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10 - Multi-Ethnicity and Cultural Identity: Afro-German Women Writers' Struggle for Identity in Postunification Germany

from Ethnicity/Hybridity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Jennifer E. Michaels
Affiliation:
Edinburgh University
Anne Fuchs
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
Mary Cosgrove
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
Georg Grote
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

German unification brought for Afro-Germans, as well as for African and other non-white immigrants and asylum seekers, an increased feeling of vulnerability and not belonging. As Marilyn Sephocle observes: “Before German unification African Germans had to grapple with identity/image issues. Today their focus is on something even more pressing: fear of being attacked.” In the following, I will focus in particular on texts by May Ayim, Helga Emde, and Ika Hügel-Marshall, who played an important role in founding the Afro-German group. Theirs are strong voices against the increase in racist violence in the immediate postunification years. In their postunification texts, these and other Afro-German women writers contest the euphoric memories of unification. Their texts shed light on their efforts to build a community, define their biracial identities, and understand their heritage: theirs is a “struggle for cultural space in the New Germany.” By fighting against racism and reclaiming their erased history in Germany they contest notions of a monoethnic German society, what Helga Emde calls “the myth of Germanic ethnic-nationalism.”

Like most Germans with biracial African or African American and German heritage, Ayim, Emde, and Hügel-Marshall grew up isolated from other black people in a predominantly white society that marginalized them. Only in the mid-1980s did Afro-Germans begin to define themselves as a cultural group. In 1984, the American black activist poet Audre Lorde taught a course on black American women poets at the Free University in Berlin where she got to know black German women.

Type
Chapter
Information
German Memory Contests
The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990
, pp. 209 - 226
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2006

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