Biography, Microhistory, and the Afro-German Diaspora: An Analytical Framework

The core archival sources used in this article consist of twenty letters and postcards by Erika Diekmann and Martha von Moos spanning the years 1946 to 1957. This epistolary archive reveals a story that is fascinating, frequently heartrending, and, in many ways, unique. As an Afro-German woman, Erika belonged to a tiny minority.Footnote ¹⁵ Her forced separation from her mother and subsequent exile in Palestine make her life appear even more exceptional. Given its unusual circumstances and trajectory, what is the value of Erika's biography for historians? According to Linda Gordon, “small, unique stories take on historical significance only when they connect with larger, more generic stories.” As a form of microhistory, biography succeeds when—by drawing the reader into the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of an individual life—it simultaneously helps her gain a deeper understanding of “how macrohistorical processes work.”Footnote ¹⁶ As Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft have observed, biographical and microhistorical approaches have proven especially fruitful in the study of Europe's black diaspora: they elucidate “global entanglements and trends by tracing the ways in which they are worked out at the personal and local level.”Footnote ¹⁷

This insight certainly holds true for Erika Diekmann's biography. Most immediately, Diekmann's case speaks to the question of the peculiarities of the Afro-German diaspora, as well as to the potential connections between these peculiarities and larger trends in the history of German colonialism and racism.Footnote ¹⁸ Germany's overseas colonial empire lasted for only roughly thirty years. The formal loss of the Reich's colonies in 1919 cut short the first tentative beginnings of battles over the civil and legal rights of colonial subjects.Footnote ¹⁹ As Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse, Yara-Colette Lemke-Muniz de Faria, Fatima El-Tayeb, Michelle Wright, and others have argued, the short lifespan of Germany's colonial empire had important long-term implications for German attitudes toward Afro-Germans: “The German discourse of linking Blackness to valuable colonial commodities and defining it as an external, abnormal physical state (Blackness as the result of drinking too much cocoa, becoming dirty, etc.) reflects a history that reveals that, unlike the Black in Britain, France, and the United States, the ‘German Black’ is not read as an Other-from-within, but as an Other-from-without.”Footnote ²⁰ Because of the traditionally strong emphasis in German citizenship law on descent rather than place of birth, black Germans have faced special obstacles in their quest for equal citizenship, since they “must confront a racist discourse directed at Africans rather than Afro-Germans.”Footnote ²¹

The fact that Erika's parentage was both Franco-German and biracial underlines the important role of intra-European relations and rivalries, as well as of global encounters between European colonizers and colonized “Others,” in helping shape conditions in the Afro-German diaspora.Footnote ²² Erika literally embodied what scholars have identified as a distinct feature of the “genealogy of the Black presence” in Germany: the centrality of experiences of military defeat and foreign occupation.Footnote ²³ After both world wars, foreign armies stationed on German soil included substantial numbers of black troops and, in both instances, the biracial children of white German mothers and black occupation soldiers became a major focal point of nationalist anxieties.Footnote ²⁴ The 1920s propaganda campaign against France's colonial troops in the occupied Rhineland, which used the racist epithet “black horror on the Rhine” (schwarze Schmach am Rhein), relied heavily on quasi-pornographic images of alleged mass rapes of Rhenish women by African French soldiers to denounce Germany's “enslavement” under the Versailles Treaty.Footnote ²⁵ As this example illustrates, the specter of racial “miscegenation” frequently remained wedded in twentieth-century German racialist discourse to a sense of national victimization by powerful foreign enemies. In highly gendered language, nationalists associated the growth in the Afro-German population with military defeat and the perceived emasculation of German men unable to defend “their” womanfolk against a sexually voracious and racially “alien” invader. This prominent discursive linkage, Wright points out, marks a striking contrast to the history of other European societies tracing “their Black presence back to moments of colonial glory that, while morally compromised, nonetheless recall the nation at a moment of political and economic strength.”Footnote ²⁶

In recent years, scholars of Europe's black diaspora have criticized the predominance of analytical frameworks derived primarily from the African American diasporic experience.Footnote ²⁷ Tina Campt, who has performed pioneering work on the German case, argues that, “unlike many black communities in the diaspora, for Afro-Germans the Atlantic is neither the crucial geographic conduit of transit, nor is the slave trade the formative event of their arrival. Collective migration is the exception rather than the rule for this community.”Footnote ²⁸ Campt is critical of an influential tendency in diaspora studies to privilege themes of geographical mobility and transnational migration.Footnote ²⁹ She questions the assumption that “diaspora is always intrinsically counternational.”Footnote ³⁰ Instead, she invites scholars to pay greater attention “to the ways that Black diasporic communities are also thoroughly emplaced and practice complex forms of homing and dwelling.”Footnote ³¹ The special features of the Afro-German diaspora—its relatively small size, the absence of unifying memories of a shared history of enslavement and extended subjection to German colonial rule, the marked discontinuities in its historical development—make it an ideal case for analyzing what Campt calls processes of “diasporic emplacement,” or “home-making.”Footnote ³² She stresses the importance of local identities and (interracial) family relations in shaping processes of diasporic dwelling, as well as Afro-Germans' at least provisional “aspiration to national subjecthood.”Footnote ³³ Approaches centered exclusively on themes of displacement and migration run the risk of “normalizing” the experiences of unattached male individuals with a high level of geographical and personal mobility.Footnote ³⁴ By contrast, the centrality of family relations to the study of diasporic emplacement challenges scholars to address explicitly questions of gender, and to examine as well the specific contributions of women to the creation and everyday functioning of diaspora communities.

