Jump to content

Ika Hügel-Marshall

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Mogism (talk | contribs) at 22:05, 3 February 2015 (→‎Biography: Cleanup/Typo fixing, typo(s) fixed: pyschological → psychological using AWB). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Ika Hügel-Marshall
Born
Erika Hügel-Marshall

(1947-03-13) 13 March 1947 (age 77)
Bavaria, Germany
NationalityGerman
Occupation(s)Author, civil rights activist
Notable workDaheim unterwegs (Invisible Woman)
Websitewww.ika-huegel-marshall.com

Erika "Ika" Hügel-Marshall (born 13 March 1947) is an Afro-German author and activist. She helped found the Afro-Deutsch movement, and her autobiography, "Daheim unterwegs" (published as Invisible Woman in English), discusses racism in Germany and her search for a family identity. She has been influenced by and praised the work of her friend, American activist Audre Lorde.

Hügel-Marshall was born to a German mother and African-American father, whom she did not meet until she was 46. She experienced severe racism as a child, including being sent to an orphanage. She studied well and helped to modernise a children's home in Frankfurt am Main. In the 1980s, she helped establish the Afro-Deutsch movement and became interested in Lorde's work. Daheim unterwegs was released in 1998 and has been remarked as highlighting issues with German racism. She has since given talks and readings on the autobiography at universities and festivals.

Biography

Erika Hügel-Marshall was born on 13 March 1947,[1] the child of a Bavarian woman and an African-American soldier, Eddie Marshall,[2] who had returned to the US before her birth.[3] Her parents had met just after the end of World War II, after a relaxation of laws forbidding military personnel from interacting with civilians.[1] According to her, black soldiers treated native German children well, distributing food and clothing,[4] but her parents generally met in secret due to racist remarks from others. In November 1946, her father returned to the US after an illness, but her mother was unaware she was pregnant at the time.[5] A year after Ika's birth, her mother married a former officer in Hitler's Sturmabteilung (SA), a paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, and a half-sister was born the following year.[5][3]

Despite her recollections of a pleasant early childhood, Ika was singled out for her skin colour.[3][5] Growing up, she faced constant racism and was referred to by the local community as a Negermischling; Mischling was the term used by the Nazis to designate "mixed" children (with a Jewish and a non-Jewish parent).[6] In 1952, her mother was forced by social services to send her to the orphanage God's Little Cabin Children's Home, despite promises that it was only temporary, for six weeks.[7] At the home, she endured mental and physical abuse from both adults and children. This included being shouted at to stop crying for her mother, being force-fed her own vomit, and undergoing an exorcism due to concerns she would grow up to have an illegitimate mixed-race child like herself.[6]

Hügel-Marshall performed well at school, often finishing top of the class, and taught herself to swim,[8] but was still patronised by the nuns teaching her, who said "we never expected much from you".[9] Teachers expected her to be promiscuous, have children out of wedlock, and become an alcoholic,[6] and thought she would do no better than find a job in childcare.[10] She transferred to a boarding school, studying working with young children, but after two years of training was unable to find employment.[9] She continued to study and achieved a licence in child education and welfare, through which she found work in a children's home in Frankfurt am Main, making substantial changes and modernisations to it during her time there.[9]

In 1965, she attempted to find her father, and wrote him a letter explaining her situation,[1] but the letter was returned marked "insufficient postage".[2] In 1990, she moved to Berlin, hoping there would be the resources to trace her father and that side of her family.[11] In 1993, at the age of 46, she finally met her father and his large American family in Chicago,[12] where she was welcomed and accepted as an equal. Hügel-Marshall later said "here is my journey's end",[13] referring to the meeting, adding "I knew my survival in a white racist society was not for nothing".[9] He died the following year.[9]

Hügel-Marshall has taught gender studies and psychological counseling in Berlin, having gained a degree in social pedagogics.[14] She works as a psychotherapist with an intercultural focus, and is also an artist who specialises in color drawings and wood sculpture.[15]

Activism

In 1986, Hügel-Marshall co-started the Afro-Deutsch movement ADEFRA in Munich,[16] which used literature and the media to call attention to the status of Afro-Germans as "statistically invisible and yet uncomfortably conspicious."[17] She and other German-born, German-speaking people with African ancestry were commonly not accepted as German because of their skin colour. The Afro-Deutsch movement, a forerunner to the Black European identity movement, used community building "to resist marginalization and discrimination, to gain social acceptance, and to construct a cultural identity for themselves."[18]

Hügel-Marshall's work has been influenced by American civil rights activist Audre Lorde,[19] Lorde was living in Germany when ADEFRA was founded, and encouraged Afro-Germans to come together and discuss their lives with the interest of encouraging autobiographies, which Hügel-Marshall did.[16] The pair first met in 1987, by which time Hügel-Marshall had read substantial material of Lorde's work and was excited that they would meet.[11] In 2012 she attended the Audre Lorde Legacy Cultural Festival in Chicago with lesbian activist Dagmar Schultz. She has a positive relationship with the city, as it was here where she found her father.[12]

