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Robbie Aitken, 2022

Up to his death in 1950 the Togolese man Amemenjong, later known as Joseph Garber, lived in Berlin for almost five decades. His life and that of his Berlin-born children illustrate the ways in which the lives of Black Germans were shaped by colonialism and its legacies and later by the racial policies of the Nazis.

It was the empire which brought Garber to Germany. First in 1891 he came for educational reasons and then in 1896 he came to be put on display as part of a human zoo staged at the First German Colonial Exhibition in Berlin-Treptow. At the exhibition’s end he decided to stay, trained as a tailor, and made military jackets for the German army during World War, before being called up to fight. In Berlin-Neukölln he married in 1910, started a family, and ran a successful men’s tailors up until the Great Depression.

Never a German citizen, only a German colonial subject, the end of the German Empire left Joseph and his children effectively stateless. This lack of legal protection rendered the family increasingly vulnerable once the Nazis came to power. Like all Black residents, Joseph and his now grown-up children were marginalised and subjected to increasing levels of discrimination. Joseph was arrested several times because of a lack of identity papers, while his children had little option but to scrape a living through performing in exotic shows and Nazi propaganda films glorifying the colonial past.

Joseph and his children survived the Nazi regime. In the post-1945 period all four Garber siblings left Germany and sought to build new lives elsewhere.

Stationen

Growing up in Aného

A First Experience of Germany in Schloss Buderose

The First German Colonial Exhibition 1896

Settling Down

A Family Home and Family Life

The 5 Bosambos

Statelessness

Marginalisation, incarceration, and survival in wartime Berlin

Postwar

New Beginnings

Madeleine Garber

Start