Let's consider the case of Germany. Certain images immediately comes to mind when one thinks about Germany in 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps the most obvious one is the steady (and in historical memory, seemingly inevitable) march towards Nazi Germany and the horrors that would follow. Yet in the case of people of African ancestry (although not limited to), the 1920s became a period that would not only see increased hardship, but also increased racial prejudice and discrimination.

Let's consider one specific case that I believe does well in showing white German ideas about the presence of people of African ancestry in Germany at the time. It is the story of a young Afro-German woman.

Erika Diekmann was born in Worms in 1920. Worms was part of the Rhineland, a region that in the aftermath of the First World War was occupied by soldiers from France, Britain, Belgium, and the United States to ensure that Germany paid the reparations it was obliged to pay to the victors of the war. The French occupying force included thousands of colonial soldiers from West and North Africa, as well as Indochina. The presence of African soldiers on German soil was quickly exploited by right-wing elements in Germany that would carry out a propaganda campaign (the "Black Horror on the Rhine"), promptly embraced by the German government, which characterized out their presence as a crime against the civilized world. Lurid and tantalizing fake propaganda stories of mass sexual assaults were spread, reaching epidemic proportions as they were translated and published around the world. Germany was painted out to be the victim, the French a horrific perpetrator of violence -- all a lure to regain the sympathy of the outside world after the humiliating defeat in the First World War. The important ramification of this was increased emphasis on the notion that whiteness was not only German but European and that blackness only belonged to uncivilized outsiders.

Yet love does not recognize race. In the occupied Rhineland, men of African and Asian ancestry entered into relationship with white German women, relationships that resulted in children. Erika was one such child. Her mother was a white German woman, but her father was a black Senegalese soldier. Erika did not know her parents. She was placed in a children’s home under that was run by the deeply conservative and religious Martha Baroness von Moos. Erika's religious upbringing brought her a close connection to German culture, becoming the cornerstone of her German identity. Yet it would be religion that would ultimately force her to migrate outside of Germany. While Erika saw herself grounded in protestant German culture, her guardians did not. Martha von Moos and her husband, the industrialist Ernst von Moos, sent Erika to attend Talitha Kumi, a Christian school in Jerusalem, in 1931. Why? Because the von Moos' believed that the multicultural Jerusalem would offer Diekmann a better chance of finding a home. In their eyes, she didn't really belong in Germany because of her race. It didn't matter that Worms was her actual home because they saw race as being geographically fixed. Erika longed to return home to Worms, something that her guardians were kept informed about by letters from Jerusalem: Worms, and Germany, was "the focus of all her longing" wrote Sister Bertha Harz, the director of Talitha Kumi in 1934 to Erika's guardians. She never came back home. In one fateful way, she was lucky: 385 Rhineland individuals of African and Asian ancestry like her would be forcibly sterilized by Nazi Germany, by which time they were known as the "Rhineland bastards". All because their fathers had been colonial soldiers of an occupying force.

Erika's story points to another fact that is not often acknowledged: People of African ancestry were born in Germany. All of them did not come as migrants or as visitors. The presence of people of African ancestry in Germany is traced back in hundreds of years, not decades, and that is an important point to remember. There were Afro-Germans living in Germany before the First World War and many more would be born after.

Let's consider the migrants. Starting in 1884, German colonial subjects from their African colonies came to Germany for a variety of reasons, including work and education. With the onset of the First World War, which isolated German Africa from its metropole, this migration came to a sudden end. Even more sudden was the change of status at the end of the war. Germany lost all of its African colonies, turning these former German colonial subjects into individuals with an undetermined status. They are not allowed to return to their homelands (now in British and French control) because they are believed to be too pro-German. Colonial authorities are also uncomfortable with Africans who had married white women in Germany. Therefore, these people suddenly found themselves stranded.

When we look at the African community in Germany in the 1920s, we see that they have a presence throughout the country, but that many can be found in Berlin and Hamburg. This is where they are most visible, not only to white Germans, but also to each other. Afro-German communities become more established as a consequence, with greater social support networks now available in the working-class neighborhoods that most of them lived in. The African Welfare Association is founded in 1918 in Hamburg, followed by the more openly political The League of the Defence of the Negro Race in 1929 in Berlin.

Yet racial discrimination is never too far away. Central is the question of citizenship. People of African ancestry are seen as racially inferior in every single aspect. Few Africans from former German colonies were ever granted citizenship. Most were denied on the simple reason that they were unwanted. Racially inferior individuals, the argument went, could not be granted German citizenship. During a time that was very difficult for white Germans, in particularly concerning employment, lacking citizenship meant unemployment and access denied to any form of unemployment benefits from the state. Many had to take temporary jobs that did not provide a steady paycheck and had to either switch job frequently or have several of them. There was also racial discrimination in housing by landlords who refused to rent apartments to Africans. Some look towards season work as entertainers. The German entertainment industry needed actors to play the racialized Other on film and on the stage. Many Afro-Germans found themselves playing everything from African-Americans to Arabs for German audiences. They could never be allowed play themselves. But it provided a necessary income for them and their families, and actually provided a space in which people of African ancestry could meet and connect.

What happens in 1933? The situation hasn't improved for the majority of Afro-Germans, but Germany was their home. Yet the end of the 1920s saw an increase in racial prejudice towards Africans, something that would reach new levels during the 1930s. Nazi Germany makes it very clear that these men and women are racial outsiders. They are officially considered racial aliens and stateless. More than ever before, they begin to face open racial harassment. Children become specific targets in school of racial abuse and will soon have their schooling be prematurely ended by the Nazi regime. Some individuals are murdered by local officials and their supports. Some Afro-German families flee and seek refuge in France. Yet for a few years, the Nazi regime hold back in some ways. The dream of reclaiming the German Empire, including its African colonies, still remain. African actors are still allowed to be employed in the entertainment business, specifically in the colonial nostalgia show Deutsche Afrika-Schau which is used to propagandize colonial aspirations. Amongst the actors we find many Afro-German veterans of the First World War, some of whom had been awarded for their service on the Western front. Yet this brief protective space would not last. After 1940, violence towards Afro-Germans increase. The show is closed down on the grounds that it was inappropriate for an Aryan audience. More Afro-Germans flee the country as their persecution picks up the pace. Those who stay or are unable to flee are subjects to violence, incarceration, sterilization (as we have seen), and being sent to concentration camps such as Sachsenhausen or Ravensbrück (where we know Afro-German women were sent). Many more go into hiding. There was no such thing as the ability of having a normal life under Nazi Germany for Afro-Germans.

But they persevered. At the conclusion of the war, some who had escaped abroad even came back to Germany. Some remained, some were unable to find their place in post-war Germany and found a new home elsewhere.

That's where we find Erika again. During the Second World War, she was interned as an enemy alien by the British mandate government in Jerusalem. That's where she might have met her future husband, Heinrich, who she marries before leaving Palestine in 1949, by which time the couple have also had their first child. They arrive in West Germany to her husband's village where they would spend several years (and have four more children). Ultimately, they could not find their footing in the new Germany. In 1957, Erika, her husband, and their four children move to the United States, where they ultimately settle in Kentucky. Erika would tragically die in 1963 after giving birth.