Abstract
This research project is a historical and narrative study of cross-racial, international couplings between Black U.S. servicemen and White German women during WWII and the children who resulted from these relationships. Once pejoratively referred to as “Brown Babies,” or worse, often both the U.S. and German governments collaborated in the destruction of families through forbidding interracial coupling and encouraging White German women to either abort mixed raced babies or give up these children for international adoption in an effort to keep Germany White. Using my own family’s history to show that mixed race children are the dross that needed to be removed from Germany, I employed memory and post-memory as my theoretical framing, coupled with authoethnography, family interviews, and narratives as my methodological tools. Of primary concern is what place Black German children and their mothers were allowed to occupy in the German national imagination and to what extent their individual rights and interests were superseded by the assertion of state interest in managing the German citizenry. Ultimately, it is argued that different tactics of constituting Germanness as homogenously White comes at the expense German women’s rights over their bodies and the exclusion of mixed race Black German children.
Highlights
This research project is a historical and narrative study of cross-racial, international couplings between Black U.S servicemen and White German women during World War II (WWII) and the children who resulted from these relationships
I am the daughter of an Afrodeutsche Nachkriegskinder, the so-called “Colored occupation child.”
In the United States Black German children were covered in media such as Ebony magazine where they made the cover of the October 1948 issue, “Homes needed for 10,000 Brown Orphans” or Jet magazine which featured a number of Black German children available for adoption in 1951
Summary
Imperial Germany (1884–1918) offers a valuable point of departure for an analysis of citizenship, race, and gender discourses that surrounds Black Germans, because it represents a first public discursive intervention into the construction of the raced citizen in Germany. In the 1880s, Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of the German empire, established five German Colonies in Africa (Cameroon, Namibia, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Togo) and expanded German colonialism in order to consolidate. Fehrenbach analysis a 1950 survey mixed were seen as opportunistic and immoral Germany, at this time, mirrored many of the same racist relationships showed that German women who had developed sexual relationships with Black GIs sentiments as the United States. Germany continued to ban interracial marriages, the were seen as opportunistic and immoral Germany, at this time, mirrored many of the same racist majority of the German press condoned and supported the violence visited upon Black GIs by White sentiments as the United States. Race discourse after the Second World War nearly always was linked to discussions of interracial sex and reproduction between German women and Black allied soldiers, but was carefully crafted to avoid speaking of Jewish and Slavic relationships with German women in explicitly racialized terms (Fehrenbach 2009)
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