – Candace Whitman-Linsen calls it a “cinematic no-man’s land” (9). Within this field, the aspects of ‘gender’ and ‘age’ as they affect the choice of dubbing actors, and the effects of dubbing, i.e. the production and reception of dubbed versions, are discussed to some degree, whereas ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are hardly examined. While it is beyond the scope of this book to delve into the complexities and problematics of dubbing in general, I focus on some specific aspects as they pertain to Die Farbe Lila24 and concentrate on the main (female) characters, primarily the protagonist Celie (played by Goldberg). In the German version she speaks with the

22 In 1992, “the dubbed version [was] [often] the only one available” in Germany (Whitman-Linsen 17). Germany’s dubbing industry, in the 1990s, had, in fact, become the largest in the world (Pruys 8). 23 These include Hesse-Quack’s Der Übertragungsprozeß bei der Synchronisation von Filmen: Eine interkulturelle Untersuchung (1969), Fodor’s Film Dubbing (1976), Toepser-Ziegert’s Theorie und Praxis der Synchronisation (1978), Garncarz’s Filmfassungen (1992), Whitman-Linsen’s Through the Dubbing Glass (1992), Herbst’s Linguistische Aspekte der Synchronisation von Fernsehserien (1994), Pisek’s Die große Illusion (1994), Maier’s Spielfilmsynchronisation (1997), Pruys’s Die Rhetorik der Filmsynchronisation (1997), and Kurz’s Filmsynchronisation aus übersetzungswissenschaftlicher Sicht (2006). Most studies focusing on dubbing follow a primarily linguistic approach (Fodor, Whitman-Linsen, and Herbst) or are conducted from a sociological point of view (Hesse-Quack, Toepser-Ziegert, and Garncarz). 24 It is not my aim to compare the American with the German version but rather to examine the possible effects of the dubbed version on its West German viewers. Considering the dominance of dubbed versions in (West) Germany, it is most likely that the majority of viewers (and possibly also film critics) were familiar with the German version exclusively and hence would not have been able to compare it to the ‘original.’

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voice of Regina Lemnitz, who is one of the best-known German dubbing actresses. Lemnitz has not only lent her voice to Goldberg, but also to several other actresses including Diane Keaton, Kathy Bates, Glenn Close, and Roseanne Barr (Bräutigam 453-54).25 The African American characters in Die Farbe Lila in general speak with ‘white’ voices in standard German without any significant dialect or other markers of regional, ethnic, social, or cultural difference.26 This is not only a characteristic feature of this film but rather conforms to the general tendency in dubbing to transfer the ‘original’ text which includes dialects and accents into standard German without such differentiations (Herbst 89). Therefore, as Thomas Herbst claims, the dubbed version has to account in other ways for the fact that in the ‘original’ film accents and dialects might reveal the social status as well as the regional and racial identity of a character and that some linguistic varieties are also associated with specific stereotypes (93). In the case of The Color Purple, the “evocation of oral culture” plays a decisive role in the novel particularly through the protagonist Celie and her use of “colloquial language, black dialect, or black folk speech, and folk idiom” (Terry 62). According to Jill Terry, this “vernacular narrative discourse” has “served to Africanise the book in opposition to the white canon” and Spielberg’s film version in this sense “signalled the reconstruction of the novel by a ‘white’, Jewish, male who until that time had been popularly regarded as the creator of the fantasies of the white American dream, the Hollywood blockbuster and perhaps the whitest of white canons” (63). She further elaborates: “In the film, […] any emphasis on ‘oral’ black dialect ceases to be radical and can be construed as little more than ‘Uncle Toming’. Of course the black film actors speak black dialect, although, actually, in only a very slight way, but this ceases to be a political action which demands attention, recognition and respect, the claiming

25 In general, it is avoided to have two different dubbing actresses for one actress (particularly if she is well-known), but it is not unusual to have one voice for different actresses (Pruys 94). 26 The only exceptions are the scenes in which Shug (Margaret Avery) sings, for example, at Harpo’s jazz club (1:00:17, 1:03:24) and together with the choir at church (2:15:43).

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of a voice and a new aesthetic cultural space for African Americans – the polemic for which The Color Purple has been celebrated.” (63)

In the German version any possible effects evoked by the use of black dialect are erased completely. In this sense, it heightens the “uncomfortable resonances” with the minstrel tradition that Terry detects in the Spielberg production (64). In this version, not only do the African American actors wear ‘masks’ to appeal to a broader public but they also have to rely on ‘white’ German dubbing voices – literally – to be heard and understood. While West German viewers do not share the American collective and cultural memories associated with slavery and its legacies, this minstrel effect is enhanced by the African American actors and actresses speaking with ‘white’ German voices. In this context, it is also particularly evident that dubbing is not only an act of translation but equally of cultural mediation, which might also be viewed as part of a process of “intercultural assimilation” (Hesse-Quack 239) and a means of “social control” (Toepser-Ziegert 55; Hesse-Quack 54-69). Whitman-Linsen states that “the basic objective of dubbing is to encourage the illusion that one is watching a homogenous whole, not the schizoid version with which one is in fact confronted” (17). Dries confirms that dubbing should generate “the perfect illusion”27 which “allow[s] the audience to experience the production in their own language without diminishing any of the characteristics of the original language, culture and national background” (9). However, creating this illusion (to the degree that it is, in fact, possible) comes at a price, as translations have to be made according to lip synchrony and in a way that fits the gestures and facial

27 Of course, the “screen […] presents constant visual reminders; printed signs, dress, landmarks, and so on, that the scene and characters are distinctly foreign to the audience” (T. Rowe 119); in this sense, the illusion can never be perfect. In Die Farbe Lila the Southern setting at the beginning of the 20th century and the characters’ dresses are such visual reminders. A particularly evident example occurs when Nettie teaches Celie how to spell words and therefore attaches signs to numerous items including household appliances, food, and body parts. In this scene a German audience sees the sign which reads, for example, “window” while Celie spells the German “Fenster” (0:19:00).

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expressions of the characters, the atmosphere of the scene, and the dramatic structure of the sequence. For István Fodor, a “satisfactory synchronization” includes a “faithful and artistic rendering of the original dialogue,” lip synchrony, and “bringing the style of delivery in the new version into optimal artistic harmony with the style of acting” (9). Of course, there are different opinions regarding the (minimum) requirements for and characteristics of ‘good’ dubbing, but many publications on the topic criticize its deficits, give prescriptive guidelines, and/or voice a plea for ‘better’ dubbing. Only few scholars address the creative process of dubbing; Guido Marc Pruys for example introduces a rhetorical perspective in order to gain a more positive evaluation of dubbing as an act of interpretation (43). Whitman-Linsen, on the other hand, addresses the losses that dubbed versions might entail:28 “Much of the color of, for example, a Whoopie (sic) Goldberg, […] will be doomed to fade in to shades of gray in dubbed versions. It is not only the character himself who becomes flatter; the local color and milieu authenticity will invariably fade, becoming increasingly one-dimensional.” (49-50)

This aspect of “flattening” and the resulting reduction of difference might however also contribute to the universal appeal that reviewers and audiences have assigned the film Die Farbe Lila. Dubbing might in this context function, as Otto Hesse-Quack suggests, as a kind of “pre-assimilator” which results in a reduction of xenophobia as it makes the foreign familiar and understandable to the target audience: “Das ursprünglich Fremde wird verständlich, und die Erkenntnis der Relativität des eigenen kulturellen Systems mündet in eine Universalität ein, die die herrschenden Xenophobien reduziert.”29 (54)

28 Otto Hesse-Quack’s study equally concludes that dubbed versions of films are usually standardized and therefore entail a loss of information (239). 29 “The ‘originally’ foreign becomes intelligible, and the insight that one’s own cultural system is relative leads towards universality which reduces the predominant xenophobia.”

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Christopher Kurz maintains that while rather universal presuppositions can be part of the dubbed version, culturally specific presuppositions which might impede the understanding within the cultural target context need to be addressed in the process of dubbing; symbols which are specific to the ‘original’ cultural setting then might have to be replaced with either universal symbols or symbols which are part of the target culture (215). In a similar vein, Wolfgang Maier proclaims it the “goal” of dubbing to bridge or decrease the cultural distance between the ‘original’ text and its dubbed version (12). According to these scholars, the process of dubbing has an inherently assimilatory tendency and necessarily results in a universalization as it has also been diagnosed for Die Farbe Lila. The use of ‘white’ dubbing voices speaking standard German creates an effect of additionally ‘whitening’ the material. Whitman-Linsen implies that this choice might also have to do with the very limited number of black German dubbing actors and actresses and the lack of a “recognizable black intonation” in German as it exists, for example, in France where “there is also a greater pool of black Francophone actors available” (51). Generally, the choice of dubbing actors can contribute decisively to the stereotyping of characters as the actors are primarily cast according to the degree their respective voice matches the character type (Toepser-Ziegert 59). Die Farbe Lila might, in this sense, appear even more an act of “Uncle Toming” as the ‘original’ film. However, the transformation of the ‘original’ language varieties into standard German can easily be incorporated into a narrative of progress when compared to, for example, the representation of African Americans in Gone with the Wind, which was released in German as Vom Winde verweht as late as 1953 and surfaces frequently in texts on Spielberg’s film. In the dubbed version of Victor Fleming’s film, not all African American characters speak standard German. While Mammy, for example, primarily articulates complete and grammatically correct German sentences in her characteristic sulky manner, Prissy is not only equipped with a ridiculously squeaky voice but also utters sentences mostly in broken German; for example when she says “Ich sehr gut alles verstehen” (1:06:52) or “Ich Doktor nicht gesehen” (1:11:11). The field slaves by and large speak only broken German; for example the black overseer states: “Ich sein Vorarbeiter, ich haben zu sagen, wenn Feierabend auf Tara” (00:08:46) and Sam relates upon meeting Scarlett O’Hara in Atlanta: “Sie sehr viel krank Miss Scarlett, aber nicht sehr krank Miss Scarlett, Vater wütend, weil nicht

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darf kämpfen mit zerbrochenem Knie […]” (1:03:16).30 Still, even when Die Farbe Lila is viewed against this backdrop and within an – albeit highly disputable – narrative of progress, the black idiom is contained in a white standard language and within white standards in general. The dubbing and the choice of actors and actresses presenting the dialogues in standard German therefore constitutes at the same time a form of familiarization as well as ‘defamiliarization’ for German audiences. Viewers are offered a framework and a language that makes the story intelligible for them and at the same time have to accept an almost Brechtian kind of ‘distanciation’ because the standard German, which most clearly does not fit the black Southern setting, breaks the illusion and draws attention to its constructedness and artificiality. However, this ‘break’ has become so naturalized that it might hardly trouble audiences who are used to dubbing and willing to accept, for example, the combination of names and songs in the ‘original’ language, which, of course, also retain local color, with German dialogues. This so-called “Majorca syndrome” entails a conceptualization of the foreign country as a mere extension of one’s home country (Pruys 116). As another example, the “Rockford paradox” equally does not bother audiences of dubbed films as they are used to sounds (like telephones or sirens) that clearly mark the setting as ‘foreign’ combined with German-speaking characters (Pruys 118). The effects of dubbing play into the general reception of the film and, I propose, even enhance several of its properties which critics have pointed out (whether favorably or dismissively): (1) It offers a ‘white’ and familiar framework, intelligible to the West German audience; (2) it contributes to the universal appeal as this framework contains and to some degree controls Otherness; and (3) it presents Foreignness in a way that characters and setting can be relegated to an exotic context which is historically as well as geographically far removed from West German viewers. These factors certainly contributed to the lack of recognition of a political agenda, which many critics already searched for in vain in the American version. While the film has been viewed in West Germany primarily as a Hollywood production (for better or worse) and not as a culturally specific fictional documentation of African Ameri-

