Postwar Germany in
the Public Perception
How the “Utopian Myth” Helped the Advancement of the
Internationalized Civil Rights Struggle
By Jesse Janssen MA Thesis, American Studies
Faculty of Humanities University of Amsterdam
Supervised by dr. E.F. van de Bilt June 25, 2018
Table of Contents
Introduction 3
Chapter 1: African American GIs and their Experiences in Postwar Germany 9
Chapter 2: Postwar Germany in Fiction of the Occupation 21
Chapter 3: The African American Press and the Image of Postwar Germany 34
Conclusion 47
Introduction
During the American occupation of West Germany, the garrison town of Baumholder was the sight of racial tensions that were reminiscent of race relations back home in the United States. In 1958, a sit-in was staged in a local bar by African American soldiers in reaction to a sign that had been placed there by the Jewish Eastern European owner, banning “colored soldiers” from entering his bar. As part of the Civil Rights Movement, sit-ins had become an important non-violent protest against racial discrimination in America, but the situation in Germany apparently forced black GIs to adopt a similar strategy. Especially the crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, did not go unnoticed by the African American soldiers who were stationed overseas, because it had sparked street battles between black and white soldiers in the same German town one year earlier. The crisis in Little Rock was also mentioned during the sit-in by a black GI who shouted to the waitress who refused to serve him: “Where do you think you are, Little Rock?”1
The bar owner proceeded to inform the military police of the black soldiers’
unwillingness to leave, after which they were removed by the American military police (MP), which thereby violated their right to equal treatment. To make matters worse, the military police did not just remove the protesting black GIs from the bar, but their captain even brutalized them in the military jail of Baumholder “with his truncheon and a waterhose.”2 The
African American soldiers in Germany thus found themselves in a position that showed a similarity with how black people were treated in America, not to mention the racial prejudices of the German people. Another painful element in this situation is that it was a Jewish man – not long ago victimized and treated as an inferior race by the Nazi regime – who withheld black people from entering his bar. This raises the question of how low African Americans ended up on the social ladder in American-occupied Germany.3
The situation in Baumholder seems to point at a collision between German and American spheres of racist thinking in postwar Germany, whereby they reinforced one another. The fact that Baumholder was a garrison town plays an important role in understanding how racism worked in postwar Germany, because racism among German civilians gained foothold especially in these towns. This had a lot to do with the influence of
1 Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002) 99.
2 Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins, 99. 3 Ibid, 95-103.
white American officers and soldiers on the neighbouring population. But Germans were also capable of expressing forms of racism on their own, although they did it less openly, as the circuitous form of objection by German officials against mixed-race relationships illustrates. They argued, for example, that such sexual relations would lead to a spread of venereal disease and prostitution. It is against this background that Germany evolved into a place where the American civil rights movement found the strength to debunk America’s segregation policies, by deliberately painting a rosier picture of postwar Germany and juxtaposing it to the situation in the U.S. With time passing, this view of postwar Germany proved to be more of an ideological image than hard reality.4
However, in contemporary historiography, a predominantly positive view of the experiences of black GIs in Berlin and Germany seems to persist. In the landmark study A
Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany, that was
first published in 2010 and accompanied by an internet platform, historians Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke argue that “in much of its coverage, the black press depicted postfascist Germany as a sort of ‘Shangri-La’ or ‘racial utopia’ where African Americans could enjoy a much better life than they could in their own country.”5 As the title of the book suggests,
Höhn and Klimke argue that African American GIs found freedom in postwar Germany. This fits into their broader argument that the Civil Rights Movement should be seen in an
international perspective in order to understand how the American military, and eventually all parts of American society, became integrated. They offer a transnational history of the advancement of civil rights in America, whereby the unexpectedly positive situation in postwar Germany for black GIs acts as a powerful ideological argument against the segregation of the American military and American society.
The internationalization of the civil rights struggle is spurred on by the combined efforts of the black press and civil rights activists to juxtapose the situation with regard to race in postwar Germany with America’s Jim Crow military and society, according to Höhn and Klimke. However, they do not examine the role of black GIs themselves and the authors of the “fiction of the occupation” in the establishment of a positive image of postwar Germany, as well as to what extent it holds up to reality. They do acknowledge that African American soldiers did not encounter only peace and harmony, for example when they argue that “the Nazi racial state, of course, directed its most virulent antipathy toward the Jews, but it also
4 Timothy L. Schroer, Recasting Race after World War II: Germans and African Americans in American-Occupied
Germany (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007) 83-84.
5 Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke, A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and
persecuted Afro-Germans as racially inferior. When the Nazis where defeated, these attitudes could not be eliminated overnight.”6 Höhn and Klimke invoke William Gardner Smith, an
African American journalist who wrote Return to Black America about his experiences in Germany, in which he also coined the term “Shangri-La” to describe the situation there in regard to race relations. They also rephrase German Philosopher Georg Schmundt-Thomas who, in his discussion of Return to Black America by Smith, used the term “racial utopia” to describe the situation in postwar Germany for black GIs.7
The historiography of the experiences of African American soldiers in Germany begins with another book by Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American
Encounter in 1950s West Germany, published in 2002. Here she focusses more on instances
of racism and discrimination African Americans experienced in Germany, primarily in regard to relations between German women and black GIs. She argues that the American military brought Jim Crow with it to Germany, and thereafter interacted with German forms of racism. Furthermore, she argues that Germans were anxious of Americanization, particularly gender norms and racial boundaries. In some sense the works by Höhn form a beginning and
provisional endpoint in the debate about the experiences of African American GIs in postwar Germany.8
In Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America, historian Heide Fehrenbach argues that antisemitism was replaced by an increase of attention that was attributed to race and colour among Germans. According to her, this was caused by the focus that was placed on children born from relationships between black GIs and white German women, the so-called “brown babies.” But this focus resulted in a liberal discourse among Germans who, in the end, would reject both the racist ideas of National Socialism and segregation in the U.S. Especially the black press in the U.S. gave much attention to this liberal discourse that was developed in postwar Germany.9
By far the most critical book on German forms of racism is Recasting Race after
World War II: Germans and African Americans in American-Occupied Germany by historian
Timothy L. Schroer. He argues that white American soldiers and German civilians became united as a result of the anxieties that existed among Germans toward relationships between
6 Höhn and Klimke, A Breath of Freedom, 45.
7 William Gardner Smith, Return to Black America (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970); Georg Schmundt-Thomas, “America’s Germany: National Self and Cultural Other after World War II” (Phd diss., Northwestern University, 1992).
8 Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins, 3-15.
