When Jim Crow Came To The German Heimat Analysis

In her article, entitled “When Jim Crow Came to the German Heimat,” Maria Hohn discusses the circumstances and natures of the interactions between American GIs and the occupied German people in the 1950s. She focuses on the influence that American racial prejudice and lingering apprehension from the “Black Horror on the Rhine” made Germans inherently leery of their new black neighbors. As a result of this influx of single, young American men, many children were born to an American man and a German woman, many of which were multiracial, with black GIs as their fathers. Heide Fehrenbach discusses the reception and treatment of both the mothers and the so-called “occupation children” in her article “Of German Mothers and ‘Negermischlingskinder.” Through both of these articles, we can understand how the initially reception and taboo of the black American GIs in Germany translated to the prejudice and mistreatment of their children and the German

Once these relationships resulted in multiracial children, the German government and society was faced with the task of deciding how these children should be received by German society. In her discussion of the perceptions of race in West Germany, Fehrenbach briefly discusses the movie Toxi, which tells the story of an Afro-German girl in West Germany, who was the product of a liaison between a black American and a German woman. These films, Fehrenbach claims, were meant to preach racial tolerance and inclusion in West Germany, with the characters engaging in “a process of critical self-examination on the issue of race and racial bias…in order to adopt a stance of social responsibility towards the child” (Fehrenbach, 173). Seen when Toxi was shown in class, the prejudice towards occupation children was widespread, with even children their own ages seeing them as the