30 These differences, of course, are an attempt to reflect the linguistic varieties of the ‘original’ version.

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can women’s lives, it definitely helped to generate a broader interest in Walker’s work. Even though her novels and the Spielberg film have catapulted Walker into the sphere of international popularity and visibility and she “perfect[ed] the arts of self-marketing” and became “the darling of women’s studies departments throughout the US,” as Sabine Broeck has argued, the “theoretical implications of Walker’s and other black feminists’ arguments” have been largely ignored by white academic feminists – and, one might add, a larger (feminist) public as well (“Urgency” 408). Walker’s interventions which Broeck explores exemplarily in her reading of the 1974 essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” were, “if at all, acknowledged in her literary contributions, but more often than not trivialized” in academic discourse (401). In this text, Walker addresses (and criticizes) both the black arts movement and white feminist criticism (Broeck, “Urgency” 406). In fact, it turns out to be “one of the crucial contributions to foreshadow and prefigure the often volatile and always complicated, overcharged relationship between black and white feminists for the two decades to come” and contains a “potential for dialogue and cooperation” which, according to Broeck, “has not however been realized widely enough” (407). Walker’s essay first appeared in Germany in 1982 in the collection Auf der Suche nach den Gärten unserer Mütter, which was edited by Sara Lennox and translated by Sybille Koch-Grünberg, two years before Lorde arrived in Berlin and before her readings and writings made an impact on white feminism in Germany.31 Similar to Lorde’s works, Walker’s publications in German targeted a female readership: Most of her novels, essays, and short story collections were published by Weismann Frauenbuchverlag [Women’s Press], including Meridian (1984), Roselily: 13 Liebesgeschichten (1986), and Good Morning Revolution: Schreiben und sozialer Protest. Essays (1988). Rowohlt published several of her books in its paperback series rororo neue frau [new woman] which was launched in 1977 and integrated into the general rororo series 20 years later. Rowohlt’s series featured, for example, Die Farbe Lila (1982), which sold over 800,000

31 The essay collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens was also published in German by Weismann Frauenbuchverlag in 1987. The publishing house issued several essay collections by Walker in the following years.

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copies and, according to the publishing house, has been the most successful title in a series which comprised 254 books (cf. Rowohlt, Kleine Verlagsgeschichte). While gender as an essential feature of her writings may have been absent and ignored in (early) discussions and reviews of Walker’s (as well as Morrison’s) literature (Koenen 97), it figured prominently in the gendered marketing strategies of German publishing houses primarily catering to white women. The (re)presentation and marketing of Walker’s writings not only focused on a female audience but also in some instances reiterated the topos of African American culture as belonging to an ‘other’ America, which had also figured prominently in the reception of Angela Davis. The back cover of Walker’s essay collection Die Erfahrung des Südens: Das schwarze Amerika erzählen (1988), which is based on In Search for Our Mothers’ Gardens, reads: “Die Erfahrung des Südens erzählt von der literarischen Tradition, in der schwarze Schriftsteller in Amerika stehen. Für die Leser ist Walkers Auseinandersetzung mit dem Werk von Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes und Flannery O’Connor wie eine ungewöhnliche Reise in das andere Amerika, in die bedrückend schöne Landschaft des Südens, den tief verwurzelten Rassismus, das harte Leben der schwarzen Bevölkerung.”32

This paragraph links oppression, hardship, and racism to the beautiful Southern landscapes in a way that romanticizes these experiences. Walker’s analysis of Southern and/or African American writers not only (re)constructs and (re)negotiates a literary tradition but rather promises the reader an “unusual journey into the other America” by introducing her to black life in the South via an insider perspective. Similarly, Gabriele Flessenkemper, for example, chose as the title for her 1986 article on Walker’s novels

32 “Die Erfahrung des Südens [The Experience of the South] deals with the literary tradition of black writers in America. Walker’s analysis of the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Flannery O’Connor offers the reader an unusual journey into the other America, into the oppressively beautiful landscapes of the South, the deeply rooted racism, the hard life of the black population.”

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and short stories “Aus dem anderen Amerika” [From the other America] (7). Again, this strategy on the one hand might arouse curiosity and interest; on the other hand it locates African American culture outside the American mainstream as its potentially subversive but at the very least inherently different Other. That this notion is also explicitly bound up with the geographic location of the American South and conjures up its iconic images present in the collective imaginary (images which were not the least established through the Hollywood version of Gone with the Wind) further enhances the potential appeal of the book as it not only offers a perspective on black culture but also revelations about Southern life. In total, there emerge at least two contrary tendencies in the German reception of the film The Color Purple and Alice Walker’s oeuvre: One approach rather appreciates the universality of these stories, the other focuses on their inherent Otherness and difference. Of course, these two approaches are neither mutually exclusive nor polar extremes; they are entangled and oftentimes simultaneously underlie the same text. In the dominant reception of the film The Color Purple and the reactions to Walker’s literary works, race does not figure prominently and is only of significance as a marker of difference or Otherness. Goldberg confirmed this: “‘The Color Purple’ is not a movie about race […]. What happens to Celie is happening to women all over the world, of all races, and backgrounds, that is the fact. This is a story about the trials of the human spirit.” (Dworkin 181-82)

In this comment the protagonist’s experience is opened up to include the experiences of all women and, in a second step, further universalized as relating to the “trials of the human spirit” which, we might assume, every viewer can relate to. Similar to the reception of Walker’s literary texts, women’s issues and gender solidarity play a significant role in the marketing and the reception of the film. In this context, also the genre of the Hollywood melodrama is of central relevance. The melodramatic text has not only been dismissed from a “traditional modernist or ‘masculine’” perspective but its affective power also constitutes a “problem in theory that feminists have failed to resolve” as they have refused to “champion the feminine, racial and political content of these tearjerkers” (Shattuc 147, 149). Utilizing Pascal Bruckner’s concepts, Jane Shattuc exposes “poten-

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tially imperialist stances” which are involved in a “liberal-to-left” discourse on the Third World and which might also bear on a white feminist reception of The Color Purple: (1) The solidarity stance builds on the oppression of women as the basis for an (imagined) solidarity that, however, ignores the specificities of e.g. Celie’s situation. (2) The pity stance leads the audience to feel sorry for the character and experience some degree of consciousness-raising with regard to their guilt and complicity in oppression but, ultimately, only reaffirms a “sense of luck and pleasure in being white.” (3) The imitation stance entails a longing for the wisdom and nobility of the black feminine culture and community that, in the end, might turn into a “vulgar substitution” (150). From the perspective of a white, middleclass feminist, Shattuc concludes that The Color Purple “not only plays on [her] false consciousness, but also on [her] authentic liberatory aspirations, those Utopian impulses that have drawn [her] to both the women’s and the civil rights movement” (151). She reclaims the melodrama in general and The Color Purple in particular in order to create a “new feminist reading strategy based on a dual awareness of the text as both positive and negative hermeneutics” and to alter the “terms of the debate” so that “emotions can be reasoned” (154). From this perspective, the film might then, as Walker envisioned it, spread a political and social agenda that particularly revolves around African American women. The film project The Color Purple, as Elena Featherstone confirms, “has a value that goes beyond – and has some people helped look beyond – the issue of race” (188). The universal appeal of the story in this sense contributes to the obfuscation of the dynamics of race and gender as well as oppression and resistance in the specific socio-cultural setting of the US South. Gerald Early, for example, in his trenchant critique of the film (as well as the novel) as a form of “everybody’s protest art” regards race as “the old stuff” represented in the film – a topic that is no longer relevant as blacks “have long ceased to be exotic or exciting or even interesting” (94). The romanticization of black life in the South and the forms of distancing (historical, cultural, etc.) employed in the film certainly fuel this tendency. The frequently voiced comparison between The Color Purple and Gone with the Wind was particularly disturbing for Walker. This association did not only come up in the reception but was already part of the production. Spielberg “referred to Gone with the Wind as ‘the greatest movie ever made’ and said that his favorite character was Prissy” (Same River 150).

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Walker, on the other hand, strove to explain to him “what a nightmare” the film was to her (Same River 282). In her opinion, it trivialized the “suffering of millions of black people over hundreds of years of enslavement […] to the point of laughter” and she describes her first viewing experience as a child in a segregated theater as rather traumatic (282). In 1995, she writes upon re-watching the film: “The old hurt I used to feel from movies like it was gone; and many were spawned after Gone with the Wind: movies that explicitly educated the white public about the kind of ‘Negroes’ who would be permitted visibility in public life. Today it is merely irritating.” (Same River 282)

In Walker’s evaluation, The Color Purple counters this depiction and white control over representations of blackness. The fact that it did not receive a single Academy Award despite its numerous nominations is, for her, a reason for relief partly because she “was aware of the kind of black characters who had been anointed before. Maids and other white family retainers” (Same River 285). This point is underscored by the fact that Out of Africa was embraced by the Academy,33 i.e. a film which Walker describes as “reactionary and racist” as it “glamorizes the rape of Africa and attempts to make colonialists look like saviors” (Same River 286). On the contrary, Early positions The Color Purple within a “long line of inept Hollywood films about black life” rather than outside or counter to it (94). In his view, the film is “protest art that moves an audience without disturbing it, the most dangerous kind of narcotic art in many instances” (101). The emphasis on the story’s universality and its fairy tale character used by critics both to defend it (e.g. in German reviews) as well as to attack it (e.g. in Early’s critique) and which was also utilized as a marketing strategy (e.g. in Goldberg’s comment) certainly contributes to the effect of “moving without disturbing” which I also detect to a certain degree in the West German reception. What Koenen has argued with regard to African American

33 Out of Africa was also popular in Germany: It ranked second (after the German film Männer) among the Top Ten films of the year 1986 and was the most commercially successful US production in Germany in that year. The Color Purple, on the other hand, did not make the list (Garncarz, “Hollywood” 134).

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women’s literature in Germany equally holds true for the reception of Die Farbe Lila: “Difference is ignored in order to create a universally human approach” (102). The difference categories of race and gender play a particularly significant role in this context. Koenen claims that the “blindness [to gender] reflects a generally low level of awareness concerning gender issues in the German media, where the literary establishment is still firmly grounded in a traditional, male understanding of literary tradition.” (98)

Similarly, I argue, when Die Farbe Lila was released in 1986 race was a category which was not (yet) deemed relevant in a West German imagined community that perceived itself as overwhelmingly ‘white.’ Therefore the ignorance towards race or more often its containment as a specifically USAmerican phenomenon without relevance for West Germany comes as no surprise. Koenen attests many reviews of African American women’s literature not only a “lack of basic information about ethnic and women’s literature” but also “numerous misconceptions and mistakes” that arise out of the “reviewers’ desire […] to create a frame of references that will supposedly make black women’s literature accessible for white (male) readers” (98-99). For the film The Color Purple the frame of reference is readily available in the guise of white director Steven Spielberg and by extension Hollywood. Koenen regards the general whiteness and maleness of the literary establishment as a major factor for its perception of African American women’s literature. I propose, in analogy, that white male domination in mid-1980s Hollywood, i.e. before the success of Spike Lee and the ensuing wave of new black filmmaking, was a crucial aspect for the production as well as the reception of films like The Color Purple – it brought African American women’s culture to the big screen but contained it within a white mainstream framework which would also be crucial for the film’s West German re- and perception.

