Feminist Studies 40, no. 1. © 2014 by Dagmar Schultz 199 Dagmar Schultz Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992: The Making of the Film and Its Reception I first met Audre Lorde in 1980 at the United Nations World Women ’s Conference in Copenhagen. At the time I was an assistant professor of North American studies at the Free University of Berlin and in a position to propose Audre for a visiting professorship for a semester. She came to Berlin in 1984 and kept returning until 1992. During these visits, I accompanied Audre to her speaking and teaching engagements, recording her both on audio and videotape, as well as through photography : Audre considered me her “house photographer.” Sometimes she would even pose for pictures or looked directly into the video camera. It was clear to us both that I would eventually do something with these photos, audiotapes, and video footage. My subsequent film Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 draws on these various recordings, showing Audre both on- and offstage and in the many different contexts that made up her life in Berlin. I see the film as a project of “archival activism ”—that is, as both a personal, individual, and sociopolitical document and a text that has the potential to generate activism. My goal in making the film was to capture the ability of Audre to empathize with, motivate, and empower women and men. At the same time I hoped to capture and convey the significance that her life in Berlin—and the encounters that she had with Black and white women there—held for her. One of Audre’s first questions on arriving in Berlin in 1984 was: “Where are the Black Germans?” She soon established close contact with 7 Celebrating Audre Lorde’s Legacy 8 200 Dagmar Schultz a number of Black women, some of whom attended her classes in 1984. She initiated work on the book Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, which was published by us at Orlanda Frauenverlag (Orlanda Women’s Press) in German in 1986 (later translated into English in 1991) and which had a decisive impact on the formation of a Black German movement as well as on a surge of transatlantic research projects on AfroGermans .1 Audre particularly encouraged Afro-German women to write of their experiences, and as a result several new authors were published, the first ones being Katharina Oguntoye, May Ayim, and Ika Hügel-Marshall .2 I was able to get three books by these newly published authors translated into English, contributing to transnational research on and contacts between Black Germans and Black Americans in the United States.3 Through her own publications, through inspiring others to write, but above all through her critical public stance concerning widespread ignorance of racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-immigrant discrimination within and outside the women’s movement, Audre made lasting contributions to the German political and cultural scene, both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her recurrent presence in Germany gave impulse to several conferences of Black, Jewish, and immigrant women; conferences that confronted the state of each group’s different communities and their interrelationships.4 Audre continually challenged white German 1. Katharina Oguntoye, May Opitz, and Dagmar Schultz, eds., Farbe Bekennen : Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1986), trans. Anne V. Adams, Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991). 2. Oguntoye, Opitz, and Schultz, Farbe Bekennen; Katharina Oguntoye, Eine afro-deutsche Geschichte: Zur Lebenssituation von Afrikanern und AfroDeutschen in Deutschland von 1884 bis 1950 (Berlin: HoHo Verlag Christine Hoffmann, 1997); May Ayim, blues in schwarz weiss (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag , 1995); May Ayim, Grenzenlos und unverschämt (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag , 1997); May Ayim, Nachtgesang (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1997); Ika Hügel-Marshall, Daheim unterwegs: Ein deutsches Leben (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag,1998). 3. Oguntoye, Opitz, and Schultz, Showing Our Colors; May Ayim, Blues in Black and White, trans. Anne V. Adams (New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2003); Ika Hügel-Marshall, Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany, trans. Elizabeth Gaffney (New York: Continuum, 2001). 4. May Ayim and Nivedita Prasad...