9 Heide Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) 1-15.
black GIs and white German women. He also spends an amount of time tracing how racism changed course in postwar Germany, because when the American policies made public expressions of racism odious, a language of morality replaced it, as Schroer argues. Racism among civilians and officials in postwar Germany against African American GIs generally did not play out on the forefront. This is primarily the result of the American policy in Germany, which meant that “Germans understood that overtly racist statements attacking African Americans were no longer publicly acceptable. Indeed, Germans after 1945 sought to avoid even using the word race.”10 But he also stresses that “although no longer acceptable in public
pronouncements, racism doubtless found frequent expressions in private. Ideas of race could also appear after 1945 clothed in a new language of morality.”11 Therefore, racism among
German civilians did not disappear, it was only kept private or expressed in a way that made it more difficult to pinpoint. This might explain why the image of postwar Germany was not primarily one in which African American soldiers experienced racism on a day to day basis.12
From this debate about the experiences of African American soldiers in postwar Germany, it becomes clear that the true extent and pervasiveness of racism is contested among scholars. Most agree that racism by white GIs found its way in various forms, but that the prejudice among Germans against African Americans was almost non-existent, or only surfaced at a later moment in time. Another aspect is the role the black press in the U.S. played in reporting on this reduction of prejudices to the extent that postwar Germany came to be seen as a “racial utopia.” There seems to be a dichotomy between the reports by the black press and the situation on the ground in Germany, primarily in the later phase of the
occupation. Furthermore, every chapter is centred around instances of deliberate action undertaken by the protagonists appearing in this thesis to portray postwar Germany in a better light, thereby contributing to the “utopian myth.” Therefore, my research question is as follows: what role did the “utopian myth” play in advancing the internationalized civil rights struggle?
The first chapter of this thesis will be concerned with situation in postwar Germany as it was experienced by African American soldiers themselves. The question that will be answered is: why do African American soldiers stick to an upbeat story even after postwar Germany became an increasingly hostile environment for them? Eventually both white American officers and soldiers, and Germans brought their prejudices and political ideas about black GIs to American-occupied Germany, but the initial fraternization between
10 Schroer, Recasting Race after World War II, 40. 11 Ibid, 40-41.
African American soldiers and Germans was surprisingly positive. In garrison towns where Germans and white American GIs would often interact, instances of racial exclusion, highly reminiscent of the American situation, sometimes emerged. But outside those garrison towns, Germans also voiced their preconceptions about black GIs, which was mainly aimed at mixed-race relationships between black GIs and white German women. And because public expressions of racism were odious, racism was increasingly voiced in a discourse of morality.
A substantial number of personal accounts in the form of interviews with African American veterans who were stationed in various periods of the occupation will be examined in the first chapter. These interviews are part of a collaborative project directed by Höhn and Klimke that accompanies their A Breath of Freedom. The problem with deriving interviews from this project is that they were conducted by Höhn and Klimke in light of their effort to prove that the Civil Rights Movement should be seen in an international context, and therefore the questions are sometimes steered in that particular direction. Nonetheless, this project is highly extensive, as it is an effort to “gather and preserve materials on an important but little known chapter of American and African-American history,” and thereby proved especially useful for this thesis.13
The second chapter will examine the so-called “fiction of the occupation,” which consists of novels and short stories written about black GIs and their fictionalized experiences in postwar Germany. It will show how postwar Germany was portrayed in fiction of the occupation. The question central to this chapter is: how can the revival of fiction of the occupation around 1968 in the form of reproductions and translations be explained? In The
Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s, Anglicist Werner Sollors dedicates a chapter to
these works, and his book is therefore particularly useful for this chapter. His selection of works forms the starting point, but unlike Sollors who examines their stylistic features in great detail, this chapter will analyse the content of the fiction of the occupation in relation to the “utopian myth.” Establishing a timeframe will prove especially enlightening, because the reason for reproducing the works of fiction from around 1968 onward is to stress the positive image of postwar Germany that was established in the fiction of the occupation for the advancement of African American rights. This chapter will therefore compare the original works with their reproductions, as well as, if present, the possible forewords by the author, because this could lead to a better understanding behind the motive of reproducing the works. A problem here is that these forewords are absent for the most part.
13 Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke, “The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GIs, and Germany,” AACVR, accessed June 14, 2018, http://aacvr-germany.org/.
The third and last chapter will deal with the black press and their reports of the situation in postwar Germany. The question that is central to this chapter is: how can the dissimilarity between their reports on postwar Germany and the accounts of black GIs be explained? The black press consisted of newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, the
Pittsburgh Courier, and magazines such as the Crisis and Ebony. During the first part of the
occupation it emphasized the freedom experienced by African American GIs, as well as the positive experiences they had with ordinary Germans. The black press thereby contributed greatly to establishing the notion of postwar Germany as a “racial utopia” or “Shangri-La,” and simultaneously denounced white American officers and soldiers for continuing their racist expressions and actions against black GIs. This chapter will show that the black press
continued to denounce white American racism throughout the occupation, while omitting increasing racial prejudice among Germans. In some sense the black press was most active in the emergence of the “utopian myth” in order to debunk racism in postwar Germany and in the U.S. It sometimes proved difficult to treat African American magazines and newspapers as a unity, because at times theirs reports are far apart from each other, but there is
nonetheless enough common ground to label it the black press.
All in all, this thesis will provide a better insight into the establishment of the contemporary notion in the public perception of postwar Germany as a “breath of freedom” and a “racial utopia” for black GIs. The three forms of primary material appearing in each chapter all have had an important influence on this public perception of postwar Germany for African American GIs and the advancement of civil rights, especially among the African American audience in the U.S. Therefore, this thesis will argue that the internationalisation of the civil rights struggle is based on a “utopian myth” that was brought to the public perception in the U.S. by African American soldiers, authors of the fiction of the occupation, and the black press. This in turn means that the experiences of African American GIs were not reported completely, which fits into a broader narrative of the underreported nature of the African American involvement during and after World War II in Germany.
African American Soldiers and their Experiences in Postwar Germany
[For] black GIs, especially those out of the South, Germany was a breath of freedom – they could go wherever they wanted, eat where they wanted, and date whom they wanted, just like other people.
-Colin Powell, My American Journey, 199514
This abstract from the memoir of former Secretary of State and United States Army General Colin Powell symbolizes how in contemporary knowledge, postwar Germany is perceived as a place of freedom for the African American soldiers who were stationed there. In the 2014 documentary A Breath of Freedom, Powell reiterates this notion when he recalls his military training in Fort Benning, arguing that “for me as a young lieutenant, who could not go off the post in Columbus, Georgia, could go off the post anywhere in Germany, it was a breath of freedom.”15 This signals that the notion of postwar Germany as a “breath of freedom” has an
enduring influence on the image that exists of American-occupied Germany, up until the present day. Colin Powell served in the American military in Germany from 1958 to 1959, so his view of postwar Germany as a breath of freedom directly reflects his experiences as an African American soldier.