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A FRICAN A MERICAN L ITERATURE AND E STABLISHMENT : T ONI M ORRISON

THE

L ITERARY

Much has been written about Toni Morrison’s novels, essays, and public persona, but only a few essays have dealt with her reception in Germany; most prominently, Anne Adams, Anne Koenen, Julia Roth, and Cathy Waegner have directed attention to the (public) reactions to Morrison and her writings.34 In addition, Isaac Bazié’s dissertation Literaturnobelpreis – Pressekritik – Kanonbildung, which examines press reactions to the Nobel Prize in Literature in Germany, France, and Britain (1984-1994), includes a brief analysis of German reactions to Morrison’s Nobel Prize (cf. esp. 15054). Adams’s essay “Straining to Make Out the Words to the ‘Lied’: The German Reception of Toni Morrison” deals with the publication and reception of Morrison’s works in the 1980s. It establishes the basis for my examination of German approaches to Morrison and her oeuvre after winning the Nobel Prize. Adams focuses on the author’s first four novels and the “two formal voices of critical reception of her work,” the “scholarly attention given to Morrison’s writings and to Morrison the writer” and the “mass-market reviewers’ assessments of the novels” (193). The two strands display significant differences; for example, while the scholars read the novels in English, the reviewers read the texts in German translation. Also, “[b]ecause of the varying levels of acquaintance with the cultural context of Morrison’s work, newspaper reviewers see the novels within the general framework of American literature, while the academic/scholarly studies treat the works within the Afro-American literary tradition and/or within the framework of women’s literature, as components of the large mosaic of U.S. narrative fiction.” (Adams 193)

Early scholarship on Morrison’s novels focused on the sociological aspects of the black community in general and of the black woman specifically as well as on the folklore, history, and culture (Adams 201). Adams claims

34 Cathy Waegner also initiated a project on “Mediating Toni Morrison in Germany” with a group of (graduate) students. It can be found online at http:// www.fb3.uni-siegen.de/anglistik/morrison/index.htm (last accessed 10 Aug. 2011).

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that “[w]ith all of the published Morrison studies by Germans concentrating on matters of content, there is relatively little material that gives attention to language and structure” (203). While this holds true for most publications, German scholarship on Morrison was also early on aware of the necessity to pay attention to these aspects of her work. Sabine Broeck and Anne Koenen, for example, in an 1984 article on the “black female literary tradition” limit their observations to a primarily thematic analysis but at the same time point out the need for a “rigorous textual analysis” which covers “stylistic and linguistic commonalities” (173). The reviews of Morrison’s first novel in German translation are, in Adams’s words, “a mix of sensitive intellectual critique, dangerously superficial and naive social commentary, and hausfrau-baiting exoticism” (20304). To some degree, these tendencies still surface in reviews of Morrison’s later works. It is my objective to assess to what extent they have continued into the 1990s and if others were added. Reviews and interviews might be regarded as a “reflection of the substance that the reading public – or that part of it that would be attracted to literature by an American Black female – is given to expect in this literature” (Adams 204). Early on Rowohlt promoted Morrison as “one of the most important voices of black America” and several interviews and reviews echoed this claim. Journalists and critics had first encountered African American literature as a part of the cultural branch of the 1960s and 1970s black liberation movement and used this tradition as a matrix in order to access later writings like Morrison’s (204). It is not surprising then that Adams detects in these reviews a tendency to emphasize the incomprehensibility of Morrison’s novels for West German readers: “If the Morrison version of the African American experience is only incompletely accessible to a nonblack untutored American readership, it eludes the West German readership almost altogether” (204). For the reviewers her novels were a challenge that was not easily overcome and resulted in different (albeit problematic) assessments of her books. As they could not fit Morrison’s writing into the “familiar form of protest, they focused on other surface phenomena they could recognize and apply to the social realism literature of the oppressed black community;” “the new form that the protest takes” generally eluded them, therefore many reviews “are, at best, affirmations of the exoticism of black people, at worst, affirmations of the pathology of the black community” (204). Similarly, Angela Praesent, editor of Rowohlt’s neue frau series, contends that the Black Power

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era loomed large over the West German reception of black women’s writing. She “attributes initial slow sales of the hardcover editions of the Morrison novels to ‘the public’s fatigue with the Black Power Movement writing of the ’70s’” and thinks that “promotion of the several black women writers’ novels in Germany, though embraced by German feminists, still suffers under the residual effects of audience ennui that is based in an assumption of having ‘already heard what the Black writer has to say.’” (Adams 192)

Morrison’s Song of Solomon was the first novel by an African American woman to be published in Germany and reviewers unanimously noted its “genealogy connection with Roots” (Adams 205). The novel appeared in German at the end of a decade in which “African American women writers became another international ‘discovery’ in the history of the novel” (Johnson 130). Shortly after Solomons Lied, Rowohlt published Sehr blaue Augen [The Bluest Eye] but, in contrast to the first novel, it appeared in paperback in the neue frau series (Adams 206). Morrison was the first black author to appear in this series which also featured translations of texts by white feminist writers (including Kate Chopin’s The Awakening or Simone de Beauvoir’s Marcelle, Chantal, Lisa…) and later included other black women authors (several books by Alice Walker, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo, Gayl Jones’s The Birdcatcher). Adams holds that through Rowohlt’s neue frau series “a readership had already been cultivated that was receptive to Morrison’s work” (192). She also justifies the publishing of Morrison’s works in this series35 because there was a “necessity to exploit an audience for Morrison among readers already enthusiastically reading fiction and nonfiction written by women,” particularly if one considers “the all-male exposure to which the German reading public was accustomed for black American literature” (192). In this line of thinking the gendered marketing strategy is consequently worth the risk of “‘ghettoizing’ the novels

35 The German version of Sula “followed in a few months, in 1980, also in the paperback Neue Frau series, marketed with a new printing of The Bluest Eye but without individual promotion” (Adams 206).

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and the novelist into women’s, or feminist, literature, which is not appropriate for all the Morrison books” (192). The reviews of Morrison’s debut novel The Bluest Eye (the second of her novels to be published in German), in Adams’s assessment, attest to the fact that the “significance of Morrison’s symbol [of the bluest eye] is lost on [the] reviewers, and doubtless also on the German female readership to whom the reviews are directed” (206). Whereas the first German editions of Sula, Tarbaby, and The Bluest Eye were marketed as part of the neue frau series, Rowohlt began to target a broader audience for Morrison’s novels with the publication of Menschenkind [Beloved] (1989) and Jazz (1993). This is also reflected in the reviews which no longer primarily address a female readership, indicating that the categorization of Morrison’s novels as “women’s literature” was challenged even before her Nobel Prize. In fact, the prestigious award can be viewed not so much as a turning point in the German reactions to Morrison than a catalyst which accelerated and amplified developments that had already begun. In an interview with Rosemarie K. Lester, which was aired on a West German women’s radio program in 1983, Morrison declares that women are neither her exclusive nor her primary audience: “I write without gender focus… […] I don’t write women’s literature as such. I think it would confine me. […] I don’t dislike the writing of women who write for women and about women exclusively, because some of it is quite powerful and quite beautiful. I just don’t do it myself because it is narrowing.” (Lester 54)

This statement, of course, on the one hand counters the limited and limiting categorization of her works as women’s literature; on the other hand it also fosters ignorance towards the specific gender aspect of several of Morrison’s novels and follows the tendency of eliding differences that Koenen has found in many reviews of African American women’s writings (102). However, Morrison’s declaration constitutes an act of resistance against comforting but narrow categorizations of her work and persona. Konrad Heidkamp, in this vein, asserts in his 1993 review of Jazz in Die Zeit: “Und doch hat sich Toni Morrison diesmal von dem unseligen Etikett ‘schwarzamerikanische Frauenliteratur’ (FAZ) oder gar ‘schwarze Feministin’

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(stern) befreit” (40).36 He contends that the novel ultimately transcends the categories ‘black’ and ‘white’ as well as ‘men’ and ‘women’ (40). Quite contrary to this presumed universal quality and transcendence of differences, Michael Althen’s report in the SZ on the decision of the Nobel committee to honor Morrison for her literary oeuvre claims that she insists on being “a black woman writer” and that she does not want to pretend that there would be no differences between ‘black’ and ‘white’ or ‘men’ and ‘women’ (15). Althen, nonetheless, regards Morrison not only as the most important African American author but also proclaims that she is by no means a writer who has to retreat to a niche to find an audience (15). Morrison’s novels are understood as representing black life, dealing with the African American past, and preserving an African American tradition; consequently her literary achievements are located in this context. In this account, the novel serves as an entry point into a foreign culture and risks falling into the trap of “popular minority and foreign texts [which] are likely to be read as guidebooks to the culture” (Johnson 130). On the front page of the same SZ issue that features Althen’s article, a headline labels Morrison an “American” author but, in the same context, she is also credited as the “first colored woman writer” to be awarded the Nobel Prize (“Literaturnobelpreis”). ‘Blackness’ and ‘Americanness’ are presented here as two independent rather than interlocking aspects of her identity. The public persona Toni Morrison, however, as well as her writings resist simple categorizations. As Dane Johnson correctly observes: “The rise of Toni Morrison shows that categories are always complex and contested, open to mutation. Writers and their fiction are not just ‘African American’ or ‘American,’ ‘male’ or ‘female,’ ‘protest’ or ‘art,’ ‘local’ or ‘metropolitan,’ ‘national’ or ‘universal.’ To study the reception of Morrison’s writing over the arch of her increasingly public circulation is to watch these categories and critical terms come into considerable confusion and crisis.” (144)

This is also the case in Germany where reviewers and critics have struggled immensely (and mostly unsuccessfully) to pinpoint, capture, and describe

36 “Nonetheless, Toni Morrison has freed herself from the unfortunate label ‘black American women’s literature’ (FAZ) or even ‘black feminist’ (stern) this time.”

