Destined to Witness

by Hans Massaquoi

  I went to Ohlsdorf Cemetery to pay my respects to the forty-one thousand fellow Hamburgers who had not been as fortunate as I during the air raids of July 1943, and had lost their lives in the raging infernos. I was stunned when I saw the seemingly endless rectangular mass graves, marked only by the name of the city district in which the remains of the deceased—frequently burned beyond recognition—had been found. As I walked in awe along the peaceful, beautifully landscaped paths, I wondered why I had been spared and why the occupants of the mass tomb below had met with such a wretched death.

  As a black person born in Germany, the most interesting group of Germans to me was the country’s burgeoning population of thousands of so-called “brown babies,” mostly illegitimate offspring of black GIs and German women. With U.S. occupation troops firmly entrenched in the country, “that old black magic” kept fräuleins in a perpetual spin, with the result that brown babies kept a-coming. West German authorities, for the most part, insisted that they kept no records regarding race and that all persons born in Germany were absolutely equal under the law. American authorities washed their hands altogether of illegitimate children fathered by U.S. occupation troops, since they were German citizens.

  To learn more about Germany’s brown babies, I ventured to the Munich apartment of Al Hooseman, the man who, I was told, knew more about the subject than any other person alive. The expatriate former heavyweight contender from Waterloo, Iowa, was founder and president of the organization Help for Colored and Parentless Children. Originally he had come to Germany in 1950 to bolster a sagging boxing career, but when he was given the part of a brown baby’s GI father in a German movie called Schwarzer Engel (Black Angel), he was so touched by the plight of these children that he hung up his gloves and took up their cause in real life. In the process, between additional movie and stage stints, he fell in love with Germany and its people and decided to stay. By the time I caught up with Hooseman, he was a Munich personality whom everyone recognized and respected, from the city’s lord mayor on down.

  “Come on in,” boomed a voice, and I found myself confronted by a bearded brown giant of a man in his mid-forties. “Don’t look around, though,” he cautioned as he led me into a cluttered, one-room bachelor apartment whose walls were literally covered with a photographic record of his adult life. There were photos of his fights, snapshots of him with various brown babies and of his meetings with an impressive string of celebrities, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Throwing wild punches at an imaginary foe while footworking his way around the room, Hooseman first recalled some of his prouder moments in the ring before venting his old grudge against Joe Louis: he blamed the Brown Bomber for having finished his boxing career by knocking him out cold in an exhibition match and causing permanent eye damage. Then he sat down to talk about his social work. His battle-scarred, still-handsome face twitched with emotion as he explained his frustration over having seen his efforts bog down because of a lack of funds. “If I could only get my hands on some money—ten thousand dollars would do for a start,” he moaned. “I would show ’em what can be done. But what little money I’ve been able to raise is not enough for hiring professional help or keeping the organization alive.

  “The biggest problem,” he continued, “is that most of these children’s mothers or grandparents or foster parents belong to the low-income group and as a result, the children enter life unprepared to compete with other children who have had the benefit of an enriched home life. Germany is a cultured country of art, music, and literature. Any child who is not steeped in these has already a strike against him. What little money the guardians of these children get in welfare assistance from the West German government is the bare minimum and not enough to give them opportunities to develop whatever special talents they might have.

  “Another unfortunate circumstance is the class-consciousness of Germans. Too often in Germany you stay in the class in which you were born. Brown babies, therefore, even apart from their color, are automatically a part of the lower class.

  “This, in a nutshell, is the problem of many of the brown babies. But it isn’t a matter of race, because any child in Germany who is born poor and illegitimate faces the same problems. In general, the children are accepted as individuals. I would say without hesitation that black children of comparable backgrounds in the United States don’t come near the degree of social acceptance which the children enjoy here. As for myself, I don’t make a lot of money, and movie parts are getting scarcer by the day, but here I am at peace with myself. Somehow, I just don’t get the same vibration anymore from that ‘Hi, baby,’ and slap-on-the back routine at home that I get out of that firm, old-fashioned German handshake.”