Erika Diekmann's correspondence with Martha von Moos offers a rare opportunity to examine the female experience of the Afro-German diaspora during the first half of the twentieth century. Erika's life spanned a crucial moment in the history of race and racism in modern Germany. Prior to World War I, roughly one thousand people of African origin resided in the Reich “at any one time.”Footnote ³⁵ This made the tens of thousands of colonial French troops participating in the 1920s Rhineland occupation “the first large-scale Black presence in Germany.”Footnote ³⁶ It is plausible that the six to eight hundred Afro-German children of some of these soldiers represented the largest cohort of native-born blacks Germans had yet encountered.Footnote ³⁷ “Black horror” propaganda reflected major shifts in debates over the alleged dangers of “racial mixing” between white Germans and Africans, “from a focus on external concerns to a focus on internal concerns.”Footnote ³⁸ Yet, while the Afro-German children of the first Rhineland occupation (the so-called Rhineland bastards) occupied a central symbolic position in the realignment of racialist discourse and stereotypes during the 1920s, we know very little about the lives of these individuals. Where more detailed biographical information on individual Rhenish “occupation children” (Besatzungskinder) is available, it tends to pertain to men.Footnote ³⁹

Erika's life sheds invaluable light on the question of how the biracial children of the first Rhineland occupation viewed their own relationship to German society, and of how the atmosphere of intensified nationalist resentment and racialist anxiety in the aftermath of World War I affected their prospects of diasporic emplacement. Equally important, Erika's story adds vital facets to our understanding of Afro-German women's active strategies of diasporic home-making, and especially the complicated role of conventional female gender prescriptions in processes of interracial family-building. The centrality of family to Erika's sense of social belonging and national identity also connects with a key factor often neglected in studies of the Afro-German diaspora: religion. Making religion more central to an investigation of the Afro-German diaspora illuminates issues of continuity and discontinuity in German racism from the colonial to the Nazi periods.

Erika Diekmann: The Elusive German Home

The forced move to Jerusalem in 1931 seems to have been traumatic for Erika Diekmann. In January 1934, Sister Bertha Harz, the director of Talitha Kumi, reported to Ernst von Moos that the girl was still homesick for Worms. Harz suggested that Erika might learn a “special occupation” (besonderer Beruf) that would allow her to travel to Germany, which remained “the focus of all her longing” (Dahin geht doch ihr ganzes Sehnen!).Footnote ⁴⁰

Erika's letters from post-World War II Palestine attest to her need to reaffirm bonds of intimacy and “family” with Martha von Moos and the Worms deaconesses. In a letter dated June 2, 1946, she asked von Moos: “Do you still visit the children's home as often as you used to, or have you given up the visits? I still remember when we were told that we could visit your house to hunt the Easter bunny; I was very little then, and so delighted about the red sugar bunnies.”Footnote ⁴¹ In another letter, she regretted “that we cannot celebrate Christmas together—how nice it used to be in the children's home.”Footnote ⁴² The young woman regularly inquired about von Moos's husband and children, and about the staff at the children's home. When she learned of the bombings of Worms, she was shocked: “I never would've thought that dear Worms could look like that. Your dear children's home, too, is now completely destroyed… How often I pictured the dear home in my mind. Are the beautiful Luther memorial and the Siegfried fountain still standing?”Footnote ⁴³ Erika's strong sense of empathy with the plight of the Germans prompted her to send food and other items to Germany. This temporary reversal of social roles during the immediate postwar years cast Erika in the role of the generous benefactor—and Martha von Moos in that of the grateful recipient.Footnote ⁴⁴ In March 1948, von Moos thanked her for a Christmas package containing “wonderful treasures… we could never hope to buy here. Your gift was a great help to us.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Erika frequently compared the difficult conditions of everyday life in postwar Germany to her own experiences of armed conflict and scarcity in 1940s Palestine. In her 1946 Christmas greetings, she worried that no mail had arrived from the Worms deaconesses; similarly, she had been unable to reach Sister Bertha Harz in Jerusalem because of the ongoing fighting among Arabs, Jews, and the British military: “The situation has not changed; the fighting continues. What a pity for beautiful Palestine. I hope that peace will arrive here soon, too, because it is much better to live in peace, without expecting that any minute another bomb or shot will go off.” Erika lamented the many innocents who had lost their lives or limbs: “We all stand in God's hand… Only if we have faith in Him can things become well again. We have to strive to become and remain righteous children of God.”Footnote ⁴⁶ She seemed to have internalized Protestant notions about the centrality of hard work and frugality for virtuous Christian conduct. Describing conditions in the Wilhelma camp, Erika emphasized that the few remaining members of the Talitha Kumi community managed a heavy workload: “Only seven of us are left now… We're very busy; everyone's happy when evening comes. We go to bed at a quarter to nine.” The rationing of essential goods added to her tasks: “Every morning I walk to the dairy with my cart and sack of ice to fetch milk.” The traditional female housekeeping skills the deaconesses had taught her apparently proved useful to Erika under such circumstances. Even during the winter, she told von Moos, children in the camp ran around barefoot: “I, too, have let out my socks to avoid darning too many stockings.”Footnote ⁴⁷

