Books & Reading

Discover literature, memoir, scholarship, and community voices that deepen conversations about Black German histories, adoption, identity, and belonging.

Explore our growing reading list below. Each book spotlight includes a short description, related reading, and links to book and purchase information.

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Adoption Across Race and Nation: Histories That Cross Borders

Adoption Across Race and Nation: US Histories and Legacies brings together perspectives on adoption, racial power, family, and national belonging. Its chapters place individual…
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Hans Massaquoi’s Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany

Hans Massaquoi recalls growing up in Hamburg as the son of a German mother and a Liberian father. His account follows childhood aspirations, racial exclusion, and the struggle to survive Nazi rule and war.
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Judy Fambrough-Billingsley’s Too Brown to Keep: A Search for Family

Too Brown to Keep: A Search for Love, Forgiveness and Healing follows Judy Fambrough-Billingsley’s journey from childhood in Germany and adoption in the United States to a search…
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Nzitu Mawakha’s Daima: Images of Women of Colour in Germany

Photographs and first-person texts bring Black women living and working in Germany into a collective portrait. Nzitu Mawakha’s black-and-white images show individuals, friendships, and community, while the women’s words return the gaze to the reader.
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Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out

History, poetry, interviews, and personal testimony meet in Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, the English translation of Farbe bekennen. The collection places Black women’s voices at the center of German history and
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Noah Sow’s Deutschland Schwarz Weiß: Understanding Everyday Racism

Deutschland Schwarz Weiß: Der alltägliche Rassismus examines how racism operates through everyday language, media, and assumptions about Germany. Noah Sow combines direct analysis and humor to make familiar practices available for
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Fatima El-Tayeb’s European Others: Belonging from Below

In European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe, Fatima El-Tayeb examines how racialized communities challenge narrow ideas of who belongs in Europe. Music, performance, activism, gender, and sexuality become routes
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Tina Campt’s Image Matters: Family Photographs and Belonging

What can a family photograph tell us beyond what first meets the eye? Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe examines photographs of Black German families and portraits of West Indian migrants…
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Tina Campt’s Other Germans: Race, Memory, and Life Stories

In Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich, Tina Campt brings historical analysis into conversation with the recollections of two Black Germans who lived through National…
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Layla Zami’s Contemporary PerforMemory: Dancing with Memory

Layla Zami explores how dance carries historical memory, responds to trauma, and opens possibilities for diasporic futures.
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Tupoka Ogette’s Trotzdem zuhause: A Life in Search of Home

Tupoka Ogette’s memoir brings childhood, motherhood, racism, and belonging into a personal account of making a home.
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Alice Hasters’s Anti Opfer: Making Room for Vulnerability

Alice Hasters examines our discomfort with vulnerability and asks what recognizing harm and responsibility could mean for public life.
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Books & Reading

Books & Reading

Adoption Across Race and Nation: Histories That Cross Borders

Hans Massaquoi’s Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany

Judy Fambrough-Billingsley’s Too Brown to Keep: A Search for Family

Nzitu Mawakha’s Daima: Images of Women of Colour in Germany

Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out

Noah Sow’s Deutschland Schwarz Weiß: Understanding Everyday Racism

Fatima El-Tayeb’s European Others: Belonging from Below

Tina Campt’s Image Matters: Family Photographs and Belonging

Tina Campt’s Other Germans: Race, Memory, and Life Stories

Layla Zami’s Contemporary PerforMemory: Dancing with Memory

Tupoka Ogette’s Trotzdem zuhause: A Life in Search of Home

Alice Hasters’s Anti Opfer: Making Room for Vulnerability

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