Dr. Tina M. Campt

Assistant Professor of Womenís Studies, UC-Santa Cruz

1999 Leverhulme Visiting Fellow, Goldsmiths College, London

tel.: 44 171 704-8022/fax: 44 171 919-7712

email: tcampt@cats.ucsc.edu

What Iíd like to do in this paper is to give you a sense of some of the uses I make of the concept of the body as an analytical\tool in my research as a historian of Germany. The body is a model that I use for reading historical discourses of race in Germany to explain and elucidate the effects of these discourses on how Germany saw its black populations, its own perception of itself as a nation, as well as how at certain key historical moments these discourses of race functioned as what Omer Bartov has called a "national adhesive" for securing German national and cultural identity. The model of the body most central to my work is a very traditional notion of the body as an organism constituted as bounded, contained and organized matter. This older conception of the body is one that, as others (including Sue-Ellen in her fascinating paper) have shown, can in some ways be seen to have been superceded by more recent models with perhaps more sophisticated discursive uses and consequences for the body. Nevertheless, the notion of the body as a bounded organism is one that for me, still retains substantial explanatory power as an theoretical tool for historical analysis. This conception of the body has of course been theorized most influentially by the anthropologist Mary Douglass. In her seminal work, Purity and Danger, Douglass made her most famous and frequently cited arguments that the structure of living organisms can be read to reflect complex social formations and used as analogies to express and explain more general views of social order. Her work theorizes how the perceived danger of bodily pollution and aspirations to purity and its maintenance symbolizes the relationship between parts of society and mirrors desires for hierarchy, symmetry and homogeneity in the larger social system.

As Elizabeth Grosz emphasizes in her reading of Douglass, it is this notion of the body that symbolizes and represents various social and collective fantasies, anxieties and aspirations: its orifices and surfaces represent the sites of cultural marginality, places of social entry and exit, regions of confrontation or compromise. Rituals and practices designed to cleanse or purify the body serve as metaphors for processes of cultural homogeneity (193). It is the notion of bodily boundaries and the real and imagined consequences of their crossing, trespassing and violation in social terms that is most significant for my own work on the history of Germanyís black citizens, particularly with respect to reading historical discourses of race and racialization, and the ways in which these overlap and are constituted through discourses of gender and sexuality. For it is the stakes of these boundaries and their function in constituting concepts of nation, race and identity that demonstrate some of the explanatory potential of the body for understanding these processes of social construction, and how such discourses legitimate and serve the exercise of power in enforcing certain forms of social order through processes of marginalization and exclusion.

Bodily boundaries correspond in many ways to the socially and ideologically constructed boundaries of society and what I would term the national body politic. Analogously, that which is perceived and constituted as a threat to these boundaries (re)presents a danger in that it demonstrates their permeability and constructedness, as well as the fact that boundaries must continually be policed. By the same token, it must be emphasized that this national body is not neutral, but thoroughly raced and gendered. In this way, bodily fears of pollution and contamination and the desire to defend certain racialized and gendered boundaries of social interaction reflect and often are used as modes of articulating more general fears of national and social interpenetration and mixing. In the same way that the crossing, trespassing and violation of bodily boundaries presents a threat to the survival of an organism through pollution and contamination, the perceived threat of racial difference and mixture to the German nation/German national identity has also historically been articulated through an notion of pollution and contamination that relies on a concept of the nation and German identity as a raced and gendered body. Here the German body politic is predicated on the assumption and maintenance of certain fundamental social boundaries of racial purity whose vulnerability often becomes apparent through the female body as a vehicle, conduit or site of entry for potential pollution/contamination.

Unfortunately, visual texts are not usually the object of my analysis and I therefore cannot offer one for our collective scrutiny. Yet it is my belief that an interrogation of the body need not necessarily take a visual focus, but rather can be read perhaps even more powerfully through its symbolic representation and resonance in other cultural images and texts. What Iíll be doing in the remainder of this paper is using the conception of the body outlined above as a lense for reading some of the early historical discourses that came to construct Germanyís pre-WWII image of its Afro-German population. In the process, what I hope to do is to suggest how we might make use of the body in historical analysis and as a broader model through which certain desires for purity and homogeneity in German society have historically been articulated.

