No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
An Afro-German Microhistory: Gender, Religion, and the Challenges of Diasporic Dwelling
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2016
Abstract
This article traces the biography of an Afro-German woman born during the 1920s Rhineland occupation to examine the peculiarities of the black German diaspora, as well as potential connections between these peculiarities and larger trends in the history of German colonialism and racism. “Erika Diekmann” was born in Worms in 1920. Her mother was a German citizen, her father a Senegalese French soldier. Separated from her birth mother at a young age, Erika spent her youth and early adulthood in a school for Christian Arab girls in Jerusalem run by the Protestant order of the Kaiserswerth Deaconesses (KaiserswertherDiakonissen). After World War II, Erika returned to West Germany, but in 1957, she emigrated to the United States, along with her (white) German husband and four children. Erika's story offers unique opportunities for studying Afro-German women's active strategies of making Germany their “home.” It underlines the complicated role of conventional female gender prescriptions in processes of interracial family-building. The centrality of religion to Erika's social relationships significantly enhances our understanding of the complexity of German attitudes toward national belonging and race during the first half of the twentieth century.
Dieser Aufsatz verfolgt die Biographie einer afro-deutschen, während der Rheinlandbesetzung in den 1920er Jahren geborenen Frau, um die Eigenheiten der schwarzen, deutschen Diaspora sowie eventuelle Verbindungen zwischen diesen Eigenheiten und größeren Trends in der Geschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus und Rassismus zu untersuchen. „Erika Diekmann“ wurde 1920 in Worms geboren. Ihre Mutter war deutsche Reichsbürgerin, ihr Vater ein französischer Soldat aus dem Senegal. Erika, die früh von ihrer leiblichen Mutter getrennt wurde, verbrachte ihre Jugend und ihr frühes Erwachsenenalter in einer von den Kaiserswerther Diakonissen in Jerusalem betriebenen Schule für christliche, arabische Mädchen. Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg kehrte Erika nach Westdeutschland zurück. 1957 emigrierte sie gemeinsam mit ihrem (weißen) deutschen Ehemann und ihren vier Kindern in die USA. Erikas Geschichte bietet eine einzigartige Möglichkeit, die Strategien afro-deutscher Frauen zu studieren, die versuchten Deutschland zu ihrer „Heimat“ zu machen. Dabei wird die komplizierte Rolle konventioneller, weiblicher Gender-Vorgaben bei den Prozessen von interrassischen Familiengründungen hervorgehoben. Darüberhinaus bereichert die zentrale Stellung, die Religion in Erikas sozialen Bindungen einnimmt, unser Verständnis der komplexen deutschen Einstellungen hinsichtlich nationaler Zugehörigkeit und Rasse während der ersten Hälfte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts ungemein.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2016
References
1 Stadtarchiv Worms (henceforth StadtAWo) Abt. 185/714, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha Baroness von Moos, April 18, 1954. To preserve anonymity, I have changed the names of the correspondents and their relatives. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are my own.
2 During the early 1920s, an average of twenty-five thousand colonial French troops of predominantly North African origin served in the occupied Rhineland. See Sandra Maß, Weiße Helden, Schwarze Krieger. Zur Geschichte kolonialer Männlichkeit in Deutschland, 1918–1964 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), 79.
3 Information on Erika's mother and stepfather is from the residential registry (Melderegister) of the city Worms in StadtAWo Abt. 11/1.
4 StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Martha von Moos to Erika Diekmann, May 19, 1954.
5 Ibid.
6 Uwe Kaminsky, Innere Mission im Ausland. Der Aufbau religiöser und sozialer Infrastruktur am Beispiel der Kaiserswerther Diakonie (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2010), 21. On Talitha Kumi, see also Seht, wir gehen hinauf nach Jerusalem! Festschrift zum 150jährigen Jubiläum von Talitha Kumi und des Jerusalemsvereins, ed. Almut Nothnagle, Hans-Jürgen Abromeit, and Frank Foerster (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2001).
7 Fliedner-Kulturstiftung Kaiserswerth (henceforth FKS), Bestand 2–1 (Diakonissenanstalt)/218, contract between Bezirksfürsorgestelle Worms and Talitha Kumi, March 2, 1931.
8 Kaminsky, Innere Mission, 144–45, 153–54.
9 In 1940, 509 German nationals were interned at Wilhelma. See ibid., 129. On the Templers from Württemberg, see Roland Löffler, Protestanten in Palästina. Religionspolitik, sozialer Protestantismus und Mission in den deutschen evangelischen und anglikanischen Institutionen des Heiligen Landes, 1917–1939 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2008), 63–68.
