| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Heide Fehrenbach. Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 263. $29.95.
This thoughtful and carefully researched book represents some of the best scholarship being done on postwar Germany today. Taking as her topic the "brown babies" fathered by American GIs, Heide Fehrenbach explores the broader cultural themes of sexuality and national identity that inform her subject.	1
As the subtitle indicates, this book is not a history of all Africans in Germany but only of those few thousand fathered by black American GIs in West Germany, mostly in the years 1945 to 1960. These were not the only blacks in West Germany—students, diplomats, and entertainers were among the others—but they were the largest group until the African political refugees of the 1970s and 1980s arrived. The story of blacks in East Germany is an entirely different one; they were largely African university students or, later, guest workers from Mozambique.	2
Fehrenbach takes as her focus the years from 1945 to about 1960 in West Germany. For her this is a formative period for later attitudes. As Fehrenbach writes, in these years race changed from something associated first and foremost with Jews to something related to blacks. Fehrenbach points out the irony of the U.S. arriving to bring democracy and freedom using a military that was only integrated in 1948. She notes, "the American occupation and democratization of Germany coincided with a postwar push by African Americans and white liberals at home to democratize American society and its institutions" (p. 3), including the army.	. . .

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