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When Berlin was a centre of worldwide anti-colonial struggles

With the 12th Berlin Biennale is focusing on decolonial engagement, we remember Berlin's history of anti-colonial struggle.

The Berlin Conference (Kongokonferenz) saw European powers divide up Africa between them. Illustration: Allgemeine Illustrierte Zeitung

This year’s Berlin Biennale is drawing attention to Berlin’s colonial history. Reminders of this brutal past lie dotted all around the city. A plaque at Wilhelmstraße 92 marks the spot where Otto von Bismarck held the Berlin Conference or Kongo Konferenz in 1884 where Africa was divided between European colonial powers. Across the street at Wilhelmstraße 52, a sign indicates where the Reichskolonialamt, the Imperial Colonial Office, once stood.

But what’s sometimes missed is that Berlin has plenty of anti-colonial history, too — with liberation fighters often operating just a few blocks from the colonialists. In the 1920s, a building at Friedrichstraße 24 served as the international headquarters of the League Against Imperialism (this is where Besselpark stands now, next to the headquarters of the taz newspaper). In September 1929, 30 Black Berliners, mostly from the former German colony in Cameroon, gathered here to found a German section of the League for the Defense of the Negro Race.

The most famous of them was the Afro-German actor Louis Brody who performed in dozens of films. They presented a theatrical revue and even planned to open a Black Theater. But lacking financial resources, the league had to dissolve in 1932. Brody, despite his communist connections, remained successful under the Nazis, who needed Black actors for their colonialist propaganda films. He had an important role in the 1941 film Carl Peters, for example.

Münzenberg ran a communist media empire in Weimar Germany that could compete with the biggest capitalist concerns, and was thus known as “the red millionaire.”

Both these leagues were run by the Communist International, uniting communists and non-communists to campaign for the independence of the colonies. The League Against Imperialism was founded at a conference in Brussels in 1927 that brought together anti-colonial leaders with European leftists and intellectuals: Jawaharlal Nehru rubbed elbows with Albert Einstein.

The League against Imperialism included Albert Einstein, Upton Sinclair, Maxim Gorki, Willi Münzenberg, Jawaharlal Nehru and the future presidents of Indonesia and Senegal. Photo: IMAGO / Photo12

The driving force behind these fronts was Willi Münzenberg. Münzenberg ran a communist media empire in Weimar Germany that could compete with the biggest capitalist concerns, and was thus known as “the red millionaire.” Münzenberg’s headquarters were at the Neuer Deutscher Verlag (New German Publishing House) at Wilhelmstraße 48, which is today a parking lot opposite the Finance Ministry. That is where the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers Illustrated Magazine) was published, including photographic reports from Soviet Russia and artwork by John Heartfield.

In his novel Mr. Norris Changes Trains, Christopher Isherwood gave his impressions of Müneznberg’s headquarters, where all this worldwide activity was coordinated (Münzenberg is fictionalized as the character “Ludwig Beyer”): “Bayer inhabited a large untidy flat on the top floor of one of the shabbier houses beyond the Zimmerstrasse.… The door of the flat stood permanently ajar. Inside, the walls were hung with posters in German and Russian, notices of mass meetings and demonstrations, anti-war cartoons, maps of industrial areas and graphs to illustrate the dimensions and progress of strikes. There were no carpets on the bare unpainted floor-boards. The rooms echoed to the rattle of typewriters. Men and women of all ages wandered in and out or sat chatting on upturned sugar-boxes waiting for interviews; patient, good-humoured, quite at home. Everybody seemed to know everybody; a newcomer was greeted almost invariably by his or her Christian name. Even strangers were addressed as Thou. Cigarette smoking was general. The floors were littered with crushed-out stubs.”

Germany was no longer a colonial power; and it was thought that an anti-imperialist call coming from Berlin would arouse less suspicion among colonial peoples

Although the African diaspora in Berlin in the 1920s consisted of just 5,000 people or so, this was not the worst place for anti-colonial activism. German police didn’t object to people organising for the independence of French or British colonies. The most famous anti-colonial activist in Germany was George Padmore. He was born in Trinidad as Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, then moved to Harlem to study medicine where he joined the Communist Party. Padmore went to Moscow in 1929 and was one of the chief organisers of an international conference of Black communists in Hamburg in 1930. They set up an International Trade Union Committee for Negro Workers as part of the Communist International. Their newspaper, The Negro Worker, was published in Hamburg — thanks to the harbour, it could easily be distributed across Africa or the Americas.

The communists’ first anti-colonial office was in Paris, but it was shut down by the authorities. Padmore later recalled their decision to move to Berlin: “Shorn of her African and other colonies following defeat in the First World War, Germany was no longer a colonial power; and it was thought that an anti-imperialist call coming from Berlin would arouse less suspicion among colonial and dependent peoples than one coming from Western European capitals — London or Paris — possessing colonial empires.”

And so, as far back as the 1920s, communists in Berlin — Black and white — were calling for independence of the colonies and demanding an end to racist oppression in the United States. It seems important that while we remember Berlin’s colonial history, we also take note of the people like Joseph Bilé, George Padmore and Willi Münzenberg, who were fighting against colonial oppression back in the day.

This is an excerpt from Nathaniel Flakin’s new anticapitalist guide book Revolutionary Berlin, available from Pluto Press and all bookstores.