White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture

Abstract

What’s so rebellious about black culture? Over the course of the 20 th century, numerous works of German literature, film, art, and music have engaged with or borrowed aspects of African-American culture. Whether these kinds of engagement constitute a kind of admiration—the imitation-as-flattery claim—or form part of the long legacy of European colonialism, remains a matter of some debate in German Studies. Priscilla Layne notes in the introduction to White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture that her book “intervenes in the largely positive discussion of the white German valorization of black popular culture” to argue that this trend represents “a selfish attempt to resolve postwar guilt over the Holocaust” (2). By covering six decades from the immediate postwar era through the early 21 st century, Layne is able to investigate changing German attitudes toward black culture via works of literature, film, music, and autobiography. The first three chapters address white German aesthetic interpretations and political orientations toward African Americans or Africans in Germany, whereas the final two chapters turn to the aesthetic production and personal narratives of a several black German artists in consideration of a fuller perspective on the cultural exchange across lines of racial identification in Germany. Layne’s book attempts to parse the distinction between appreciation and cultural appropriation, taking works in which white German men identify themselves as “rebels,” as outsiders to mainstream German culture—and dominant conceptions of white German masculinity—through an affiliation or even outright identification with Africans, African Americans, or Afro-Germans. In these works, black culture is positioned as inherently “rebellious” and understood as always already counter-cultural in Germany despite the presence of black people in Germany since at least the 19 th century, when the German Empire controlled large swaths of territory in then-German East Africa, West Africa, and Southwest Africa. At the same time, the reception of African-American culture in Germany—beginning, appropriately enough, with the