Examining the early narratives of racial difference, nation and identity that interpellated Black Germans in the interwar years and the decades before, Iíll be looking at the impact ofthe use of African colonial troops by the French in the occupation of the Rhineland and what was seen as the dire consequences of the permanent residence of their Black German progeny in prompting Germans to publicly enunciate their conceptions of what Germanness was (ie., pure) by defining what it was notñ that is, Black or any mixture therewith. The public statements made in relation to these troops and their children taken together with the discourse of racial difference and mixture out of which it arose was a rich site of articulation of German identity. When read historically, the discourse of these discussions reveals not only the tensions of the occupation, but also the multiple ways race came to take on social meaning. This discourse drew strongly on a conception of Germanness defined through certain boundaries that delineated and constructed Germanness as racially pure. The preservation and constant policing of these boundaries is directly analogous to a notion of bodily boundaries that symbolically presents the German nation as a body perpetually vulnerable to contamination that threatens its survival, thus rendering its boundaries in constant need of protection and defense. The boundaries of this construction of Germanness rested on an essential conception of racial difference that articulated racial mixture as a threat to the German nation that blurred the implicit racial boundaries of who constituted a "German", in the process, calling what were viewed as the basic premises of German identity, racial purity, radically into question.

In the campaign protesting the use of black occupation troops at least four powerful discourses converged to create this early and perhaps most enduring image of a Black German population. The first of these was a scientific discourse of race as a biologically immutable category of human difference. The authority of this essential notion of race lie in its value as a means of differentiating among individuals and the social and political implications these distinctions were imputed to have. It was what was seen as the significant genetic consequences of racial mixture postulated in the work of geneticists and eugenicists at the turn of the century that made this a particularly potent component of these debates. At the same time, the threat racial mixture was seen to pose within this essential discourse of race was articulated as a form of endangerment and violation of the boundaries that constituted German national identity. During the Kaiserreich, this discourse came together with an equally compelling colonial discourse on racial mixture, specifically the legacy of prewar debates on mixed marriage in the German colonies, and had a significant impact in shaping German responses to the presence of a black population in their midst, both in pre- and interwar Germany. Finally, a discourse of German victimhood combined with these discourses of race in the Rhineland protest campaign to transform German defeat into a larger narrative of German victimhood. In this narrative, Germany was only the first and most innocent victim of a racial conspiracy/pollution that would ultimately unite it in victimhood with its former enemies -- in the process, recasting defeat as heroic martyrdom. It was through these discourses that German responses to Blacks and Afro-Germans were articulated, and in their terms that Black Germans came to take on meaning.

In each of these discourses we find historical echoes and resonances of a recurring "spectre" which in each context, figured racial mixture as an imagined threat to the German nation, German identity and by implication, to the purity of the white race. In the first case, the spectre was a genetic one that transmitted the negative traits of an "inferior race" to contaminate and degrade the genetic pool of the pure and thus superior white race. In the second case, it was the spectre of a mixed race colonial citizen who through his claim to the rights of legitimate political subjecthood, posed a threat to the German body politic through the prospect of racial parity symbolized by a mixed race, Black German citizen. In the post-WWI occupation, this spectre returned in the form of the "Rhineland bastard" (a term coined during the protest campaign that eventually came to represent the Black German children left behind by these soldiers) as a threat to both the purity of the German nation (read body) and its post-colonial balance of power in the former colonies ñ a threat posed from within the boundaries of the Reich itself. Eventually, in the Third Reich the echoes of this imagined danger came together with the vision of a National Socialist racial state and led to the sterilization of members of this group of Afro-German children as the most concrete embodiment of this fantastic threat to the purity of the Aryan race. In this trajectory, the Rhineland campaign is particularly salient because (though not necessarily the first such site) it articulates the central elements of a spectre of racial mixture expressed through a language of pollution and endangerment -- a spectre that has recurred repeatedly both before and after the First World War.

On April 23, 1920, responding to an article by Edmund Dene Morel in the Daily Herald, six Reichstag delegates petitioned the German government for an inquiry into the rapes and assaults allegedly committed by Black soldiers on civilians in the occupied territory. The language of their charges linked alleged rape incidents to the trampling ("zertreten") of German national honor and dignity and further to the purity of the white race. In this way, the initially racist objections to a black military presence in the Rhineland were refounded on the basis of the purported sexual misconduct perpetrated by these soldiers, in addition to the most serious consequence associated with this uncontained sexual menace: miscegenation. This coupling of black sexuality with the threat of interracial sex and miscegenation was a primary element around which the discourse of the campaign against the post-WWI black occupation troops was structured. Yet the images of Blacks and Africans used in this period to represent the threat posed by Black occupation troops in the Rhineland campaign and out of which the trope of the "Rhineland bastard" would eventually emerge cannot be said to have originated in the Weimar Republic. In fact, they had a much longer history that considerably predates the contentious debates and diplomatic rhetoric of the post-World War I period. These representations are, first and foremost, products of a scientific discourse on race which defined race as essence, locating its origins and meaning in nature and biology. Indeed, the notion of race as a biological human trait has been the focus of scientific research for centuries. Yet the aim of this research has never been limited to the strictly "scientific" goal of understanding the biological basis of race. More often, and perhaps more importantly, it has also sought to explain the meaning of race for society as a whole, and its implications for human interaction in particular.

