On a wintry night in November 1990, the Angolan worker Amadeu Antonio was dining with two Mozambican friends at a restaurant in a small town northeast of Berlin. Less than a month before, Germany had begun a new era of national unity. Eberswalde, once a key industrial town in the former East Germany, was being integrated into a country dominated by its larger, more powerful western counterpart.
As the night progressed, white skinheads, prowling the dimly lit streets to find and attack Black people, approached the three men. Armed with baseball bats, they began a vicious assault, according to trial records. While Antonio’s friends managed to escape, he was beaten into a coma. Two weeks later, the 28-year-old succumbed to his injuries, leaving behind his pregnant girlfriend.
Antonio’s death became one of the first recorded cases of neo-Nazi violence in the newly unified Germany. It would symbolize the violent climate for racialized German communities following reunification, including events like the 1992 Rostock pogrom, in which right-wing extremists threw stones and petrol bombs at an apartment block housing asylum-seekers.
Earlier in 1990, the self-described African-American poet, activist, feminist, lesbian and mother, Audre Lorde, delivered a speech in Dresden, a major city in the former East Germany. The country was still experiencing euphoria from the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Yet Lorde’s speech painted a different picture from the tear-filled scenes of reuniting families shown on televisions globally. Life was not that simple, she explained; with Black students being killed and foreign workers beaten in their own neighborhoods in Leipzig, “Then we seriously rethink the definition of freedom in Germany.”
Already well known in the United States for her writing and activism connected to the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, Lorde first traveled to Berlin in 1984, following her invitation to teach creative writing and literature as a guest professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute of North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin.
While also confronting a liver cancer diagnosis, she often traveled with her partner, the writer and activist Gloria Joseph, to receive homeopathic treatment in West Germany until her death in 1992, at the age of 58. Berlin would become a source of both support and comfort, as well as a place that would haunt her. It was here in West Berlin, as she wrote in her diary in 1984, that she was “listening to what fear teaches.” In her poetry, she also delved into what could be learned from the wars of the past.
Bearing witness to the monumental changes happening at a transitional time for Germany, she was characteristically poetic, progressive and political as she addressed themes of silence, racism, joy and solidarity in the diaspora. Lorde became a part of Berlin, literally and figuratively. She forged deep connections with members of the significant African diaspora living across Germany — communities with roots in the country spanning at least three centuries, including those who migrated from regions like present-day Tanzania, Namibia, Cameroon and Togo, formerly occupied during Germany’s brief colonial era. After she died, some of her ashes were scattered in Krumme Lanke, a lake in West Berlin. Last year, part of a major thoroughfare was named after her.
Less than four decades later, it feels like the same forces that frustrated Lorde continue to pervade the country. The ascent of the far right — with the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party polling second in February’s elections, its best result since its founding less than a decade ago — is seeing the normalization of racism on the streets. Meanwhile, Germany’s unrelenting support of Israel and its genocidal war on Gaza has threatened to isolate Western Europe’s largest economy on the global stage.
In the late 1980s, Berlin’s Kreuzberg district was one of the most economically deprived areas of the city, meaning its cheap rents drew in artists and musicians. An undesirable location due to its proximity to the western side of the wall, it was where authorities housed “gastarbeiter,” or guest workers, from Turkey, Poland, Italy and elsewhere, who had been brought in to help rebuild the country after World War II.
Today, as well as being home to a large multigenerational Turkish-German diaspora, Kreuzberg is an ethnically diverse area in which holistic healers, drug dealers and hipster freewheelers share space under a looming police presence. A politicized space in which parallel lives are playing out, it’s fitting for a poet like Lorde to have part of a street named after her. The move was met with resistance from some locals, so the state kept the other half named Manteuffelstrasse, after a 19th-century Prussian prime minister, Otto Theodor von Manteuffel.
Kreuzberg is one of the many places across the city still connected to Lorde. From it, a 30-minute journey west on the U3 subway line will get you to the Free University, now home to an archive of her readings, writings and pictures. But Berlin surprised her. As she wrote in her journal entry in “A Burst of Light” in 1984: “The city is different from what I expected. It is lively and beautiful but the past is never very far away, at least not for me.”
