 "Photo: N/A")
Last Thursday, Vassar Associate Professor of History Maria Höhn and Heidelberg University Professor of American Studies Martin Klimke were focused on hanging paintings in the Palmer Gallery when an unexpected package arrived. It was a 1972 painting by East German artist Susanne Kandt-Horn arriving at Vassar on loan from a children’s hospital in Berlin named, surprisingly, after Martin Luther King, Jr.
To those in the know, the hospital’s namesake is not actually a surprising choice at all. In 1964, King gave a sermon at Saint Mary’s Church in East Berlin, and he has been a highly revered figure in Germany ever since, as Saint Mary’s representative Roland Stolte explained.
Stolte took a moment to admire the painting with Klimke before Höhn called everyone to the center of the gallery to look at another treasure. She unveiled the guest book from Saint Sophia, another Berlin church where King spoke in the 1960s. She pointed out his signature halfway down the page. “We didn’t think we would get this,” Klimke said. “It’s really wonderful.”
King’s visit to East Berlin was the focus of last Thursday’s panel discussion entitled “Tracing an Untold History: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Visit to Cold War Berlin in 1964,” which was chaired by Höhn and Klimke and featured American and German scholars.
Thursday was the first day of a five-day international conference, “African American Civil Rights and Germany in the 20th Century,” organized by Vassar and the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. The conference also featured a lecture by renowned civil rights activist Angela Davis—currently Professor Emerita of History of Consiousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz—on her experiences with the civil rights movement in Germany entitled “Between Critical Theory and Civil Rights: A Sixties’ Journey from Boston to Frankfurt to San Diego.” Davis studied in Frankfurt between receiving her undergraduate degree and Brandeis University and her master’s at the University of California, San Diego, and in Frankfurt she was involved in radical student actions. Upon returning to the United States, Davis became heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement.
The conference accompanied a month-long exhibit in Main Building’s Palmer Gallery featuring photographs of American GIs in Germany. (Check out www.miscellanynews.com for additional coverage.) According to Stolte, a discussion of King’s sermon was a perfect way to begin the conference because the sermon left a lasting impact on East Berliners and set the stage for the decades of change that would follow in Cold War Germany. “The sermon gave [East Berliners] confidence and hope” at a time that was very difficult for East Berlin, said Stolte. “It was very impressive,” he added. “[East Berliners] never forgot it in their lives.”
The conference’s key organizers, Höhn and Klimke, echoed this sentiment. Höhn remarked that during and after World War II, the United States and Germany’s histories became “intricately intertwined” in a way that is often overlooked in U.S. scholarship. “Why don’t we know anything about this?” she asked. “Why don’t we know about the history of our soldiers there?”
Questions like these led Höhn to begin research on the relationship between American GIs and Germans during World War II as part of her 2002 dissertation. In many ways, she said, her research “opened up a new field of inquiry” into this particular chapter on race relations. While attending a conference in Heidelberg, Germany, she met Klimke and “immediately realized we had so much
in common.” In addition to his work at Heidelberg University, Klimke works out of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. The focus of Klimke’s research at the Institute has been on the impact of black political activism on student organization in both East and West Germany.
Whereas Höhn’s work focuses on the “huge transfer of people” from the United States to Germany in the 1940s, Klimke has investigated the impact those people left on Germany, particularly how the Black Power movement influenced organizers in East Berlin after World War II. He wondered, “What makes German students interested in the BlackPanthers?” and used that as a starting point for his research.
According to Klimke, East Berliners were able to point to the inequality they faced under Soviet rule in East Germany and compare it to the injustices committed against black Americans. Despite their differences, East Berlin activists were able to eke out an unlikely solidarity with the Black Panthers. The movements were “highly politicized in both contexts,” Klimke said. The Black Panthers became “role models as revolutionaries [for East Berliners].”
Höhn added that German students were not a repressed minority like black Americans, and that the struggle for Germans was a more “existential one,” particularly against old-world colonial powers. “For many [East Germans] it wasn’t an East-West thing,” she said, “inequality remained a global issue.”
She also pointed out that the Black Panthers benefited from the similarities they were able to draw between East Germany and the United States. By comparing the two countries, said Höhn, the Black Panthers were able to attack the credibility of the so-called “free world.”
“I wish someone would tell these stories,” said Höhn.
In addition to last weekend’s conference, Höhn and Klimke are finishing work on a website that they envision as a “depository for oral histories,” as a way to tell these stories. (Available at http://www.aacvr-germany.org). They hope the relationship between black Americans and Germans can become an established part of history curricula in both Germany and the United States.
The formation of the website and the conference have been particularly pleasurable experiences for both Klimke and Höhn for reasons aside from the obvious. Höhn says she spends as much time in Germany as possible—“I go every year”—and even took two full sabbatical years to study there, but it’s still easy to imagine that she racked up a fairly large phone bill in planning for last weekend’s conference. The conference was the product of almost five years of international correspondence, but Klimke and Höhn had no complaints about the logistics of working with another researcher overseas.
In concert with the internationalism of the project, Höhn sees a local application for her work. She has been working with Poughkeepsie and Arlington High Schools to incorporate some aspects of the conference and the digital archive into the curricula there. “We see [the archive] as a democratic tool,” said Höhn, and she is hopeful will find its way to a broader audience.
Vassar students have gotten involved with Klimke and Höhn’s project as well. Madeleine Joyce ’10 has contributed to the digital archive by collecting oral histories from family, friends and neighbors. “I knew [Höhn] was collecting research and stories of African American soldiers who were stationed in Germany, so when I randomly found out that my neighbor had been in Germany in the ’50s, I told [Höhn], who wanted it up on the website,” wrote Joyce in an e-mailed statement. “I edited the footage I took of [my neighbor] into a little oral history documentary, and it’s up on the digital archive now.”
Daniel Gilberg ’10 has also been working with Höhn, who is his thesis advisor and whose research interests influence his own research. Under Höhn’s direction, Gilberg is conducting research on black American athletes at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. “I’m looking at athletic competition and how it tested Hitler’s racial ideologies,” said Gilberg, adding, “and how it proved him wrong.”
Höhn has been an invaluable source of guidance for Gilberg, who said the topic came in large part from her research on black Americans in Germany. “It was sort of her idea,” he said, “and I expanded upon it.” He added, “The number of sources she draws upon is unfathomable.” Last weekend’s conference helped Gilberg place his thesis topic in a larger context. For Gilberg, this topic is particularly interesting because he sees the 1936 Olympics as a “clash of racial and national ideologies” similar to the one that took place in post-war Germany and the United States.
Whether you call it a “clash” or a sharing of ideologies, it seems fitting that a conference documenting and discussing the American-German encounter in the 20th century should come from such an international team of researchers. “It has been a partnership that transcends countries and academic levels,” said Höhn. The exhibit African American Civil Rights and Germany in the 20th Century will be open for public viewing at the Palmer Gallery until Oct. 29.
Be the first to comment on this article!