As this chapter will demonstrate, his view is not entirely shared by other black GIs, because while the earlier experiences of African American soldiers in the first phase of the American occupation of Germany tend to be more positive, particularly in their encounters with the German people, in accounts of the soldiers who served in a later phase of the
occupation, the racist attitudes of white American officers and soldiers seem to prevail. Next to reviewing a variety of personal accounts of black GIs, this chapter will give possible explanations for why African American soldiers still stick to an upbeat story of their experiences, as Powell’s public expressions illustrate. It will argue that the contemporary image in the public perception of the experiences of black GIs in postwar Germany, is based primarily on the earlier and more positive recollections from the first phase of the occupation. It is thereby part and parcel of the “utopian myth.”
The official integration of the American military in 1948 with the issue of Executive Order 9981 by President Harry S. Truman did not in fact end racist attitudes and prejudices, and even de facto integration of the American military itself in Germany. With time passing,
14 Colin Powell, My American Journey (New York: Penguin Random House, 1995) 53. 15 Breath of Freedom, directed by Dag Freyer (2014, Broadview TV).
white American soldiers and officers increasingly brought their prejudices with them to postwar Germany, resulting in a persistence of racism and an increase in racial tensions. The notion of postwar Germany as a racial utopia served as a powerful and important ideological argument in the struggle against segregation both in the U.S. and Germany. This chapter will show that the image of postwar Germany as a breath of freedom for African American soldiers is primarily founded on the experiences of black GIs in the early stages of the occupation, and it was therefore less and less in accordance with the actual situation on the ground, which, in order to contest discrimination and the rising racial tensions, made it all the more necessary to emphasize this early stage of the occupation.16
The recollections of their experiences in postwar Germany by African American soldiers should be seen in light of these circumstances, with a continuation – or rather a new visibility – of discrimination and an increase of racial tensions. The black GIs who were stationed in Germany in the early stages of the American occupation of West Germany and Berlin are surprisingly positive about the fraternization with Germans, especially considering that the racist Nazi regime of Hitler had only recently been overthrown, and there is a lack of denunciation of white American racist attitudes. One of these soldiers is Lawrence Johnson, a mechanic who served in the 17th Automotive Maintenance Ordinance Company. He was part
of the 1st Army that moved through Europe, before entering Germany in May 1945. Before
returning to the U.S. only five months later, he also served on guard duty in postwar Berlin. His recollection of the German people he encountered there are solely positive, and his description of postwar Berlin matches the contemporary notion of American-occupied Germany as a breath of freedom for African American soldiers.17
The terms he uses to describe his experiences with the German people echo the words with which the situation in postwar Germany for African American soldiers in their
interactions with the German people is described in contemporary perception. First of all, Johnson was surprised to learn that Germans spoke English very well, to the level that they spoke English as well as the Americans. He recalls that “because they believe in obeying the rules, they were very mannerly and even hospitable,” but also that “they were very
courteous,” and that “they were too highly intelligent” to be indoctrinated to discriminate against black people.18 This element of indoctrination suggests that Johnson argues against the
influence of white American officers and soldiers on German racial prejudices, which is one
16 Höhn and Klimke, A Breath of Freedom, 88.
17 Lawrence Johnson, “A Lot of Pleasure in Berlin,” interview by Maggi Morehouse, The Civil Rights Struggle,
African American GIs, and Germany, AACVR, 1998. http://aacvr-germany.org/index.php/oral-histories-6?id=51.
of the possible explanations for their increase in discrimination. However, he could also be referring to a form of Nazi doctrine that played out even after World War II by German officials.
In his Recasting Race after World War II, Schroer addresses the attitude of German civilians and officials toward the presence of African Americans in Germany just after the war around 1945. He argues that “there is ample evidence that many Germans privately continued to regard African Americans as inferior to whites, among whom Germans numbered themselves. And many Germans regarded the presence of black troops in the occupying American forces as a particularly pointed insult to German dignity. One [conservative leader of the Cristian Democratic Union party in Eschwege] asserted that a ‘Negro’ could ‘never be the equal of a German.’”19 Schroer therefore argues that German
racial prejudice did not just vanish when they encountered African American soldiers, but they simply did not voice their racist attitudes. This explains why, in the personal accounts of black soldiers from the early part of the occupation, the surprisingly positive fraternization between them and the German people prevails.
Furthermore, Schroer stresses that “in 1945 the unseating of the ‘Master Race’ in Germany was only beginning. In that process, African Americans would serve as a foil to Germans’ self-definition as white. Whiteness from the first suggested the existence of a bond to Germany’s American conquerors, one that could facilitate the embryonic project of
integrating Germany into the white, Christian West.”20 Schroer’s remarkably pessimistic view
of the German attitude toward race relations just after the war points out that this history is not simply black or white, meaning that not all Germans were positive about the presence of African Americans in postwar Germany, and not all Germans became prejudiced and discriminatory in the later phase of the occupation.
Schroer’s view is supported by Höhn when she argues that “while Germans expressed little open hostility toward black soldiers, the presence of single black men nonetheless evoked considerable anxiety.”21 Also in the book she has written with Klimke several years
later, Höhn reiterates this notion, when they argue that “oral histories reflecting on the occupation years, even the positive ones, make it clear that racist stereotypes permeated German perceptions to black GIs.”22 This supports the view promoted in this chapter that the
existing prejudice among Germans was enforced – or expressed more openly – by an increase
19 Schroer, Recasting Race after World War II, 41. 20 Ibid, 41
21 Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins, 86.
of white American discrimination in Germany. Nonetheless, the absence of instances of discrimination against black GIs by white American soldiers and officers, as well as the surprisingly positive attitude of Germans, is still striking in the early accounts of the situation in postwar Germany. This is a returning element in the oral histories by African American soldiers of the early phase of the occupation of West Germany and Berlin, while this became a central issue in accounts of the later phase of the occupation.
One possible explanation for the lack of attention to the role of white American officers and soldiers in race relations with African American GIs in the early stages of the American occupation of West Germany, as opposed to their later role, is that they had other things in mind – such as fighting the war and thereafter occupying Germany – than focusing on the presence of black GIs. Only when these missions were accomplished, did they have time to concern themselves with African American soldiers, and did the prejudices they took with them from the U.S. come to the surface. However, this line of argumentation does not leave room for the fact that encounters between black GIs and white American officers had already taken place, because almost every division was led by a white officer. Furthermore, racist attitudes cannot simply be postponed, they are present in a person or not and will express themselves at any given time.