Racial mixture played an important role in late-19th and early 20th century scientific efforts to define and interpret the significance of race and racial difference. For the innate or inherited differences thought to exist between the races did not in and of themselves necessarily present any problems that could not be remedied through the legislation of interracial social contact. More significantly, racial mixture represented the most problematic outcome of the genetic implications of racial difference, in that it posed the question of what "racial traits" would be passed on to mixed race children, and what long-term implications these individuals and their offspring would have for the future of the race. Hence, at the turn of the century, racial mixture became a important site for scientific inquiries into racial difference, for it was here that scientific laws of heredity (specifically, the applied and adapted theories of Mendel and Darwin, and concrete proof of the pessimistic prognoses of the racial theories of Gobineau) could be put to the test. Paradoxically, people of mixed-racial heritage came to be seen as both absolute proof of the untenability of racial theories of heredity, as well as their absolute truth.

Although racial mixture had popularly been seen as a social problem for some time, scientific studies of individuals of mixed-racial heritage began shortly before the war to formulate a somewhat different objective. These investigations of racial mixture explicitly aimed at clarifying how physical, psychological and intellectual traits were transmitted genetically among humans. At the same time, their explorations were also intended as scientific investigations of social problems (see also Campt/Grosse, 1994) The context in which most of these studies were conducted was the European colonial territories. The question they sought to answer was to what extent human social and cultural development would be influenced by the resulting biological or genetic effects of racial mixture that were seen to necessarily accompany modern colonialism, migration and acculturation. The argument explored by these studies was that racial intermixture had not only physical effects but more important, had an impact on both the intellectual capacity and psychological constitution of racial groups. In spite of the fact that these studies did not necessarily assume that racial mixture negatively affected the larger population, many posited social and psychological deficits among mixed race people to be the result of the genetic inadequacy of racial mixture. Echoing the arguments of Gobineau, the predominant view among geneticists at the turn of the century and shortly thereafter, was that in the majority of cases, racial interbreeding resulted in the "pauperization" of the genetic traits of the "superior" white race.

In both the racial discourse of the Rhineland newspaper campaign and in scientific studies of the genetic implications of race, individuals of mixed race have a special status, for the issue of racial mixture is of particular significance in this context. Here it is important to emphasize that as a marker of difference between individuals, racial difference only becomes an issue of contention with regard to the interaction between individuals of different races. In this logic, (as scientists like Eugen Fischer and Charles Davenport attempted to prove) racial mixture was the ultimate test of racial difference in that it is here that the consequences of racial distinctions would supposedly become apparent. It is for this reason that racial mixture is often constructed as a threat, as the site of the inherent conflict of difference that underlies racial distinctions. Hence, racial mixture has often functioned as a driving force (either implicit or explicit) in discussions of racial difference. As a vehicle with the potential to catalyze such discussions in volatile ways, the combination of essential conceptions of racial mixture with a discourse of racial endangerment offers a powerful tool of political mobilization with often unpredictable results. Using the body to analyze the functioning of this discourse of racial mixture reveals a more complex picture of the power of a conception of racial mixture as a danger to the German nation/identity, particularly when articulated through the authority of a scientific discourse of race as essence. For, thus conceived, racial mixture can be seen to violate social boundaries analogous to those which threaten the core of the living organism. Douglass outlines four primary forms of dangerous boundary crossing that reproduce certain fundamental forms of bodily endangerment.

1. Danger to external boundaries (pollution or crossing from outside)

2. Danger to transgressing internal lines (pollution or crossing from within)

3. Danger from the margins of the lines (corruption of the borders themselves)

4. Danger from internal contradiction (corruption of the logic that sustains and uphold the borders and or the system itself)

 

Similarly, the body can also be used to explain the functioning of boundaries of community as they relate to social responses historically provoked by racial mixture. As Douglass explains, what underlies all responses to border crossings is a basic anxiety about bodily margins that expresses a danger to the survival of the group. In this way, anxieties of endangerment through pollution and boundary crossing are in no way random or subjective, rather, they serve a policing function; for it is through the policing and enforcing of their boundaries that communities remain in tact. The fact is, communities have no real or "natural" basis. On the contrary, they are created through the boundaries they construct to distinguish and distance themselves from others. Indeed, communities are defined by their capacity to maintain these fundamental forms of distinction. By extension, the crossing of these social boundaries destabilizes the legitimacy of such distinctions and at the same time, calls the distinctiveness of the group/organism constituted through them into question. It is for this reason that the "boundary crosser" is conceived as both threatening and powerful. It must be therefore be emphasized that community boundaries are (a) not natural, but thoroughly constructed, (b) never solid and as a result, (c) paradoxically always constitute the condition of a communityís existence and at the same time, the inherent potential of its ultimate destruction.