After her expulsion from Palestine, Erika was hopeful that Martha von Moos would help her return to her native Worms. In February 1949, while staying in an unknown location, she wrote to von Moos about the recent birth of her first son. It was unnecessary to send any photographs, the young mother explained, since “you will soon see me standing in front of you.” The precise date of her family's arrival in West Germany was not yet certain: “Our first stop will be a camp, which we can leave only if someone vouches for us. So, I thought, if you do not mind, I'd send you a letter or telegram and ask you to be so kind and pick up your little Moor (Mohrchen)… My husband, too, will be very grateful to you, dear Baroness, because I want to live only in Worms.”Footnote ⁴⁸ A reunion never took place, however. It is possible that Erika refrained from contacting von Moos upon her initial arrival in West Germany, or that her messages got lost. Martha von Moos later claimed that she had been unable to locate Erika, “despite multiple investigations.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Even after Erika finally resumed contact in 1954, the two women never met in person. Though Erika was in touch with her sister Gudrun in Upper Hesse, she apparently never returned to Worms.Footnote ⁵⁰ What accounted for this surprising change of heart?

Poverty, as well as Erika's responsibility for four little children—three of whom were born in quick succession between 1951 and 1954—clearly made traveling to Worms difficult.Footnote ⁵¹ “If I had the money,” she told von Moos in January 1956, “I'd come to visit you.”Footnote ⁵² When the Diekmanns arrived in Heinrich's native village, Schwege bei Dinklage, the region was flooded with refugees, and jobs and housing were scarce. Heinrich apparently never found steady employment during the time the couple stayed in Lower Saxony. To supplement the family income, Erika did housework on nearby farms and helped with the harvest. The family's lodgings consisted of two makeshift rooms in an old barn, where gaps in the doors and windows let in cold drafts. There were not enough blankets and warm clothes for the children. Erika collected rainwater to do the laundry because the available well water was too dirty.Footnote ⁵³ In his only letter to Martha von Moos, written in June 1954, Heinrich mentioned that his unemployment compensation (Arbeitslosenfürsorge) barely sufficed: “Being unemployed has beaten me down so (hat mich so heruntergeschlagen) that I now only weigh 125 pounds; how different this is from the good times we had in Palestine.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Erika constantly worried about having enough food and other necessities for her children. In January 1956, for example, she wrote, “To feed four children is not easy; they all want to have a full belly (die alle wollen satt sein)… So far, we haven't been starving—it's only difficult to buy all the things we need since everything's so expensive.”Footnote ⁵⁵ She, too, was nostalgic for Palestine, which she fondly called her “second home” (meine zweite Heimat): “It was beautiful there. What a pity that we can't go back; we'd leave immediately.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The tone of growing frustration in Erika's letters from Schwege coincided with important changes in her attitude toward German authority figures. After years of making do with two rooms in a ramshackle barn, she had evidently lost patience with Dinklage officials unable or unwilling to find adequate accommodations for her family: “There is no apartment for us. I think I'll get a journalist to take photographs [of the barn] and write about it in the newspaper; otherwise, we won't get an apartment.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Erika's exasperation about the unhelpfulness of local bureaucrats was only the tip of the iceberg. As the letter of April 18, 1954 (quoted at the start of this article) suggests, her sense of disappointment and alienation went even deeper. In this letter, as we have seen, Erika asked Martha von Moos whether her biological father had been “deported or gassed back then,” the first explicit reference to Nazism in their correspondence. Heinrich's and Erika's dire financial situation likely prompted the inquiry, and she apparently hoped that, as the daughter of a victim of the Nazi regime, she might qualify for restitution payments by the German government.Footnote ⁵⁸ She assigned partial responsibility for her difficulties in locating her father to von Moos and the deaconesses, who had cut her off from any further contact with her birth mother. For the first time, Erika voiced open criticisms of her teachers: “It's sad that I was not told the whole story back then, and that I was forbidden to write to my mother—even if she may have been bad, still, she was my mother, and other people were only kind to me out of pity. It's regrettable that I was raised so strictly. I don't want to blame anyone for this, though.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Erika's April 1954 letter simultaneously broke two silences: the silence about Nazism, and the silence about some of the hardships of her own institutional upbringing. What might account for the timing of this letter? In the late 1940s, Erika vaguely described World War II as “God's punishment, because human beings are so sinful and only remember Him when they are in great need.”Footnote ⁶⁰ It is unlikely that the young woman had remained completely unaware of the Nazi persecution of Europe's Jews. Because of the massive influx of Jewish refugees into Jerusalem during the 1930s, the neighborhoods surrounding Talitha Kumi increasingly became exclusively Jewish. In fact, the deaconesses, whose work in the inner mission focused on Arab Christians, observed this development with considerable unease.Footnote ⁶¹ During the initial stage of the Arab uprising of 1936–1939, Jewish youths threw stones at Talitha Kumi, presumably because the school's sympathies for the Arab side were common knowledge.Footnote ⁶² The Kaiserswerth Association of German Deaconess Motherhouses (Kaiserswerther Verband deutscher Diakonissenmutterhäuser) avoided immediate fusion with Nazi-led organizations (Gleichschaltung), though its directors agreed to consult with Nazi government officials on important matters of administration and policy.Footnote ⁶³ This limited defense of institutional self-government did not necessarily reflect principled objections to the Third Reich's broader political agenda. For instance, Pastor Siegfried von Lüttichau, the head of the motherhouse in Kaiserswerth and director of the Kaiserswerther Verband, was himself a member of the Nazi Party and cultivated friendly relations with the regime.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1938, pupils at Talitha Kumi wrote to von Lüttichau about a visit to their school by a German bishop who had promised them “to tell Mr. Hitler that we pray and sing well at Talitha Kumi.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The pastor forwarded the letters to the Reich chancellery (Reichskanzlei).Footnote ⁶⁶ It is hard to imagine that Erika never attended any of the many National Socialist events supported by the Protestant German community in Jerusalem.Footnote ⁶⁷

