Blackness in Interwar Germany: Jazz, Race and the Making of the Third Reich

The first comprehensive account of Blackness in Germany, spanning the late Empire, the Roaring Twenties and the aftermath of World War Two.Germany’s past in relation to Blackness is often dismissed as peripheral: its colonial enterprise lasted merely three decades, and, until the end of World War Two, the Black population in Germany was small.Yet debates about Blackness, especially in the 1920s, were part of wider discussions in which social and political problems were articulated through race-problems the Nazis later claimed to have answers for.Through a deep exploration of Germany’s imperial experiences in Africa, Stefan Ihrig reveals that ideas about Blackness played a significant role in German history, even when there were few Black people in Germany or, as under Hitler, Africa largely fell outside the regime’s predatory gaze.He examines the Weimar period, when Blackness served as a symbol-and to some extent the embodiment-of the Jazz Age. And he analyses how anxieties about racia