Thanks

This book would never have been written if the children and grandchildren of two big families hadn’t pestered me for years to put my memories on paper. My children have had to suffer rejection, exclusion, insults and undisguised racism as a result of their heritage. Their children, the great-grandchildren of Theophilus Wonja Michael from the German colony Cameroon, whose African heritage is now barely visible, have rarely had to suffer such negative experiences. That means that if anything they are proud of their African heritage and their appearance. So the question is: When will there be a change in people’s attitudes to Germans who at first sight look foreign?...

Translator’s Preface

Many readers will pick up this book looking for the story of a Holocaust survivor, and it is certainly one of the few works of testimony that give us first-hand insights into what black people experienced in the Nazi “racial state”. Readers should start at the beginning and read on to the end, however, since what Theodor Michael has done is to tell three overlapping stories from the privileged perspective of a long life fully lived: a German story, a black story and a story of global diasporic consciousness. Equally important, he is self-consciously inserting himself into a continuous chain of storytelling in which black Germans explain their history to each other. ...

Black German

When I was born in Berlin, the year 1925 was just fifteen days old. Fourteen days earlier the Apostolic Nuntius Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, had delivered the congratulations of the diplomatic corps to Reich President Friedrich Ebert. Nobody expected that barely two months later Friedrich Ebert would be dead. After his death the aged Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, a living legend since his victory over the Russian army at Tannenberg, became President. Of course I knew nothing about all this; people told me later that I had enough trouble of my own getting into the world and staying alive. My mother was already seriously ill when I was born, and she died a year later....