  After visiting the major population centers of West Germany, I recognized one incontrovertible fact: the former Third Reich, once a shrine to a spurious racial-purity cult, had ceased to be a “white” nation. In addition to black GI-fathered children, it was well-nigh impossible to walk the streets of the Federal Republic without seeing people of color—Americans, Africans, West Indians—all of whom had become as ubiquitous and as integral a part of the German scene as Knackwurst, beer, and Mercedes-Benz automobiles. This contrasted sharply with the racial situation that had prevailed up to the end of World War II, when the mere sight of a black person was a noteworthy event.

  The new generation of Germans seemed to enjoy a carbon copy of “the American way of life.” This was most evident in young people’s fanatic display of American-style clothes, dance, and music, especially soul and jazz. Unlike the Nazi days, when playing or listening to jazz were sure ways to land in jail, jazz appreciation was totally unfettered. From the windows of record shops throughout the nation, I was greeted by the faces of black jazz and pop artists, most of them at least as popular and renowned in West Germany as back home in the United States.

  “Get a load of how these cats are digging the sounds. You’d think you’re in one of them Harlem joints,” remarked a black soldier as he and I peeped through the door of a jam-packed Munich discotheque. For several minutes I watched the enraptured young faces of this new breed of Germans as they “frugged,” “swam,” and “monkeyed” to a Count Basie beat. Vividly remembering the rigid, goose-stepping brownshirts of my childhood, and the taunts I endured because of my brown skin, I was filled with renewed hope for the country of my birth.

  REFLECTIONS

  Unfortunately, since I made those observations back in 1966, times have changed again. Subsequent developments on Germany’s racial front, characterized by the alarming rise in hate crimes and the proliferation of a variety of neo-Nazi groups with racist agendas, have rendered my optimistic sentiments woefully obsolete.

  While it would be an exaggeration to say that, racially speaking, Germany is back at square one, the sad fact remains that racism in Germany is far from a thing of the past. My encounter in 1997 with about one hundred young German-born black people from a wide spectrum of educational, social, and economic backgrounds, all members of the ISD (Initiative Black Germans), has convinced me that much work still needs to be done—by the German federal government and the private sector, as well as individual citizens—to assure the absolute equality and complete economic and social integration into German mainstream society of Germans of African descent and other racial minorities. It is only through constant and concerted vigilance that Germans can hope to prevent repeating the horrors of the Holocaust.

  I hope that my story will convey the inescapable lesson I have drawn from the slice of history I was destined to witness from uncomfortably close range: if it happened once, it could happen again; and if it could happen in Germany—a country raised on the wisdom of intellectual giants like Goethe and Schiller and enriched by the timeless contributions of musical geniuses like Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms—it could happen anywhere.

  Terrorism and brutal pogroms in the name of racial, religious or ethnic cleansing, and tribal dominance as practiced by the Nazis i
n Germany have been reenacted by the Afrikaners in South Africa, the Serbs in Kosovo, the Tutsis in Rwanda, and the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, to name just a few. Initially, the purveyors of racism need no more than the silent acquiescence of the public. In the case of Nazi Germany, first Germans and then the entire world turned a deaf ear to the flagrant human rights abuses until it was too late to prevent the architects of racial madness from carrying out their evil schemes. That sad chapter in history suggests that it is never too soon to confront bigotry and racism whenever, wherever, and in whatever form it raises its ugly head. It is incumbent upon all people to confront even the slightest hint of racist thought or action with zero tolerance.

  Those of us who have experienced the depravity to which a country can sink under a government controlled by unscrupulous manipulators owe it to our fellow human beings to keep this unholy specter vivid in the public’s mind.

  WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

  I am frequently asked by people who are familiar with my life story what ever happened to that disparate group of relatives, friends, and adversaries in Germany, Liberia, and the United States who at one time or another played major or peripheral roles in my life. Because of the massive population shifts following the destruction of major parts of Hamburg and other German cities and because of the heavy casualties among German military personnel and civilians during World War II, the fate of a great many of them will never be known to me. In many cases I lost track of people simply because of distance, both in terms of time and space. I call myself fortunate, however, for having been able to maintain close ties with some of my relatives and friends and, in some cases, to reestablish contact after an interruption of many years.

  My mother’s two sisters, Clara and Hedwig, and her oldest brother, Hermann, all of whom helped me to gain a foothold in the United States following my arrival from Liberia in 1950, have died. Except for Onkel Hermann, who remained a bachelor until the day he died, they left me with an army of second and third cousins too numerous to count.

  During frequent trips to Germany while on assignment for Ebony, I used to cross into Communist East Germany to visit my widowed Tante Grete, who lived with her granddaughter, Karla, Karla’s husband, Bernd, and their two teenage daughters in Nordhausen. After predicting her pending death each year from the time she reached middle age, Tante Grete didn’t make good on her prediction until she was well into her late eighties. Her daughter, my cousin Trudchen, who was like a sister to me during my childhood summer vacations in the Harz Mountains, died while still a young woman, long before her mother.

  In the mid-sixties, I had a huge surprise when then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office invited me to attend a reception at Chicago’s Sheraton Hotel for Liberia’s deputy secretary of defense, the Honorable Morris W. Massaquoi, and several Liberian generals in his retinue. When, after passing several security checks by U.S. military officers, I was finally admitted to my brother’s VIP suite, I had another surprise coming. Instead of the wiry police inspector I had left behind in Liberia’s hinterland, I was met by a rather portly, meticulously attired gentleman, who seemed quite at home amid the opulence that surrounded him. Neither of us could get over the quantum leap that had brought us from abject poverty and a rat-infested shack to the measure of comfort and respectability each of us had achieved.

  When President Tubman died, in 1971, I went to Monrovia to cover the funeral for Ebony. I flew on the government plane that carried a delegation of U.S. officials who were to represent President Nixon at the state funeral. On our arrival at Robertsfield International Airport, I had a second reunion with Morris. Like Morris, Monrovia had prospered. The sleepy town of my memory had awakened and had turned into a bustling city, replete with a skyline and traffic jams.

  During the viewing of Tubman’s body, Morris and I recalled how the president had listened to our plight when it became obvious to us that Uncle Nat was ripping us off. Morris told me that since Uncle Nat had died in 1962 from a host of severe health problems, his battle had shifted to Aunt Fatima, who, he claimed, was fighting him tooth and nail for our late father’s property. I was glad I had made up my mind long ago to forget about the inheritance, especially after seeing that years of worrying about it hadn’t gotten Morris anywhere.

  During my brief stay in Monrovia, Coast Guard boss Morris gave me the VIP treatment by personally accompanying me on a short “inspection cruise” in one of his speedy Coast Guard cutters. As he showed me around his domain, he told me that he had been conducting a private war with Stephen Tolbert, the new president’s younger brother and head of the Tolbert family’s fishing enterprise. Morris insisted that Stephen Tolbert was using Coast Guard docks for his own private fishing fleet. “Each time I catch one of his boats at our docks,” Morris bragged, “I have it impounded at his expense.”

  When I pointed out to Morris that it didn’t seem to make good political sense to annoy the brother of the president now that his benefactor and protector, President Tubman, was gone, Morris scoffed, “Don’t you worry. Tolbert will serve only what little is left of Tubman’s term. After that we’ll vote him out. It’s already been taken care of.”

  Having just conducted an exclusive interview with President William Tolbert during which he assured me that he planned to continue President Tubman’s policies, I was not so sure. “Maybe so,” I said, “but I still think you should take it easy with Stephen Tolbert.”

  Unfortunately, my good advice came much too late. As soon as I had returned to Chicago, I learned that President Tolbert had fired a number of Tubman appointees and that Morris had been among the first.