Therefore, a more likely explanation for the absence of the experienced racism in accounts from the early phase of the occupation is the absence of a forced and more intense interaction between the two groups. This interaction was a result of Executive Order 9981 in 1948, which immediately becomes visible from the account of Felix Goodwin, who took an active part in the integration of the American military. His account serves as a glimpse into the transition period in the American military from segregated to integrated, at least officially, from an African American perspective. But even more important is his recollection of the reactions of white soldiers to the forced integration, because it can illuminate their shift in racial attitudes. One quote from the interview immediately illustrates Goodwin’s no-nonsense attitude, as well as his impartiality in the process of the integration of the American military, when he says about the white soldiers that “I didn't care whether their Daddy was the Head of the Ku Klux Klan. I said, ‘This is the United States Army. I don’t give a damn if your daddy is Robert E. Lee or J.E.B. Stuart or whoever. It makes no difference to me. The Civil War is over.’ But, I was tough on the black guys, too. When they complained I told them, ‘I don’t care how high up you are in the NAACP. We have an American company here in Germany and you are going to obey the Army regulations. I don’t intend to have any racial problems in
my Company.’”23
As 1st Lieutenant Commander, Goodwin helped to integrate a Battalion that comprised of mainly white soldiers. Historian Maggi Morehouse, who conducted the
interview with Goodwin, argues that “Goodwin's experiences elucidate the interplay of deeply engrained racial prejudices and the local reality of statewide segregation in further
complicating a successful integration of the U.S. Army. In this environment Goodwin's confident demeanor and use of his rank on behalf of racial equality repeatedly led to frictions with the local populace and white soldiers.”24 Morehouse considers him to be a champion of
civil rights in postwar Germany, but Goodwin himself seems much more reluctant in his role of integrating the military, and is aware of the difficulties he has to face in order to
accomplish the mission that is instructed to him. This becomes clear when he says that “the new integrated companies were going to be ten percent black and they were bringing in white fellows from all around to form this mixed company. They would move out ten percent of the white boys out of a company and move in ten percent of a black company. Well, there was no problem as long as they had ten percent of privates or corporals. But where the problem started was with your black First Sergeants and Master Sergeants and Lieutenants, of course.”
25
The reaction of white American soldiers to the forced integration, which they generally opposed, can serve as part of the explanation for the difference in their racial attitudes between the first part of the occupation and the later phase. When Goodwin got moved to the headquarters at around 1952, where he would end up running things himself, he encountered only white soldiers from Lubbock, Texas. Eventually there were about six or seven black soldiers who were integrated into the unit, along with several “white
replacements,” as he calls them. During the first inspection, the antipathetic attitude of the white American soldiers in the unit manifested itself, because they had drawn Confederate flags and Rattlesnake flags from the Revolutionary era, that read “Don’t Tread on Me,” on big sheets of white paper. Goodwin reacted in the following manner: “‘Soldiers,’ I said, ‘we have a problem in our company. I see we have a very patriotic company that loves flags. But, I’m mad as hell because I did not see a United States flag up there. We’ve got a Nazi flag, a Confederate flag, a don’t-tread-on-me-Revolutionary-War flag, but, I don’t see the flag of our
23 Felix Goodwin, "I didn't care whether their Daddy was the Head of the Ku Klux Klan," interview by Maggi Morehouse, The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany, AACVR, 1998. http://aacvr-germany.org/index.php/oral-histories-6?id=47.
24 Goodwin, interview. 25 Ibid.
country. So starting at the front door and into every room, we are going to have all four flags —the American flag, and then those other three that you want.’”26
Goodwin again shows his impartiality in the matter of the integration of the American military, by allowing the soldiers to hang any flag they like – although this childlike act of hanging flags with a racist connotation must have offended him – as long as the American flag, that represents the unity of the American military, is also hung. Furthermore, Goodwin’s account serves to illustrate the turning point in the occupation of Germany. This is the first instance in any of the personal accounts of the African American GIs who have served in postwar Germany that points at an increase in racial tensions.27
It also means that a timeframe can be established, because the period from the end of the war in 1945 to the actual integration of the American military in 1952 is referred to as the “first period of the occupation,” and the period from 1952 onward is referred to as the “later phase of the occupation.” Goodwin’s claim that an effort was made to truly integrate the American military in 1952 is supported by Höhn in her article “‘We Will Never Go Back to the Old Way Again:’ Germany in the African-American Debate on Civil Rights” in the 2008 edition of Central European History, when she argues that “throughout the years of
occupation and into the 1950s, civil-rights advocates and the black press evoked America's mission in Germany to achieve first de jure integration of the army in 1948 and then de facto integration (1952-54).”28
One of the accounts from the later phase of the occupation, so after 1952, is from Thomas P. Stoney, who served in Germany from 1957 on. This should be seen against the background of the accounts before 1952, because as the following accounts will illustrate, they consist of distinctly different and less positive experiences in postwar Germany with regard to race relations. Stoney’s account is centered on the instances of discrimination by white American officers and soldiers he experienced, which leads him to argue that “our troops took their prejudices with them, and, as a result, the guest houses where the troops were stationed, were very much segregated because of the troops.”29 The attitudes of white
American soldiers also had an effect on the German people, because some would not rent to black GIs, but Stoney nonetheless claims that they loved Germany. As white soldiers became
26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.
28 Maria Höhn, “’We Will Never Go Back to the Old Way Again:’ Germany in the African-American Debate on Civil Rights,” Central European History 41, no. 4 (December 2008) 633.
29 Thomas P. Stoney, “Black soldiers in Germany,” interview by Maggi Morehouse, The Civil Rights Struggle,
African American GIs, and Germany, AACVR, 2009, audio, 3:58.
increasingly discriminatory, also the German people became more prejudiced, which shows that postwar Germany may not have been the breath of freedom that it is made out to be in contemporary knowledge.30
The influence of white American officers and soldiers on Germans is one of the possible explanations for the increase in German prejudice against African American GIs. In this line of reasoning, Germans should be seen as sort of blank pages who were freed from Nazi doctrine after the war, and only when American soldiers influenced them with their racist ideologies – or perhaps even forced it on them – did they also become more
discriminatory. This would also explain the initial surprising lack of prejudice by the German people against black GIs. A more likely scenario is one in which the lingering racism among some Germans expressed itself once white Americans gave impetus to it, whereby American and German forms of racism might have enforced each other. In this scenario, the initial lack of German prejudice against black GIs might be explained by the fact that Germans were only busy with defeat at first and could not be bothered by the color of their conqueror’s skin. In other words, their priority lay elsewhere. An even more plausible explanation is that African American GIs were part of the victorious-, and later the occupation army, and therefore found themselves in a position of power. Germans were in no position to go against them, and only when they regained their self-confidence, did they dare to express their racist attitudes. Either way, it is necessary to stress that this was only true for a small part of the German population, but in light of the understanding of postwar Germany as a breath of freedom, it is a vital element.
