FILM: Brown Babies Project – the Black/white Biracial Children of Postwar Germany
A great film project entitled: Brown Babies: The Mischilingskinder Story, is playing in select theaters throughout the United States. It is the untold story of the mixed-race/nation children born from the relations between African-American serviceman and German women after World War II. This is the same project mentioned in my earlier blogpost, leading to the link.
Although this is not news or stories of “The Pacific,” as my blog topic is about, this story points to the relations between the hierarchies of color, nation, gender, and war trauma’s effects and behaviors–as victorious or defeated, much like the processes that parallel the present formation of social relations in the Pacific. These social relations, born of war and race and nation-building, born of the subjugation of women, born of scorn and memory, sadness and violence, play themselves out similarly around the globe. The specter of color is strong and alive. Who made this order?
This story, of African-American/white-German babies born after the Second World War, is also a mostly invisiblized story. The stories told in this great film project, similar to the stories told by the children of African-American/Asian women after US Occupation and/or wars in the Pacific, are hard to tell, both to be silent on our own because of shame and because it re-traumatizes, as well as being silenced by governments and institutions and family members. So these stories cannot remain silent forever. So they are being told.
Below is a dramatic trailer for the movie. See and listen to the parallels between these stories and those that have and will continue to dot the mindscape that I put forward in these blogposts throughout. This is not just to feel lament, sadness, anger. Hopefully it will move us to re-think, re-position ourselves, to act with compassion and power, to shift the contours that make this possible.
You can visit their website here .
Dream of the Water Children: The Black Pacific 
Love history this is a must see.
LikeLike
I was very interested in the stories about the brown babies because its very personal to me. My father an African American man who have long pass-away told us his children that we had a half sister. That he had fathered a child (daughter) with a German woman during the WW II. My father for many years before he died wished he could have found his daughter, and how he wish we his children could have known our half sister. To this day day our family always say how we wish we could find our half sister that is if she is still alive. Thank you
LikeLike