“Being German and Black” to this is the impressive life story of Theodor Michael, who was born in Berlin in 1925 as the son of a Cameroonian and a German.
“When his father came to Germany, Cameroon was still a German protectorate, a colony. Africans were received quite kindly in Germany. After World War I, the colonies were lost and the climate became much less friendly. It was felt that the blacks should not take jobs away from the Germans. But in the very popular Völkerschauen they were still accommodated, the ‘aliens of the species’ with the ‘negroid touch’. Even during the Nazi era they were used as extras in the very popular colonial films. But then they ended up in concentration camps or forced labor camps. That’s what happened to Theodor Michael: after his parents died, he eked out a living as a bellhop, porter and extra until he was interned in a forced labor camp in 1943, at the age of 18.” Publisher description
Theodor Wonja Michael 2015: Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu. Memoirs of an Afro-German. Munich: DTV.
If you don’t have a bookstore worth supporting near you, you can also buy the book from the alternative non-profit online bookstore links-lesen.de, which supports political projects with the profits. The link to the book is: http: //www.links-lesen.de/article/978-3-423-34857-7