Germans and African Americans

Two Centuries of Exchange
Erscheinungsjahr 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60473-784-4
Verlag: University Press of Mississippi

Buch, Englisch, 304 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 590 g

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 post-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 Hitler'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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Greene, Larry A.

Ortlepp, Anke

Über Autor(innen)

Larry A. Greene, South Orange, New Jersey, is a professor of history at Seton Hall University. He is the author of two books and numerous articles on African American history.

Anke Ortlepp, Washington, D.C., is a research fellow with the German Historical Institute. She is the author of numerous books in Germany and the U.S.