It was on the issue of interracial marriage in the colonies where scientific notions of race as essence converged with a colonial discourse on racial mixture. Scientific conceptions of the negative genetic consequences of racial mixture were already an element of nineteenth century German colonial policies as articulated on the issue of "Rassenmischehe" or racially mixed marriages between white colonial settlers and indigenous colonial peoples. Only six years before the Rhineland occupation, the Reichstag debates on racially mixed marriages prefigured many of the same arguments and fears voiced later in the newspaper protest campaign. Although interracial marriage was not illegal under German Imperial law, colonial officials began refusing to register interracial unions in the colonies in 1890. In 1905 Governor von Lindequist issued the first such measure in the form of a decree banning interracial marriages in German South West Africa. His explicit rational cited what he saw as the dangerous effect of racial mixture on the purity of the white race. As he stated, "Such unions do not preserve, but rather diminish (deteriorate) the race. As a rule the offspring are physically and emotional weak and unite in themselves the negative traits of both parents." Lindequist's administrative order was followed by similar decrees banning mixed marriages in the German colonies of East Africa in 1906 and Samoa in 1912. The bans were not officially codified as laws sanctioned by the Reichstag, but only decrees issued by colonial governors and a colonial secretary. It was in response to the 1912 Samoan decree that a protest ensued in the Reichstag, prompting delegates to debate the legality of these colonial decrees in light of their conflict with imperial law. But the objections raised in protest of the bans did not focus in any fundamental way on juridical arguments on the question of the precedence of imperial over colonial legislation. Rather, numerous explicitly moral arguments were made both for and against the bans which presented marriages between German colonists and non-white colonial natives as a threat to sexual morality and existing racial hierarchies of difference.

Despite the virulence of this debate, most historians and even those involved in the debates at the time concede that the bans themselves could never effectively be enforced. Individuals wishing to marry in contravention to these colonial restrictions needed only to travel to any of the neighboring colonial territories or return to Europe (or for that matter, Germany) to wed, after which their marital status must legally be honored upon their return. But as Lora Wildenthal astutely argues, by restricting the rights of German men to marry and pass on the rights of German citizenship to their wives and children on racial grounds, the bans were an attempt to assert race as a legal category in defining citizenship. Clearly the central issue behind the decrees was that of the citizenship of both indigenous colonial spouses and more importantly, the mixed race children of these unions. What was thought to hang in the balance of the legality of mixed marriages was the status of Blacks as German citizens and a future Black German population with a legitimate claim as German political subjects. Two deputies to colonial governors in Southwest Africa gave the following justification for the bans.

The native woman, the mixed-blood children produced by both [her and her German husband] and their offspring [become] German citizens and are thereby subject to the laws valid for the Germans here. The male mixed-bloods will be liable for military service, capable of holding public offices, and will partake of the right to vote to be established sometime in the future, as well as other rights tied to citizenship. These consequences are of a high degree of seriousness.[...] Not only is the preservation of the purity of the German race and of German civilization here very substantially impaired because of them, but also the white man's position of power is altogether endangered.(as cited in Wildenthal, 267)

 

This group of mixed race Germans became a source of alarm in that their presence triggered expressions of racial endangerment that tapped into both scientific discourses on the hereditary consequences of racial mixture and popular beliefs in their negative impact on the race, and thus raised the question of the implications for the future of the German (and/or white) race. The legalization of unions between white German colonists and non-white indigenous colonials was problematic in that it undermined racial assumptions of purity with regard to citizenship which had until then served as one of the clearest and most fundamental (essential) boundaries delineating German national identity. Granting non-white colonial spouses and their mixed race children the status of German symbolically represented an entry into the German national body which threatened to dissolve the boundaries of racial difference around and in relation to which Germanness was intrinsically constituted. Through the invocation of an imagined spectre of racial contamination associated with the negative consequences of racial mixture the issue of mixed marriages evolved into an even more volatile issue. More than a "problem" it was seen as a threat both to the fragile colonial balance of power, as well as having detrimental implications for domestic politics within the Reich.

The official Reichstag discussion of colonial mixed marriages began in May 1912, when Colonial Secretary Solf was one of the first speakers arguing in favor of parliamentary support of the colonial bans. Using the violent backlash against emancipated Blacks in the United States as a cautionary example of racial parity gone awry (American anti-miscegenation laws had served as a model in the conception of the mixed marriage bans), Solf appealed to the emotions of the representatives, urging them to allow themselves be led by their "instincts". As a strategic attempt to mobilize and exploit the emotional potential of this issue, Solf repeatedly invoked the figure of a racially-mixed child as a spectre which threatened the purity and sanctity of any German family. "You send your sons to the colonies: do you want them to return with wooly-haired [black] grandchildren?" He continued to raise the stakes on this issue, emphasizing the particular danger racial mixture posed to (white) German women. Here the German national body is a raced body made vulnerable through the female body as the conduit of racial pollution.

