In 2021, two Black victims of the Nazi regime were finally honored with so-called STOLPERSTEINE -- (lit. “stumbling stones or blocks”) – pioneered by German artist Gunter Demnig in Berlin. With concrete cubes bearing the names of persecuted residents in front of their homes, victims are being remembered in Berlin and other German cities.
What was life like as a Black woman or man in Nazi Germany? Why did it take more than 75 years to honor Black victims of the Nazi regime? What are the many forms of racism in today’s Western societies, triggering a renewed global Black Lives Matter movement in 2020?
This talk featured Prof. Robbie Aitken, historian of Black Europe, Sheffield Hallam University, who led the effort to place the Stolpersteine for Martha Ndumbe and Ferdinand James Allen; Dr. Tiffany Florvil, Associate Professor of 20th Century European Women’s and Gender History at the University of New Mexico; and Ms. Alice Hasters, journalist, blogger, and author who identifies as a Black German and publishes about her experience in today’s society. Moderated by Dr. Nicholas Boston, sociologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at the City University of New York, Lehman College.
Professor Robbie Aitken is an Historian of Black Europe and Empire at Sheffield Hallam University. He has written widely on the development of a Black community in Germany from the 1880s up to 1945. His publications include Black Germany, the Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884-1960, written with Eve Rosenhaft. Currently he is working on the Black experience of Nazi Germany as well as post-war compensation claims made by Black victims of the Holocaust. He has worked with a wide range of non-academic audiences such as schools, museums, artists, film directors, and community groups, and has been involved in several public exhibition and memorial projects in Berlin as well as developing and staging his own travelling exhibition ‘Black Germany’, which has been shown in the UK, Germany, and Cameroon.
Tiffany N. Florvil is an Associate Professor of 20th-century European Women’s and Gender History at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in the histories of post-1945 Europe, the African diaspora, Black internationalism, as well as gender and sexuality. She has published pieces in the Journal of Civil and Human Rights, APuZ, and The German Quarterly. Florvil has also coedited the volume, Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions and Histories (2018), as well as published chapters in Gendering Post-1945 German History (2019) and To Turn this Whole World Over (2019). Her manuscript, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (University of Illinois Press 2020), offers the first full-length study of the history of the Black German movement of the 1980s to the 2000s. The book won the Waterloo Centre for German Studies First Book Prize in 2021. It also received an Honorable mention from the DAAD/GSA Book Prize in Literature and Cultural Studies at the German Studies Association and was a Finalist for the ASWAD Outstanding First Book Prize. She is on the Board of the Journal of Women’s History, on the Advisory Board for the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA), and on the Editorial Board for Central European History. She is also the founder and an editor of the “Imagining Black Europe” book series at Peter Lang Press.
Alice Hasters is an author and journalist. In 2019, her book, Was weiße Menschen nicht über Rassismus hören wollen, aber wissen sollten (“What White People Don’t Want to Hear about Racism”), was published, becoming a bestseller in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. She is co-host of the monthly podcast Feuer & Brot, and works for public radio and television, such as Deutschlandfunk, Tagesschau and Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg.
Nicholas Boston, Ph.D., is associate professor of journalism and media studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York, and visiting professor of communications at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. His research is at the intersection of digital media, migration, and identity. He holds a doctorate in sociology from Cambridge University, and a master’s from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He is the recipient of a 2016 DAAD visiting professorship at the Freie Universität in Berlin, where he taught in the Institute for Media and Communication Studies. He has also been a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, a 2006 recipient of the McCloy Fellowship in Art to Berlin from the American Council on Germany, and Michaelmas Visiting Scholar in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge, where he is a member of the advisory board of the LGBTQ+ Programme.
This event was presented by 1014, the American Council on Germany, the German General Consulate New York, the School of Arts and Humanities, Lehman College (CUNY), the Goethe Institut Los Angeles, Deutsches Haus at New York University, The Belle Zeller Scholarship Fund, the German Fulbright Alumni Association, The Women's Foreign Policy Group, The CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, the US Fulbright Association, and the European Union Studies Center (CUNY Graduate Center).