  In retrospect, Morris’s firing turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since it removed him from the line of fire nine years later, when Samuel Doe purged President Tolbert and other top members of Liberia’s ruling class in a bloody massacre that shocked the world. Instead, Morris lived quietly as a businessman, occasionally visiting me in the States, until illness claimed him at age sixty-eight in 1985, his fervent wish to recoup our father’s legacy still unfulfilled.

  In keeping with my resolve to leave well enough alone, I never mentioned the estate when I briefly visited with Aunt Fatima, who by 1971 was dean of the University of Liberia and one of the most respected educators in the country. She proudly told me that her daughter, Püppchen, was a student in Germany. Through Fatima, who died in 1978, I learned that Ma Sonii, my paternal grandmother, had died in 1958 after she moved from Lagos to Monrovia following the death of her husband. I didn’t catch up with Fritz and Fasia until 1991. Following Sergeant Doe’s coup, they had moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where Fritz was able to establish himself as an artist and art dealer. Both he and Fasia live near their children and grandchildren and it seems doubtful that they will ever return to Liberia. Their mother, Ma Rachel, and brother Arthur, Liberia’s former director of natural resources and mines, died in 1986 and 1984, respectively.

  Throughout my odyssey on three continents, I never lost touch with my old coconspirator “Yankee Werner,” who launched me on my beachcomber’s career on Hamburg’s waterfront more than five decades ago, and who is partially responsible for my early obsession with America. From the moment I arrived in the United States in May 1950 until this day, we have kept our friendship alive through phone calls, holiday cards, and occasional visits. Werner, divorced, remarried, and the father of a grown daughter, put in many years as a purser of a major airline and now lives happily in retirement with his wife, Birgid, in sunny California.

  The most prominent survivor of that old gang of mine is my fellow non-Aryan Ralph Giordano. Disillusioned with the Communist Party, which he served for eleven years as a correspondent and publicist, he established himself as a popular presenter of TV documentaries before chronicling the story of his family’s survival under the Nazis in his novel Die Bertinis, in 1982. The novel, which immortalizes a certain character named “Mickey Massakon,” became a best-seller in Germany and made the name Giordano a hous
ehold word and Ralph a rich man. Widowed and remarried, Ralph lives with his wife, Rosie, in Cologne, grinding out additional books at the rate of one per year on such disparate subjects as Israel, Ireland, and Germany—past and present. Both of his parents died, as did his older brother, Egon, who succumbed to a heart attack shortly after Ralph’s first literary success in 1982, and his younger sister, Gabriela, who was born after the war. His younger brother, Rocco, still lives in Hamburg.

  In 1992, after seeing an article about me in the Hamburg press, Erika, my erstwhile childhood playmate, was able to reestablish contact with me. Having put her precocious past as a four-year-old stripper behind her, Erika, daughter of the late Hamburg senator Walter Schmedemann, has long been a housewife, mother, and grandmother who spends her time with her retired security-agent husband, Harald Stobbe, traveling to exotic spots around the world—including my home in the United States—or at their comfortable home in Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel.

  Inge, the last woman to capture my heart before I left Germany as a young man of twenty-two was among the survivors. After promising to love me forever, she had what she thought was a better idea and married a British Royal Air Force officer with whom she led a nomadic but interesting life in some of the most exotic places throughout the British colonial empire. Eventually divorced, she returned to Hamburg. It was at that stage, more than twenty years after I had left Germany, that a mutual friend reintroduced us and we were able to compare notes. Since then, I have been told, she has left Hamburg without a trace.

  One of my former buddies, whom I had mourned for several years after I was told that he had died in a traffic accident, surprised me by turning up very much alive. Stopping briefly in Hamburg while on an Ebony assignment in Germany in the late sixties, I accidentally came across the name Fred Gass in the local telephone directory. Although believing Fred, my erstwhile crony in Haus Vaterland and other Hamburg hot spots, to be dead, I dialed the number out of curiosity and found myself talking with a woman who informed me that she was Frau Giesela Gass, the wife of postal worker Fred Gass.