Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich
Hardcover: 296 pages
Publisher: University of Michigan Press (December 11, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0472113607
ISBN-13: 978-0472113606
It's hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity. Tina Campt's Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of individuals, with important distinctions from other accounts. Most strikingly, Campt centers her arguments on race, rather than anti-semitism. She also provides oral history as background for her study, interviewing two Black Germans for the book.In the end, the author comes face to face with an inevitable question: Is there a relationship between the history of Black Germans and those of other black communities?The answers to Campt's questions make Other Germans essential reading in the emerging study of what it meant to be black and German in the context of a society that looked at anyone with non-German blood as racially impure at best.Tina Campt is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University. It's hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity. Tina Campt's Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of individuals, with important distinctions from other accounts. Most strikingly, Campt centers her arguments on race, rather than anti-semitism. She also provides oral history as background for her study, interviewing two Black Germans for the book.In the end, the author comes face to face with an inevitable question: Is there a relationship between the history of Black Germans and those of other black communities?The answers to Campt's questions make Other Germans essential reading in the emerging study of what it meant to be black and German in the context of a society that looked at anyone with non-German blood as racially impure at best.Tina Campt is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University.
About the author:
TINA MARIE CAMPT is an associate professor of women’s studies at Duke University with secondary appointments in the departments of history and German; she is also a visiting associate professor of women’s studies at Vanderbilt. The author of over eleven articles and chapters on race in Germany, her first book was Other Germans: Blacks, Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University of Michigan Press, 2004). Campt’s forthcoming publications include work on diasporic hegemonies and popular culture.
Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities fellows program