The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs and Germany

Professor Maria Hoehn- History Department, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY

Maria Höhn, who teaches German history at Vassar College, is an established scholar of the American military presence in Germany. She is the author of GIs and Fräuleins (2002), Amis, Cadillacs, und “Negerliebchen”: GIs im Nachkriegsdeutschland with Verlag Berlin-Brandenburg (2008), Over There: Living with The U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present (2010), which she co-authored and co-edited with Seungsook Moon. She has also published numerous essays on African-American GIs and Civil Rights in Germany, in both Germany and the U.S. Those essays explore how African-American GIs stationed in Germany enunciated their demands for civil rights, and how both German and American society responded to those demands. She has also published essays that explore German and American debates on interracial marriages, and on the political collaboration between German student radicals and Black Panther GIs during the late 1960s and the early 1970s. She is the past recipient of an NEH Faculty Humanities Grant, and other prestigious fellowships. Höhn is the winner of this year’s DAAD/GSA prize for the best article in the German Studies Review for her contribution, “The Black Panther Solidarity Committees and the Voice of the Lumpen” (German Studies Review XXXI, no. 1 (February 2008): 133-154). 

Also, Maria Hoehn, along with Martin Klimke, is the recipient of the NAACP  Julius E. Williams Distinguished Community Service Award in 2009

Martin Klimke- German Historical Institute, Washington, DC and Heidelberg Center for American  Studies, University of Heidelberg

Martin Klimke is a research fellow at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His 2005 dissertation The Other Alliance: Global Protest and Student Unrest in West Germany and the U.S., 1962-1972, was awarded the prestigious Ruprecht-Karls Prize for best doctoral thesis at Heidelberg University in 2006, which was published by Princeton University Press in January 2010. Klimke has been working extensively in the area of transnational history and social movements and has published numerous articles on processes of cultural transfer and global protest networks. He is the co-editor of the publication series Protest, Culture and Society (Berghahn Books, New York/Oxford) and, among others, 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956-77 (New York/London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Klimke has also published essays on the transnational dimension of the African American civil rights movement, Black Power in Germany in the 1960/70s, and has co-edited Blacks and Germans, German Blacks: Germany and the Black Diaspora, 1450-1914 (forthcoming).

Since 2006 he has been the director and coordinator of the international Marie-Curie project European Protest Movements Since 1945, which is supported by the European Commission. He is currently a research fellow at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., where he is co-directing the research project and digital archive The Nuclear Crisis: Transatlantic Peace Politics, Rearmament, and the Second Cold War and writing a biography of peace activists Petra Kelly and Randall Forsberg.

Sophie Lorenz (University of Heidelberg)

Sophie Lorenz studied History, Political Science and Public Law at Heidelberg University from 2003 to 2009. In July 2009 she completed her M.A. with a thesis about Black Power, the student protest movement and Black-Panther Solidarity in West Germany during the 1960s and 1970s. Currently, Sophie teaches and works as research associate at the History Department at Heidelberg University. Since October 2009 she is a Ph.D. student in History at Heidelberg University and is working on her dissertation project “Transnational Solidarities: The GDR, Angela Davis and Black America.”

Laura Stapane (HCA Heidelberg)

Laura Stapane studied History of Art and Media Studies, History and Political Science at the University of Oldenburg. After finishing her MA thesis about family portraits as a reflection of the bourgeois culture in the late 19th century, she worked at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, Italy and the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC.

She is currently working for the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) at the University of Heidelberg as a research fellow and project coordinator, where she is responsible for the coordination of “The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GIs, and Germany“ as well as for “The Nuclear Crisis“ project.

Jane Manchon (Vassar College)

Jane Manchon is a senior International Studies major at Vassar College exploring the moral implications and challenges of filming other cultures. She has worked as a junior consultant in Vassar’s Media Cloisters and now works as a Multimedia Developer in the college’s Visual Resource Library with a focus in video editing and graphic design.

Her senior thesis will culminate in a short film set in Samoa, where she spent a semester abroad. She received two grants (The Geraldine Gewirtz Friedman ’41 Career Development Fund and The June Ross Marks ’49 Travel Fund) that facilitated her two-week return in January 2011 to capture the footage that she is currently editing.

Alexandra Zeman (Vassar College)

Alexandra Zeman is a junior Classical Greek major at Vassar College, intending on pursuing international art and antiquity trafficking law in law school. Through her work in Classics, she has received an Abby Leach Memorial Fellowship in 2009 and the Reno Prize “for outstanding work in Greek” for 2009-2010. She has been a research assistant to both Professor Lydia Murdoch and Professor Maria Hoehn in the History Department.