Black German

Book Launch: Black German

5:00pm - 7:00pm / Tuesday 2nd May 2017 / Venue: Leggate Theatre Victoria Gallery & Museum
Type: Other / Category: Department
  • Suitable for: Anybody interested in the topic, including university staff and students and members of the public.
  • Admission: Admission is free please visit Eventbrite to register.
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Join us for the launch of Black German, the first English translation of Theodor Michael's bestselling memoir by Eve Rosenhaft.

Reading from the book will be Tayo Aluko – Nigerian-born, Liverpool-based award winning playwright and singer.

Theodor Michael is among the few surviving members of the first generation of ‘Afro-Germans’: Born in Germany in 1925 to a Cameroonian father and a German mother, he grew up in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic. As a child and teenager he worked in circuses and films and experienced the tightening knot of racial discrimination under the Nazis in the years before the Second World War. He survived the war as a forced labourer, founding a family and making a career as a journalist and actor in post-war West Germany. Since the 1980s he has become an important spokesman for the black German consciousness movement, acting as a human link between the first black German community of the inter-war period, the pan-Africanism of the 1950s and 1960s, and new generations of Germans of African descent. Theodor Michael's life story is a classic account of coming to consciousness of a man who understands himself as both black and German; accordingly, it illuminates key aspects of modern German social history as well as of the post-war history of the African diaspora.

View the full programme and register for the event here.