Do you want these girls [those sent by the Colonial Society (deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft )] to return with Hereros, Hottentots and bastards? [...] Consider these facts, consider them according to your instincts as Germans and as white men! The entire German nation will thank you, if you consider nothing else than this: we are Germans, we are white and we want to stay white.[...] Do you want to our race to be bastardized? (as cited in Essner, 509)

The combination of scientific and colonial discourses of racial purity which converged on the issue of mixed marriages was also constructed around a gendered and sexualized discourse which, as Wildenthal contends, "counterposed menís rights to German racial purity." Foreshadowing what would later recur in the protest campaign against the Black occupation troops, racial mixture was an imagined danger that mobilized racial and sexual fears in the form of racial parity ñ a spectre whose power lie in the threat it posed to white men's position of power. Here gender played an integral role on both sides of the debate, where women were engaged as both primary and secondary victims of this threat. On the one hand, opponents and supporters of the bans relied on gendered arguments for the protection of native women. Whereas Representative Lebedour, for example, argued that the bans allowed for the protection of indigenous women from the exploitation of white settler men in search of cheap housekeepers, cooks and concubines, the colonial secretary, Solf, also argued that because of the shortage of native women, they should be protected from white male colonistsí attempts to take them away from their men. On the other hand, opponents of the ban offered a complexly gendered argument that combined a defense of male marital and sexual privilege with a vision of the civilizing mission of a (superior) white German colonialist as a "Kulturtr”ger" among black inferiors. For example, Liberal Representative Freiherr von Richthofen emphasized that the objective of German colonial politics was to bring a "higher culture" to the natives "[um] sie zu einer h–heren Lebensauffassung erziehen zu k–nnen." Toward this end, both "geignete Kulturtr”ger" and the appropriate distance between him and his "Erziehungsobjekt" were necessary. Here German women were constructed as a necessary bulwark ensuring this distance and the maintenance of this important cultural ñ read racialñ boundary.

Furthermore, German women saw themselves as important protectors of the purity of German nation/ "race". Their self-proclaimed mission in the colonies was based in part on a notion of white female bodies as barriers to the potential pollution of the German race via miscegenation. Indeed, the availability of white female bodies offered what was seen as an important alternative to the dangerous temptations of non-white, indigenous female sexuality. Indigenous womenís bodies were figured as vessels and conduits for transporting pollution and contamination into the German national body. It was the sexual lures they presented to German male colonists that produced the mixed race progeny which destabilized the equation of Germanness with whiteness and violated the imaginary boundary separating the German national body ñ a body constituted as pure and white ñ from the Others from which it attempted to distinguish itself.

In spite of the vehement opposition and reservations voiced against the ban on both sides of the discussion, the result of these heated debates was the passage of a resolution affirming the legality of colonial mixed marriages, along with a second resolution aimed at strengthening the influence of the Reichstag in colonial legislative affairs. Throughout these discussions essential, biological notions of racial difference, superiority and hierarchy enunciate a scientific discourse of race that pervades these debates. Though often articulated in the language of "culture" and "civilization", the discussion nevertheless belies the logic of racial purity that was used as an compelling political tool. Here references to "culture" and "civilization" referred to what were viewed as essential differences and immutable traits attributed to skin-color. This elision marks an important tension in these discourses of race and racial difference ñ one that dissolves the boundaries between groups of individuals and raises the question of which distinctions between them are considered learned or innate. Yet regardless of what these distinctions are attributed to, they are purported to matter nonetheless, with extremely serious implications for those seen to trespass the boundaries of such differentiation, as in the case of racial mixture.

In spite of the fact that the legality of mixed marriages was upheld, racial mixture continued to be viewed with ambivalence and foreboding. The fears of racial parity articulated in these discussions would later return with a vengeance following the war, and in many ways even came be realized in the scenario presented by African occupation troops and their Black German children.

What offends European sensibility in the use of black troops, is not their blackness, but rather the fact that savages are being used to oversee a cultured people. Whether these savages are totally black or dark brown or yellow makes no difference. The prestige of the European culture is in danger. That is what is at stake. And precisely those peoples, those such as England and France who are dependent upon the dominance they exercise over colored peoples, should consider that with the degradation of Germany in the eyes of the colored, they degrade the white race and with this, endanger their own prestige.[...] Thus the fact remain unchanged, that a cultured people like the French allow another cultured European people to be overseen by savages. Whether these savages are slightly more black or brown or yellow is of no matter. They must feel themselves to be policing a people of the white race. This is what outrages the German people. At the same time, it is the dangerous thing for the white race in general. "Die Farbigen Truppen im Rheinland", Die Leibziger T., {title unreadable in original} 26 May 1921

 

