Theodor Michael
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781781383117
- eISBN:
- 9781786944283
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781383117.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This is the first English translation of an important document in the history of the black presence in Germany and Europe: the autobiography of Theodor Michael. Theodor Michael is the last surviving ...
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This is the first English translation of an important document in the history of the black presence in Germany and Europe: the autobiography of Theodor Michael. Theodor Michael is the last surviving member of the first generation of ‘Afro-Germans’: Born in Germany in 1925 to a Cameroonian father and a German mother, he grew up in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic. As a child and teenager he worked in circuses and films and experienced the tightening knot of racial discrimination under the Nazis in the years before the Second World War. He survived the war as a forced labourer, founding a family and making a career as a journalist and actor in post-war West Germany. Since the 1980s he has become an important spokesman for the black German consciousness movement, acting as a human link between the first black German community of the inter-war period, the pan-Africanism of the 1950s and 1960s, and new generations of Germans of African descent. His life story is a classic account of coming to consciousness of a man who understands himself as both black and German; accordingly, it illuminates key aspects of modern German social history as well as of the post-war history of the African diaspora.Less
This is the first English translation of an important document in the history of the black presence in Germany and Europe: the autobiography of Theodor Michael. Theodor Michael is the last surviving member of the first generation of ‘Afro-Germans’: Born in Germany in 1925 to a Cameroonian father and a German mother, he grew up in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic. As a child and teenager he worked in circuses and films and experienced the tightening knot of racial discrimination under the Nazis in the years before the Second World War. He survived the war as a forced labourer, founding a family and making a career as a journalist and actor in post-war West Germany. Since the 1980s he has become an important spokesman for the black German consciousness movement, acting as a human link between the first black German community of the inter-war period, the pan-Africanism of the 1950s and 1960s, and new generations of Germans of African descent. His life story is a classic account of coming to consciousness of a man who understands himself as both black and German; accordingly, it illuminates key aspects of modern German social history as well as of the post-war history of the African diaspora.
Frank Mehring
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604737844
- eISBN:
- 9781604737851
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604737844.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter offers empirical insights into the racial discourse on diversity, the creation of national and personal identities, and the perception of minorities in Germany and the United States by ...
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This chapter offers empirical insights into the racial discourse on diversity, the creation of national and personal identities, and the perception of minorities in Germany and the United States by looking at the two countries’ racial history. It focuses on Hans Jürgen Massaquoi’s triple identity as a mixed-race person of African and German heritage born in Hamburg to a German mother and African father in the Weimar era and later naturalized as an American citizen. While managing editor of Ebony, the most influential African American magazine in the United States, Massaquoi published a series of articles on Afro-Germans. The chapter examines his autobiographical writings and compares the attitudes of Americans and Germans toward blacks, mixed-race people, and racial assimilation. It also considers Massaquoi’s journey of personal transformation and how he became witness to the national transformation brought about in America by the civil rights movement.Less
This chapter offers empirical insights into the racial discourse on diversity, the creation of national and personal identities, and the perception of minorities in Germany and the United States by looking at the two countries’ racial history. It focuses on Hans Jürgen Massaquoi’s triple identity as a mixed-race person of African and German heritage born in Hamburg to a German mother and African father in the Weimar era and later naturalized as an American citizen. While managing editor of Ebony, the most influential African American magazine in the United States, Massaquoi published a series of articles on Afro-Germans. The chapter examines his autobiographical writings and compares the attitudes of Americans and Germans toward blacks, mixed-race people, and racial assimilation. It also considers Massaquoi’s journey of personal transformation and how he became witness to the national transformation brought about in America by the civil rights movement.