The position of power that black GIs found themselves in is also addressed by Schroer in his Recasting Race after World War II, although he primarily focuses on power relations between African American soldiers and white German women. When addressing the situation in the small town of Wirsberg in Upper Franconia, Schroer argues that “the soldiers’
comparatively strong position in Wirsberg was further supported by the possibility of seeking outside assistance. Following the American military’s raid on the women in town, the soldiers informed their German friends in the town that they would complain to Washington about the racial discrimination.”31 Schroer bases his characterization of the position of black soldiers as
“comparatively strong” on the fact that one of them was known as “the Bürgermeister” – or the mayor. Furthermore, he acknowledges that the complaints of black GIs in reality never reached Washington, for one because it would have met incomprehension, but also simply
30 Stoney, interview.
because their complaints went unvoiced.32
Schroer mentions several elements that would allow for a substantiated claim that black soldiers were indeed in a position of power in Germany, at least relative to German women, when he argues that “the possibility that African American men, despite their privileged position as members of a conquering army, their greater economic resources, and their male prerogatives, nevertheless might be under the thumb of their white lovers
sometimes lurked in African American discussions of romantic relations with German women.”33 This makes the possible explanation for the initial lack of prejudice on behalf of
the German people in the first part of the occupation more likely, because next to being part of the conquering army, from which they could already derive power, black GIs were also in a stronger economic position compared to the Germans. Nevertheless, this only explains part of the story, and the argument of this thesis is that the influence of Executive Order 9981 on German- and American racial attitudes in postwar Germany was more profound than the balance of power between Germans and Americans. Furthermore, this explanation already becomes questionable when the shift in German attitude is included, because as the
occupation progressed, the Germans did not gain much more power from a legal perspective, whereas the black GIs did with the issue of Executive Order 9981. But the Germans may have gained self-confidence.
Contrary to the experiences with regard to race relations in postwar Germany, which became less favorable for African American soldiers as time passed, the role of black GIs in the struggle for civil rights was a fairly consistent history, according to both Johnson and Stoney. In 1945, when Johnson was stationed in postwar Berlin, the segregation in the American military, as well as the possibility for an improvement of civil rights in the U.S., was not talked about by black GIs, according to him. In a similar fashion, Stoney argues that “the advocacy for better rights in the military among the troops did not begin until the 1970s, the soldiers did not become activists until the early 1970s.” This shows that the image of postwar Germany as a racial utopia that was transmitted to the U.S. only came into play in the later phase of the occupation, meaning that this image must have been founded on the earlier experiences, because the later experiences do not allow for such optimism.34
The oral history of Thomas Ward is also part of the later phase of the American occupation of West Germany. In 1957, he left New Orleans for Bamberg in Germany. Once here, Ward is not enlisted in an all-black military unit, but instead in a company that
32 Ibid, 139-143. 33 Ibid, 140.
comprises of mainly white soldiers. He experienced several instances of racial prejudice and discrimination by some of his superiors and fellow white soldiers, which is similar to Stoney, who was stationed in postwar Germany at around the same time. However, Ward’s account also gives an insight into the segregation that was enforced by white soldiers and officers and that also involved German people. This segregation went beyond the military and into the social spheres, and in that sense it closely resembled the segregation that could also be found in the American society. When he went to Club Cherie, a local nightclub in Bamberg, he learned that he was not welcome in this white GI part of town, which resulted in him almost getting into a fight. Thereafter, he was sent to Nuremberg Strasse where, apparently, the black GIs were supposed to hang out. This division of society in colored- and white only bars is in stark contrast with the depiction of postwar Germany as a “Shangri-La” or “racial utopia.”35
In the garrison town of Baumholder, this U.S. style segregation came to a head in 1958, when black GIs were informed by a sign in front of a local bar that it was closed to “colored soldiers.” Inspired by civil rights activists in the U.S., the African American soldiers decided to stage a sit-in. This eventually led to a confrontation between the soldiers and the American military police, whereby the soldiers were brutalized by the captain of the military police. The fact that the military police chose not to defend the black GIs’ right to equal treatment, but instead arrested them for disturbing the peace, shows the marginalized position the African American soldiers found themselves in. This is even more worthy of complaint when the fact is taken into account that the bar owner was an Eastern European Jew, not long ago in a highly marginalized position himself under Nazi rule.36
In her reflection on the situation in Baumholder and, more generally, the unfavorable position of African American soldiers in Germany around 1958, Fehrenbach, argues that “the integration of the U.S. military did not end racial segregation: it merely moved it off base. Under pressure from the white GIs, German bar-owners near U.S. bases excluded black soldiers from their establishments, forcing the soldiers to carve out their own social space in less desirable areas of town and frequently in bars owned by Eastern European Jews.”37 She
goes on to state that “as a result, Jim Crow practices were transferred to German garrison towns, with whites cleaving to whites and Blacks relegated to areas of racial otherness.”38
Although it must be stressed that these practices remained largely confined to garrison towns,
35 Thomas Ward, “Experiencing Germany as an African American GI in the Late 1950s,” interview by Madeleine Joyce, The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany, AACVR, 2009, audio, 20:45. http://aacvr-germany.org/index.php/oral-histories-6.
36 Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins, 99. 37 Heide Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler, 42-43 38 Ibid, 43.
and that it was basically enforced by white American soldiers, it nevertheless paints a completely different picture of the experiences of black GIs in postwar Germany than the contemporary notions of “freedom” and “Shangri-La”.
The account of Joe McPhee provides an insight into an even later period in the American occupation of West Germany, because he was stationed in Germany from 1963 until 1965, in the 3rd Infantry Division Band. From his experiences in postwar Germany,
McPhee remembers that “the army was integrated at the time [of the March on Washington], but there were still remnants of civil war battles going on. From time to time racial incidents would happen. The interaction with the German citizens was quite cordial. But things were not really how I thought they should be, with civil rights stuff. There were all kinds of
incidents going on.”39 The situation in Germany eventually led McPhee to become involved in
the NAACP from 1962 on. His account shows how discrimination and racial tensions continued throughout the occupation period, and the situation of black GIs only became a priority of foreign policy after the crisis in the military in 1970/1971.40
Höhn writes about the use of the experiences of African American soldiers in postwar Germany by the black press and civil rights activists that “they drew on the experience of soldiers stationed in Germany to make the case that it was in post-Nazi Germany that black GIs found the equality and democracy denied them in their own country. Civil rights advocates also used the soldiers' experiences in Germany to indict America's continuing system of segregation and discrimination as undemocratic. Because of the widely read and immensely influential African-American press, discussions of postwar Germany reverberated powerfully among America's black community.”41 This is in line with the argument made in
this chapter, but what should be added is that it was particularly the African American GIs’ experiences in the first part of the occupation that brought about a view of postwar Germany and that was capitalized by the black press in order to make a forceful argument in the struggle for equal treatment in the U.S.
