Conference to explore Afro-German life
Multidisciplinary sessions to address issues of race, identity and belonging

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

The existence of Afro-Germans is unknown to most Americans, although many of the 500,000 Afro-Germans in Germany today are of American G.I. parentage and distinguished African Americans like educator and writer W.E.B. DuBois and abolitionist Frederick Douglass had notable ties to Germany and Germans.

The social and cultural issues that Afro-Germans face today and how their experiences can enrich our understanding of historical and contemporary racial issues will be explored Oct. 12-13 at UB at a conference titled "Not So Plain as Black and White: A Multidisciplinary Examination of the Afro-German Experience."

The conference will be free and open to the public.

It will begin with "Everything Will Be Fine," an award-winning comedy about Afro-Germans today, which will be shown at 8 p.m. Oct. 12 in Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, 2495 Main St., Buffalo.

A full day of presentations and films will follow from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Oct. 13 in Park Hall on the North Campus. "An Angel Strikes Back," a film about multiculturalism in Germany today, will be shown at 8 p.m. in Hallwalls.

Patricia Mazon, UB assistant professor of German history, and Reinhild Steingrover-McRae of the Humanities Department at the Eastman School of Music, are joint conference coordinators. It is sponsored by the UB Graduate Group for German and Austrian Studies, the SUNY Conferences in the Disciplines and the German Academic Exchange Service.

Mazon points out that thousands of Africans emigrated to Germany during the past 500 years, many of whom were brought to Germany as "living curiosities" or as slaves. The establishment of German colonies in Africa at the end of the 19th century increased the number of encounters between Africans and Germans, but prior to World War II, their numbers were small. Many of them fell victim to the Third Reich's racial theories and its resulting campaign of forced sterilization and murder.

With the American occupation of Germany after World War II, Afro-Germany was reborn from relationships between black American GIs and German women. Their ranks swelled further as many thousands of immigrant workers from Mozambique, Angola and Namibia were imported to deal with East Germany's chronic labor shortage. African students and refugees who settled in Germany have brought additional depth and breadth to the Afro-German cultural mix.

"One of the reasons that Afro-Germans have captured the interest of scholars across the humanities," Mazon says, "is because looking at their experiences allows us to see another dimension of the 19th- and early 20th-century ideas of race that led to the Holocaust.

"The experiences of Afro-Germans in today's Germany offer insight into the transformation of that nation-willing or not-into a multicultural society," Mazon says. "Our discussion is especially timely in light of the wave of violence against foreigners and persons seen as such in Germany since its reunification."

She says this conference will bring the subject of Afro-Germans out of German studies and into a broader arena, where many areas of specialization can be brought to bear.

"German and non-German specialists have much to learn from each other in terms of how race and ethnicity are represented and lived in Germany, Africa and the United States," Mazon says.

Information regarding the conference can be found at http://wings.buffalo.edu/cas/mll/lunz/gggaas/GGGAAASAfroConference.htm or by contacting Heidi Lechner at 832-5966, or lechner@acsu.buffalo.edu.