The language of this quotation echoes the fears expressed in the Reichstag debates of the threat posed by Blacks and their mixed race offspring. Taking up the issue of the racial/cultural hierarchies raised in these debates, the above article refers to the Demutigung or the humiliation Germany was seen to face through the imposition of primitives on a Kulturvolk. The dichotomy set up implicitly within this discourse opposed German as a white, civilized Kulturvolk to Blacks as an uncivilized or primitive Naturvolk characterized by savagery, unbridled passions, appetites and instincts. As earlier, what was seen to be at stake in the interracial contact that transpired through the use of Black troops in the postwar occupation was the violation of the boundary which implicitly divides the Kulturtr”ger from his Erziehungsobjekt ñ a boundary which forms one of the ideological cornerstones of the colonial hierarchy. The use of Black troops as a force of occupation in Germany in this way both reversed this relation and transgressed this sacred boundary, while at the same time, the language used to articulate this threat naturalized "culture" as an essential attribute, access to which is mediated by race.

The significance of the presences of these "primitives" in Europe was that this contact would have essential, genetic implications for the white race. For Germans could not simply "unlearn" civility and culture. Rather, the prospect of miscegenation was tantamount to the ruin of "race", for the consequences of miscegenation was the pollution of white German genetic stock. Here the German nation is constructed as a body vulnerable to contamination through the introduction of Black troops within its national boundaries. This violation of its boundaries poses a fundamental danger to its existence, for the German body seems only able to exist in a pure form. Violation/contamination by the Black thus represents its essential negation. In this way, the humiliation decried in this and numerous other articles in the campaign articulates an injury inflicted upon a wounded German national body. It is an injury that stands at the beginning of a larger continuum. As a racial injury inflicted by the victorious powers on a vanquished German state, it is only the first step in a process of postwar victimization.

The article cited above is one example of the accusation frequently leveled against the victorious powers of their participation in the "Sch”ndung der weiþen Rasse". This charge aimed not only at compromising France and Britain's position as victorious powers; but also at discrediting their status as colonial powers inasmuch as this status is predicated on the racial hierarchy that such "Rassenschande" would destroy. The discrediting of France and Britain as colonial powers in turn legitimated Germany's own status through its defense of the racial hierarchy on which it was based -- this time and most dangerously, within Europe itself. The language of this excerpt is a typical example of a strategic deployment of skin color as essentialized "culture" that occurs frequently in the articles of the campaign. In this article, as in numerous others published during this campaign, skin-color is rhetorically rejected as playing a role in the protests against the black troops, while at the same time, race/racial inferiority (Blacks as a "savage race") is emphasized as the primary danger presented by the use of these troops in the occupation. Skin-color is equated with culture, thus eliding racial difference and level of "civilization".

The articles in the newspaper campaign against the black troops illustrate that Germany's defeat in WWI was experienced not only with a sense of loss and humiliation, rather it too was articulated as a threat. Here, as was the case in the mixed marriage debates, the threat which served as the implicit and explicit subtext of this campaign was the perceived threat of racial parity. Racial parity was the danger perceived to result from Germany's loss of the war, and with which Germans were confronted in several areas including the military and, to a certain extent, German society itself. In the military, the use of black colonial troops by other European countries effectively set Blacks on an equal level with whites. Germany itself did not use colonial troops during the First World War, although it had in fact considered this as an option. France's use of black alongside white troops in the occupation forces presented Germany with a superficial form of racial parity which it had never before encountered; neither in the colonies, nor in the military, nor in German society as a whole.

The main danger in the use of colored troops in the heart of Europe lies far more in the systematic awakening and cultivation of their sense of power over the white race.... The French have provided amply for the military training of the Blacks through their use of them in the war and as occupation forces. But, drunk with their victory, the French military still refuse to see the terrible danger. Not long ago Senegalese negroes were exuberantly celebrated shortly before their transfer to Paris as the 'Heroes of Dirmuiden, the Marne, the Dardanelles and other places where one [had to hang on] {word unreadable in the original} at all costs'.... It is in this way that the feeling of power of the colored race against the whites is only strengthened by the French military. --"ëDie Geister, die ich rief...': Die Gefahr der farbigen Besatzungstruppen f¸r Europa", Die Weser Zeitung, 23 July 1921

Perhaps more significantly, racial parity was also perceived as a threat to German society itself. Again, the threat of racial parity was articulated as a gendered, sexual threat to the German body politic. Unlike in the mixed marriage debate where white women figured as necessary barriers to interracial sexual pollution/contamination, in the Rhineland campaign, the white female body became a dangerously porous conduit of the violation of this boundary. In several articles the white German woman was presented as the channel of this threat, portrayed as both a whore and a victim and, as such, as both an active and passive conduit of Black male sexuality. The latter, in turn, was demonized as, among other things, infectious, instinctual, uncivilized and most notably, insatiable and uncontrollable. At the same time, Black men were also seen as irresistible seducers of white women, who were supposedly unable to resist their exotic colonial desire for Black male sexuality. The access of Blacks to white female bodies via the use of black troops in the occupation, represented another form of racial parity; that is, a sexual equality between black and white men in relation to (or, perhaps, in the possession of) white women. This, in turn, was articulated in the campaign against the black troops as a threat to the German man.