Ignorance is thus an insufficient explanation for Erika's pre-1954 silence about National Socialism. In many ways, Erika's relationship with Martha von Moos and the deaconesses seems to hold the key. Immediately after World War II, Erika identified closely with Germany and Lutheran culture. This, along with concern for von Moos's feelings, might have kept her from mentioning Nazism. At a time when she was still living in an internment camp, and when many of her old teachers were leaving Palestine, Erika's experience of utter dislocation and fear of an uncertain future may have led her to romanticize Worms and its inhabitants.Footnote ⁶⁸ In many ways, maintaining friendly relations with von Moos appeared vital to Erika's successful prospects of returning “home.” Because she lacked contact with her parents and siblings, von Moos and her former teachers at the Worms children's home were the closest “family” Erika had in her native country.

This changed after 1949. Erika had counted on Martha von Moos to meet her upon her arrival in Germany and welcome her back to Worms. That von Moos failed to do so must have been a serious disappointment. In her April 1954 letter, Erika accused her teachers of harshness and of pitying rather than loving her. By then, her own emotional energies and loyalties had refocused on her biological family: during her stay in Schwege, Erika had three more children with Heinrich. She also resumed contact with her half-sister, Gudrun, and started researching her father's fate under the Nazi dictatorship. The difficulties Erika faced in her efforts to make a home for her family in postwar West Germany introduced new tensions and doubts into her view of German society. Her worry that the Nazis might have persecuted her father further complicated her sense of national belonging. Though Erika continued a friendly and respectful correspondence with Martha von Moos until 1957, Worms no longer stood at the center of her emotional attachments and desire for a home. This eventually held true of Erika's attitude toward Germany as a whole.

It is difficult to gauge the precise impact that personal experiences of racial discrimination had on Erika's changed outlook. For instance, none of her letters from Schwege mentions any suspicion that her own or her children's biracial parentage had hindered the family's access to more adequate housing. It is also unclear whether Erika was aware of the fact that the Nazis had forcefully sterilized close to four hundred biracial children born in the 1920s during the Rhineland occupation.Footnote ⁶⁹ Her own half-brother, Ludwig, the son of a Vietnamese French soldier, may have fallen victim to this hushed-up illegal action. In November 1938, the Worms police investigated Ludwig's whereabouts to include him in the national “card catalog of colored people” (Farbigenkartothek) set up by the Nazi Party Office for Race Policy (Rassenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP) in Berlin.Footnote ⁷⁰ Ludwig's fate remains unclear. The vast majority of the children registered for inclusion in the Farbigenkartothek became victims of compulsory sterilization. Though Erika requested in one of her early letters that Martha von Moos help her locate Ludwig and Gudrun, she never mentioned any actual contact with her half-brother.Footnote ⁷¹

Even if Erika did not comment explicitly on instances of racism directed against her personally, her sensibilities had clearly changed. Prior to 1954, race and racial difference had not been consciously problematized in Erika's correspondence with Martha von Moos. By using the nickname “Mohrchen” in reference to herself, Erika acknowledged her own racial “Otherness” while simultaneously affirming affectionate ties to von Moos and the Worms deaconesses who had raised her. At this point, the perceived strength of commonalities between Erika and her teachers—a common hometown, shared memories of Erika's childhood, Lutheran beliefs and practices, German language and culture, the war experience—appeared to render racial difference secondary and essentially benevolent. When Erika's expectations of a warm welcome in Worms failed to materialize, and as the harsh reality of living conditions in Schwege began to sink in, she may have also become more conscious of the dangers of racial stereotypes. In any event, Erika no longer called herself Mohrchen in her letters from the 1950s. Instead, she now seriously contemplated the possibility that she was the daughter of a victim of Nazi racism.

Martha von Moos: “Everyone did good things for you!”