One possible explanation for the disconnectedness between the experiences of African American GIs in a later phase of the occupation and the contemporary notion of postwar Germany as a “breath of freedom,” is that the experiences of GIs who were stationed at a later moment in time had far less impact on the public perception of postwar Germany, for one
39 Joe McPhee, “The African American GI experience,” interview by students of Professor Maria Höhn, The Civil
Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany, AACVR, 2010, audio, 21:41.
http://aacvr-germany.org/index.php/oral-histories-6.
40 Joe McPhee, interview; Höhn and Klimke, A Breath of Freedom, 170. 41 Maria Höhn, “We Will Never Go Back,” 605.
because the image was already established in the minds of African Americans, but also because in the later phase of the occupation other wars, such as the Korean War, were ongoing that by then had a far bigger impact on the public perception.
The image that follows from these oral histories is one in which discrimination increased and racial tensions heightened between black GIs, and white soldiers and officers, while the German people were also sucked into this struggle as the occupation of postwar Germany progressed. In the beginning of the occupation, just after the war around 1945, African American soldiers were surprised by the generosity and lack of prejudice on the side of the German people, while tensions between black and white soldiers did not play a
significant role, simply because encounters between them were few and far between as a result of the segregation in the American military. Executive Order 9981 officially ended segregation in 1948, and from this moment on, tensions can be seen increasing in the oral histories of black GIs. In the late 1950s, the situation in Germany as described by the African American veterans is one that did not differ much from the situation for black people in the U.S., with bars that were accessible only for white GIs. Therefore, Colin Powell’s description of postwar Germany as a breath of freedom, which he bases on the fact that they could go wherever they wanted, does not hold up to the accounts of soldiers who were stationed in Germany at around the same time as him.
However, he is correct in his description of the situation if he refers to the early phase of the occupation. At that point soldiers could indeed “go wherever they wanted, eat where they wanted, and date whom they wanted, just like other people.” Of course Colin Powell was not stationed in exactly the same place as Stoney and Ward, so it is possible that he could not have encountered discrimination or segregation to the same extent as these black GIs. But his public expressions show that African American soldiers – such as himself – stick to an upbeat story even after postwar Germany became an increasingly hostile environment for them, because they refer back to the “utopian myth” that was based on the accounts of black GIs from the first part of the occupation. This had proved such a powerful ideological image and argument against racial inequality, both in Germany and in the U.S., that, in order to
denounce this increasingly negative situation, it became even more necessary to emphasize this “utopian myth.”
2.
Postwar Germany in Fiction of the Occupation
[…] These examples of postwar fiction are concerned with the role of African American G.I.s as father figures. Developing a complex part for their black G.I. protagonists, marked by a tension between paternal potential and social
constraints that may inhibit that potential’s full realization, mattered to writers of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
-Werner Sollors, The Temptation of Despair, 201442
From 1948 until 1953, several works of fiction have been produced that helped shape the image that exists today of postwar Germany as a place of freedom and progress for African American soldiers, next to the personal accounts of these soldiers, as is shown in the previous chapter, and the efforts of the black press, as will appear in the next chapter. In his book The
Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s, Werner Sollors discusses in great detail the
representation of black GIs in American and German fiction. All of the selected works of fiction by Sollors are published around 1950, in other words; the first part of the occupation.
However, from 1968 onward, some works of fiction regained relevance and
importance. The novel Last of the Conquerors by William Gardner Smith was reprinted at a later moment, and the same goes for the short stories “Home” by Kay Boyle and “D.P” by Kurt Vonnegut, which was also adapted for television, while Wolfgang Koeppen’s Tauben im
Gras was translated into the English version Pigeons on the Grass several years later. This
further develops the narrative of the contemporary image of postwar Germany. This chapter will argue that some works of the fiction of the occupation regained relevance and
importance, because they served the purpose of establishing a positive image of postwar Germany in order to argue for racial equality both in Germany and in the United States, after this image came under attack by the 1970-1971 racial crisis in the American military. The fiction of the occupation therefore contributed to the establishment of postwar Germany as a “utopian myth.”
One of the first books to touch on the subject of the experiences of African American soldiers in Germany after World War II is Last of the Conquerors by William Gardner Smith, which is also his debut novel. This novel, that was published in 1948, is partly based on Smith’s own experiences as an African American soldier in Germany. Next to reporting on the situation in postwar Germany for the Pittsburgh Courier under his alias Bill Smith, as will be examined in the next chapter, he was also stationed as a soldier in Berlin in 1946. As part of the 661st Truck Company, he was assigned to work as a clerk-typist, as well as being the
head of the motor pool. Therefore, his fictionalized account can give another perspective on the experiences of black GIs and on the image that was created of postwar Germany, because even though in fiction the truth is exaggerated or perhaps even completely left behind, it does have an influence on how postwar Germany is perceived by its readers.43
42 Werner Sollors, The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s (Harvard: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014) 212.
In Last of the Conquerors, Smith emphasizes the racial intolerance of white American soldiers and Americans in general, while at the same time stressing German racial tolerance. He thereby gives a positive depiction of postwar Germany, resembling the image that persists in contemporary scholarship. The protagonist of the novel is Hayes Dawkins, an African American soldier who is at first stationed in a quartermaster unit in Berlin, and thereafter in the transportation corps near Heidelberg. The story is set just after World War II, and therefore contributes to the representation of the early phase of the American occupation of Germany. In Berlin, Hayes meets German secretary Ilse Mueller, and they eventually fall in love. This is representative of many other mixed race relationships in postwar Germany, but at the same time it symbolizes the unprejudiced and open attitude of the German people – women in particular – toward black GIs in the first part of the occupation.44
At one moment in the novel, the image that Smith tries to paint of postwar Germany is accurately shown when he describes a scene where Hayes and Ilse who go swimming at Wannsee beach: “I had lain on the beach many times, but never before with a white girl. Here, away from the thought of differences for a while, it was odd how quickly I forgot it. It had lost importance. Everyone was blue or green or red. No one stared as we lay on the beach together, out skins contrasting, but our hearts beating identically and both with noses in the center of our faces. Odd, it seemed to me, that here, in the land of hate, I should find this one all-important phase of democracy. And suddenly I felt bitter.”45 Although this scene provides
a highly romanticized version of reality, it does offer the reader a glimpse into the perspective of an African American GI in Germany, and thereby puts it into sharp contrasts with the situation in the U.S. Furthermore, the romantic side of the story makes it easier to empathize with black soldiers, which is also necessary for the positive view that is being transmitted of postwar Germany.