The white woman has always had a visibly privileged position among Europeans. For this reason the negro has also shown her for the most part, absolute respect and submissive obedience. But the white woman was also something different to him; something beyond the term 'Weib'. She was something unreachable to him; something he certainly only seldom consciously desired.[...] Now the negro, who inhabits Africa and parts of the rest of the world in countless millions and generally stands on a lower rung of the evolutionary ladder, is not only being brought to Europe, not only being used in battle in a white country; he is also systematically being trained to desire that which was formerly unreachable for him--the white woman! He is being urged and driven to besmirch defenseless women and girls with his tuberculous and syphilitic stench, wrench them into his stinking apish arms and abuse them in the most unthinkable ways! He is being taught that [...] he can do anything his animal instincts even remotely demand, without the slightest restraint, he even finds support for this from the 'victors'. "Die Schwarze Schmach", Hamburger Nachrichten, 30 July 1921

 

In this excerpt, the white female body again forms the conduit of the racial pollution that endangers the German body politic. It is unbridled black male sexualityñ essential in its insatiability, and yet socially malleable in its ability to discern between appropriate and inappropriate objects of desire ñ that is the perpetrator of this act of national pollution. The violation of this most fundamental of boundaries presented this sexualized form of racial parity as perhaps the most intolerable threat to the German nation, that was seen as a rallying point for the German people and eventually other whites. Ultimately racial parity posed the most significant danger to white German men in the threat it posed to their masculinity. This is also true of the military, where "Wehrhaftigkeit", the ability to perform military service and protect one's country and property, has long been regarded as a primary masculine attribute. Here the threat posed by racial parity was the emasculation of the white German male. In the logic of national body politics, it appears that this masculine potency could only be maintained through inequality.

But the 'Black Horror is --how long must one scream it into the ears of a deaf world'-- not only a disgrace for Germany. It is much more. It represents the desecration of white culture in general. At the same time, it means the beginning of the end of the supremacy of the white man." "V–lker Europas...!", Grenzland Korrespondent, 24 April 1922

The discourse on the black troops in the 1919-23 newspaper campaign can in many ways be read as an attempt to recover Gemany's pre-war "Great Power" status. This involved the displacement and/or projection of the fears aroused by the changes occurring in post-war German society onto another surface. The black occupation troops were one such surface, and the threat of racial parity served as a catalyst in this process. However, the ultimate result of the displacement of German national anxieties onto the black troops was the racialization of the post-war situation: German society attempted to regain its pre-war status by affirming its racial superiority to Blacks and specifically the black troops. This was achieved through the extension or generalization of the problem of a black presence in Germany, and the exaggeration of the perceived threat of racial parity into a crisis which threatened all Europeans and the white race in general. This process of racialization is also part of a dynamic that strategically transformed the presence of a black force of occupation in Germany into the fiction of an all-encompassing racial threat to civilization. Here, the merging of fiction and reality was intended to have strategic political consequences -- namely, the potential and much hoped for revision of the post-war settlement along racial lines. The most dubious effect of this process was the way in which this racialized discourse succeeded in presenting the black troops as a common "enemy" of all white nations, against whom they should unite and overcome their differences. The extension of the threat posed by the black troops to this more encompassing formulation created a point of identification between Germany and its former European adversaries via the threat to racial purity, i.e., "whiteness". This, in turn, led to a defensive closing of ranks among whites against an alleged threat to the white race.

Only too late will they realize that they have conjured up a catastrophe for the whole of Europe through the use of colored troops in the Rhineland. All hope rests on the remaining European states and America. Hopefully the feeling of solidarity among the white race will break out in time to effectively meet the rising African threat.[Ibid.]

 

In addition to creating a racially inferior "black enemy", the discourse of the newspaper campaign simultaneously constructed a position of racial superiority for the white German counterpart to this figure; a scenario might be described as follows: The racially inferior black enemy poses a threat which must be controlled and contained. The racially superior white German champions this moral campaign of containment. The effect of this is the re-establishment of the old colonial hierarchy at the ideological level. Through a racialized discourse in which the use of black troops in the postwar occupation was constructed as a dangerous attack on the established racial order, Germany is constituted as the victim of a racial conspiracy. Its defense of the racial hierarchy in the discourse of the campaign effectively makes it the last protector of the white race. In this way, its victimization is recast as a heroic sacrifice (or martyrdom) for the race.