10 The camp at Wilhelma was closed down in April 1948.
11 Diekmann's letter mentions that the couple had to leave Palestine two months after their wedding. See StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Heinrich Diekmann to Martha von Moos, June 9, 1954.
12 StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha von Moos, n.d. (circa spring or summer of 1957).
13 The author is in possession of the passenger list of the flight the Diekmanns took from Bremen to New York on April 24, 1957.
14 The author is in possession of Erika Diekmann's death certificate (issued by the Office of the Registrar of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Kentucky).
15 The most recent and comprehensive study of Afro-German history is Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft, Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Pioneering works include Katharina Oguntoye, May Opitz, and Dagmar Schultz, eds., Farbe bekennen. Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1986), translated as Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, trans. Anne V. Adams (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, ed., The African-German Experience: Critical Essays (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996); Katharina Oguntoye, Eine afro-deutsche Geschichte. Zur Lebenssituation von Afrikanern und Afro-Deutschen von 1884 bis 1950 (Berlin: Hoho Verlag Christine Hoffmann, 1997).
16 Linda Gordon, “Biography as Microhistory, Photography as Microhistory: Documentary Photographer Dorothea Lange as Subject and Agent of Microhistory,” in Small Worlds: Method, Meaning & Narrative in Microhistory, ed. James F. Brooks, Christopher R. N. DeCorse, and John Walton (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008), 145–71 (quotation on p. 146). On microhistory's opportunities and challenges, see Peter Burke, History & Social Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 38–43; see also Andrew I. Port, “History from Below, the History of Everyday Life, and Microhistory,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. James D. Wright, 2nd ed., vol. 11 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015), 108–13.
17 Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft, “Introduction,” in Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century, ed. Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 1–15 (quotation on p. 3). Compare also the forum “Transnational Lives in the Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 118, no. 1 (Feb. 2013): 45–139Google Scholar.
18 For a helpful discussion of different concepts and theories of diaspora, see Clifford, James, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (Aug. 1994): 302–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Building on William Safran's definition, Clifford defines the main features of diaspora as a “history of dispersal, myths/memories of the homeland, alienation in the host (bad host?) country, desire for eventual return, ongoing support of the homeland, and a collective identity importantly defined by this relationship.” See ibid., 305.
19 Though in a limited way, the legal rights of colonial subjects became an issue during the 1912 Reichstag controversy over bans on interracial marriage introduced by the governors of German Southwest Africa (1905), German East Africa (1906), and Samoa (1912). On the marriage bans, see Helmut Walser Smith, “The Talk of Genocide, the Rhetoric of Miscegenation: Notes on the Debates in the German Reichstag Concerning Southwest Africa, 1904–1914,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 107–23; Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), esp. 84–87; Krista Molly O'Donnell, “The First Besatzungskinder: Afro-German Children, Colonial Childrearing Practices, and Racial Policy in German Southwest Africa, 1890–1914,” in Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890–2000, ed. Patricia Mazón and Reinhild Steingröver (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 61–81; Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten. Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 219–50.
20 Michelle M. Wright, Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 190 (emphasis in original). Also see Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse, and Yara-Colette Lemke-Muniz de Faria, “Blacks, Germans, and the Politics of Imperial Imagination, 1920–60,” in Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox, and Zantrop, eds., Imperialist Imagination, 205–29; El-Tayeb, Fatima, ‘“Blood is a Very Special Juice’: Racialized Bodies and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Germany,” International Review of Social History 44 (1999): 149–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Schwarze Deutsche. Der Diskurs um “Rasse” und nationale Identität 1890–1933 (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2001).
21 Wright, Becoming Black, 191. Contemporary accounts by Afro-German women who grew up in the Federal Republic of Germany attest to the accuracy of Wright's assessment. See, e.g., Laura Baum, Katharina Oguntoye, May Opitz, and Dagmar Schultz, “Drei afro-deutsche Frauen im Gespräch—Der erste Austausch für dieses Buch,” in Oguntoye, Opitz, and Schultz, eds., Farbe bekennen, 145–63.
22 On German history's transnational dimensions and the global entanglements of German colonialism, see, e.g., Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt, 1871–1914, ed. Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006); Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich: Beck, 2006); Ulrike Lindner, Koloniale Begegnungen. Deutschland und Grossbritannien als Imperialmächte in Afrika (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2011); German Colonialism in a Global Age, ed. Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
23 The quotation is from Wright, Becoming Black, 187.
24 On the Weimar period, see especially Reiner Pommerin, “Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde”. Das Schicksal der farbigen deutschen Minderheit, 1918–1937 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1979); Tina M. Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), esp. 63–80. On post-1945 West Germany, see Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Heide Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Timothy L. Schroer, Recasting Race After World War II: Germans and African Americans in American-Occupied Germany (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007).
