The Afro-American sociologist and activist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) formulated one of his most prominent sentences as a prognosis at the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”. The main problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line, i.e. the racist demarcation between skin colors.
Three and a half decades later, Du Bois embarked on a world tour. First up was Europe – England, France, Belgium. Before continuing on to the Soviet Union, China, Japan and finally back to the USA via Hawaii, Du Bois made an extended stopover in Germany. He stayed in the Nazi Reich for a total of five months. He wrote about his impressions and sent them overseas, where they were read as a weekly column in one of the best-selling African-American newspapers of the time, the Pittsburg Courier.
A good 20 of these travelogues, primarily those in which Du Bois recorded his observations on the Third Reich, are now available in book form in German. At first glance, the English title “Along The Color Line”, which takes up Du Bois’ famous dictum, does not seem particularly appropriate. Because, of all things, in that “problem of the twentieth century” that took shape in Germany in 1936, racism played a decisive role, but not the color line. Six million Jews were not murdered because of the color of their skin.
Obviously, the title had a different reading in mind. If one follows the careful afterword by the editor Oliver Lubrich, “Along The Color Line” is not least about naming the perspective from which Du Bois perceived the European, especially the German conditions at that time. So far, so plausible. Because it is unmistakable how much he looks at socio-political, sporting, cultural and scientific events abroad in his texts as a committed Afro-American intellectual and pioneer of the civil rights movement. It is also striking that Du Bois’ Hitler Germany report is divided into two parts.
The first part includes those columns that were published during his stay in Germany in the USA: It is about the Olympic Games in Berlin, with which the Third Reich wanted to polish its image before the eyes of the world after the Nuremberg Race Laws were enacted the previous year . But Du Bois concentrates on the exceptional Afro-American athletes like Jesse Owens and Jimmy LuValle, who carried off the image victory for black America with their gold medals.
Du Bois also sees potential for black empowerment in German high culture, even in that which the Nazis had assimilated. Richard Wagner, for example, whose life and work Du Bois dealt with during his visit to Bayreuth, is recommended as an example for imitation with his biography of a social climber (he was the son of a lowly civil servant and a baker’s daughter). The in-house vocational training at the Siemens works in Berlin is meticulously examined. Du Bois visits museums and ponders the virtues of Bavarian beer.
As witty and knowledgeable – Du Bois was already familiar with the country and the language from previous visits to Germany – the detailed descriptions are as blurred is the overall picture that emerges of life under the dictatorship. Criticism of the regime is voiced cautiously at best. Du Bois does not say a single word about the situation of the Jews.
While reading, the question inevitably arises as to whether the color line, in addition to the author’s visual axis, also describes the limit of his perception, a barrier that makes him insensitive to the concerns of minorities to which he himself does not belong.
The fact that this question can be answered in the negative becomes clear no later than in the article that appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier on December 5, 1936. Du Bois had already left Germany at the time of publication and no longer had to fear any consequences. In the following columns, too, he writes openly and provides complex analyzes of the contemporary historical, mentality-historical and, last but not least, technical (radio as a propaganda instrument) aspects of National Socialism.
And while Du Bois still insists that in Germany of all places there was no significant hostility, especially none that would come close to the experiences of racism in the USA, he emphasizes the qualitative peculiarity and the extent of state-controlled anti-Semitism in Germany: a “vengeful cruelty and public disparagement beyond anything I have ever witnessed”. This statement is also made along the color line. In the case of Du Bois, it is the specific observer position of someone who compares without equating.
William E.B. DuBois: “Along the Color Line”. A journey through Germany 1936. Edited by Oliver Lubrich. Translated from the English by Johanna von Koppenfels. C. H. Beck, 176 pages, 20 euros