In one of Lorde’s first trips, she wrote a poem inspired by a visit to Ploetzensee Prison in West Berlin, which once served as a major execution site during the Nazi era. Titling her poem after what she had seen written on the memorial site, “This Urn Contains Earth From a German Concentration Camp,” she went to the core of what she felt was missing at a site designed to honor victims of National Socialism. “But you have to forget Ploetzensee’s bland lack of assumpting responsibility, the obscure circumlocutions that protect Germany’s children from their history and humanity,” she wrote in an unpublished journal entry found in the archive of her papers at Spelman College in Atlanta. “So a Germany committed to this kind of thinking only is a Germany of the past, committed to repeating the same mistakes. Who will it be this time?”
Even as Germany refuses to pay reparations to the Herero and Nama communities whose ancestors died at the hands of German colonizers in present-day Namibia more than a century ago — an event widely considered the first genocide of the 20th century — it is heavily criticized for its strong commitment to Israel, which has led to heavy-handed repression domestically.
Lorde also tackled racism and the dangers faced by people of color, with poems like “Berlin Is Hard on Colored Girls,” which illustrated the concept of divisions by describing the border guards and the split city. She also penned “East Berlin 1989,” in which she spoke of the growing far-right violence and racial hostility to which she was bearing witness, writing: “Already my blood shrieks. Through the East German streets. Misplaced hatreds. Volcanic tallies rung upon cement.”
Are these misplaced hatreds what we can see today in the policies of the AfD, who have called for a “remigration” package to send so-called foreigners back to a place the party calls their home?
For the Jamaican-British writer Ashley Williams-Leon, who also lived in Germany, Lorde and Joseph’s experience of being stared at for being Black in Berlin resonates “I had the same experience when I was in Germany as they did in the 1980s, and what was really empowering about her work was her calls to stand tall, even as I wanted to shrink,” she tells New Lines.
While in Berlin, Lorde spent time with German women of African descent, even helping to coin the term “Afro-German” and contributing to fostering a movement, alongside people such as the late activist, poet and educator May Ayim, who was born to a German mother and Ghanaian father. They collaborated on a collection of stories, “Showing Our Colors,” in 1986, which, for the first time, showcased personal stories from 13 Afro-German women that explored their lives through the lens of Germany’s colonial history, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. According to the filmmaker Dagmar Schultz, a close friend of Lorde’s, she liked Berlin immensely.
“She wrote that the work she did here was the most effective,” Schultz tells New Lines. Schultz fondly recalls many evenings at her home, shared with her life partner, the late artist Ika Hügel-Marshal, as well as Joseph and friends like Ayim, filled with dancing. It was in their living room that Lorde gave her last reading in Berlin, on Sept. 20, 1992.
Since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the start of the Gaza war, the German media and political establishments, as well as large parts of society, have committed to staying silent on the horrors being committed against Palestinians. They have refused to question Israel, to look at the links between the Holocaust and the Nakba or scrutinize the repression of speech and the increasingly brutal police violence against pro-Palestinian protesters on German streets. Schultz, who made a documentary titled “Audre Lorde, the Berlin Years, 1984-1992,” says that Lorde was very aware of what silence meant in this city. “When she was teaching, she would tell her students to read their poems out loud and then ask the room what they felt after hearing the poem. In New York, students would respond, while in Germany, heads would go down. This sort of silence in society is characteristic of society here.”
This silence manifests itself today through state repression, particularly in Berlin, against pro-Palestinian support. People have landed in trouble with the police for wearing keffiyehs, speaking Arabic at demonstrations or chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The crackdown is being carried out by police forces using excessive violence — actions that are alarming international human rights observers, yet are being shielded from criticism by Germany’s mainstream media and politicians.
What would Lorde think about German silence today? Schultz believes Lorde would have a clear view of what was happening now, particularly how antisemitism is being used to silence people, including those in the arts. “I think she would say it’s a way of Germans and German politicians to not deal with what antisemitism actually means, and of just dealing with debt, and feelings of guilt and obligation.”