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African American women’s literature. Morrison, in numerous instances, refused to be categorized and defined by the press and the public. In 1998, she told Die Zeit that she decidedly did not consider herself an American author; but she tolerated the label as she had become a kind of “honorary American” (Raddatz). Similarly, in a 1999 interview in Der Spiegel she made clear that she disliked to be labeled as for example ‘the voice of black America’ (Weingarten, “Ich” 248). In the same context, she admitted that she had strategically emphasized her ‘blackness’ earlier in her career to counter the label of “honorary white woman” (Weingarten, “Ich” 248-49). The FAZ’s report on the Nobel Prize refers to Morrison as “schwarze Amerikanerin” [black American] and conveys that the decision of the Nobel committee comes as a surprise only at first glance. In fact, Paul Ingendaay assures his readers that it is safe to assume that Morrison’s position in “Weltliteratur” [world literature] has already been secured and that Morrison has long become a (literary) institution; in this vein, the Nobel committee – the “Altherren-Riege” [old boys’ club] as he calls it – appears to have made an excellent decision (“Heraus” 33). In his opinion, Morrison’s oeuvre displays a range of qualities that also distinguish it from, for example, Alice Walker’s works: “Morrison schreibt weitgehend aus der Perspektive schwarzer Frauen, dabei von ihrem ersten Roman an […] ohne die geringste Spur von Weinerlichkeit und ohne den leicht kitschigen Unterton, von dem ihre Kollegin Alice Walker bedroht ist (weshalb sich plakative Verständigungsgeschichten wie ‘Die Farbe Lila’ so widerstandslos für Spielberg-Verfilmungen eigneten.”37 (“Heraus” 33)

For Ingendaay, Morrison balances politics and aesthetics in her writings and emerges as “bestechendste Historikerin Amerikas” [America’s most captivating historian] in the literary field (33). In the debate about her Nobel Prize, Morrison’s search for a black identity and her role as chronicler

37 “Morrison writes mostly from a black woman’s perspective and she does so from her first novel on […] without the slightest trace of weepiness and without the slightly sugary undertone to which her colleague Alice Walker at times falls prey (which is why hackneyed stories such as ‘The Color Purple’ lend themselves so easily to Spielberg adaptations).”

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and analyst of (African) American history frequently surface as major arguments – alongside the literary merits of her oeuvre. Ingendaay’s comments on Walker and The Color Purple suggest that the major flaws oftentimes detected in the film might be attributed to the literary source. While one major point of critique regarding the Spielberg movie was the erasure of the political and pointed usage of black vernacular and oral tradition, Ingendaay asserts that Morrison actually “saves into her writing” the “traditional black forms of expression” including “speech, song, and jazz” (“Heraus” 33). However, reviewers and critics sometimes found these qualities hardly reflected in the German translations of Morrison’s works. Adams maintains that the translations of Morrison’s first four novels “done by four different translators (or, in one case, by a pair of translators) vary greatly in quality” (208).38 Yet, all translations reveal an “incompatibility between the black American and German languages. […] Because of its creolized form, Afro-American language presents a German translator with a linguistic phenomenon that exceeds the framework of American English.” (Adams 208)

Morrison’s novel Jazz received particular attention when it appeared in German in 1993, only a few months before Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize. Heidkamp, for example, states about the translation of Jazz: “Sicherlich ist die eigenwillige Sprache der Toni Morrison nicht leicht zu übersetzen, doch so leblos müßte der Versuch nicht enden. Statt sich dem manchmal fast singenden Tonfall anzunähern, staksen die Sätze von Helga Pfetsch in korrektem Deutsch, grammatikalisch makellos und so unsinnlich wie die Transkriptionen eines Trompetensolos im Vergleich zur Musik.”39 (40)

38 Sula was translated by Karin Polz, Tar Baby by Uli Aumüller and Uta Goridis, Song of Solomon by Angela Praesent, and The Bluest Eye by Susanna Rademacher. 39 “Translating Toni Morrison’s idiosyncratic language is certainly not an easy task; still the attempt need not be this lifeless. Instead of approximating the at

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Althen recommends reading the ‘original’ text (15), and Matthias Wegner attributes the general lack of interest in Morrison’s novels in Germany to the translations (L8). Barbara von Bechtolsheim’s evaluation of the translation seems to be the exception among reviewers and critics. She writes in the SZ that Pfetsch manages to take up the musicality and momentum of the English version (17). These reviews reveal that in the early 1990s a number of critics (no longer) primarily relied on the German version of a novel as previous reviewers might have done. The critical stance towards the translation of Jazz attests to these reviewers’ familiarity with (or at least awareness of) the English version of the text. Similarly, Ingendaay’s review of Im Dunkeln spielen [Playing in the Dark], which appeared in Rowohlt’s neue frau series in 1994 in a translation by Pfetsch and Bechtolsheim, harshly criticizes the translators’ work: Bechtolsheim’s part is “akzeptabel” [acceptable] while Pfetsch’s translations are merely “deutsche Sprachruinen” [ruins of the German language] (B5). In his review, Ingendaay relegates the relevance of Morrison’s texts to American literary criticism exclusively (B5) and fails to recognize any connections to the German context and his own white subject position (Roth 494). Roth concludes from her analysis of the German reception of Playing in the Dark that white German reviewers mostly fall short of any form of critical self-reflection (494).40 Furthermore, she diagnoses in 2005 that

times almost vocal/singing tone, Helga Pfetsch’s grammatically flawless, sterile standard German prose is as dry as the transcriptions of a trumpet solo compared to the music.” 40 The back cover description of Im Dunkeln spielen also foregrounds this aspect and reveals a Janus-faced image of America: “Amerika, Land der (immer noch) unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten, Hort der Demokratie, und doch zerrissen von einem unlösbar scheinenden Rassenkonflikt” [America, (still) country of unlimited opportunities, stronghold of democracy, and yet torn apart by a seemingly unsolvable race conflict]. Morrison’s literary criticism is clearly located in this American setting but, of course, Morrison’s “we” – the “readers and writers” she addresses in the final paragraph of the last essay of this collection (125) – could be read as more inclusive and her theories could be applied not only to American literature but also to some degree to German journalism and literary criticism.

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Morrison continues to be almost exclusively known in Germany as a novelist whereas her theoretical, academic, and scholarly achievements are largely ignored (492). Consequently Morrison’s work is discussed in “secondary arenas” only and her status as theorist and literary critic is denied by disregarding her essays and intellectual arguments (497). As Roth observes, this approach is taken in most reviews of Im Dunkeln spielen and also in numerous critiques of Morrison’s novels, and cannot simply be explained through cultural difference (497-500). Like Alice Walker, Morrison is received in Germany as author of literary texts more than as a theorist, scholar, or critic. By being confined to this role her Otherness remains safely contained in the realm of literary production while criticism and scholarship can be retained as a sphere dominated and controlled by (predominantly) white male Europeans. In both cases, the German reception largely fails to account in any meaningful way for the feminist implications and/or the impact of critical whiteness theory. However, the Nobel Prize certainly contributed to the fairly broad acknowledgement of Morrison’s literary achievements and her popularity in Germany. Even though, as scholars like Koenen and Roth have pointed out, her success is limited to the literary field, it still is, in fact, a success. In March 1993, Wegner pointed out that Jazz – though embraced by critics – was greeted with little interest among the (reading) public (L8). Towards the end of the year, the Nobel Prize proved to have measurable effects on the sales of Morrison’s novels in Germany. Jazz, for example, sold about 15,000 to 20,000 copies before the Nobel committee announced its decision; afterwards, editions increased six-fold before Christmas 1993, and the demand for the paperback editions of her other novels also rose significantly (Hagelüken 27). Rowohlt spokeswoman Angelika Wellmann told the SZ that the publishing house had not been prepared for the sudden demand for Morrison’s works, and for some days printed only her books to meet it (Hagelüken 27). Publishing director Michael Naumann in a press statement from October 7, 1993 said that the decision by the Nobel committee was at the same time surprising and exhilarating (Rowohlt, Literaturnobelpreis). Also in October 1993, the SZ published an article based on a survey of Munich bookstores which revealed that they had equally been surprised by the Nobel Prize for Morrison. Most stores, except for a few small ones like the “Frauenbuchladen” [women’s bookstore], could not meet the increased demand and quickly ran out of stock (“Nobelpreisträ-

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gerin?” 18). While the decision of the Nobel committee mainly generated surprise, some critics had already discovered the literary merits of Morrison’s work. In fact, Wegner in his review of Jazz from March 1993 anticipated the award when he stated that it would be by no means “abwegig” [odd] if Morrison would receive that year’s Nobel Prize (L8). However, his prognosis was the exception among German critics and readers. With regard to the critical and popular attention for Morrison’s novels, the Nobel Prize had a significant impact; as Johnson pointed out in 1996 with an eye to the US context, Morrison had become a cultural icon and a new novel by her “[was] a gala publishing event complete with full-page advertisements in the key industry organs and a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review” (129). However, Der Spiegel, for example, in 1998 constructs the ‘mass spectacle’ generated by Morrison’s new novel Paradise as a specifically American phenomenon which, with its fusion of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, would not and could not be paralleled in Germany (“Hexen” 190). Morrison is described as a public intellectual à la Günter Grass but with the significance in mass and popular culture of a John Grisham (“Hexen” 190-91). Key tenets of critical and popular Americanization debates are repeated in this article – the fear that American cultural imports would erode German ‘high’ culture and the denial that the American cultural influence has already destabilized clear-cut boundaries between ‘high’ elite culture and ‘low’ mass culture. The question of Morrison’s implied, intended, and actual audiences is a main factor in discussions of her oeuvre in (West) German discourses. Waegner contends that Morrison’s “focus is clearly on the black reader” and therefore her works pose a special challenge to white European readers who “can easily despair” because they “must be so very ‘other’ as to be completely beyond the pale of Toni Morrison’s address” (169). However, considering Morrison’s conception of ‘participatory reading,’ this statement can be modified: “We cannot all be members of the black community, but we can indeed be members of the reading community” (Waegner 170). In a 1999 interview in Focus, Morrison also emphasizes the role of the reader. Responding to readers complaining about the sadness of her books, she argues that for her there is a ‘happy end’ when a reader has gained an insight, has acquired knowledge by reading the novel (D. Scheck). Similarly, Adams maintains that Morrison can be understood as “a writer who addresses intelligent German readers as she does any other intelligent

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readers” (211-12). These critical assessments are echoed in several reviews’ take on Morrison’s (implied) readership. Ingendaay holds that Morrison might not transcend differences but is nonetheless clearly an author for a “white audience” (“Heraus” 33). Klaus Harpprecht in Die Zeit agrees that Morrison has always also addressed a white readership and speculates that the white audience was primarily responsible for her success. He describes Morrison’s career as a “produktive Konfrontation mit der Welt der Weißen” [productive confrontation with the white world]. Susanne Weingarten (Der Spiegel) goes even further when she labels Morrison in August 1993, i.e. before the Nobel committee had officially announced its decision, “Die Schwarze für Weiße: Symbol, Alibi, Gewissen” [The black woman for whites: symbol, alibi, conscience]. Weingarten portrays Morrison as black token woman in the white American canon but at the same time describes her in an exoticized and racist fashion as performing a repertoire encompassing “die stolze afrikanische Stammeskönigin […], die sonore Intellektuelle und die sinnliche Black Mama” [the proud African tribal queen […], the outspoken intellectual, and the sensuous black mama] (“Die Schwarze” 146). In order to ‘make it’ in the white world, i.e. to have any significant success and influence, Weingarten suggests, Morrison had to abandon her (black) roots, her history, language, and heritage, and consequently had to cope with a split identity (147). Rather than an accurate evaluation of Morrison’s career, this narrative reveals a lack of knowledge regarding the African American context of her work. Weingarten describes the novels as presenting a form of ‘black solipsism’ and a black world in which whites only exist at the margins and as “seltsame, fremde, unberechenbare Kreaturen” [odd, foreign, unpredictable creatures] (148). Consequently, she claims: “Ein weißer Leser reist […] durch diese Romane wie durch ein fremdes Land in dem er nicht sonderlich willkommen ist”41 (148). Ultimately, Weingarten settles for a compromise and concludes that Morrison has assimilated to the white world but at the same time insists on being a “black woman writer” (149). Her article implies that despite Morrison’s success in the white literary world her novels are not geared towards a white audience. Hubert Spiegel even claims in 1999 that Morrison does

41 “The white reader travels through […] these novels like through a foreign country where he is not particularly welcome.”

