Historian Timothy L. Schroer’s Recasting Race after World War II explores the renegotiation of race by Germans and African American Gls in post-World War II Germany. Schroer dissects the ways in which notions of blackness and whiteness became especially problematic in interactions between Germans and American soldiers serving as part of the victorious occupying army at the end of the war.
The segregation of U.S. Army forces fed a growing debate in America about whether a Jim Crow army could truly be a democratizing force in postwar Germany. Schroer follows the evolution of that debate and examines the ways in which postwar conditions necessitated reexamination of race relations. He reveals how anxiety about interracial relationships between African American men and German women united white American soldiers and the German populace, and he traces the importation and influence of African American jazz music in Germany, illuminating the subtle ways in which occupied Germany represented a crucible in which to recast the meaning of race in a post-Holocaust world.
Recasting Race after World War II will appeal to historians and scholars of American, African American, and German studies.
TIMOTHY L. SCHROER is an assistant professor in the History Department of the University of West Georgia.
Author(s): Timothy L. Schroer
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Year: 2007
Language: English
Commentary: scantailor optimized
Pages: 320
City: Boulder
Tags: jazz;nazi germany;world war II;racism
Recasting Race AFTER WORLD WAR II
Contents
List of Illustrations
Louis E. Martin during a European tour by members of the African American press in 1948
Marcus Ray addresses an audience in Munich during his November 1946 tour
Marcus Ray and Brigadier General Leroy Watson investigate conditions at the Talley Ho service club for African American soldiers in Nuremberg during Ray’s November 1946 tour
Otto Ohlendorf stands to hear the death sentence imposed on him at Nuremberg for crimes committed during World War II
Photograph of an African American GI and a German woman from the Baltimore Afro-American, November 9, 1946
The Jazz Pirates, a band composed of members of the 427th Army Band, in rehearsal in January 1948
Herr Henken of the Frankfurt Symphony Orchestra instructs William Gibbs of the 427th Army Band as Larry Thomas looks on in Frankfurt, Germany, January 1948
Jam session including Germans and African American GIs
Walter White pictured in the U.S. Information Center at Kitzingen, Germany, during his 1948 visit
Acknowledgments
A Note on Translation
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1: Germans, Blacks, and Race through 1945
CHAPTER 2: Blackness and German Whiteness through American Eyes
CHAPTER 3: “Bad Girls” and “Boys Who Never Had It So Good”: Sex and Race in American-Occupied Germany
CHAPTER 4: Frauleins and Black GIs: Race, Sex, and Power
CHAPTER 5: Black Music and German Culture
CONCLUSION
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
