Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange

by Greene, Larry A.

• ISBN13: 9781604737844
• ISBN10: 1604737840
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-12-07
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi

Summary

Germans and African Americans, unlike other works on African Americans in Europe, examines the relationship between African Americans and one country, Germany, in great depth.Germans and African Americans encountered one another within the context of their national identities and group experiences. In the nineteenth century, German immigrants to America and to such communities as Charleston and Cincinnati interacted within the boundaries of their old-world experiences and ideas and within surrounding regional notions of a nation fracturing over slavery. In the postÂ-Civil War era in America through the Weimar era, Germany became a place to which African American entertainers, travelers, and intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois could go to escape American racism and find new opportunities. With the rise of the Third Reich, Germany became the personification of racism, and African Americans in the 1930s and 1940s could use HitlerÂ's evil example to goad America about its own racist practices. Postwar West Germany regained the image as a land more tolerant to African American soldiers than America. African Americans were important to Cold War discourse, especially in the internal ideological struggle between Communist East Germany and democratic West Germany.Unlike many other countries in Europe, Germany has played a variety of different and conflicting roles in the African American narrative and relationship with Europe. It is this diversity of roles that adds to the complexity of African American and German interactions and mutual perceptions over time.

Author Biography

Larry A. Creene is professor of history at Seton Hall University. He is the coauthor of two books and author of numerous articles on African American history. Anke Ortlepp is a research fellow with the German Historical Institute. She is the author of numerous books on American cultural history.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. vii
Prologue
African Americans in the German Democratic Republic	p. 3
An Unexpected Alliance
August Willich, Peter H. Clark, and the Abolitionist Movement in Cincinnati	p. 17
German Immigrants and African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, 1850-1880	p. 37
Louis Douglas and the Weimar Reception of Harlemania	p. 50
Race in the Reich
The African American Press on Nazi Germany	p. 70
Field Trip into the Twilight
A German Africanist Discovers the Black Bourgeoisie at Howard University, 1937-1939	p. 88
Love across the Color Line
The Limits of German and American Democracy, 1945-1968	p. 105
The Erotics of African American Endurance, Or: On the Right Side of History?
White (West)-German Public Sentiment between Pornotroping and Civil Rights Solidarity	p. 126
"Nazi Jim Crow"
Hans Jürgen Massaquoi's Democratic Vistas on the Black Atlantic and Afro-Germans in Ebony	p. 141
A Raisin in the East
African American Civil Rights Drama in GDR Scholarship and Theater Practice	p. 166
Ollie Harrington
His Portrait Drawn on the Basis of East German (GDR) Secret Service Files	p. 185
Exploding Hitler and Americanizing Germany
Occupying "Black" Bodies and Postwar Desire	p. 201
Reconstructing "America"
The Development of African American Studies in the Federal Republic of Germany	p. 218
Contributors	p. 231
Index	p. 234
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