Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany

"I was born in March 1947. My arrival was quietly, anxiously celebrated within my mother's family but the rest of society had long since made up its mind to exclude my mother and me from its fold. When I was a year old, my mother married a white German man; a year later my sister was born. We were a family, even if I always knew my father wasn't really my father. I saw no reason in the world that I wouldn't be able to grow up with my white mother, in my white family, and be perfectly happy." So begins the story of Ika Hugel-Marshall, daughter of an African American serviceman who left Germany for the United States the day after learning that he had impregnated the German woman with whom he was having an affair. Seven years later, Ika is led from her home to an orphanage where she is subjected to the tyrannies of Sister Hildegard and is taken to have the "black demon" exorcised from her. Ika struggled to come to terms with life as a German - the only life she knew - among people who seemed bent on disavowing her existence. Only in her late thirties does Ika meet other Afro-Germans and begin to discover her own identity. Emboldened by them, she seeks out and eventually finds her father, who is living on Chicago's South Side, and discovers another aspect of herself.

Biographies & Memoirs

Hügel-Marshall, Ika

Community & Culture

Continuum Intl Pub Group

A rare and intimate look at race in Germany.

Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany, republished in a new annotated edition, recounts Ika Hügel-Marshall’s experiences growing up as the daughter of a white German woman and an African-American man after World War II. As an «occupation baby», born in a small German town in 1947, Ika has a double stigma: Not only has she been born out of wedlock, but she is also Black. Although loved by her mother, Ika’s experiences with German society’s reaction to her skin color resonate with the insidiousness of racism, thus instilling in her a longing to meet her biological father. When she is seven, the state places her into a church-affiliated orphanage far away from where her mother, sister, and stepfather live. She is exposed to the scorn and cruelty of the nuns entrusted with her care. Despite the institutionalized racism, Ika overcomes these hurdles, and finally, when she is in her forties, she locates her father with the help of a good friend and discovers that she has a loving family in Chicago.

Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany (New Directions in German-American Studies)

Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

Daheim unterwegs. Ein deutsches Leben.

Fischer (Tb.), Frankfurt

Daheim unterwegs: Ein deutsches Leben

Unrast Verlag

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Books by Hügel-Marshall, Ika