If the Black residents of Weimar Berlin are remembered at all, it’s usually as jazz musicians or as objects in dehumanising Völkerschauen. Yet, despite the limited career prospects, these Berliners consistently fought for agency and respect. As Robbie Aitken explains, for Africans in Germany in the 1920s, “talking about their backgrounds was a form of resistance”. The professor of imperial history at Sheffield Hallam University adds: “They were challenging stereotypes about African primitiveness”, which were widespread in Germany at the time.
It’s only recently that Berlin has begun to reckon with its colonial legacy. In the last decade, three commemorative plaques have been installed: for Martin Dibobe, Joseph Bilé and Louis Brody. Nowadays, museum exhibitions and walking tours offer stories of Black resistance throughout Berlin’s history. These stories, once pushed to the margins of Germany’s history, stand as powerful reminders of the Black community’s long fight for dignity and equality – and their relevance has not faded.
Martin Dibobe – Kuglerstraße 44 in Prenzlauer Berg
When it opened in 1902, Berlin’s Hochbahn was a sensation: electric trains racing above the city on steel tracks (the Hochbahn is now the above-ground part of the U1/U3). For some, though, a bigger sensation was that a Black man was working there. Newspapers reported on a “schwarzer Landsmann” (a Black countryman) who checked tickets and drove trains.
Martin Dibobe had come to Berlin six years earlier: the 20-year-old Cameroonian was put on display at the German Colonial Exhibition of 1896. Over the summer, some two million Berliners came to Treptower Park for dioramas purportedly showing life in the colonies. 106 people, treated like display objects, had been brought to Berlin and forced to wear supposedly “native” clothing, even in cold, wet weather.
Despite being subjected to degrading examinations in the name of “race science”, Dibobe stayed in the German capital and got a job at Siemens, building tracks for the new subway. That’s how he learned to love trains and applied for a job at the Hochbahn. Within a few years, Dibobe had gone from the Orientalist costumes of what was then characterised as a “primitive savage” to the proud uniform of a Beamter, a state official.
It’s only recently that Berlin has begun to reckon with its colonial legacy.
On June 27, 1919, as Germany was losing its colonies to the victorious powers of World War I, Dibobe sent a petition to the National Assembly in Weimar. He and 17 other African men in German declared their loyalty to the Reich, but, crucially, they also included 32 demands for complete equality for Africans in the new German state. Unsurprisingly, the German government published the first part and ignored the second.
In 1922, Dibobe returned to Cameroon with his family, he had a German wife and two stepchildren, but the territory was now a French mandate, and the new colonial authorities suspected him to be a pro-German agitator. He was refused entry and forced to go on to Monrovia in Liberia. There, Dibobe’s traces are lost to history.
A ceramic plaque now marks his former home in Prenzlauer Berg, and since 2019, an aluminium plaque at the location of Germany’s Imperial Colonial Office at Wilhelmstraße 62 is dedicated to the Dibobe petition. Dibobe was the very first African person the city has honoured in this way.
Joseph Bilé – Bülowstraße 39 in Schöneberg
In late 1929, the Socialist School Students League (SSB) held a rally against colonialism at Alexanderplatz. The second speaker, Joseph Ekwe Bilé, was a Cameroonian who had been living in Germany and Austria for two decades. He had been among the signatories of the 1919 petition, but in the following decade, he radicalised.
At Alex (much smaller then than the square we know today), Bilé denounced the cruelty of both the old German authorities and the new French ones in Cameroon. He connected oppression in African colonies to lynching in the US, arguing that capitalism was exploiting Black people around the world.
Born to a wealthy family in Douala, in what was then German Kamerun, Bilé came to Germany for his education, even enlisting for the army at the beginning of World War I. When the war ended, Bilé was technically French but functionally stateless: the French authorities did not allow him to return. Unable to find steady work as an engineer, he had to work in circuses, films and theatres in Germany and Austria.
When he moved to Berlin, Bilé rented a room in Schöneberg at Bülowstraße 39, right next to the Nationalhof ballroom – which is best remembered for lesbian gatherings and “transvestite balls” (as they were known at the time), but also hosted anti-colonial rallies where Bilé spoke.
On September 17, 1929, around 30 Africans in Berlin founded the Liga zur Verteidigung der Negerrasse (League for the Defence of the Negro Race – LzVN). They were inspired by a similar project in Paris: the Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre (LDRN). They set up their office in a building on Friedrichstraße 24 in Kreuzberg, where Besselpark is today. This building was a hub of anti-colonial resistance: the global headquarters of the League Against Imperialism. Launched in Brussels by the Thuringian-born, communist propaganda chief Willi Münzenberg in 1927, this organisation united anti-colonial activists like Jawaharlal Nehru from India, Sukarno from Indonesia and Jomo Kenyatta from Kenya, with supporters like Albert Einstein and Romain Rollande.
Bilé denounced the cruelty of both the old German authorities and the new French ones in Cameroon.
Bilé was not just secretary of the LzVN, but also a delegate to the First International Conference of Negro Workers in Hamburg in summer 1930. At the three-day meeting, he met other Black communists like George Padmore from Trinidad and James W. Ford from the US. He reported on the plundering of Cameroon, while others spoke about the situation of Black people in their respective countries, in order to draw up a programme for world-wide liberation.
After going to Moscow for communist training, Bilé was no longer able to return to Germany, as the Nazis were in power. He made it back to Cameroon in the mid-1930s, where he dropped out of radical politics and worked as an architect. He died in 1959 in his native Douala, less than a year before Cameroon finally won its independence.
In a ceremony in 2022, a letter from his grandson in Cameroon was read out at the unveiling of the plaque at Bilé’s former Berlin home.
Louis Brody – Kurfürstenstraße 40 in Tiergarten
In early 1930, African American newspapers announced that Berlin was going to get its own Black theatre. The reality was a bit more modest: in December, a show premiered at Kliem’s Ballroom behind Hasenheide 13 in Neukölln. (That venue, once among numerous beer halls on either side of the street, is currently being renovated into a gallery.)
The revue featured 40 performers (almost all of African origin) a jazz band and dialogue in French, English, German and a Bantu language. Sonnenaufgang im Morgenland (Sunrise in the Orient) was a celebration of African culture, displaying how colonialism had devastated the continent.
The driving force was Bebe Mpessa, a Cameroonian immigrant who was better known under his stage name: Louis Brody. He was an actor, musician and wrestler. He appeared in dozens of films, and he was one of few Black actors in Germany whose name was included in advertisements. As early as 1921, Brody was protesting against anti-Black stereotypes and calling for German citizenship for people from the former colonies. Brody was a founding member of the Afrikanischer Hilfsverein (African Aid Association) in 1918 in Hamburg, and also of the League for the Defence of the Black Race in Berlin in 1929.
As early as 1921, Brody was protesting against anti-Black stereotypes and calling for German citizenship for people from the former colonies.
Despite a short run, the show hit a nerve: the Nazis, who sometimes held meetings across the street at Neue Welt (now Huxley’s), were incensed at Black pride in the middle of Berlin. When they were put in power in 1933, they shut down all forms of Black self-organisation. Even while he was subjected to racist persecution, Brody continued to secure acting roles under Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who sought Black performers for colonial films.
After the war, Brody appeared in a few East German films before his death in 1951. Despite his fame, he never got a German passport. While his grave was not preserved, a plaque now marks his former home at Kurfürstenstraße 40, and a Stolperstein commemorates the persecution he suffered, at a different residence at Gaudystraße 5.
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