In September of 2013, I traveled to Papenburg in Lower Saxony to watch a live performance by Label Noir of their production Heimat, bittersüße Heimat (2009). For readers unfamiliar with Label Noir, it is an all-Black German theater troupe founded in 2007 and based in Berlin. Founding member Aïcha Diallo viewed the platform as a way for Black Germans to process experiences of racism through improv acting. The ensemble assists professional Black German actors in casting calls to diversify the German media and theater landscape. The troupe also creates, performs, and produces works that free Black performers from stereotypical and racist roles. Unique to this production, Label Noir staged Heimat, bittersüße Heimat across multiple German cities, disrupting the institutionally white space of the theater both aesthetically and politically. My connection to the group began in the summer of 2011. Black German, Potsdam-based artist Patricia Vester informed me of Label Noir's work after she attended their performance in Berlin. I contacted Lara-Sophie Milagro, one of the artistic directors of the ensemble and conducted an interview with multiple members of the group, including Vanessa Rottenburg (former artistic co-director), Dela (Gakpo) Dabulamanzi (current artistic co-director), Jonathan Kwesi Aikins, Leander Graf, Genifer Habbasch, Veronika Naujuks, Sithembele Menck, and Michelle Bray. This conversation provided central insights into the group's productions and the German theater scene more broadly. Milagro also gave me a recording of a recent performance of Heimat, bittersüße Heimat in Hamburg, so I had watched the production many times before witnessing it in person in Papenburg. Heimat, bittersüße Heimat does not have one clear narrative arc. Rather, it comprises many interconnected episodic scenes presented in five chapters whose titles convey the topics they address. These are interwoven to create a cohesive performative rendering of the multiplicity of Heimat or Heimat/en, as I refer to Black Germans' plural reconfiguration of the concept (see Plumly, “BLACK, Red, Gold”; Plumly, “Heimat Transgressions” 130-32, 139-42). The staging of the performativity of Heimat and racial (non-)belonging spurred new approaches to Heimat discourse and theory through the art of acting. Heimat has often been understood to be stable, unchanging, and rooted in its supposed anchoring of identity. Although local iterations of Heimat exist, rendering it plural, the national Heimat memory unifies these, as Alon Confino argues. Label Noir's theatrical interpretation of the term upends these notions and signals the ever-shifting sand of diasporic Heimat/en and, in particular, the exclusion from and non-belonging of Black Germans to the national Heimat, despite their local rootedness. Heimat at the national level is reimagined as multivalent, polyvocal, and inclusive vis-à-vis the performance's debunking of the myth of Germanness as synonymous with whiteness. Not least due to its intricacy, Heimat, bittersüße Heimat evokes the 1986 collection Farbe bekennen. Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte, a seminal text in Black German studies that evades generic categorization. Like Farbe bekennen, Heimat, bittersüße Heimat is an amalgamation of different genres including poetry, video clips, music, photographs, and autobiographical narratives. This made it challenging to analyze but also forced me to grapple with how diverse generic forms produce and perform ambivalent Heimat/en in unique and often contradictory ways. Particularly striking about Heimat, bittersüße Heimat is the subversive humor at the center of the play (see Colvin; Plumly, “BLACK, Red, Gold”; Watkins). One of its objectives was to produce a liberating means through which Black Germans could, in seeing themselves reflected in the experiences of the performers, laugh about the absolute absurdity of everyday racism, without ignoring racism's seriousness and the power of its impact. This laughter is not comforting; rather, it offers a temporary release from the violence inflicted and enacted on Black Germans and other People of Color daily. It serves as a means through which to process illogical and painful scenarios (hence the titular bittersweetness). In this way, the performance leaves its traces in the body and mind long after the laughter in the theater subsides. White Germans viewing the piece are prompted to reflect on what traits of the racist white characters—even (and especially) those who are supposedly well-intentioned, referred to as “Gutmenschen” in Chapter 3 of the play—hit too close to home for their comfort. There is no difficulty in determining when to read a character as white due to the acts of racism they perform. One scene is explicitly designed to expose racism as a lived, existential threat. A young man, Herr Alfahid, runs from neo-Nazis and is denied entry into the Koordinierungs-Hauptbüro der Bundeszentrale für ein multikulturelles Deutschland (ironically “abbreviated” as KHBFEMD) because the office is closed upon his arrival. While the scene elicits laughter due to its ridiculous scenario, it also exhibits how actual bureaucracy and the rigid German and Western structuring of linear time facilitate violence by failing to provide a safe space of refuge. In conversation with Milagro, I learned that this scene was based loosely on actual events. Here, and in the so-called Standortbestimmungen und Hymnen—meant to change with each performance—the production blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction. Each show's individual performers write their own Standortbestimmungen, which offer insights into their personal Heimat/en by exploring topics such as childhood, family, and the intersection of personal and national history. For example, Leander Graf performs Zarah Leander's Schlagerlieder “Ich weiß es wird einmal ein Wunder geschehen” and “Davon geht die Welt nicht runter,” as he interjects details from his own family's Nazi history. Zarah Leander was a famous actress of German film in the Nazi era and the titular face of Heimat, the film Carl Froehlich directed in 1938. By layering the performances of two Leanders, the play engages the trope of Heimat on a metalevel. Other scenes attempt to break out of a white frame at the interpersonal level but remain confined by them on a metalevel. Black love is