A Variation on the Violence of War

This talk suggests that the children fathered by African American soldiers and white European women during the US occupation of Germany after the Second World War inherited a variant of wartime violence through their paternal illegitimacy, maternal abandonment, and the social exclusion that resulted from their racial mixture.

Through the story of one Black German adoptee it considers how the violence of war reverberates for generations and how war and its aftermath complicate racial and national identities.