Professor of History, Indiana University
Research project:
German Racial Regimes in a Transnational Context: An Afro-German Microhistory
Research project:
The project focuses on a biographical microhistory to examine broader aspects of different German “racial regimes”-or, historically specific constellations of predominant beliefs about, and legal and political practices towards, Blacks as perceived racial “Others”-during crucial moments of the twentieth century. “Erika Diekmann” was born in Worms in the occupied Rhineland in 1920. Her mother was German. Her father was a Senegalese French soldier. Until she was eleven, Erika stayed in a Protestant children’s home in Worms. In 1931, her guardians sent her to a Lutheran school for Christian Arab girls in Jerusalem. In 1949, Erika returned to West Germany, along with her (white) German husband and their son. In 1957, she and her family immigrated to the United States. Erika died in Kentucky in 1963.
Erika’s story offers unique opportunities for situating German attitudes towards Blacks within broader international and transnational contexts. As a child of the first Rhineland occupation, Erika was the target of 1920s propaganda against the “black horror on the Rhine” (schwarze Schmach), which aimed to discredit the Versailles Treaty by falsely accusing colonial French soldiers of mass rapes of Rhenish women. “Black horror” propaganda borrowed selectively from Allied war propaganda about the “rape of Belgium” by atavistic “Huns.” The Nazis revived black horror propaganda in their murderous campaign against African French soldiers during WW II. Memories of the Weimar-era and Nazi campaigns against colonial French soldiers continued to reverberate in postwar West Germany and helped shape Germans’ encounters with African-American GIs. Erika’s biography also points to certain hitherto neglected complexities and realignments in twentieth-century German racial discourse. For instance, while Erika’s conservative Protestant mentors impressed on her the centrality of marriage and motherhood, the Nazis subjected hundreds of other Afro-German children of the Rhineland occupation to compulsory sterilization, irrevocably depriving them of the right to become parents.
Events:
October 29, 2016, 2 p.m.
Fireside chat of the women’s network of the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”
November 11, 2016, 11.30 a.m.
Paper Presentation
Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften
Am Wingertsberg 4
61348 Bad Homburg v.d. Höhe
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Biografische Angaben
Julia Roos received her doctorate in history from Carnegie Mellon University in 2001. In 2002, she received the Fritz Stern Prize for the best dissertation submitted in the field of German history at a North American university. From 2002-2003, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of History at Princeton University. Since 2006, Roos has held a position as Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington. In 2012, she was promoted from Assistant Professor Without Tenure to Associate Professor With Tenure. -
Publikationen
Weimar through the Lens of Gender: Prostitution Reform, Woman’s Emancipation, and German Democracy, 1919-1933. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. “An Afro-German Microhistory: Gender, Religion, and the Challenges of Diasporic Dwelling,” Central European History vol. 49, no. 2 (June 2016): 240-60. “Racist Hysteria to Pragmatic Rapprochement? The German Debate about Rhenish ‘Occupation Children,’ 1920-1930.” Contemporary European History 22, no.2 (May 2013): 155-180. “Nationalism, Racism, and Propaganda in Early Weimar Germany: Contradictions in the Campaign against the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine.’” German History 30, no. 1 (March 2012): 45-74.