In this trajectory, the Afro-German children of the black occupation troops were the realization of the fears expressed in the propaganda campaign as the concrete embodiment of racial parity and post-war German defeat and humiliation. Similarly as in the Mischehe debates, these children were used provocatively as a shock tactic aimed at evoking outrage and repulsion and creating a sense of endangerment caused by deploying black troops in Europe. The message behind this strategy was that the use of black troops would have long-term repercussions for Germany, or more explicitly, for the "German race". Here the public statements of one of the most prominent speakers involved in the campaign, Ray Beveridge, are of particular significance.

One highly publicized example of Beveridge's rhetoric is her speech given at a protest rally in Munich on 22 February 1921. At the rally, Beveridge presented two "little martyrs" of the occupation to the audience: an undernourished and underdeveloped white German child, said to be the victim of the Allied "hunger blockade" and a Black German child described as a "living and unfortunate witnesses to the black disgrace and white shame" ("lebendigen und ungl¸cklichen Zeugen Schwarzer Schmach und weiþer Schande"). Beveridge's speech, which was published repeatedly in newspapers throughout Germany, quite literally cast these "little Bastards" as symbols of German defeat and the impending threat to the purity of the German race, in that the former (the white child) was a symbol of defeat, whereas the latter (the Black German child) was a symbol of both defeat and the imagined threat to racial purity. As part of the deployment of the "Rhineland Bastard", the children of black soldiers were also depicted as the carriers of the infectious diseases of their fathers, in particular sexually transmitted diseases. Sexuality played a crucial role in the campaign against the black troops as it was the representation of the black soldiers as a sexual threat which provoked the most vehement popular reaction. Interracial sex was seen as a mode of contamination that represented the ultimate rape of the German body ñ a body both raced as white, and gendered as a virginal female whose purity is lost through the violation of the Black. Here, racial discourses were permeated by and combined with discourses of gender and sexuality. Whenever the issue of race was raised, it was immediately and invariably posed in relation to a sexual threat; for example, essential notions of "biological difference" and stereotyped ideas of the exaggerated "sexual passions" of Blacks combined with the threat of the sexual transmission of infectious diseases. This in turn was exacerbated by the excessive sexual "appetites" of Blacks and their supposed lack of capacity to control them, as well as the powerful allure they were also thought to have for white women.

The Black German children of these soldiers were seen as a lasting legacy of the occupation, while their mixed racial heritage and illegitimate birth posed both a moral and biological threat to the "chastity" and "purity" of the German "race". The danger they posed surpassed that of the black troops, for as German citizens whose presence in the country was in no way temporary, the children presented a more far-reaching threat. In the articles written in this period, this danger is formulated as Mulattisierung or the "mulattoization" of the German race -- a foreboding warning that, should this situation be allowed to continue, "one need not wonder if, in a few years, there are more half-breeds than whites walking around; if sacred German motherhood has become a myth and the German woman, a black whore."

As an echoing spectre of racial mixture, the images of Blacks and Afro-Germans that arose out of post-WWI campaign against the Black troops resonate and at the same time rearticulate both essential scientific discourses of race and racial mixture and colonial conceptions of the social and political consequences racial mixture that was seen to pose to the German nation. The concept of the nation that structured and sustained each of these discourses was one that took the body as its model ñ a model in which bodily boundaries and their defense against violation and contamination functioned as the bedrock of social order and cohesion. Using the body to read the discourses of race, nation and identity through which Black Germans were interpellated in the first half of this century, Iíve attempted to show some of the ways in which this theoretical model might enhance our understanding of how Germanness has historically been constructed as a community identity based on boundaries of belonging and exclusion that are thoroughly raced and gendered. In conclusion, I hope that in our discussions of these and other junctures of bodies and identity we might keep in mind that all such intersections must always be historicized and understood as the products of the multiple stories and histories out which they have evolved.

Works Cited:

Omer Bartov. "Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust," The American Historical Review 103/3, 1998, 771-816.

 

Tina Campt and Pascal Grosse. "Mischlingskinder in Nachkriegsdeutschland: Zum Verh”ltnis von Psychologie, Anthropologie und Gesellschaftspolitik nach 1945," in Psychologie und Geschichte 6/1-2, Leverkusen: Leske+Budrich, 1994, 48-78.

 

Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse and Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria. "Blacks, Germans and the Politics of Imperialist Imagination, 1920-1960" in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, Sara Lennox, Sara Friedrichsmeyer and Susanne Zantop, eds., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998, 205-229.

 

Mary Douglass. Purity and Danger. An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge, 1991.

 

Cornelia Essner. "Zwischen Vernunft und Gef¸hl. Die Reichstagsdebatten von 1912 um koloniale ëRassenmischeheí und ëSexualit”tí" in Zeitschrift f¸r Geschichtswissenschaft 6, Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 1997, 503-519.

 

Elizabeth Grosz. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.

 

Lora Wildenthal. "Race, Gender and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire" in Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1997, 263-283.