Howard University student Jacob Maldonado examines the photos at the Homestory Deutschland exhibit, detailing the lives of Black Germans in both recent history and antiquity. (Photos by Shantella Y. Sherman)
The photo exhibition “Homestory Deutschland – Black Biographies in Historical and Present Times,” created by the Initiative of Black people in Germany was unveiled at The Gallery Lounge in the Armour J. Blackburn University Center at Howard University, Feb. 3, at a reception that brought together students and a host of Black Germans to share their experiences. Funded by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, the collection of self-portraits gives voice to the complex and varied biographies of Black German women and men over the past three centuries of German history.
“It is important that as we acknowledge Black history month that we understand it from a perspective that Dr. Frances Cress Welsing and Neely Fuller did by examining the aspects of human activity and how Black and brown people inhabited the whole planet and have, in some cases, experienced the same things,” Oduno Abdul Tarik, a local resident who attended the exhibition, told the AFRO. “These types of exhibits document how the war against Blackness has never stopped and it has been global in perspective.”
The exhibit features 27 black and white photographs of Black men and women.
“Lots of people, when they talk about the history of Germany and the history of people who were persecuted, they usually confine it to the Jewish people and homosexuals, but I had never heard about how Black cultural identity was perceived in German history,” Jacob Maldonado, a Howard student, said. “It is so interesting to come here and get firsthand narratives from these peoples’ lives about how it was like to grow up there and how it shaped them into the people they are now. It is amazing that so many ended up rising up against racial adversity and many became activists.”
The biographies of Black men and women who found themselves characterized by stereotypical racist perceptions and struggled to be acknowledged and respected in German society bought to light the ways in which systemic conditions and structures are imprinted upon individual life stories.
“Homestory Deutschland” offers insight into the identity formation of Black and brown people in a space that was at once inviting and welcoming, with periods of extreme hostility and racial violence. And while those on display seemed able to define both their German spaces as their own, they did so while questioning their nationality, their race, and the ambiguity of both.
“Homestory Deutschland – Black Biographies in Historical and Present Times “runs through March 10. For more information go to howard.edu.