Martha von Moos's reaction to Erika's letter of April 18, 1954, was defensive. The decision to remove Erika from Worms, von Moos claimed, had been motivated entirely by concern for the girl's happiness and well-being. In a long letter dated May 19, 1954, she told Erika that “your exotic looks (Dein fremdländisch [sic] Aussehen) caused more and more worry about your future.” The white children started to tease her at school, an observation that led “everyone who cared about you to predict great suffering.” At the same time, Erika's mother was trying to get control of her daughter to rent her out for work in traveling circuses and bars: “This is why we were glad when… Talitha Kumi agreed to accept you. As we saw with our own eyes when we visited you there during Easter of 1933, [the school] was home to many black little girls like yourself.” The baroness did not believe that Erika had any realistic prospects of receiving restitution from the German government, for Erika's mother had died of natural causes in August 1942, and her father had returned to Africa in the early 1920s: “We never knew his name or other personal details. After all, one would not have been able to understand his language anyway, or distinguish him from the other Negroes from Senegal (Senegalneger).” Erika was not a victim: “no injustice was done to you—on the contrary: everyone did good things for you (es wurde von allen Seiten Gutes an Dir getan)!”Footnote ⁷²

Martha von Moos criticized the fact that white German children had made fun of Erika's skin color. Yet, the perception that her racial “Otherness” rendered Erika a potentially problematic “alien element” in German society played a significant role in her and her husband's decision to send the girl away—a reaction that combined paternalistic attitudes with racialist stereotypes. As her comment about Erika's father shows, Martha von Moos believed that all Senegalese men looked alike and were incapable of speaking any European languages. Even some of her more affectionate remarks betrayed a tendency to stereotype Africans and Afro-Germans: “Apparently, you strongly resembled your father—you were such a darling (goldiges) little girl with the exotic looks (mit dem fremdländischen Aussehen).”Footnote ⁷³ Considered charming in a small child, Erika's ascribed exoticism worried her teachers once she became a teenager. In her letter of January 1934, Bertha Harz told Ernst von Moos that Erika needed firmer guidance than other pupils “because her mixed blood is claiming more and more influence over her (denn immer mehr macht sich das gemischte Blut in ihr geltend).”Footnote ⁷⁴ When Ernst von Moos learned from Harz of Erika's homesickness, his response suggested that, at least at this point, he and his wife were disinclined to contemplate Erika's return to Worms: “We are happy to hear that dear Erika is still so fond of Germany, but hope that she will continue to settle in well in Palestine.”Footnote ⁷⁵

The idea that Erika did not really belong in Germany also reflected the impact of the racist “black horror” campaign of the 1920s against France's colonial occupation troops. Whereas most of these troops were of North African origin (with much smaller Madagascan and Vietnamese contingents), Worms was the only place briefly occupied by a Senegalese regiment as well.Footnote ⁷⁶ In November 1919, Ernst von Moos sarcastically reminded a Berlin acquaintance “that we now live on the banks of the Senegal here… We are surrounded by blacks, whose endlessly long hands and legs beautify the countryside and whose picturesque reflections adorn the German Rhine.” Despite his outrage, von Moos was pleased to observe that “the clumsy ‘colonization efforts' (Kolonisationstätigkeit) of the French have an energizing effect on our population's patriotic sentiments and have started to cure the Social Democratic workers of their internationalist mania (internationaler Irrwahn).”Footnote ⁷⁷ Inasmuch as Erika literally embodied this hated French “colonization effort,” exiling her may have represented, in part, an attempt to excise the memory of Germany's “colonial humiliation.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In any event, the last Allied troops left the Rhineland in June 1930; nine months later, the von Moos's sent Erika to Palestine.

Eugenic ideas about the alleged heredity of nonconformist social behavior influenced Martha von Moos's decisions as well.Footnote ⁷⁹ With astonishing bluntness, she told Erika that her “tainted” genetic heritage had required strict discipline: “If, according to your memory, the Sisters were harsh toward you, they only did this to prevent your mother's frivolous genes (leichtsinniges Erbteil Deiner Mutter) from destroying your life, too. Otherwise, no honorable man would have married you.”Footnote ⁸⁰ During the 1950s, von Moos continued to worry about the potentially negative impact of Erika's “race” on her ability to lead an orderly and respectable life. In a letter from June 10, 1954, to the wife of the Dinklage pastor, she referred to Erika as “the offspring of a Negro of the first French occupation… As you can imagine, this heritage (Abstammung) has cast a shadow over [Erika's] life from the beginning.” The baroness was eager to find out more about Heinrich and hoped that Erika was “in good hands.” She requested that the pastor's wife visit the Diekmanns in their home to ascertain whether Erika “has become a good housewife and mother,” and to deliver gifts for von Moos's godson. Martha included ten deutschmarks in her letter, and promised to send another fifty deutschmarks to buy items that would “give Erika and her youngest child pleasure and help.”Footnote ⁸¹