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not write for an international audience; rather her novels address a clearly defined and exclusive readership (“Flugverbot” L3). He elaborates in his review of Paradise: “Der moralisch-didaktische Tonfall, Elemente, die Gospelmusik und die Rhetorik schwarzer Predigten ebenso zitieren wie die Schauergeschichten des ‘American Gothic’, die ‘slave narrative’ des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts oder die zynischen Abrechnungen mit dem schwarzen Binnenrassismus der ‘Harlem Renaissance’ Ende der zwanziger Jahre – all dies ist für den deutschen Leser nicht auf Anhieb nachvollziehbar. Wer sich davon nicht abschrecken lässt, begegnet in ‘Paradies’ nicht nur der wichtigsten Stimme schwarzer Literatur Amerikas, sondern einer der großen Stimmen der Weltliteratur.”42 (“Flugverbot” L3)

Specifically the American and African American (literary) traditions invoked constitute great obstacles for the German reader who might not (immediately) grasp their meanings. However, Spiegel promises, those willing to meet this challenge will encounter not only the most important African American writer but also one of the great authors of world literature.43 African American literature is viewed in this context as culminating in Morrison’s work as she is stylized into its single most important voice and as such also as part of the pantheon of literary achievement (affirmed through the Nobel Prize and her status in world literature).

42 “The moralistic-didactic tone, elements which reference gospel music and the rhetoric of black sermons as well as American gothic tales, the 19th century slave narrative, or the cynical account of the Harlem Renaissance’s intraracial black racism at the end of the 1920s – all of this is not immediately comprehensible to the German reader. In ‘Paradise’ those who are not scared off by this incomprehensibility encounter not only one of the most important voices of America’s black literature but also one of the great voices of world literature.” 43 Heidi Thomann Tewarson affirms this evaluation in her 2005 monograph on Morrison, which addresses a general (reading) public in Germany. She states that Morrison writes primarily about and for the African American minority and relates their life and history (7) but equally emphasizes the universal aspects of Morrison’s writing and the necessity of participatory reading which positions readers in an active and creative role (8).

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Beyond the feuilleton, “[t]elevision has become, […], a mediator between novel and reader, specifically in the popular televised book review shows” (Waegner 172). According to Waegner, in the US as well as in Germany, “Morrison’s works are publicized to wide television audiences, and the TV gurus enhance their own image by either praising – as Oprah does – or panning, as Marcel could not resist doing” (173). She refers to two TV programs, both of which dedicated (part of) their airtime to discussing Morrison’s novels: the well-known and award-winning (German) TV program Das Literarische Quartett [Literary Quartet] hosted by Marcel Reich-Ranicki and the (American) Oprah Winfrey Show – particularly, “Oprah’s Book Club” – which was also available to German audiences as selected shows were broadcast44 “albeit generally after midnight, on the […] women’s network ‘tm3’”45 (172). Waegner contrasts these two approaches, “Winfrey’s sisterly solidarity” and “Reich-Ranicki’s authoritative dismissal,” in order to examine their potential to mediate Morrison’s novels to the European audience (173); she concludes that a mixture of the two would probably work best in Germany (176). While Waegner’s analysis offers some valuable insights, I am not interested in the ‘best’ and ‘most influential’ way to culturally mediate Morrison’s writings to the German public; my analysis focuses on the German program’s representation, discussion, and evaluation of Morrison’s books, rather than on the American import, which was a rather marginal phenomenon of German TV culture.

44 Waegner elaborates on the shows which dealt with Morrison’s novels: “In December 1996 the Book Club broadcast included a video portrait of Morrison, excerpts from an emotion-filled candle-light dinner with Morrison, Winfrey, and four enthusiastic female guests (2 black, 2 white), as well as a studio appearance by Morrison. […] The result was a stunning show which brilliantly succeeded in ‘selling’ Morrison to the mainstream TV audience, but which the critical German viewing public nonetheless found not entirely to their taste” (175). For the program on “Paradise, broadcast in the United States on 6 March 1998 and in Germany on 16 April […] Oprah had to build in several extra steps of mediation to prevent herself from falling prey to any Reich-Ranicki-type of skepticism” (175). 45 tm3 was a private German TV station. It became 9live in 2001 and finally went off air in 2011.

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After Morrison received the Nobel Prize, two of her novels were discussed on Das Literarische Quartett. The prestigious book review show was hosted by controversial but charismatic literary critic Marcel ReichRanicki and aired on public television channel ZDF from 1988 to 2001. Reich-Ranicki, known as the “Literaturpapst” [pope of literature], became the most influential German literary critic and the show a prestigious epitome of literary criticism in Germany, discussing literary works on Friday prime-time for an audience of up to 800,000 viewers (Waegner 172). Morrison’s Jazz (1992) was discussed in an episode aired on December 12, 1993, and Paradise (1997) was the topic of an episode first broadcast on October 29, 1999. The discussions of the two novels offer a glimpse at the critical reception of Morrison’s books in Germany and particularly the problems of cultural translation. In both episodes, four literary critics struggle to make each novel relevant to German readers, to find possible connections between the topics and stories of the texts and the German context in which they are read, and to deal with the cultural difference between their own backgrounds and the text’s frame of reference. For the discussion of Jazz, the regular cast of the quartet (Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Hellmuth Karasek, and Sigrid Löffler) was joined by German Studies scholar Jürgen Kolbe. One major strand in the debate revolved around the question whether Morrison’s novel was merely a novel about African Americans to which German readers could hardly relate, or not. Kolbe claims that the novel lacks consistency and that it did not affect him as a reader: “Das ist mich eigentlich nicht sehr viel angegangen”46 (Das Literarische Quartett 2041). He regards the novel as presenting an ‘other’ world which is not ‘ours’ and underscores his point by addressing an issue of the translation, namely that there is no German idiom corresponding to Black English Vernacular (2040). And Reich-Ranicki complains: “Ich empfinde […] dieses Milieu, das sie schildert, als vollkommen fremd. Und es ist fremd, weil die Autorin mit dem Thema nicht zurande gekommen ist, nur deshalb”47 (Das Literarische Quartett 2046). In Waegner’s interpretation,

46 “It did not really concern me much.” 47 “I feel alienated by this completely foreign milieu, which she [Morrison] describes. And it is only foreign for one reason: because the author is not able to handle her topic.”

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“Reich-Ranicki made an iconoclastic final pronouncement: Jazz is completely inaccessible […] not because Europeans are too far away from America’s slavery past and the Harlem Renaissance, but because Morrison had tackled a subject beyond her ken and thus, he implied, she could not mediate it for the Other-reader – hence his helplessness as mediator to the TV audience of her work.” (173)

However, some panelists painted a strikingly different picture from ReichRanicki’s dismissive and despairing one. While for his colleagues the cultural difference of Jazz seems unbridgeable, Hellmuth Karasek proposes another approach by highlighting the rather ‘universal’ aspects of the novel and linking them to the German context. For instance, he reads it, first and foremost, as a murder mystery that in its basic components and with its representations of a potentially universal urban experience (of an oppressed minority) could, he insinuates, even be set in Germany (with, of course, the exception of the ‘mythical’ part of the story) (Das Literarische Quartett 2042-43). While Sigrid Löffler, literary editor of Die Zeit, calls Jazz an unequivocally black story and Reich-Ranicki holds that it is not a novel about New York but about black people (2044-45), Karasek counters that for him the milieu is not at all foreign and that he could immediately transfer it to Berlin’s Kreuzberg (2047). However, even Karasek concedes that Morrison’s search for myths (and alternatives to white American ideology and mythology) and her take on the past rather confuses and alienates the (white European) reader. Waegner concludes that Löffler “sought to explain – and found herself defending – Jazz, using largely sociological arguments” and both Karasek and Kolbe “were impressed with Jazz’s evocation of the Harlem setting, but were puzzled by the Virginia axis of the novel” (173). In the discussion of Paradise, six years later, the regular cast was joined by guest panelist Ulrich Greiner, who in the comparatively short debate on the novel makes only one brief statement. He tries to defend the text with a sociological argument but, at the same time, calls it “literarisch missglückt” [a literary failure] (4435-36). However, the standpoints on Morrison represented by the regular panelists were much in line with their previous judgments of Jazz. Löffler tries to make a case for the value of the work via contextualization and praises its sophistication and subtlety. Karasek, apparently not able to relate this novel’s contents to German contexts, claims it is exactly this complexity which makes it inaccessible and hard to read, and Reich-Ranicki outright dismisses the text as opulently detailed and

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poor in thoughts (“arm an Gedanken und reich an Details” 4439), as a failure (4438), and as including far too many moments of male-bashing (“Wie böse die Männer sind.” 4440). His ultimate verdict is that North America has better and more relevant authors than Morrison but she still is a “beachtliche Autorin” [remarkable author] (4437).48 Koenen refers to the discussion of Morrison’s Jazz on Das Literarische Quartett in connection with another media representation, the German news show Tagesthemen and its coverage of Morrison’s Nobel Prize. The report included an expert’s view: “That expert, interviewed at the Frankfurt/Main book fair, turned out to be German Secretary of Defense Volker Rühe, whose qualification for being allowed to air his opinion was that he had once studied English literature. His statement amounted to the admission that even he, the expert, had never heard of Toni Morrison – the implication of course being that an extremely obscure writer had been honored – and the choice of commentator suggesting a lack of genuine interest in Morrison’s work to say the least.” (Koenen 95)

Apparently, there was not only a lack of knowledge prevalent in media reports and press reviews as well as a lack of adequate language to describe and assess Morrison’s writings but also severe insecurity and confusion in terms of who should and could comment on her novels and function as a (cultural) mediator for the German audience. The terms and language used to describe both Walker’s and Morrison’s work therefore ran the risk of being not only inadequate but oppressive – and, as Morrison has put it, “[o]ppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge” (Nobel 16). Koenen cites these two “media events” specifically in order to demonstrate that they put forward a notion of “literature of women of color” as “marginal or exotic, a literature of otherness” (95). These reviews, she argues, fail to recognize the significance of African American women’s

48 The TV presence of Morrison’s books most likely also had an effect on German sales figures as it generated publicity for Jazz and Paradise. In general, if a book was discussed on Das Literarische Quartett, sales increased regardless of whether it had been praised or trashed (Waegner 173).