Another work of fiction mentioned by Sollors is Tauben im Gras by German novelist Wolfgang Koeppen, one of the most distinguished German writers of the postwar period. This novel was first published in German in 1951, and in the author’s foreword to the second edition from 1953, Koeppen writes that “I depicted this time, the root of our Today, and I suppose I gave a generally valid description of it, for people believed they saw in the novel
Pigeons on the Grass a mirror in which many, whom I had not thought of while writing,
thought they recognized their own image, and several others, whom I had never associated with the circumstances and depressed states such as this book portrays, felt – to my dismay –
44 Ibid, 191.
that I had affronted them, I who had acted only as an author and, as Georges Bernanos writes, ‘filtered life through my heart in order to draw off its secret essence, full of balm and
poison.’”46 In this book, two African American soldiers appear, among the thirty other
characters, and his foreword suggests that he simply described the situation as he saw it. The fact that black GIs only play a marginalized role in his novel adds to the credibility of this claim, because unlike the other works of fiction appearing in this chapter, he does not put them at center stage. In postwar Germany, black soldiers were among many others, and their presence and issues were certainly not center stage.
The representation of the two African American soldiers – Washington Price and Odysseus Cotton – out of the thirty protagonists in total in Pigeons on the Grass, gives a sense of the image that comes forward from the novels that were written in this period, although in this novel it is distinctly more difficult to really come to grips with the meaning Koeppen bestows on it. His style of writing can be summarized as a form of modernist experimentation, and it features streams of consciousness, as is also visible in the following passage when Odysseus is described by a German girl from her point of view: “a woman stood in front of a shoe store, she saw the Negro walking by, mirrored in the window, she thought, ‘the sandals with the spike heels, I’d like those, if you could just once, those boys do have some bodies, virile, saw a boxing match once, Papa was exhausted afterwards, but not him.’”47 Besides showing the amazingly short attention span this woman has, this passage also
shows that the first thing coming to mind when seeing a black GI is his physique, a returning element in fiction of the occupation.
The short story “D.P.” by American writer Kurt Vonnegut was first published in the
Ladies’ Home Journal in 1953. The protagonist of the story is an African American boy who
was named Karl Heinz by the Catholic nuns who run the orphanage where the boy lives, but he is renamed Joe by a carpenter. Former Heavyweight champion of the world, Joe Luis, was the only colored man the carpenter had seen, hence the name Joe. The story is set in the German village of Karlswald, and the storyline is centered around Joe’s struggle for identity, being the only colored child in the orphanage. This short story does not deal with the
relationship between African American soldiers and German people like in the other works of fiction, although Joe was born from a mixed race relationship, however, this story establishes a sense of fatherhood and a parental role that African American soldiers had to perform in postwar Germany. In this case quite literally, because Joe eventually meets some black GIs,
46 Wolfgang Koeppen, Pigeons on the Grass, trans. David Ward (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991) vii. I am quoting here from the second edition of the novel that was translated by David Ward.
one of whom he mistakes for being his father.48
Sollors argues that “the story has a sentimental effect because the father-child relationship is established while we know all along that it is a make-belief arrangement generated perhaps by the metaphor of ‘your people’ in the sense of ‘people with darker skins.’ But it still conveys a new strength to ‘the most displaced little old person’ the sergeant had ever seen. Vonnegut’s ‘D.P.’ suggests the wish fulfillment of an all-male family romance while the boy still returns to the nuns’ orphanage in the end.”49 This father-child relationship
could be seen as a form of social criticism on behalf of Vonnegut to highlight the inner struggle a child born from a mixed-race relationship between an African American soldier and a German woman has to deal with, but Vonnegut does not seem particularly negative about fraternization between Germans and African Americans. It is more likely that Vonnegut tries to establish a sense of empathy for black GIs in postwar Germany who take on the role of father for German children.
The description of the African American soldier in this story who Joe mistakes for being his father is thereby worthwhile to discuss, because it shows the image Vonnegut tries to create of this black GI in particular, and African American soldiers in general. During a parade on a hot summer day, they approach the school when Vonnegut writes: “but then Joe saw a massive brown man, naked to the waist and wearing a pistol, step from the trees. The man drank from a canteen, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, grinned down on the world with handsome disdain, and disappeared again into the twilight of the woods.”50 And
later on in the story, when Joe sneaks of to the military base at night, he sees his “father” again: “the sergeant stepped into a patch of moonlight, his hands on his hips, his big shoulders back, the image of an emperor. Joe saw that it was the same man that he’d marveled at in the afternoon.”51 Vonnegut tries to create an almost unearthly image of the soldier in order to
establish the figure of an African American soldier who Joe looks up to, and, more symbolically, the image of the black GI as a father figure for German children in general.
Similar descriptions are given of another African American GI in the short story “Home” by Kay Boyle. The African American protagonist in Boyle’s short story “Home” is unnamed, and the only piece of knowledge provided to the reader is that he comes from Mississippi in the U.S. He has a month’s pay in his pocket when he walks toward the Clothing
48 Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkeyhouse: A Collection of Short Works (London: Lowe & Brydone, 1969) 146-147.
49 Sollors, The Temptation of Despair 217. 50 Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkeyhouse, 149. 51 Ibid, 150.
Store that is located the American Shopping Center, where soldiers from the Northern, Eastern, Southern, and Western states come together to get their shoes polished, or to get a Coke or another typically American product. During a springtime wind, the black GI sees a small child standing in the rain outside the shopping mall. When he sees himself in a mirror, his uncertainty about the color of his skin and thereby his role as a soldier becomes clear: “[…] the soldier saw himself, tall, gaunt, chalk-eyed, separated not only by his color from these others, but by his own perplexity; and then, as if recalling that he had been lent a
temporary dignity by the uniform he wore, he put his cap quickly back upon his head again.”52
The problem this black GI is dealing with, namely the contrast between his position as an American soldier in postwar Germany, and his position back home in the U.S. where segregation laws still deem him inferior, is emphasized by Boyle throughout this short story, and it represents other African American soldiers as well. This feeling of empathy toward the African American soldier is enhanced by the positive picture that Boyle paints of him, both in his actions and in the way she describes him throughout the story. When the soldier wants to know what the favorite color of the boy is, he turns to the saleswoman in order for her to translate his question: “’ask him what’s his favorite color, ma’am, will you?’ said the soldier, his voice modest and shy.”53 And after he has taken off the boy’s stockings, and ponders
whether his feet have been frozen sometime, after seeing how battered his feet are, he “held the boy’s feet cradled in his long, dark hands.”54 The image of a polite and caring person is
created by Boyle, not only in how she describes him, but also in his way she makes him speak.
At one point in the story, the true nature of the soldier’s generosity becomes clear: “for the duration of the dream, the boy was his, the authority of family, of country, of occupation even, having discarded him, and the soldier, who had known only leaning Negro shacks, become the provider, the protector at last, the dispenser of white-skinned charity.”55 For him,
the situation in postwar Germany, so far from home, provided the possibility to act the way he wants, but is unable to in the U.S., because segregation laws withhold him from doing so. He is not held back by all the warnings the saleswoman throws in his way, because he is not yet formed by the situation in postwar Germany. The German woman reacts reserved, because she knows the state of the country and her fellow countrymen well enough to understand that
52 Kay Boyle, “Home,” Harper’s 202, no. 1208 (January 1951) 79. 53 Boyle, “Home,” 81.
54 Ibid, 82. 55 Ibid,82.
this boy has a double agenda. Furthermore, she is aware of the fact that German people are not allowed in the American Shopping Center for a reason.