Autobiography

In 1998, Hügel-Marshall published her autobiography, Daheim unterwegs: Ein deutsches Leben,[20] chronicling her experiences surviving as a black woman in Germany. Daheim means "at home" while unterwegs means "on the way" or "in transit"; the combination is a deliberate oxymoron suggesting someone seeking a home in her own country.[21] The English translation of the book, published in 2001 by Continuum International Publishers, is titled Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany; an annotated English version was published by Peter Lang Publishing in 2008.[15] The book explores the relationship with her father and with Germany, and describes a search for her identity.[22]

The book has won the Audre Lorde Literary award and has been read by Hügel-Marshall at public events across Germany, Austria and the US.[14] It been described as "an intensely moving journey in search of herself... a personal story, but also a microcosm of racism in contemporary Germany"[23] and "in many ways, paradigmatic for the Black-German experience."[24] In 2007, she gave a reading and seminar on the book at the University of Rochester[25] and in 2012, she gave a public reading at the Goethe Institute's annual Berlin & Beyond Film Festival.[26]

References

Citations
  1. ^ a b c Hügel-Marshall 2008, p. 49.
  2. ^ a b Hügel-Marshall 2008, p. 50.
  3. ^ a b c Wright 2003, p. 187.
  4. ^ Hügel-Marshall 2008, p. 3.
  5. ^ a b c Hügel-Marshall 2008, p. 4.
  6. ^ a b c Kaplan 2003, p. 316.
  7. ^ Hügel-Marshall 2008, p. 9.
  8. ^ Hügel-Marshall 2008, p. 15.
  9. ^ a b c d e Kaplan 2003, p. 317.
  10. ^ Fehrenbach 2005, p. 242.
  11. ^ a b Hügel-Marshall 2008, p. 94.
  12. ^ a b Maxwell, Carrie (10 October 2012). "Lorde's life, work honored at festival". Windy City Times. Retrieved 7 January 2015.
  13. ^ Hügel-Marshall 2008, p. 123.
  14. ^ a b Hügel-Marshall 2008, p. Back cover.
  15. ^ a b "Ika Hügel-Marshall". Ika Hügel-Marshall's website. Retrieved 8 January 2015.
  16. ^ a b Hügel-Marshall 2008, p. 144.
  17. ^ Siek, Stephanie (13 October 2009). "Germany's 'Brown Babies': The Difficult Identities of Post-War Black Children of GIs". Der Spiegel. Retrieved 7 January 2015.
  18. ^ Janson 2005, p. 62.
  19. ^ Gerund 2014, p. 188.
  20. ^ Jeremiah 2013, p. 93.
  21. ^ Wright 2003, p. 255.
  22. ^ Hopkins 2005, pp. 199–200.
  23. ^ Kaplan 2003, p. 318.
  24. ^ Janson 2005, p. 63.
  25. ^ "EVENT: Program by Ika Hügel-Marshall, author of Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany". University of Rochester. 31 January 2007. Retrieved 8 January 2015.
  26. ^ Stephanie Rosenbaum Klassen (29 September 2012). "Brats and Brews for Berlin & Beyond Film Festival". KQED. Retrieved 8 January 2015.
Sources
  • Fehrenbach, Heide (2005). Race After Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-11906-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Gerund, Katharina (2014). Transatlantic Cultural Exchange: African American Women's Art and Activism in West Germany. transcript Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8394-2273-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Hopkins, Leroy (2005). "Writing Diasporic Identity Afro-German Literature since 1985". In Mazón, Patricia; Steingröver, Reinhild (eds.). Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890–2000. Boydell & Brewer. pp. 183–208. ISBN 978-1-58046-183-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Hügel-Marshall, Ika (2008). Gaffney, Elizabeth (ed.). Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany. Peter Lang. ISBN 978-1-4331-0278-3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
  • Janson, Deborah (2005). "The Subject in Black and White: Afro-German Identity Formation in Ika Hügel-Marshall's autobiography Daheim unterwegs: Ein deutsches Leben". Women in German Yearbook. 21. University of Nebraska Press. JSTOR 20688247. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help) – via JSTOR (subscription required)
  • Jeremiah, Emily (2013). "Material Femininity and Germanness in Larissa Boehning's Lichte Stoffe". In Heffernan, Valerie; Pye, Gillian (eds.). Transitions: Emerging Women Writers in German-language Literature. Rodopi. pp. 91–109. ISBN 978-9-401-20948-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Kaplan, Marion (2003). "Rev. of Hügel-Marshall, Gaffney: Invisible Woman: Growing up Black in Germany". Central European History. 36 (2). JSTOR 4547317. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help) – via JSTOR (subscription required)
  • Wright, Michelle (2003). Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-8586-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Template:Persondata

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ika_Hügel-Marshall&oldid=645512085"