Martha von Moos's instructions to the wife of the Dinklage pastor revealed a characteristic mixture of religious paternalism, racial and class prejudices, as well as conservative notions of social estate (Standesdenken). She and her husband went to some lengths to locate an appropriate home for Erika. In fact, Martha told Erika that, during the Weimar period, “a number of Catholic descendants of Negroes in Worms found acceptance in a home in Morocco.” For quite some time, von Moos tried unsuccessfully to find “a Protestant school in a country with other black children, since you had been baptized and raised a Protestant.”Footnote ⁸² The welfare office (Fürsorgeamt) in Worms covered Erika's tuition at Talitha Kumi until 1938. It is likely that the von Moos's used their personal influence, and possibly additional financial incentives, to convince the Kaiserswerth deaconesses to accept the girl.Footnote ⁸³ The choice of Talitha Kumi, one of the oldest and most venerable Protestant German institutions in Jerusalem, testified to the couple's deep religiosity—and perhaps also to their sense of their own elevated social status. During Easter of 1933, Ernst and Martha von Moos visited Talitha Kumi as part of their pilgrimage to the Holy Land (for reasons that remain unclear, Erika did not meet them). Two other factors appear to have been relevant for their choice of school. One was pragmatic: the British mandate power in Palestine returned German church property in Jerusalem relatively quickly after World War I, whereas conditions were more difficult in areas controlled by the French mandate power.Footnote ⁸⁴ Talitha Kumi's educational mission matched the gender and class-specific expectations Ernst and Martha von Moos envisioned for Erika. The school did not offer more advanced degrees. Its curriculum combined a very basic education in a limited range of academic subjects with a strong emphasis on vocational training in home economics (Hauswirtschaft) to prepare poorer Arab girls for traditional female jobs and roles in the family.Footnote ⁸⁵

Martha and Ernst von Moos apparently believed that Jerusalem, because of its multiethnic and multinational population, offered Erika a better chance of finding a home than Worms did. It is ironic that their decision placed Erika in an increasingly dangerous and violent environment, as tensions between Arabs and Jews continued to mount during the 1930s.Footnote ⁸⁶ But even in retrospect, Martha von Moos was unwilling to acknowledge some of the hardships of Erika's exile. As mentioned earlier, Erika's letter of April 1954 included references to Nazi crimes, alongside bitter criticisms of her own austere upbringing. In her response to Erika's criticisms, von Moos drew a sharp line between “the sad Hitler Years” (die traurige Hitlerzeit), on the one hand, and Erica's education by the Kaiserwerth deaconesses, on the other. She was particularly adamant about refuting the accusation of lovelessness. Precisely because her teachers had genuinely cared about her, von Moos told Erika, they had avoided spoiling her: “Do not think that the friendliness you experienced was mere pity… Real love is different, as you undoubtedly know, since you are a mother now, too. A good mother who loves her children occasionally has to be strict to educate them to become decent, lovable, and industrious human beings.”Footnote ⁸⁷

In defending the deaconesses, Martha von Moos simultaneously justified her own actions. She depicted Erika's removal from Worms as a successful rescue mission that had freed the girl from the clutches of a “depraved” mother and protected her from the cruelty of her German classmates. At no point did von Moos mention the persecution of Afro-Germans under the Nazi regime. Von Moos's response to Erika's complaints also reflected her own complicated relationship to National Socialism. She and her husband had initially welcomed the new regime. But during the “church struggle” (Kirchenkampf), i.e., the division within German Protestantism between the extremely pro-Nazi “German Christians” (Deutsche Christen) and the oppositional “Confessing Church” (Bekennende Kirche), the couple sympathized with the latter. Ernst von Moos never joined the Nazi Party or any of its organizations. This did not prevent him from holding important positions in the local administration and war economy during the Third Reich, however. After the war, when Worms became part of the American zone of occupation, the authorities considered von Moos sufficiently “exonerated” to allow him to serve in major public functions.

Connecting Microhistory and Macrohistory: Broader Implications of Erika Diekmann's Biography

Erika Diekmann's story underlines the considerable analytical merits of Tina Campt's concept of diasporic emplacement. Campt suggests that the lack of a more substantial black German community sustained by the collective memory of a shared history of enslavement and prolonged colonial subjection significantly complicated Afro-Germans' relationship to mainstream German society, and especially their ability to maintain a position of distance. Instead, familial and local ties crucially energized black Germans' aspirations to “national subjecthood.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Erika's life illustrates the pivotal role of the local in helping shape Afro-Germans' sense of national belonging, and in effecting fluctuations and reversals in the intensity of Afro-Germans' identification with German culture.Footnote ⁸⁹ During her exile in Palestine, Erika had longed to return to Germany. In her letters from the late 1940s, “Germany” was largely synonymous with Worms. Local ties to Martha von Moos and the Worms deaconesses constituted a major lifeline that gave Erika a sense of social connectedness. As long as these local relationships seemed intact, Erika remained confident that Germany was her “home” and aspired to inclusion in mainstream German society. Yet, she did not return to Worms after the war. Nor did any other German town replace Worms as a local setting where Erika felt socially accepted. Her frustrated attempts to regrow local roots in 1950s West Germany were a central dynamic contributing to Erika's increasing sense of alienation from her native country.