The African American soldier, however, is not influenced whatsoever by the state postwar Germany is in and to which lengths the German people will go in order to survive. He keeps having faith in the German boy and remains equally generous, even after he is told that the boy and his mother played a trick on him and other soldiers. In reaction to the remark by the saleswoman that he should take the clothes off the boy and that he deserves nothing, the black GI says: “’well at home,’ said the soldier and his voice was quiet as he counted the bills of military currency out; ‘at home, ma’am, I never have much occasion to do for other people, so I was glad to have had this opportunity offered me,’ he said, and then he went away.”56 This is the ending paragraph of the short story by Boyle, and it symbolizes how
African American soldiers are represented in fiction of the occupation, because in postwar Germany they could act, and were sometimes depended on, as fatherly figures.
Furthermore, it can be seen as a meeting of victims, because both the little German boy and the black soldier are victims to a certain extent. The former because he lives in a broken country that necessitates the resourcefulness and shrewdness displayed by the boy and his mother, and the latter because he is severely restricted in his freedom of action in his home country and only in postwar Germany experiences this freedom, as becomes clear from the ending paragraph. Therefore, one of the possible explanations for why the two are
condemned- or drawn to each other is exactly this mutual victimhood. Or, as Harold Linton, Colonel in the U.S. Airforce argues in the documentary Breath of Freedom: “you cannot experience anything worse than what the Germans had experienced, that defeat. And so while they were trying to pull themselves up, black soldiers were trying to pull themselves up from battling segregation. And maybe that kind of helped to bond and bind us together.”57
On a deeper level, this might also be a possible explanation for why African American soldiers experienced freedom in Germany, because they were victims in their own country and would have experienced freedom in every other country where their victimhood was absent, as the reports of their experiences in countries such as France and Great Britain during the war illustrate. Another possible explanation is their role as the new ruler in postwar Germany that for once put them not on the receiving end of discrimination, but on an end that allowed for a more generous and giving position. German satirist and actor Dieter Hildebrandt recalls in the same documentary that “white GIs would play a game of only smoking their
56 Ibid, 83.
cigarettes halfway, and then tossing them. And we would not pick up the buts and thought: ‘you bastards.’ The only one not to do that was the black soldier. That was our first
impression. What was part of their nature, I believe, was a sense of fairness.” Furthermore, he argues that “black GIs tended to identify with the defeated, and a kind of empathy developed between us.”58
About the representation of black GIs as fatherly figures, Sollors argues that “black G.I.s who taught a new way of carrying oneself, a way that was furthermore sweetened by chewing gum or chocolate, could thus be perceived as unusual pseudo-parental figures who differed from other parental authorities available in postwar Germany.”59 Furthermore, on the
representation of African American soldiers on a more physical level, he notes that “the general metaphors of tutelage and reeducation cast U.S. soldiers of all racial backgrounds in the role of at least teacher, if not parent. This may have been all the more attractive to German youngsters because of the poses African American G.I.s struck displaying a casualness, or
Lässigkeit, that differed from the then common straighter posture of German grown-ups.”60
The general image that is created of African American soldiers in fiction of the occupation is primarily positive and seems almost adoring at times. But on a deeper level, fiction of the occupation portrays postwar Germany as a place of freedom for black GIs, because they could fulfill an educational role which they could not fulfill in the U.S., and this is in line with the contemporary notion of postwar Germany as a “breath of freedom.”
After first being published in 1948, Last of the Conquerors by Smith was reprinted in 1973. In 1969, Vonnegut’s “D.P.” was reprinted in Welcome to the Monkeyhouse: A
Collection of Short Works, and in 1985 it was adapted for television under the same title,
while Tauben im Gras by Koeppen was first published in German in 1951, and was translated into English by David Ward in 1988. On first glance this might seem an irrelevant element to discuss, because many works are reprinted, translated or adapted for television for no
particular reason. One of the possible explanations for why all these novels and short stories have an extended life is simply that they were deemed valuable enough to be worth
reproducing for future generations in a collection of works or on a different medium such as television. The preface to Welcome to the Monkeyhouse seems to suggest such a thing when Vonnegut he writes with much humor: “here it is, a retrospective exhibition of the shorter works of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.–and Vonnegut is still very much with us, and I am still very much Vonnegut. […] I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories
58 Ibid.
59 Sollors, The Temptation of Despair 215 60 Ibid, 214.
about writing that might help others. When I write I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful.”61
Indeed, perhaps in the case of Vonnegut’s collection of short works there is no point in reading too much into the exact reason why Vonnegut reprinted “D.P.” among other works in 1969, and therefore maybe his self-reflection should be trusted. However, the argument about the reproduction of the novels appearing in this chapter is not primarily located in each novel individually, but more in all of them taken together. If the moments when each novel is reprinted, as well as when they were first published, are compared to each other, a clear division in time becomes visible. The initial publications of the works appearing in this chapter range from 1948 to 1953, in other words, from the moment when Executive Order 9981 was issued to the moment when the American military was de facto integrated, as Höhn and Klimke argue. This is no coincidence, since it was exactly in this period that is was necessary to place the African American soldier, as well as his fraternization with the German people, in a positive daylight in order to argue for the actual integration of the American military.
The period in which the reproductions of the novels appear ranges from 1968 to 1988, in other words, from the 1970-1971 racial crisis in the American military to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which signaled the end of America’s occupation of West Germany. In the years 1970-1971 there was a racial crisis in the U.S. Army Europe (USAREUR), or the 7th
Army, which, according to Höhn and Klimke, meant that “in the eyes of black GIs,
Germany’s image had declined markedly since the postwar decade, and even just a few years earlier. […] Black soldiers had numerous complaints about the way Germans treated them. Service in German restaurants and discotheques was often unfriendly; some establishments told black GIs that they were private clubs that admitted only members, yet white GIs who were not ‘members’ had no problems.”62 In order to combat race inequality in the U.S. – since
the civil rights struggle had become an international struggle, as Höhn and Klimke argue – the image of postwar Germany had to be repaired, or at least the focus had to be placed on the more positive first part of the occupation. The image of postwar Germany as a “breath of freedom” had been a powerful ideological argument in the struggle for civil rights at home, and the fiction of the occupation could help reinforce this image, which is also the reason why it was reprinted or translated into English from 1968 onward.
61 Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkeyhouse, xi. 62 Höhn and Klimke, A Breath of Freedom, 166.