staged when a gay couple converse about loyalty and infidelity (or “fremd gehen”), marking Heimat as the intimate sphere and fremd as venturing into a new and unexplored territory of sexual encounters. Notably, Freddy Quinn's “Unter fremden Sternen” (1959) serves as the leitmotif of this scene, showing how race still inflects intimate constructs of Heimat and Fremde, given these terms' discursive history. Nevertheless, Heimat is registered as extending beyond any mere geographical framing and into other terrains, notably queer territories of desire and pleasure. Heimat, bittersüße Heimat also offers a timely engagement with the racist dimensions of local geographies when the M-Straße subway station, which forms part of the stage setting for one of the scenes, is renamed as Königin-von-Saba-Straße (Queen of Sheba Street). This scene references a subway station in Berlin-Mitte, whose name the government changed in 1991 from Otto-Grotewohl-Straße (1986) to a derogatory term for Black people. Previously (since 1950), it was known as Thälmannplatz, after the Communist politician Ernst Thälmann, who was murdered by the Nazis. Black German activists have long demanded a new name for the station. Following sustained political pressure in Berlin, the street and station are supposed to be renamed Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Straße in honor of the eighteenth-century Black German philosopher and first documented African professor in Europe. However, this has yet to transpire. This political waiting game aptly echoes the fourth chapter of Heimat, bittersüße Heimat titled “Warten.” While the formal complexity and political relevance of Heimat, bittersüße Heimat were already evident to me in the recording, what became more palpable during my live viewing of the performance in Papenburg were the responses of the audience, reflecting the embodied affectivity or felt experience of the piece. These included laughter and sighs as well as uncomfortable and awkward silences. Being present in the theater forced me to register the overwhelming whiteness of the city, the theater, and the viewing public (including myself), and to bear witness to the (non-)transformations that white audience members underwent in the process of viewing and reacting to the piece. It thus offered me a chance to critically reflect on my own positionality and power as a white, non-German, United States-based academic in relation to the staged performance and to question both the white and U.S. privilege that I brought to the room as the post-performance Q&A discussion ensued. As the performers fielded questions and audience members often made aggressive and defensive comments that denied racism, sometimes under their breath and oftentimes openly and loudly, I found myself enraged and attempting to speak out in the performers' defense. But they had encountered such reactions countless times before and were more equipped than I am to handle them. And more importantly, the platform was theirs, not mine. This also allowed me to consider how significant such a performance must have been for the People of Color in attendance that evening. Not only did the performance promote recognition of Black Germans and other marginalized populations in Germany, but it also opened up discourse on taboo topics, such as the existence of racism in Germany. It made me question further: who is heard and seen and who is ignored and denied authority when speaking in institutional spaces? These are questions I carry with me always as a scholar in the field of Black German studies. But they are also questions that have been posed by countless Black Germans prior to this production, for example by May Ayim in her intellectual, activist, and artistic work. Ayim is projected as the last image of the production, and it is dedi-cated to her memory. A new generation of Black German artists building on Ayim's legacy, including Philip Khabo-Koepsell, Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo, and Mo Asumang, continue to probe such questions. Heimat, bittersüße Heimat and other Label Noir productions repeatedly challenge how I think about discourses of race, representation, and performativity, the visual registering and sonic resonance of Black Germans, and the continuously transforming Black German aesthetic. Their work, in all of its richness and intricacy, speaks and pays homage to the Black Diaspora within and beyond Germany. Label Noir recently performed a filmed reading of “On Noah's Blood-Stained Rainbow We Dance,” written by Black South African playwright Monageng “Vice” Motshabi for the International Playwrights Laboratory at the Maxim Gorki Theater in 2020. It brings the Black German experience into conversation with the Black South African experience. In 2022, Label Noir translated and filmed a performance of white United States playwright Claire Coss's “Emmett, tief in meinem Herzen,” made during the pandemic for the Hebbel Theater am Ufer (HAU) in Berlin, in which cast members played both Black and white historical characters. The production is a psychological inquiry into the infamous murder of Emmett Till. Here again, Label Noir intentionally leaves their audience with more questions than answers. Oftentimes these questions are uncomfortable. For example, what does it mean for Black German actors to play the roles of white U.S. racists from the Jim Crow South in the 1950s? As Milagro stated in conversation with Kevina King at the 2022 Black German Heritage and Research Association Conference, “I never saw or rarely ever saw a Black interpretation of whiteness, at least not in Germany.” I had never seen a Black German interpretation of U.S. whiteness prior to this performance either. As per Milagro, it challenges us to “go to the core of what is white and what is Black.” Label Noir allows me to think, rethink, learn, unlearn, configure, and reconfigure my analytical, theoretical, and subjective approaches to Black German studies. This is but one mark of brilliance they offer. Their Black German aesthetic practices push viewers literally and figuratively to see and act in new ways. They acknowledge that the work of dismantling white supremacy, but also of embracing, creating, producing, and staging Black realities and speculative futures, Black joy, and “Black aliveness,” as Kevin Quashie calls it, is constantly in the making.