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literature; they “overlook and distort the fundamental concerns of these fictions,” re-affirm the authority of their own white privileged perspective and do not take into account the cultural specificity and literary background of the texts in question (96). In the reviews issued (and aired) around and after 1993, several strategies are employed to present Morrison’s writings to a German audience and to deal with its Otherness and Foreignness particularly when and where it resists being incorporated into a hegemonic white and male European tradition. The Nobel Prize seems to function primarily as a catalyst for developments in the reactions to Morrison’s works that had already begun when the committee made its decision; for example, the (almost paradigmatic) shift in the perception of Morrison as an author confined to women’s literature and an African American writer (hardly accessible to white readers) to Morrison as a member of the literary establishment and as an author of books that belong to world literature (and that can – or even should – be read and understood by any intelligent reader willing to take on the challenge). Of course, these positions need to be regarded as extremes, as two poles between which the reactions to Morrison and the re- and perception of her works oscillated at every point of her career. While there was neither a teleological development nor a single turning point, after the Nobel Prize, the public perception of Morrison in Germany in general tended more towards the second approach. Johnson detects a similar development in the US where already in 1992 “Morrison had been transformed from a well-known, well-respected writer into a cultural icon of African American and American writing” (138). In American reviews he witnesses a paradigm shift from Morrison as African American writer to Morrison as American author. This shift occurred not until the publication of Beloved in 1987 when “a novel centered on black women is read as ‘universal’ – as both ‘black’ and ‘great’” (143). When Jazz appeared in 1992, the “idea that Morrison can be most fully ‘American’ as both African American and female” largely takes hold and “clearly breaks from the suggestion in the 1970s that she write more ‘universally’ by including European Americans” (Johnson 144). While Morrison’s status as American writer and author of books with a ‘universal’ quality has become solidified in Germany, this is neither an unproblematic nor uncontested development. As much as cultural mediation and translation are necessary for German audiences, there are certain dangers inherent in the

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process. Several strategies are frequently employed to familiarize German readers with the subject matter, style, and language of Morrison’s novels, most of which also attest to a constant struggle to find a language adequate to capture African American women’s texts and experiences in general, which has equally shaped the reviews of Spielberg’s take on Walker’s The Color Purple. In the critical debates on Morrison and her (literary) oeuvre, the figuration of an ‘other’ America (re)surfaces, for example, in Bechtolsheim’s review of Jazz: “Und jede erneute Lektüre evoziert dieses andere Amerika wieder anders und läßt etwas von jenem afro-amerikanischen Geist spüren, der auch die weiße westliche Kultur so beeinflusst.”49 (17)

America as part of the Western(ized) world is assumed to be familiar to the German reader but the novel promises another and new facet – an ‘other’ America which is inherently different from the dominant culture. The “African American spirit” makes the reading exciting but also non-threatening as it has already been appropriated by white Western culture. It has become incorporated into this cultural framework and hence become intelligible and accessible to the white Western reader.50 Another frequent tendency is the elevation of Morrison’s works to the ranks of world literature.51 Bazié concludes that the German press reactions

49 “And each re-reading evokes this other America albeit in a different way and makes the reader feel some part of this African American spirit which has also influenced white Western culture.” 50 Not only African American culture but also America’s literary establishment has been labeled an ‘other’ America, for example, in a report on the 2002 Frankfurt book fair in Der Spiegel (Hage 174). 51 World literature as a term popularized by Johann W. von Goethe “crystallized,” according to David Damrosch, “both a literary perspective and a new cultural awareness, a sense of arising global modernity” (1). It is, however, a most elusive and complex term. Damrosch points out that world literature “has often been seen in one or more of three ways: as an established body of classics, as an evolving canon of masterpieces, or as multiple windows on the world (14). All

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to Morrison’s Nobel Prize are overwhelmingly conservative and cite Goethe’s term “world literature” without accounting for its implications (250).52 This categorization is repeated in later reviews and entails on the one hand a form of appreciation as her writings are ascribed global cultural significance but on the other hand runs the risk of neglecting the cultural specificity of her texts. These universalistic approaches obscure the significance of her novels for an African American (women’s) tradition. Hubert Spiegel, for example, writes about a reading in Frankfurt am Main that took place as part of Morrison’s publicity tour for Paradise in 1999 and describes Morrison as “würdevolle Diva der Weltliteratur” [dignified diva of world literature] (“Schwarze” 16). He further contends that Morrison stages black America’s encounter with itself which might be unpleasant for those involved but is fortunate for world literature (16). Morrison’s work is at the same time read as a representation of African American history, society, and culture and valued for its anthropological, sociological, and historical quality rather than its literary merits. However, German readers might only be able to relate to the universal appeal that classifies her writing as world literature, not to its cultural specificity and Otherness. Her writings are conceived of as both great literature and therefore worthy of a place in world literature and ‘black’ and therefore relevant only in and for an African American cultural context. Johnson argues that Morrison’s career evidently unsettles the presumed opposition between ‘blackness’ and ‘great literature’ which had been prevalent for a long time, because “she has attained the highest recognition possible from the literary establishment for a living

of these conceptualizations come into play in the German reviews of Morrison’s work. In common parlance, world literature is often used “as a simple gesture towards […] all-inclusiveness” or quite to the contrary to refer to “the best of the world’s literature” (Thomsen 2). The German press clearly employs the term in this second meaning. In this context, it usually implies a form of appreciation and serves as a marker of achievement. 52 Goethe states in an often quoted passage from his conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann: “National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of World literature is at hand, and every one must strive to hasten its approach. But, while we thus value what is foreign, we must not bind ourselves to anything in particular, and regard it as a model” (351).

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writer – as well as considerable commercial success – while writing resolutely African American texts” (139). The status of Nobel Laureate furthered the tendencies to identify Morrison as a writer of global significance and to appreciate her contribution to world literature. It did, however, neither entail a critical questioning of world literature and canon-formation nor a reflection of the critics’ own positionality vis-à-vis the racialized and gendered structures of the literary field. Morrison’s incorporation into the exclusive and exclusionary group of Nobel Laureates and her appropriation by the (white Western) literary establishment therefore does not result in a revision, (lasting) destabilization, or critical reflection of these categories’ composition, exclusionary mechanisms, and hierarchies. Johnson’s observation fits neatly into this line of thinking when he claims that “the Nobel Prize for Morrison […] is not surprising, not a clear break from the past. Instead, the Nobel is business as usual, even if the usual business has become more transnational and more multiethnic. I believe it is fruitful to consider cultural systems as canon-making machines, for a canon, in a general sense, is about narrowing choices and establishing relationships between consumers and producers (whether spiritual or financial).” (153)

Morrison’s Nobel Prize turns out to be “business as usual” rather than a significant “break from the past.”53 Morrison’s texts, “made to pass as classic[s]” as Johnson holds, lend themselves easily for an inclusion into the tradition of Nobel Laureates (and world literature) as they appear “valuable in different, sometimes contradictory ways for a variety of readers” (131). Even though her novels are clearly “sensitive to systems of exclusions,” they also include aspects which “make them easily exportable into a world literary marketplace that desires classic stories from exotic places” (John-

53 Bazié holds that the period between 1984 and 1994 marks a turn or at least reorientation in the politics of the Prize as the Swedish Academy acknowledged the literary achievements of non-European writers and conferred the distinction to authors such as Wole Soyinka, Nagib Machfus, Octavio Paz, Nadine Gordimer, or Derek Walcott (7). Morrison’s Prize is then hardly surprising in the early 1990s when these changes in the politics of the Prize were well under way.

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son 131). This world literary marketplace is still very exclusive; Mads Rosendahl Thomsen states that most authors included in an ‘international’ canon are very much “involved with Western culture and literature” – e.g. Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Nadine Gordimer, and Salman Rushdie (7). He points out that world literature always oscillates between idealism and realism as there are several “obstacles to the impact and diversity of world literature” – not only the “closed history of the Western canon,” but also language barriers, cultural knowledge, and national identity (11). The Swedish Academy is regarded as an authority on world literature and Bazié consequently points towards its significance in canon-formation (213). Similarly, however, the press, scholars, and critics can influence this process by supporting, criticizing, or questioning the decisions of the Academy.54 The German press attempted to grasp and explain the meaning of Morrison for world literature and for a German readership rather than to dismiss or question her nomination. Whereas many accounts situate Morrison within world literature, this seldom gives rise to a critique of the general mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion of canon-formation or of the role of journalists and critics in this context. Elisabeth Wehrmann’s 1993 article in Die Zeit recognizes that Morrison investigates “why the educated white man needs the projection of his dark Other” that generates desire as well as repulsion and fear and why his cultural hegemony relies on exclusion (83). This article also draws attention to the racist underpinnings of Weingarten’s Der Spiegel portrait of Morrison titled “Die Schwarze für Weisse,” and represents one of the few (limited) attempts of medial self-reflection regarding racism in German journalism. While Wehrmann reflects on the position of the educated white man and the racist tendencies in the German press she does not review her own status and position (83). As Lorde’s criticism of white feminism has shown, white women also need the projection of their dark Other. What Adams has pointed out for the early reception of Morrison in the 1980s is still largely true in the 1990s (211): Questionable accounts such as Weingarten’s need

54 For a systematic analysis of methods of canon-formation through press reviews and critiques see Bazié 226-233. He generally differentiates between inductive canonization, canonization a priori, integrative canonization, revendicative canonization, and canonization per procura.

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to be put into perspective vis-à-vis the popularity of Morrison among the reading public as well as among scholars and students, and the general acceptance of her literary achievements within an African American, American, and even world context. Adams holds that there is an “essential Morrison” to be discovered by those readers who do not read her novels “as superficial anthropology” and who take on the challenge of its Foreignness (211). Yet, I argue that there is no ‘essential’ Morrison to be discovered. The German constructions and appropriations of Morrison certainly provide several legitimate reasons for criticism (cf. Adams, Koenen, or Roth) as they, for example, re-inscribe “a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony” between white German and African American culture (Said, Orientalism 5). Still, as active recipients German interpretive communities, the general readership as well as literary experts create their own versions of Morrison and her oeuvre as a matter of course, as there is no ideal way to engage with authors and their texts. What Johnson terms the “noncosmopolitan aesthetic” of Morrison’s fiction contributes to its marketability and offers different ways of accessing her works (131). In Johnson’s words: “One can imagine a reader who enjoys these tales for their depiction of an exotic alternative land – but, almost as easily, one can also see how these texts would help a cosmopolitan reader interrogate his or her desire for and creation of such exotic others.” (150)

Whereas, in this sense, Morrison “participate[s] in and complicate[s] the battle of cultural representation and the creation of literary value by inscribing debates on misreading and cultural appropriation in [her] novels” (Johnson 130), her works lend themselves, although not unambiguously, to several interpretative angles dominating the German press. For example, the often emphasized ‘universal’ or ‘classic’ (and implicitly ‘timeless’) qualities of Morrison’s novels, of course, can be backed by textual evidence. Morrison also supported this view for instance, when she told Die Zeit that she intended Beloved to be a “Fabel über menschliche Schicksale” [fable about human fates] and not ‘merely’ a book about slavery (Raddatz). She also reads her Nobel Prize retrospectively as an expansion of the canon and states in a 1999 Der Spiegel interview:

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“Ich habe mich zum ersten Mal als Amerikanerin gefühlt. Und ich habe mich als Frau gefühlt und als jemand der aus Ohio stammt, und als Schwarze. […] Was meine Auszeichnung noch besser machte, war die Tatsache, dass dadurch das Reich der offiziell anerkannten Literatur erweitert worden war.”55 (Weingarten, “Ich” 251)

The event, in Morrison’s recollection, not only represents an overdue extension of the literary canon but also signifies a moment in which she felt “American,” i.e. belonging to a nation, at the same time as she stresses her regional, gender, and racial/ethnic identity. Whether her inclusion into an international canon of world literature constructed by the Western world actually challenges this canon, the parameters of its formations, and the power hierarchies that structure the literary field, or whether her work is appropriated and assimilated into it remains an open question at this point. Like Spielberg’s The Color Purple, Morrison’s books are generally presented to the German audience in a way that suggests a reception, reaction, and creative appropriation on two distinct levels: (1) on an abstract level on which a connection to and understanding of the narrative is possible through its universal elements; (2) on a culturally specific level where understanding is neither completely possible nor imperative. Consequently, the reader/viewer is presented with stories that she can enjoy almost without reservations and understand without being bothered with those elements that are deemed ‘foreign’ or ‘other.’56 This suggests that the respective narrative is situated in a safe in-between space: It is neither immediately relevant for the socio-cultural context of its German audiences (and thus

55 “For the first time I felt like an American. And I felt like a woman and like an Ohioan and like a black person. […] The fact that with my award the realm of officially recognized literature had been expanded made it even better.” 56 In her analysis of the critical and scholarly reception of Beloved, Sabine Broeck stresses the way in which the ambiguity of the novel has been utilized to critically redouble its utopian and therapeutic moment (“Mit der Autorin lesen” 95). While the text offers white and black readers a position that allows for a participation in the recuperation of slavery’s trauma, a reduction of the text to this aspect is problematic and maybe even alarming (98, 105). In this context, complexity and ambiguity are equally contained in order to reinforce a reconciliatory and pleasant reading experience.

