I met Theodor Wonja Michael at Hamburg Central Station in March 2013. He was waiting on the platform, in a wheelchair, next to him was his wife. A man with a gray beard, his left eye pinched, it looked like he was winking. He had a high voice and liked to laugh. So he sat in front of me. I looked back on almost 90 years of German history. On a man who was born during the Weimar Republic. Who had survived the Nazi era. The later actor was, scribe and spy. The black was like me.
As a teenager, I worked intensively on black German history, with a story that is hardly taught in schools in Germany. I discovered a volume that contained two dozen biographies. Also by Theodor Wonja Michael. He is one of the few known black eyewitnesses. The greater is its importance for Afro-Germans: Theodor Wonja Michael was the living proof that we have been in this country for a long time, that we are no strangers here.
He was born in Berlin in 1925, the son of a seamstress from East Prussia. He does not know much about his mother, she was said to have been beautiful and intelligent, played the piano, and died a year after his birth. Michael's father came from Cameroon and was a member of an aristocratic family. The country was under German rule at that time, as a resident of the so-called "protected areas" had Michael's father a passport that allowed him life in Germany. He saw it as his right to live here. A self-image that was very important to his son Theodor.
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Theodor Michael
Being German and Black: Memories of an Afro-German
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dtv publishing company
Pages:
224
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EUR 9.90
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After the death of the mother, the father brought the family through as a subway builder, he dragged daughter and son to Völkerschauen where they mimic primitive people. Michael hated it. "Where I went and stood, I was staggered, strangers were running my fingers through my hair, smelling on me," he wrote in his biography, which appeared in 2013. If black people today are annoyed that they want to strangers in the hair, then that has a story.
Michael was lucky
During the Nazi era, the regime kept showing that the boy did not want Theo. Michael was not allowed to be the "young people" of the Hitler Youth, he had to leave high school. He got a "stranger's passport" stating that he was stateless. "Special features: Negro", it said in the paper. Theo punched through, as Page in the Berlin Hotel Excelsior about. But he also lost this job. The reason: He was not included in the "German Labor Front" because of his "Negroid impact".
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In the Third Reich, there was only one role for Michael: the exotics. He gave him as an extra in propaganda films like "Carl Peters" with Hans Albers. There he was made up, because he was not dark enough. In "Munchausen" he waved the sultan with a palm to air. "We were the Moors you needed, it was a question of existence for us," he later said.
That too is part of his story: Theodor Wonja Michael was lucky. It is estimated that two thousand blacks were murdered in concentration camps, and hundreds were sterilized. Several "compatriots", as he calls them, disappeared from his environment during the Nazi era.
How did Michael survive? I interviewed him in 2015 for an anthology and asked for it. My impression was that he could not say that for himself. He tried to avoid any contact with the authorities, stopped at every red light, had no girlfriend, searched the niche. "Just do not notice, that was my motto," he told me then.
The last years of the Nazi era Michael spent as a forced laborer. For a Berlin armaments plant, he screwed together iron parts, lived until the liberation in 1945 in a foreign labor camp.
A door opener for future generations
Michael was still an actor after the war. But this time voluntarily. "I like being an actor because it's my free choice today," he once said. He played at the theater, was a dubbing and radio announcer. Later, he went to study and worked as a journalist. He founded the magazine "Afrika-Bulletin", soon became known as a connoisseur of the continent.
Michael knew so much about Africa that in 1971 he got an unusual offer: The Federal Intelligence Service asked him for a conversation. Michael hesitated. "The motherland treated me like spit chewing gum," he said two years ago. "And now this difficult motherland comes up to me and says: We need you."
Michael finally agreed, too, to be a door opener for future generations. About his time in the foreign intelligence service, he keeps himself covered. "Some marveled or admired my plumage, others growled against it:" He can not even sing properly like we do, he just croaks, "it says in his biography.
Michael was finally courted. The then head of the Federal Chancellery, Egon Bahr, signed his certificate of appointment. He was, according to his biography, the first black federal official in the higher service. The boy, who once bore a tourist pass, retired in 1987 as government director.
Michael sat down for the black German community until the end. Even as a man of over 90, he sat on podiums, arguing, reading from his book.
So too, in March 2013, when I picked him up from Hamburg main station. He had come to an event where he should read, I was helping with the organization. I took Michael to a car and drove him to his hotel. It was a bit like a fan meeting a celebrity: you're excited, but you're not sure what to say. He asked me which exhibitions I could recommend in Hamburg. I was embarrassed that I did not have a good answer.
Theodor Wonja Michael died on Saturday night in Cologne after a long illness. This was confirmed by a spokesman for the Initiative Schwarze Menschen ISD in Germany, DER SPIEGEL. Michael was an active member there. With him dies one of the last known black German contemporary witnesses of the national socialism. The ISD only knows about Hamburg's Marie Nejar. Michael was probably the penultimate witness.
His wife said he had fallen asleep peacefully. He leaves behind several children and grandchildren. Theodor Wonja Michael was 94 years old.