25 See esp. Nelson, Keith L., “The ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’: Race as a Factor in Post-World War I Diplomacy,” Journal of Modern History 42, no. 4 (Dec. 1970): 606–27Google Scholar; Marks, Sally, “Black Watch on the Rhine: A Study in Propaganda, Prejudice and Prurience,” European Studies Review 13, no. 3 (July 1983): 297–333CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lebzelter, Gisela, “Die ‘Schwarze Schmach’: Vorurteile—Propaganda—Mythos,’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11, no.1 (1985): 37–58Google Scholar; Christian Koller, “Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt”. Die Diskussion um die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial- und Militärpolitik, 1914–1930 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2001); Jean-Ives Le Naour, La honte noire. L'Allemagne et les troupes coloniales françaises, 1914–1945 (Saint-Amand-Montrond: Hachette, 2003); Maß, Weiße Helden; Iris Wigger, Die “schwarze Schmach am Rhein”. Rassistische Diskriminierung zwischen Geschlecht, Klasse, Nation und Rasse (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2007); Roos, Julia, “Nationalism, Racism, and Propaganda in Early Weimar Germany: Contradictions in the Campaign against the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine,’” German History 30, no. 1 (March 2012): 45–74Google Scholar.
26 Wright, Becoming Black, 187.
27 See esp. Brown, Jacqueline Nassy, “Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space,” Cultural Anthropology 13, no. 3 (Aug. 1998): 291–325Google Scholar; Campt, Tina, “Family Matters: Diaspora, Difference, and the Visual Archive,” Social Text 27, no. 1 (spring 2009): 83–114Google Scholar; idem, “Pictures of ‘US’? Blackness, Diaspora, and the Afro-German Subject,” in Black Europe and the African Diaspora, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 63–83; Michelle M. Wright, “Middle Passage Blackness and Its Diasporic Discontents: The Case for a Post-War Epistemology,” in Aitken and Rosenhaft, eds., Africa in Europe, 217–33.
28 Campt, “Family Matters,” 87.
29 A classic study focused on themes of transatlantic mobility is Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). It is significant that Gilroy uses the ship—following Mikhail Bakhtin—as “chronotope,” or “unit of analysis for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented.” As Gilroy argues, “the image of the ship—a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system—is especially important for historical and theoretical reasons… Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs.” Ibid., quotes on pp. 225, 4.
30 Tina Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 55.
31 Campt, “Pictures,” 73 (emphasis in original).
32 See also Aitken and Rosenhaft, Black Germany, 10–11.
33 Campt, “Pictures,” 73 (emphasis in original).
34 Clifford, “Diaspora,” 313; Wolff, Janet, “On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism,” Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (1993): 224–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Aitken and Rosenhaft, Black Germany, 2.
36 Campt, Other Germans, 35.
37 The estimate is from Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus. Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986), 354.
38 Campt, Other Germans, 28.
39 For a rare example of autobiographical testimony by a child of the 1920s Rhineland occupation forced to submit to compulsory sterilization, see the interview with Hans Hauck in Campt, Other Germans.
40 StadtAWo Abt. 185/451, letter from Bertha Harz to Ernst von Moos, Jan. 29, 1934. On Harz, see Ruth Felgentreff, “Bertha Harz und Najla Moussa Sayeg: Zwei Diakonissen—eine Aufgabe, ein Dienst,” in Nothnagle, Abromeit, and Foerster, eds., Seht, wir gehen hinauf, 96–121.
41 StadtAWo Abt. 185/713, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha von Moos, June 2, 1946.
42 StadtAWo Abt. 185/713, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha von Moos, n.d. (prob. 1946).
43 StadtAWo Abt. 185/713, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha von Moos, Nov. 24 (prob. 1946).
44 For examples of more bitter and tense role reversals in relationships between Jewish displaced persons and non-Jewish Germans in post-1945 Germany, see Atina Grossmann, “Victims, Villains, and Survivors: Gendered Perceptions and Self-Perceptions of Jewish Displaced Persons in Occupied Postwar Germany,” in Sexuality and German Facism, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 291–318; idem, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), esp. 208–14.
