Other Germans : Black Germans and the politics of race, gender, and memory in the Third Reich / Tina Campt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Campt, Tina, 1964-

Series:

Social history, popular culture, and politics in Germany

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

World War, 1939-1945--Black people--Germany.

World War, 1939-1945.

Black people--Race identity--Germany--History--1939-1945.

Black people.

Africans--Germany--History--1939-1945.

Africans.

Race relations.

History.

Black people--Race identity.

Germany--Race relations--Political aspects.

Germany.

Physical Description:

x, 283 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan, [2004]

Summary:

It's hard to imagine a subject more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent in studies of German history and culture, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity. Tina M. Campt's Other Germans tells the story Germany's Black citizens and the complicated ways in which members of this population managed to survive Germany's most painful and perplexing epoch, the Third Reich. Most strikingly, Campt focuses her path-breaking study of the Holocaust primarily on race, rather than anti-Semitism. By centering on Germany's Black community rather than its Jewish population, Campt is able to examine a very different question than many other studies of Nazi Germany: What happens when we view the Holocaust not through the history of anti-Semitism but through the ideology of racial purity that fueled the regime's fundamental organization? From this vantage point, the book reveals how, in the service of "racial purity," the regime produced some of the very subjects it ultimately sought to destroy.

As background for her study, Campt draws on the memories of two Black Germans whose lives and identities were shaped in profound ways by the regime. Her interdisciplinary work examines this powerful historical material by bringing together social history, feminist theory, and African-American diaspora studies with an ethnographic approach. Other Germans is essential reading in the emerging study of what it meant to be Black and German in a society that viewed anyone with non-German blood as racially impure at best.

Contents:

Pt. 1. Echoes of imagined danger: specters of racial mixture

"Resonant echoes": the Rhineland campaign and converging specters of racial mixture

Confronting racial danger, neutralizing racial pollution: Afro-Germans and the National Socialist sterilization program

Pt. 2. Memory narratives, memory technologies: race, gendering, and the politics of memory work

Conversations with the "Other Within": memories of a Black German coming of age in the Third Reich

Identifying as the "Other Within": National Socialist racial politics and an Afro-German childhood in the Third Reich

Diaspora space, ethnographic space: writing history between the lines: a postscript.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-273) and index.

ISBN:

0472113607

OCLC:

52631313