Tea at Trianon: The Overlooked History of Berlin’s Black Community

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, January 11, 2022

The Overlooked History of Berlin’s Black Community

From Atlas Obscura:

There are more than seventy-five thousand Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” laid into footpaths across Europe. Collectively, it is the largest decentralized memorial of its kind anywhere in the world. Each four-by-four brass stone is placed at the last known residential or working address of a human being who was murdered by the Nazis. Though most of the stones commemorate people who were Jewish, Roma and Sinti, homosexual, or disabled, there were many other groups persecuted by the Nazis–including Black people. In Germany, four of these stones are dedicated to Black victims, two of which were installed in Berlin in 2021. They belong to Martha Ndumbe and Ferdinand James Allen.

“The Black victims of the Nazis have long not been considered—neither by academic research nor by memorial politics,” says Sophia Schmitz from the Coordination Office Stolpersteine Berlin. “But in a town like Berlin a Black community in the 1920s and 1930s did exist, all of whom were at first harassed and later more often than not murdered during Nazi rule. It is our aim to uncover their stories and make them present again, late as it is.”

Dr. Robbie Aitken, a professor at Sheffield Hallam University and author of Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community 1884 - 1960, coordinated the initiative to lay Ndumbe’s and Allen’s stones with support from the Stolpersteine office and Dekoloniale, a Berlin-based project that is examining Germany’s colonial history and its consequences. Both Ndumbe and Allen lived in Berlin during World War II, but Aitken says that they were also part of a larger Black community that existed in Germany dating back to even before World War I, many of whom were people from German colonies in Africa, as well as other African countries. Most of them lived and worked in Europe as performers in the Völkerschauen–or human zoos–large ethnological exhibitions that featured Africans in tribal dress that perpetuated stereotypes of African life and reinforced a sense of German racial superiority. (Read more.)