45 StadtAWo Abt. 185/713, letter from Martha von Moos to Erika Diekmann, March 3, 1948.
46 StadtAWo Abt. 185/713, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha von Moos, n.d. (prob. 1946).
47 StadtAWo Abt. 185/713, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha von Moos, Jan. 23, 1947.
48 StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha von Moos, Feb. 10, 1949.
49 StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Martha von Moos to Erika Diekmann, May 19, 1954.
50 In May 1954, Erika wrote that she was in regular contact with her sister: “She writes to me always and sends Christmas gifts for the kids.” See StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha von Moos, May 30, 1954.
51 In 1957, Erika and Heinrich Diekmann had four children, aged eight, six, five, and three.
52 StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha von Moos, Jan. 15, 1956.
53 Ibid.
54 StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Heinrich Diekmann to Martha von Moos, June 9, 1954.
55 StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha von Moos, Jan. 15, 1956.
56 StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha von Moos, Feb. 22 (prob. 1955).
57 StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha von Moos, n.d. (circa autumn 1954).
58 Erika's prospects of receiving restitution payments were unlikely since Senegalese French troops had left Germany during the summer of 1920. On compensation for black German victims of the Nazi regime in postwar West Germany, see Aitken and Rosenhaft, Black Germany, 324–25.
59 StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha von Moos, April 18, 1952.
60 StadtAWo Abt. 185/713, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha von Moos, n.d. (prob. 1948).
61 See Kaminsky, Innere Mission im Ausland, 111.
62 Ibid., 118.
63 Ibid., 91–93; Heide-Marie Lauterer, Liebestätigkeit für die Volksgemeinschaft. Der Kaiserswerther Verband deutscher Diakonissenmutterhäuser in den ersten Jahren des NS-Regimes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), esp. 50–53.
64 On Lüttichau, see Lauterer, Liebestätigkeit, esp. 54.
65 FKS, Bestand 2-1/319, letter from Frieda S. to Siegfried von Lüttichau, Oct. 31, 1938. Several letters in the same folder written by other girls mention this event as well.
66 FKS Bestand 2-1/319, letter from von Lüttichau to Dr. Lammers, April 13, 1935.
67 On the relationship of the Protestant German congregations in Palestine to National Socialism, see Ralf Balke, Hakenkreuz im Heiligen Land. Die NSDAP-Landesgruppe Palästina (Erfurt: Edition Tempus, 2001), 79–92; Löffler, Protestanten in Palästina, esp. 143–58.
68 In a letter to von Moos of Jan. 23, 1947, Diekmann reported that five deaconesses had left the camp at Wilhelma for Egypt. See StadtAWo Abt. 185/713.
69 The Nazis subjected 385 biracial “Rhineland bastards” to forced sterilization. See Bock, Zwangssterilisation, 354 n. 114. For the details of Nazi-era discussions, see Pommerin, “Sterilisierung,” esp. 53–77; see also Campt, Other Germans, 72–80.
70 StadtAWo Abt. 13/443, report by Worms Einwohnermeldeamt to Worms police commissioner, Nov. 22, 1938; report by Kreisbeauftragter of the Nazi Party Office for Racial Policy in Worms to Worms police commissioner, Nov. 19, 1938.
71 StadtAWo Abt. 185/713, letter from Erika Diekmann to Martha von Moos, Nov. 24 (prob. 1946).
72 StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Martha von Moos to Erika Diekmann, May 19, 1954.
73 Ibid.
74 StadtAWo Abt. 185/451, letter from Bertha Harz to Ernst von Moos, Jan. 29, 1934.
75 StadtAWo Abt. 185/451, letter from Ernst von Moos to Bertha Harz, Jan. 15, 1934.
76 Koller, “‘Von Wilden aller Rassen,’” 252–55.
77 StadtAWo Abt. 185/672, letter from Ernst von Moos to Mr. J., Nov. 11, 1919.
78 A number of historians have suggested that Weimar-era (white) Germans viewed the presence of biracial “occupation children” (Besatzungskinder) in the Rhineland as a provocation reminding them of the perceived inversion of conventional colonial hierarchies, and specifically of Germany's alleged postwar demotion to the status of a “colony” ruled over by African “savages.” See Marcia Klotz, “The Weimar Republic: A Postcolonial State in a Still-Colonial World,” in Germany's Colonial Pasts, ed. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 135–47; Maß, Weiße Helden, esp. 130, 213; Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 155; Brett M. van Hoesen, “The Rhineland Controversy and Weimar Postcolonialism,” in Eley and Naranch, eds., German Colonialism, 302–29. On the loss of Germany's colonies in 1919 as “national trauma,” see also Aitken and Rosenhaft, Black Germany, 21.
