Part-2 Destined to Witness:
Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany
By Hans Massaquoi
White Germans he encountered told him his brown skin and little curly afro were beautiful. And the house was constantly filled with illustrious black guests from all over the world: Jomo Kenyatta, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, Jack Johnson and scholar Alain Locke. All, at one time or another, enjoyed the hospitality of the Liberian household in the upscale Rotherbaum district of Hamburg.
When Hans' grandfather and extended family are recalled to Liberia, though, his delicate health prompts doctors to advise mother to keep him behind in Germany. So they remain in Hamburg, moving to a working-class neighbourhood, where almost immediately Massaquoi faces racism for the first time.
Although he faces social exclusion, hostility and racist taunts at school, Massaquoi is somehow shielded by his mother's love and support, and that of some of his working-class white German neighbors. It is a rich community of characters whose humanity and foibles Massaquoi never loses sight of. Gradually, however, we watch as he temporarily adopts – much to the chagrin of his mother – the prejudices in abundance around him. He comes to believe, for instance, that Gypsies are "dangerous people, who steal children, especially blond-haired children," and because he is taught it in school, he begins to believe the propaganda that Jews are the most despicable people in the world.
He admires the shiny new uniforms of the Nazis soldiers as Hitler comes to power, and he so longs to join the Hitler youth that he asks his aunt to sew a swastika on his shirt. "Barely seven, I, of all people, became an unabashed proponent of the Nazis simply because they put on the best show with the best-looking uniforms, best-sounding marching bands and best-drilled marching columns, all of which appealed to my budding sense of masculinity. The communists or Kommune, as well as the Social Democrats, or Sozis by contrast,often looked ragged and undisciplined to me during their demonstrations, having chosen to project an exaggerated proletarian image rather than one of Prussian militarism."
Even though his mother loses her job because
she has a black child and Germany becomes increasingly perilous for
Massaquoi, it is awhile before he fully awakens to his particular
predicament. "Like everyone around me," recalls Massaquoi, "I cheered the
man whose every waking hour was dedicated to the destruction of inferior non
Aryan people like myself, the same man who only a few years later would lead
his own nation to the greatest catastrophe in its long
history and bring the world to the brink of destruction." Finally, though,
he begins to see what is happening. In addition to fighting the spreading
bigotry, Hans must overcome a crippling self-hatred. Although he is a good
fighter, winning confrontations through wit and fist, he describes the
difficulty in confronting a regime that legally deemed him inferior. One
method of psychic survival was reading. "Consequently – and in spite of the
Nazi's restrictive, one-dimensional totalitarianism – I became part of a
vast multifaceted and multicoloured world long before I was able to
physically escape the mental prison that was Nazi Germany. If it had been
Dr. Goebbels's intention to keep our young minds nationalistically inward
directed, he had missed the boat as far as I was concerned. The genie of
knowledge in the form of dozens of dog- eared books was out of the bottle
and filled my mind with wondrous images that made me yearn for adventures
far beyond the narrow boundaries of Germany."
After the war Massaquoi and his mother face immense hardship amid the devastation wreaked by allied bombing. In the second part of the book Massaquoi meets real black American GIs, learns English and joins a jazz band. He leaves Germany for Liberia in 1948, reunited with his father and the rest of his long-lost family, but also noticing with discomfort the inhumanity of the Americo-Liberian regime towards the indigenous peoples. His journey continued; in the early 1950s he immigrated to segregated America – showing that no one place has a monopoly on racism – where he served in the US Army before becoming a journalist and, eventually, managing editor of Ebony. Massaquoi now lives in New Orleans with his wife and two sons.
First published: March 5, 2001