“Family”—and especially the surrogate family represented by Martha von Moos and the deaconesses—initially buttressed Erika's attachment to Worms. “Family” was crucial to Erika's efforts at claiming a home for herself in Germany. Since she did not have contact with her parents and most of her siblings after 1924, Erika created new families of her own: first, the surrogate family of the Worms children's home and Talitha Kumi, and later, the biological family she started with Heinrich Diekmann. The search for a family partly sprang from Erika's particular emotional needs as a person separated at a young age from her birth mother and subjected to repeated experiences of forced social and geographical displacement. At the same time, Erika's active involvement in forging (imagined and real) familial ties to white Germans challenged assumptions that her racial “Otherness” barred her from equal membership in German society.

In the 1950s, Erika's emotional identification with von Moos and the Worms deaconesses cooled—and the needs and well-being of her own nuclear family became a central concern. Yet, even as her relationships with her former mentor and teachers in Worms grew more distant, the Lutheran religious beliefs and gender norms the latter had taught her continued to influence Erika's choices. The large number of children Erika had with Heinrich between 1949 and 1963 (at least seven, two of whom died at birth) suggests that she embraced traditional, religious notions of her own marital and motherly duties. The quick succession of Erika's pregnancies makes it unlikely that the Diekmanns practiced any consistent birth control. This eventually took a heavy toll on Erika's health, in fact: she died in childbirth in 1963, when her youngest surviving child was only fifteen months old. Despite some of the deprivations and risks motherhood imposed on Erika, her decision to have a large family with Heinrich was politically ambiguous: while it conformed to certain conservative prescriptions for female gender roles, it simultaneously challenged racialist inhibitions against mixed marriages and the inclusion of racial “Others” into mainstream white society. In this way, Erika's life attests to the pertinence of Eve Rosenhaft's observation that practices of métissage (interracial sexual relations and mixed marriages) can represent important strategies of diasporic emplacement.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the German context, the absence of a more substantial and continuous black German community may have enhanced further the significance of métissage in Afro-Germans' efforts to claim Germany as their rightful home and defy racial discrimination.

Erika's biography highlights the importance of religion in negotiating the changeable and often ambivalent relationship between experiences of forced and voluntary transnational migration, on the one hand, and processes of diasporic emplacement, on the other. For Erika, religious approaches to family and motherhood initially represented key strategies of claiming a legitimate place for herself in German society. Adherence to Lutheran religious beliefs and practices, as well as conformity with conservative Protestant notions of social hierarchy and moral conduct, were the preconditions for obtaining the affections of Martha von Moos and the deaconesses. Erika's letters suggest that Protestantism represented a major element in many of her most important social relationships, and that it significantly shaped her own standards of proper behavior. Religion's role in Erika's life was nevertheless ambiguous. It allowed her to imagine families accepting her despite her racial “difference.” At the same time, Erika was critical of the harshness and disciplinary nature of her education in religious schools. The internalization of conservative Protestant beliefs about sexual propriety and women's motherly duties potentially estranged Erika even further from her birth mother.

Until the 1950s, Lutheranism crucially grounded Erika's sense of identification with German culture and nation. As Erika grew progressively disillusioned with everyday life in West Germany, the ties between her religious beliefs and her sense of attachment to her native country started to weaken significantly. She simultaneously became more vocal in her criticism of German authority figures—not stopping at Martha von Moos and the deaconesses. Erika grew increasingly aware of the ways in which the needs of her own nuclear family conflicted with bureaucratic inertia and an unfair distribution of resources. Under these changed conditions, religious beliefs and connections took on a new significance: from being central elements of Erika's sense of local and national “rootedness,” they turned into important facilitators of voluntary geographical mobility. In 1957, financial support from the American Lutheran Church made it possible for the Diekmann family to emigrate to the United States.

Erika's frustrated efforts at diasporic home-making likely had a significant influence on her and Heinrich's decision to leave Germany. This raises an important question, however—namely, what Erika's correspondence with Martha von Moos reveals about the nature and dynamics of German attitudes toward race. To a considerable extent, Erika's story supports prevailing interpretations stressing the continuities of German racism against Africans and Afro-Germans from the colonial period through the post-1945 era.Footnote ⁹¹ Martha von Moos's intransigent defense of her assumption that, because of Erika's African heritage, she had been better off in Palestine—where she lived among “other black little girls like yourself”—highlights the extent to which predominant notions of German national identity remained racialized during the 1950s.Footnote ⁹² Yet, Erika's life also points to certain oft-neglected tensions in German racial discourse—especially to the ways in which religion and religiously inflected nationalism could function to complicate the racial “Othering” of Afro-Germans by dominant groups in German society.

A number of historians have argued that the 1920s debates about the biracial “Rhineland bastards” radicalized earlier colonial discourses about the alleged dangers of “racial mixing,” and thus played a crucial role in paving the way for the compulsory sterilization of close to four hundred Afro-German Besatzungskinder during the Third Reich.Footnote ⁹³ During the late Weimar Republic, individual German officials proposed forcefully sterilizing all Afro-German Rhenish children, or, alternatively, systematically exiling them to Africa or Asia.Footnote ⁹⁴ Such plans failed before 1933 because of resistance by many parents, as well as sizeable opposition to a national sterilization law.Footnote ⁹⁵ Ernst and Martha von Moos's religious paternalism, which sought to protect Erika against her biological mother's alleged genetic predisposition toward “social deviancy,” clearly contained racialist components. At the same time, the emphasis that the von Moos’s and the deaconesses placed on Erika's education in preparing her for the future roles of wife and mother differed in significant respects from the goals of Nazi racial policy. The forced sterilization of the biracial “Rhineland bastards” during the Third Reich irrevocably deprived the affected Afro-German children of the choice of having children themselves. Despite their worries over the potential eugenic and moral dangers of “racial mixing,” Martha and Ernst von Moos never seem to have contemplated subjecting Erika to compulsory sterilization.