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does not affect Germans directly) nor is it as far removed as to be completely unintelligible and inaccessible. The fable, parable, or fairy tale quality is therefore emphasized with regard to Spielberg’s film as well as Morrison’s novels; Der Spiegel, for example, labels Paradise a “Fabel der Gewalt von Schwarzen gegen Schwarze” [fable of violence of blacks against blacks] (“Hexen” 191). This description underpins the specificity of the black socio-cultural context and at the same time characterizes the story as a “fable,” foregrounding its universal dimension. Along the lines of what Koenen calls the “Germanification” of African American women’s writing, Morrison in these accounts seems to write almost but not quite about “us” as (West) German readers. Morrison’s noncosmopolitan aesthetic might in fact “[offer] possibilities for accepting cultural difference without homogenization, while the appropriative mechanisms for international fiction move in the opposite direction, dissolving the other into something almost like us” (Johnson 153). In his 1993 article, Harpprecht contemplates retrospectively his own reading experience of Song of Solomon and relates the numerous parallels to his own life and to German history. The “Grundmuster menschlichen Verhaltens” [basic patterns of human behavior] which Morrison exposes seem to justify his perceived analogies between German or Polish peasants and African Americans or the matching of Morrison’s characters with people out of his own life. The Bible references make the text particularly accessible in his view: “Milieu und Personal der Bibel […] öffneten dem Leser aus dem schwäbischen Pfarrhaus den Zugang zu jenem Buch, und sie gewährten ihm die Sensation des Wiedererkennens, die allemal den Zauber der großen Literatur ausmacht: die Entdeckung einer tiefen Vertrautheit, die das respektvolle Staunen vor der Fremdheit nicht aufhebt – es braucht beides. Die Gestalten Toni Morrisons wurden ihm zu Nachbarn, die er selber in der mythischen Erfahrung der Kindheit durchwandert zu haben meinte.”57

57 “The Bible’s setting and characters […] allowed the reader from the Swabian parsonage to access this book and they granted him the sensation of self-recognition that always creates the magic of great literature: the discovery of a deep familiarity, which does not neutralize the respectful astonishment at the foreign-

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In such accounts Morrison appears as an integrational figure located on the bridge that spans the abyss between ‘black’ and ‘white.’ Johnson’s analysis affirms that Morrison has positioned herself as a “[mediator] between the place from which [she] come[s] and the culture [she] perceive[s] to be controlled by the large metropolises” (131). Bazié, in a similar vein, categorizes Morrison’s Nobel Prize among those for the “Weltenüberbrücker” [bridgers of worlds], i.e. authors who were part of the Swedish Academy’s efforts in the late 1980s and early 1990s to expand its focus to include ‘new’ cultures and languages and to further its interest in connecting cultures and traditions (224-59). For German reviewers and readers it has evidently been a challenge to connect to Morrison’s work in terms of terminology, vocabulary, cultural knowledge, and literary understanding. In (West) Germany, both the reception of Walker via Spielberg’s The Color Purple and the public interest in Morrison’s works peaking with her winning the Nobel Prize reveal the conundrum of cultural mediation, translation, and transfer. Walker and Morrison have to some extent achieved mainstream success, critical praise, and academic recognition in Germany. This popularity, of course, comes at a price – not only does the focus on these two figures (and by now several other African American women writers) potentially exclude other writers but it also entails a certain degree of assimilation, appropriation, and incorporation into the parameters of a white German reading/viewing public, a literary elite, and a still predominantly white and male cultural establishment. Although several reviews demonstrate a lack of cultural knowledge in combination with a self-confidently wielded discursive power, the cultural texts in question resist simple categorizations as well as assimilation into a popular cultural or literary canon. Although much potential for cultural confrontation, discomfort, or lack of understanding is neutralized or obscured by the press reviews and by the (familiar and established) parameters imposed on the works they still harbor a productively unsettling quality. They demonstrate that the German mainstream and cultural establishment reaches its limits when it encounters the African American female Other. This Other then functions as a projec-

ness – both are necessary. Toni Morrison’s characters became his neighbors whom he believed to have transmigrated into the mythical experience of his childhood.”

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tion screen or countermatrix for a white (male) German identity construction that remains unquestioned, and is accessed from a position of power that remains safely in place. While there are, of course, some exceptions, the full potential of both Walker’s and Morrison’s literary and theoretical work still has to come to bear on a German (media) mainstream which, as the reactions to Spielberg’s The Color Purple as well as to Morrison’s Nobel Prize show, requires critical (self-)reflection and a revision of its approach towards Otherness and Foreignness. Taking the cues from Morrison’s Playing in the Dark it might be possible to recognize how the African American presence has explicitly and implicitly informed German discourses; in the light of the feminist agendas of Walker and Morrison a critique of the male-dominated white mainstream might be imperative. But this critique would have to account for the fact that there is neither an ‘essential’ Morrison nor an ‘original’ Walker to be recovered. As their cultural texts travel across the Atlantic via mass cultural products from Hollywood or the rather ‘high’ cultural (world) literary circuit they are necessarily creatively changed and appropriated as they take hold in another culture. And the resulting specifically “German” or “Germanified” (mainstream) versions of Walker and Morrison are revealing, first and foremost, in regard to the workings and mechanisms, unarticulated assumptions, ideological undercurrents, and subject positions of (West) German discourses.

7 Conclusion

The analyses of (West) German discursive constructions and receptions of Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison as well as the cursory view on previous German interactions with African American culture have illustrated the wide range of cultural exchanges between African America and (West) Germany in the 20th century. They have also revealed that this exchange has been to a considerable extent fostered, shaped, and determined by the postwar Americanization and Westernization of Germany. The processes of cultural transfer, in general, have been characterized by reciprocity, which is most evident in the cases of African American GIs in Germany and their significance for the Civil Rights movement or Lorde’s experiences in Germany and her conception of the black diaspora. They have occurred via the American and German cultural mainstream (Hollywood, the world literary market, or the mass media) and often at the same time somewhat ‘outside’ or even counter to it (youth culture, 1960s and 1970s counterculture, the emerging Afro-German movement, the black diaspora). In the process, African American culture has been received, negotiated, and appropriated as part of the German construction of ‘America’ and in relation to the potential threat or promise of (cultural) Americanization. At the same time, it has also been stylized into representing a facet of the US located outside its cultural imperialist and hegemonic role. All examples demonstrate – albeit to different degrees – that these neat categorizations do, of course, not hold up on close examination and are subject to continuing processes of re-negotiations and changing parameters. The case studies on Davis, Lorde, Walker, and Morrison have shown that their respective personas, activism, and cultural productions have entered (West) German culture via slightly different media and forms

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of (cultural) mediations and consequently addressed a variety of (West) German audiences. The works of all four women have, however, provided points of connection with German readers/viewers/recipients and, as the media discourse reflects, Germans have struggled to imagine equivalences with African Americans, to create entry points into African American culture but also to distinguish themselves from American and African American cultures and to control or even deny their relevance for Germany. The Otherness of African Americans and their cultural productions is frequently employed to re-affirm and re-construct ‘whiteness’ and ‘Germanness’ at the same time that it harbors the potential to question these categories of difference. African American culture then is constructed as Other by (white) German audiences along the lines of several categories of difference like nationality, culture, race, ethnicity, and gender1: (1) As specifically American Other, African American culture can be perceived as an extension of Americanization and put in a context in which race, racism, and race relations are regarded as American phenomena. Ultimately, this fuels an idea of Germany as a largely homogenous imagined community in which these problems are only of minor significance. (2) As racial/ethnic Other, it allows for imagined equivalences between Germans and white Americans and thus affirms German ‘whiteness.’ In a different register, African Americans can also be perceived as part of a black diaspora. The selfidentification through ethnic and/or racial belonging enables Afro-Germans to forge a connection along the lines of diasporic experiences. (3) As female ethnic Other, it entails the possibilities of feminist alliances across ‘the color line’ but is equally subject to the exclusionary workings of patriarchal mechanisms and white feminism’s racialized structures. The African American “Other-from-Without” (Michelle Wright) emerges as a projection that affirms and upholds (white) German identities and is constructed in relation to the American Other. Race, in fact, sometimes functions as the “trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures” (Gates 5). In mainstream discourse, it is sometimes conflated with an (often not or mis-recognized) Afro-German “Other-from-Within” (Michelle Wright) as blackness and race are associated with Americanness. In

1

These categories of difference can, of course, only be separated for analytical clarity but ultimately have to be viewed intersectionally in their interplay.

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(West) German dominant discourse, this Other requires cultural mediation and translation that result in an (inter)active and creative reception and (inter)cultural transfer. In the process, the Otherness and Foreignness of African American culture seem to call for strategies of coping with the (perceived) difference and result in a variety of frameworks for its reception or appropriation and appreciation or dismissal. These frameworks, however, create and maintain power hierarchies and it is highly problematic to fit African American culture into white German or European frames of reference and to impose standards, images, and language on its difference. Yet, the frameworks serve to contain the Otherness within known and established structures, attempt to facilitate intelligibility, and, ultimately, also function to demonstrate that “Otherness is never radical” (Todorov 374). The modes of constructing African American culture and ‘blackness’ in West German discourses have, of course, changed over time – as, for example, Afro-Germans have claimed spaces and raised their voices, or as the interactions with African American culture have brought attention to German race issues, or as white German feminism has been challenged and modified through its encounter with African American and Afro-German women. However, as my analyses of Davis, Lorde, Walker, and Morrison as well as their forerunners who have been established in the (West) German collective imaginary have demonstrated, some discursive strategies occur frequently and prominently as frameworks for the re- and perception of African American cultural productions and their producers.2 Americanizations and ideas of Americanness and America provide the most significant context for the discursive construction of African American Otherness in (West) German discourses. In many places and instances, “people have mobilized a figure of America […] in order to articulate debates about their ‘own’ identities” (Appiah and Gates 3). This was particularly relevant for Germany post-World War II as America took on a salient function for the development of a West German national and cultural identity. In all cases under scrutiny in this book, the connection between

2

I argue that these discursive strategies and frameworks have a specific significance for the cultural transfer between African America and (West) Germany but as (to some degree) general strategies of coping with difference they are most likely employed in other contexts as well.

