Political, ideological and cultural flows across the Atlantic have often been approached as unidirectional. This is particularly manifest in the historiography of American popular culture and its spread in post-Second World War Europe. By contrast, in the book under review, Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke, echoing an approach that has been recently gaining ground, analyse reciprocal transatlantic transfers. The authors offer a lucid and nuanced account of the entanglements between African Americans, especially GIs, and institutions as well as protest groups in Germany. They demonstrate that the civil rights movement was not confined to the United States: its geographical boundaries were broader, since African American soldiers, who served in US military bases in Germany, functioned as powerful actors in this struggle, acting in cooperation with local activists.
The first four chapters of the book present the encounters of African American soldiers with Germans on various occasions: the First and Second World Wars, the post-1945 partition and partial occupation of Germany by the USA as well as the stationing of US troops in West Germany during the Cold War. Höhn and Klimke offer a comprehensive analysis of various facets of these encounters: they explore the experience of the African American soldiers inside and outside the barracks. The authors stress that the latter, in particular, was an emancipating experience, a ‘breath of freedom’, for black American GIs: racial segregation was not so widespread or institutionalised in the Federal Republic of Germany, while it had been established in the USA in the late nineteenth century through the so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws. Höhn and Klimke also delve into the implications of the Cold War for policymakers in the USA. As they argue, American officials had to confront the contradiction of claiming to eliminate racism in Germany, while sustaining racial discrimination among US citizens. Under pressure from African American activists as well as from Soviet propaganda, which underlined the contradictions of US policy towards racism, many white American liberals turned against segregation laws in this period. It was the point of the ‘nationalization of America's race problem’, as Klimke and Höhn describe it, marked by US President Harry Truman's decision in 1948 to desegregate the military (pp. 63–88). This result, however, was not achieved immediately; the authors indicate that it was actually a long-lasting process, which also involved intense contacts between radical African American GIs in West Germany with West German student activists. The last three chapters of the book illuminate the connective tissue between these groups and demonstrate clearly the ways in which both sides attempted to form a ‘revolutionary alliance’ with an ‘explicit global agenda’ (p. 108). In this vein, the book complements works recently published by other scholars, such as Belinda Davis,Reference Davis1 which clearly demonstrate that cross-border travel and intermixing with non-German students helped West German students develop a feeling of Weltoffenheit, openness to the world.
Höhn and Klimke mention major occasions on which civil rights and Black Power activists interacted with West German militant students, especially the student solidarity activities organised in support of Angela Davis. The latter, an African-American who advocated the Black Power movement and had joined the Communist Party of the USA, was indicted by the American authorities for being an accomplice to a kidnapping and murder. Höhn and Klimke also scrutinise joint publications by radical African American GIs in West Germany and student activists in the early 1970s, such as the Voice of the Lumpen in the greater Frankfurt area. The authors once again nicely probe the response of the establishment, displaying that such common activism, even if short-lived, forced the West German authorities to develop a more liberal attitude towards multicultural encounters in their country. Höhn and Klimke do not limit themselves to West Germany, however. They also enquire into the enthusiastic reception in the German Democratic Republic for Angela Davis and her case. They argue convincingly that the East German regime approached the race relations issue in the USA as a Cold War weapon and tried to delineate an ‘other America’ that struggled against the ‘imperialist policies’ of the US authorities.
As a general remark, the book is well-documented and jargon-free, and is thus capable of reaching a larger audience than specialised historians of the twentieth century. Moreover, it is nicely complemented by a website, www.breathoffreedom.org, which contains additional material, such as relevant images and movies. One concern I would like to raise is that I would have appreciated some more information on the construction of the dominant and subordinated masculinities of the African American GIs. What was, for example, the experience of African American homosexual soldiers? Was the service in West Germany indeed a ‘breath of freedom’ for them? Tackling this issue would also nicely complement the pioneering case-studies that are explored in a couple of other books that Höhn has recently authored or co-edited and which delve into US military history from the perspective of gender and race.Reference Höhn2, Reference Höhn and Moon3 However, this comment is not at all meant to devalue the significance of the work under review. The book certainly contributes to a richer historiography of the Cold War in particular, illuminating more ways in which it was experienced. In a sense, it lends support to the argument put forth by Melvyn P. LefflerReference Leffler4, namely that inserting parameters, such as race, into the examination of the Cold War, helps render its analysis much more complex.