What place does the Nazi regime occupy, then, in the history of modern German racism? The way religion inflected Martha von Moos's perception of Erika's racial “Otherness” offers some clues. To an important extent, Ernst and Martha von Moos shared exclusionary notions of national identity and belonging, according to which Erika's biracial parentage made it impossible for her to be truly German. Simultaneously, however, the couple's religious paternalism led them to inculcate in Erika Lutheran beliefs and norms central to Protestant German culture. Tensions in the von Moos's attitude toward Erika thus add nuance to our sense of the complexities of the relationship between race and notions of national belonging in early twentieth-century Germany.

Erika's exile in Palestine undoubtedly brought great hardships for her. It is one of the bitter ironies of Erika's story that the harsh experience of banishment to a foreign country simultaneously became a means of protecting her bodily integrity. Though Martha and Ernst von Moos were instrumental in removing Erika from Germany, they continued to take a certain interest in her life. After sending Erika to Jerusalem, assurances that the girl was receiving a proper Protestant upbringing remained important to the couple. In the course of the 1930s, Bertha Harz repeatedly reported to Ernst von Moos about Erika's progress at Talitha Kumi.Footnote ⁹⁶ During the 1950s, Martha von Moos corresponded with Erika and sent blankets, children's clothes, and money to Schwege. She solicited help from the wife of Dinklage's pastor to ascertain that Erika was “in good hands” and fulfilling her motherly duties in a way that “honors her good education by the Sisters here and the Kaiserswerth deaconesses.”Footnote ⁹⁷ The baroness agreed to be the godmother of Erika and Heinrich's son, a decision that established an important bond of patronage between her and Erika's family. Von Moos's inquiries about the morally upright nature of Erika's conduct suggest that, in her eyes, accepting the role of godmother potentially conferred upon Erika and her relations the status of respectable and worthy members of society. The relationship between the two women was always profoundly asymmetrical, yet Martha von Moos felt a sense of obligation toward Erika—one significantly shaped by her conviction of her own superior social status and Christian mission. Paradoxically, the von Moos's were eager to remove Erika from Germany because her presence offended their nationalist sensibilities—after all, Erika's Franco-German parentage served as a reminder of Germany's humiliating defeat by its “archenemy.” Yet, they imparted to her conservative Protestant beliefs and social norms that were fundamental to their own conception of what constituted “Germanness,” a decision that arguably hindered a fully consistent attempt to excise Erika from the German nation.

The tensions in Ernst and Martha von Moos's relation to Erika also point to the complicated ways in which relations among rival European countries and the entangled history of European colonialisms contributed to the formation of, and changes in, German discourses about race. During the height of the “black horror” campaign in 1920–1921, concern about the biracial Besatzungskinder stood at the center of nationalist anxieties over Germany's perceived “victimization” by the Versailles Treaty and its most adamant supporter, France. The vast majority of out-of-wedlock Rhenish children by Allied soldiers were white, yet this group received considerably less public attention.Footnote ⁹⁸ Intense racialist fears coincided with a moment of profound economic and political crisis, at a time when Germany was a pariah in the international community. There were significant shifts in public discourse nine years later following Franco-German rapprochement.Footnote ⁹⁹ On the eve of the departure of the last Allied troops from the Rhineland, the “Rhineland bastards” once again made headlines. This time, however, the term referred to all out-of-wedlock Rhenish children fathered by Allied soldiers, and the discussion focused on demands for a reduction in reparations and for Allied soldiers to pay child support—not primarily on the specter of “racial pollution.” Racism against Africans and Afro-Germans clearly did not disappear in 1930. Erika Diekmann's biography attests to its continuing baleful influence. Rather, the fluctuations in Weimar-era debates over the “Rhineland bastards” show that German attitudes toward race in the 1920s were neither homogenous nor static, and, moreover, that we can gain much by analyzing them within broader international and transnational contexts.

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Erika's hopes that Germany would offer a home where she and her family could thrive were disappointed. Did she fare better in the United States? The fragmentary information obtainable from death certificates and funeral announcements makes it plausible that Erika and Heinrich joined America's working class. Heinrich worked as a press operator in a factory that produced office furniture. Erika's death certificate listed her occupation as “housewife” and her race as “Negro.” She had no social security number. Neither Erika nor Heinrich obtained American citizenship. When the Diekmanns arrived in the United States in 1957, the civil rights struggle was still in its early stages, and racial violence against African Americans was endemic in the South. For a mixed couple like Erika and Heinrich, conditions must have been difficult. In Kentucky, where the Diekmanns eventually settled down, interracial marriage remained technically illegal until the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ A family tree posted in recent years on ancestry.com lists Erika's country of birth as “India.”