Review: Tina Campt: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich.

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:

In Other Germans, Tina Campt offers a significant and timely contribution to German Studies, Holocaust scholarship, and research into the function of memory within a greater historical and cultural context. In the author's own words, her work "examines the historical discourses that preceded and enabled the emergence of a Black German subject"; further, she "analyzes how the processes of racial and gender formation designed by National Socialism to purge non-Aryans from the landscape of German society contributed in paradoxical ways to the production of some of the subjects it sought to expunge" (2). In order to set herself apart from other research into Germany's National Socialist past, Campt writes that, "this work examines the generative effects of this totalitarian government and the processes of racialization and gendering that constituted its fundamental organizing techniques and practices" (1-2). Thus, Campt begins to make the case for the value of her scholarship, observing that the era of National Socialist control is most often considered only or at least primarily for its "destructive capacity" (1-2).