Antiracist Feminism in Germany: Introduction to Dagmar Schultz and Ika Hügel

Abstract

In September 1991 German skinheads attacked Vietnamese and Mozambican workers in the small East German town of Hoyerswerda as its townspeople watched and applauded. The events of Hoyerswerda vividly documented the rise in racist violence in Germany since 1989 and a more broad-based support for racism among the German people. Hoyerswerda also cast its shadow over the November 1991 Women in German conference and was responsible for WiG members' decision to focus the 1992 WiG conference on two guest speakers who had played a central role in German antiracist feminism, Dagmar Schultz, a white Christian woman, and Ika H?gel, an Afro-German woman. Their talks at the 1992 conference, slightly revised to account for developments in Germany since then, are printed in this volume. As the number of attacks on foreigners in Germany continues to mount (6300 in 1992 [Buch steiner]) and the names of other German towns?H?nxe, Rostock, M?lln, Solingen?have also become emblematic for escalating racist violence, the issues that Schultz and H?gel raise here remain of utmost urgency. In their essays, Schultz and H?gel draw on their many years of active engagement in antiracist struggle within the women's movement. Schultz, active in the German women's movement from its beginnings, was one of the founders of Berlin's Feministisches Gesundheitszentrum, and her name may be familiar to WiG members as a coeditor of the 1984 collection German Feminism (and author or editor of six other books). As she ex plains here, her own antiracist politics were forged in the American civil rights movement and still reveal their American origins, evident in the moral rigor with which she demands accountability from herself and others (particularly vis-?-vis white skin privilege), her emphasis upon differences among women, and her commitment to coalition-building. With typical modesty, Schultz does not reveal the major role her own often unacknowledged efforts have played in making racism a central concern of German feminism. She herself may have initiated the discus sion of racism within the German women's movement with an article in the October 1981 issue of the feminist journal Courage, where she re ported on the 1981 National Women's Studies Association convention,