Recasting Race after World War II: Germans and African Americans in American-Occupied Germany (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Recasting Race after World War II: Germans and African Americans in American-Occupied Germany Annette F. Timm Recasting Race after World War II: Germans and African Americans in American-Occupied Germany. By Timothy L. Schroer. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2007. ISBN 978- 0-87081-869-1. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 295. $34.95. African American troops made up about 10 percent of American soldiers in the United States Forces, European Theater (USFET) during the four years of direct occupation of post-World War II Germany (p. 2). Timothy L. Schroer’s book explores how the presence of these soldiers transformed the rhetoric and practice of racism both in Germany and within the American military itself. It provides a refreshingly trans-Atlantic perspective that revises our tendency to view the occupation as a one-way process of “Americanization.” Schroer argues that past accounts have over-emphasized the continuities in post- World War II German racism, and he insists that the demise of Nazism in 1945 “marked an important change in the history of thinking about race” (p. 3). That Nazi crimes were committed under the explicit banner of racial ideology, Schroer insists, forced postwar Germans to transform publicly expressed (if not privately held) racial sentiments and provided American reformers with considerable ammunition in their quest for civil rights. Racial segregation within the U.S. military, after all, contradicted the Allies’ stated intent to destroy racial prejudice in a denazified and democratized Germany. Schroer sets out to historicize whiteness in occupied Germany, insisting that racism must be understood as a culturally constructed code of conduct that found expression not only in the continued segregation of black troops but also in the policing of white German women. Schroer’s account takes the reader through various moments of German-American contact during the four years of direct occupation. With excursions into topics like the German reaction to “black” Jazz and spiritual music, the heart of the book is an exploration of German and American fears about romantic and sexual contacts between black soldiers and white Fräuleins. German women’s desperate need for food and material goods, available in abundant supply from all American GIs, all but erased the boundary between prostitution and “legitimate” love affairs. Given these conditions, women were particularly susceptible to the “allure of the exotic racial Other” (p. 145), which was dramatically enhanced by the unquestioned and entirely novel political and economic power that black GIs held over defeated German men. While Schroer’s argument that the women’s whiteness “counterbalanced” the power of masculinity and created “something like a level playing field for white women and black men engaged in sexual relationships” (p. 143) is not entirely convincing, it is beyond doubt that the issue of fraternization highlighted the subordinate role of blacks in the U.S. army. The harsher treatment of women involved in inter-racial relationships (they were far more likely to be subjected to forcible VD examinations and confinement in prison-like hospital wards) angered black soldiers who viewed restrictions on their sexual choice as clear evidence of the hypocrisy of racially segregating a force whose goal was denazification. Meanwhile, USFET commanders hesitated to eliminate segregation in the occupation army primarily because they were uncomfortable with the prospect of mixed-race social functions. The specter of black GIs dancing with white women was a more powerful justification for continued segregation than dubiously supported arguments about the inferior effectiveness of black units. By 1948, continued pressure from reformers who argued that “a Jim Crow army could not stamp out Nazi race hatred” (p. 44) helped prompt an executive order from President Truman that began the process of desegregation. Schroer is careful not to overemphasize this victory. He points out that while explicit discussions of biological racial differences all but [End Page 1325] disappeared from public rhetoric in occupied Germany, and eventually from U.S. military policy discussions, they were replaced with a gendered rhetoric of morality that was almost as powerful as scientific racism had been in defining the boundaries between groups. There are frustrations for the reader in this book. A beautifully crafted introduction is followed by chapters that are organizationally...