Other Germans

"Tina M. Campt's Other Germans tells the story Germany's Black Citizens and the complicated ways in which members of this population managed to survive Germany's most painful and perplexing epoch, the Third Reich. Campt focuses her path-breaking study of the Holocaust primarily on race, rather than anti-Semitism." "By centering on Germany's Black community rather than its Jewish population, Campt is able to examine a very different question than many other studies of Nazi Germany: What happens when we view the Holocaust not through the history of anti-Semitism but through the ideology of racial purity that fueled the regime's fundamental organization? From this vantage point, the book reveals how, in the service of "racial purity," the regime produced some of the very subjects it ultimately sought to destroy." "As background for her study, Campt draws on the memories of two Black Germans whose lives and identities were shaped in profound ways by the regime. Her interdisciplinary work examines this powerful historical material by bringing together social history, feminist theory, and African-American diaspora studies with an ethnographic approach. Other Germans is essential reading in the emerging study of what it meant to be Black and German in a society that viewed anyone with non-German blood as racially impure at best."—Jacket.