79 On the links between eugenics and colonialism, see Pascal Grosse, Kolonialismus, Eugenik und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland, 1850–1918 (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2000).
80 StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Martha von Moos to Erika Diekmann, May 19, 1954.
81 StadtAWo Abt. 185/713, letter from Martha von Moos to the wife of the Dinklage pastor, June 10, 1954.
82 StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Martha von Moos to Erika Diekmann, May 19, 1954 (emphasis in original).
83 The Kaiserswerther Diakonissenanstalt faced financial difficulties at this time; since Martha and Ernst von Moos donated widely to religious causes, it is possible that they also gave money to the Anstalt. See Kaminsky, Innere Mission im Ausland, 68.
84 Ibid., 57–62. In Beirut, for instance, the French mandate power did not return property of the Kaiserswerth deaconesses confiscated during World War I.
85 Ibid., 79.
86 C.F. Löffler, Protestanten in Palästina, esp. 104–18, 431–34.
87 StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Martha von Moos to Erika Diekmann, May 19, 1954.
88 Campt, “Pictures,” 73.
89 Historians have stressed the remarkable extent to which local and regional associations and meanings of Heimat (“home”) continued to inform Germans' sense of national identity well into the twentieth century. Erika's story may suggest that, in the case of Afro-Germans, the presence of strong local attachments functioned as a particularly vital connection to the larger national unit, and that the weakening of local ties could have contributed significantly to black Germans' decision to question their own personal identification with “Germany.” On the relationship between local and regional identities and conceptions of Heimat, on the one hand, and more abstract notions of the German nation, on the other, see Celia Applegate, “Localism and the German bourgeoisie: the ‘Heimat’ movement in the Rhenish Palatinate before 1914,” in The German bourgeoisie: Essays on the social history of the German middle class from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, ed. David Blackbourn and Richard J. Evans (London: Routledge, 1991), 224–54; idem, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); idem, “The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Heimat, National Memory and the German Empire, 1871–1918,” in History and Memory 5, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1993): 42–86Google Scholar.
90 Rosenhaft, “Schwarze Schmach and métissages contemporains,” in Aitken and Rosenhaft, eds., Africa in Europe, 34–54.
91 For a strong emphasis on relatively unbroken continuities in German racism, see El-Tayeb, “Blood is a Very Special Juice”; idem, Schwarze Deutsche.
92 StadtAWo Abt. 185/714, letter from Martha von Moos to Erika Diekmann, May 19, 1954. Scholars have made a persuasive case highlighting important realignments in (West) German “taxonomies of race” after 1945. Shifting attitudes toward blacks resulted, in part, from Germans' emulation of certain aspects of American racial beliefs that they encountered in the United States army of occupation. Martha von Moos's letters do not mention the presence of African American GIs in 1950s Germany; instead, when it came to questions of race, her main point of reference remained the 1920s debate over the biracial children of the first Rhineland occupation. This may have reflected von Moos's sense of skepticism that blacks could be easily integrated into German society, a prevailing viewpoint in West German society during the 1950s, though waning somewhat (at least, on the surface) during the following decade. See Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler, esp. 169–75. On West German encounters with African American troops, see Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins; Schroer, Recasting Race.
93 Campt, Other Germans, esp. 27–28; El-Tayeb, Schwarze Deutsche, 167–200.
94 Pommerin, “Sterilisierung,” 29–33.
95 On Weimar-era debates over a national sterilization law, see ibid., 33–40; Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 207–8; and Young-Sun Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 254–64. On the Nazi period, the most comprehensive treatment is Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus.
96 StadtAWo Abt. 185/451, letter from Bertha Harz to Ernst von Moos, Jan. 29, 1934; StadtAWo Abt. 185/646, letter from Bertha Harz to Ernst von Moos, Oct. 8, 1935.
97 StadtAWo Abt. 185/713, letter from Martha von Moos to the wife of the Dinklage pastor, June 10, 1954.
98 On debates over the illegitimate German children of American occupation soldiers, see Erica Kuhlman, Reconstructing Patriarchy after the Great War: Women, Gender, and Postwar Reconciliation between Nations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 32–33.
99 Roos, Julia, “Racist Hysteria to Pragmatic Rapprochement? The German Debate about Rhenish ‘Occupation Children,’ 1920–1930,” Contemporary European History 22, no.2 (May 2013): 155–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
100 Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 290.