A deeper dive into Lorde’s time reveals that silence was a recurring theme she addressed while in Germany. In “Audre Lorde: Dream of Europe,” Mayra A. Rodriguez Castro transcribed a series of Lorde’s seminars and interviews from her time in the city as well as other parts of the country and Europe. The book opens with her first seminars on Black women’s poetry at the Free University in 1984, when she brought in her works such as “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” first published in 1977, as well as Donna Kate Rushin’s “The Bridge Poem.”
Transcribing these sessions, Castro noted the silences that followed Lorde’s remarks, which became a mainstay throughout Lorde’s “Poet as an Outsider” sessions between May and July 1984, in which she explored verse by Black Beat poets and Langston Hughes, among others.
The longer Lorde spent in Berlin, the more vehemently she challenged its silence. In her later talks, such as an address to women in 1988 at a newly established grassroots feminist autonomous space in Kreuzberg, she shared her poetry and reflections on the city and the diaspora. During this talk, she expressed disbelief at the common perception that women in Berlin were reluctant to speak. “But if you have nothing to say,” she provocatively asked the silently observing crowd, “then why are you still sitting here?”
A couple of years later, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in then-unifying Berlin, Lorde spoke of a shift in the city’s atmosphere, yet still called out the racist violence she witnessed against minorities in the country. She read older works, describing them as a “prayer of strength.” Emotive, rich in symbolism and deeply reflective, her final lines from the poem “Solstice,” part of the collection “The Black Unicorn,” resonate: “may I never lose / that terror / that keeps me brave / may I owe nothing / I cannot repay.”
She then called on the audience to speak, seemingly knowing by now that silence would follow. “This is your favorite part of the evening, isn’t it?” she asked. In other words, why are they still sitting?
Her activism also served as a critique of this pervasive silence. In a letter co-written with Joseph to Helmut Kohl, then Germany’s chancellor, just days before her passing, Lorde posed a piercing question: “Where are the ‘good Germans’ who will not acquiesce this time in silence?” She drew a direct link to 1932 (amid Hitler’s rise), questioning why these historical connections were not being made in German media and government and on the streets. It was a fitting question then and remains a pertinent one that many are asking about Germany and Gaza today.
It’s worth noting that, while some of Lorde’s speeches did address Palestine, her own position on the issue has been critically examined in recent years. In a piece last year exploring the fallout over Zionism between Lorde and her former friend, the African-American author June Jordan, Marina Magloire wrote that Lorde’s support was not a constant feature of her life and activism, stating, “Lorde’s journey to a pro-Palestine stance was slow and halting.”
According to Conor Tomás Reed, a scholar and organizer of radical cultural movements at the City University of New York, Lorde had a very keen understanding of how a state can dehumanize and erase people who are oppressed. “She knew that even when a state is trying to atone for its past harms, if it does not have a full and comprehensive sense of rooting out the ideology and daily aggressive behaviour towards people who are different, then this harm will persist in its society.”
Reading through Lorde’s work in Berlin as she confronted the realities of her weakening body, her words of resilience hold particular weight. So does her commitment to joy, community and solidarity. In a Germany that feels divided, with a state that enacts a status quo that many feel dehumanizes, what lessons can be learned from Lorde’s time here?
In a 1988 exchange published in “Dream of Europe,” Lorde speaks of survival, drawing on statements from her earlier works in which she says that survival is not theoretical but something that we take part in every day. She asks the reader to question what needs to change in their lives, writing of the ways we can learn about this. “We learn by looking at the differences inside ourselves, the contradictions that exist inside me, inside you. How do we deny pieces of ourselves, how do we avoid using one part of ourselves, the mother to the other parts within us, the lover or the warrior, how do we learn to give voice, space and breath to all the parts of ourselves without being ripped apart?” Learning to do that “is a template for learning how to relate with others.”
“Lorde was a fighter,” Williams-Leon says. “Her work was necessary back then, as it is necessary now.”
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