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African American culture and an idea of America figures prominently. African American culture and African Americans might be represented and viewed as an integral part of the dominant American culture – as, for example, is the case with black GIs in US uniforms or African American women’s lives and culture represented in a Hollywood film. In this context, African American culture might be to varying degrees utilized to re-affirm American exceptionalism, multiculturalism and diversity, and narratives of progress (particularly with regard to American race relations). Mostly however, African Americans and African American culture are discursively constructed as representatives of an ‘other’ America that is implicitly understood as being ‘better,’ more interesting and exciting, or even subversive to the American mainstream. In this case, the image of America is split in order to accommodate what does not seem to fit the established picture of the US. Thus it becomes specifically useful and effective also for recipients and groups who are actually excluded or perceive themselves as outside of or counter to the dominant culture (cf. 1960s and 1970s student and counterculture or the Afro-German movement). In these contexts, African American culture has also been coded as subversive to the German mainstream; this has been the case, for example, with jazz music during the Third Reich or the reception of the Black Power movement. This strategy is not so much revealing about African Americans as it is about German discourses; in all cases examined in this study it is evident that discourses which at the surface revolve around the African American Other mainly use it as a projection screen to (indirectly) reflect on, negotiate, or affirm German constructions of gender, culture, literature, race, national identity, transatlantic relations, and not the least America. The African American women and their works which stand at the center of this book – Davis, Lorde, Walker, and Morrison – have frequently been defined through and by their womanhood. The figure of proclaimed and/or imagined sisterhood provides a strategy to connect to their works and to identify with their concerns. Mainstream discourse has – at least in the beginning – relegated their works to the niches of women’s culture, literature, or more generally women’s issues. Feminist discourse has taken up their activist agendas and cultural productions and emphasized the link of common womanhood, solidarity among women, and a joint feminist project. At the same time, particularly Lorde’s interventionist activism and her critical thinking, both of which directly addressed Germany but located it in

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transnational discourses like the black diaspora, introduced issues of race and racialization into white German feminism (and German discourses at large). White (German) feminism has thus been to some degree exposed as exclusionary and racist. However, all four writer-activists have not only been categorized as ‘women’ but discursively constructed as African American or black women specifically. In the German reception of Davis in the student movement and counterculture, for example, gender solidarity was activated but so was the desire to ‘become black’ and to identify with the iconic figures and transnational symbols of the black liberation struggle. Lorde’s significance has been established through her insistence that Afro-German women are part of the black diaspora and that Germany is shaped by and intertwined with this diaspora. In this context, the white dominant discourse has been challenged (primarily through the Afro-German movement) to acknowledge this interconnectedness and to refrain from externalizing race and blackness as non-German phenomena. For Afro-German women particularly, Lorde’s activism raised an awareness of the black diasporic community and provided vital impulses for their own activism, literary work, and (collective as well as individual) identities. In Lorde’s thinking, which was vitally influenced by her experiences in Germany, these women were not only an integral (though often unacknowledged) part of German society and culture but also of a diverse global black diaspora and a heterogeneous community of women. While Lorde never received the mainstream media attention of Morrison or Walker, her work has most directly been connected to (West) Germany. In the (mass) media reception of Walker and Morrison, the blackness and African Americanness of their respective writings and personas is perceived as largely unconnected to Germany. The media events that revolved around the Spielberg film The Color Purple as well as the Nobel Prize in Literature for Morrison revealed that both Walker and Morrison received the broadest attention as their works where mediated through white established cultural or literary institutions like Hollywood or the Nobel committee. In both cases, reviews and media portrayals reveal the idea that beyond and behind the depiction of African American (women’s) culture there is a universal quality to be discovered in their works. This allows for German audiences to enjoy the Foreignness of these texts as an exotic feature and to relate to their universal characteristics without bothering about the culturally specific elements. African American culture,

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in this context, does not directly relate to Germany, and its Otherness and ‘blackness’ remain at a safe distance across the Atlantic. Similarly, Davis, Lorde, Walker, and Morrison have achieved wide popularity and recognition in the cultural field. In (West) German discourses, they are frequently assigned even a central and significant position within this field – as for example when Morrison’s books are lauded as world literature or when Davis becomes an established cultural icon. However, in each case the comparatively secure and accepted position in the cultural sphere at the same time entails a limitation to this specific realm. Particularly Morrison’s and Walker’s works as theorists, scholars, and critics have been mostly neglected. While it is frequently mentioned that, for example, Morrison is also a professor, the content and significance of her theoretical and scholarly work seem to be of minor importance. Similarly, Davis’s thinking and scholarly work seem to be of interest to the press in the early 1970s primarily in relation to her assumed involvement in the San Rafael shootout; beyond that, her work as a scholar, professor, and critical thinker is marginalized in the German press and public interest. Josephine Baker provides an early example of this dynamic though in a somewhat different manner; while her early performances captured the German media and public, her later activism and work was never allowed to take center stage. German media and public discourses apparently appreciate, promote, and negotiate African American women’s contributions within the cultural field but at the same time pay hardly any attention to their activities beyond this field. Ultimately, in all cases, narratives of progress determine accounts of African American women’s art and activism in (West) Germany. These narratives are not only a reification of a specific mythical notion of America and, by extension, the West as progressive, innovative, and futureoriented but also cast African American culture in this particular light. In the press reactions to the film The Color Purple and Morrison’s Nobel Prize as well as in the construction of the relationship between African American and Afro-German women (by Lorde as well as Afro-German women), these narratives of progress surface prominently, for example when the development of African American woman’s activism and black feminism in the US becomes a model for Afro-German women; or when the depiction of African American women in The Color Purple is read primarily as an illustration of Hollywood’s progress in terms of racism and

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stereotypical portrayals of African Americans; or when the Nobel Prize is awarded to Morrison because she has closed a gap in the literary representation of American history and culture. This appraisal of achievement has its logical counterpart in a rhetoric of revolutionary promise or “not yet” which is also often used in (West) German assessments of African Americans and African American culture. From this perspective, Davis and the Black Power movement carried the promise of revolution, just as Morrison’s Nobel Prize harbored the potential to change the (world) literary canon. That this phenomenon is not limited to the German reception of African American women’s work is demonstrated by a more recent example: Barack Obama’s campaign for and his election to the Presidency of the United States in 2008 offered the hope for change and generated widespread enthusiasm which were based on the vision of an ‘other,’ new, and/or better America. In the process of (West) German constructions of African American culture, my analyses suggest, there seem to be (at least) three major lines of argument for its appreciation or dismissal: (1) its exotic Otherness; (2) its success or significance within a white cultural establishment; (3) its subversive potential. While this classification is neither comprehensive nor exhaustive, these tendencies have decisively shaped (West) German discourses on the writer-activists and their works examined in this study. Yet, in all cases, they leave the “positional superiority” (Said, Orientalism 7) of the white (West) German subject intact. Exoticism, the fascination with African Americans and African American culture’s exciting Otherness, has not only been an important factor in German reactions to Josephine Baker but also figures in other contexts; for example, when the representation of African American women’s culture in The Color Purple becomes a fairy tale in an exotic setting (cf. the reviews by Karasek and Riedl); or when Morrison is labeled a “proud African tribal queen” or “sensuous black mama” in order to rouse interest among German readers (Weingarten, “Die Schwarze” 146) and her works are marketed as “classic stories from exotic places” (Johnson 131). African American women’s culture has also been constructed and evaluated according to its success in a white culture industry or through the recognition and acknowledgement by established (white) cultural authorities. This is most clearly the case for Walker’s and Morrison’s popularity which has been fostered to a large degree by the respective frameworks of

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Hollywood and the literary establishment, i.e. the Nobel committee. While these are globally operating institutions, German nationwide media and cultural authorities similarly function as instances of authorization or legitimization and take on a position of power, control, and domination with regard to African American culture and its local reception. Though not primarily relating to women’s culture, the German reception of jazz as an African American cultural product provides another example of a quite similar dynamic. It, however, also demonstrates that African American culture might not only be accepted or embraced due to its mainstream success but rather gain a subversive and countercultural appeal because it is perceived as being positioned outside this mainstream. For the countercultural construction of Davis this aspect was vital. In a somewhat different vein, it was Lorde’s intervention into the mainstream rather than any form of assimilation that facilitated her interactions and crucial exchanges with AfroGerman women. These strategies of control and of containment as well as the appreciation (or dismissal) of a different culture which are presented from a mostly unchallenged position of superiority and power in the (West) German mainstream explain the lack of critical self-reflection in this context. As far as they have been employed ‘successfully,’ they have, of course, reduced the unsettling potential of Otherness and re-affirmed the white dominant position. They constitute a form of epistemic violence and discursive control and are central to the establishment and maintenance of power structures and normative orders as well as the distribution of knowledge. However, the discursive strategies of control and containment only work to some extent and never absolutely. Just as the often discussed Americanization of (West) Germany (if not the world) has never been entirely determined by the imperialist and hegemonic role of the US, the “Germanification” of African American culture, its adaptation and appropriation into German contexts and discourses, and its (specifically) German construction neither erase nor control its Otherness completely. This is not only the case because individual recipients, groups, and audiences might engage with African American culture beyond the mainstream discourse but also because read contrapuntally, in Edward Said’s sense, the dominant texts do not manage to contain the presence of other voices. Rather, such a reading reveals the “other histories against which (and together with which) the dominant discourse acts” (Said, Culture 59).

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In conclusion, the analyses of crucial moments of the (West) German reception, appropriation, and construction of selected African American women artists and activists have revealed that throughout the 20th century, German identities have been negotiated in part through an African American (female) Other. German discourses on race and racism, whiteness, feminism and gender, cultural and national identities, America, and transatlantic cultural crossings have been influenced by Davis, Lorde, Walker, and Morrison and their cultural work. African American women’s culture in (West) Germany has been actively constructed and utilized to serve agendas of countercultural movements as well as the dominant mainstream and the (white) establishment. African American culture and its most prominent (female) representatives occupy a comparatively firm place in the German collective imaginary and have been discursively constructed, utilized, and created in numerous ways; they thus call for much more detailed and encompassing analyses than the tentative results – neither comprehensive nor exhaustive – which this book can provide. German audiences have imagined, constructed, and experienced diverse points of contact and possible equivalences in order to relate to African American women’s culture. Yet, at the same time, it has been regarded as ‘foreign’ and Other and thus in dire need of cultural mediation, explication, assimilation, or even white authorial control. The specifically German dimension of the interactions, re- and perceptions, and cultural traffic results in parts from the particular relationship West Germany established with the US in the aftermath of World War II. Discourses on African American culture in general are therefore frequently enmeshed in – sometimes conflicting – debates about America and Americanization. African American women’s culture specifically is often located discursively in the contexts of gender solidarity, feminism, and women’s culture at large. Ultimately, there are numerous indicators that it might be useful to think about not only the Americanizations or Self-Americanizations of (West) Germany but rather to expand on the specific forms of African Americanization as they have affected (West) German discourses, cultures, and identities. They neither function as mere extensions of American cultural imperialism nor as its radical Other but rather emerge from the complex dynamics of a cultural exchange that cannot be adequately captured through the lens of Americanization, the “Black Atlantic,” or the black diaspora – or any other global(ized) framework alone.

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