In early spring of 2018, I found myself on a phone call with an estranged cousin, Beate. I had just moved back to Germany to research and relive my childhood in preparation for work on a memoir. When my cousin learned I had moved back, she got in touch.

“Aren’t you so glad to be back in Germany?” she asked. “Isn’t it so beautiful?”

Before I could respond, she followed it up by scoffing, her voice dripping with disdain, “But it is so sad we have all these Blacks now.”

What she actually said, in German, was einfach furchtbar. “Simply awful.” But it’s more than that; from the root, furcht, meaning bloodcurdling, terrifying, gruesome. 

I was born in 1946 in Weiden, Germany; the daughter of a German war widow and an African American GI. What so many Americans today fail to understand is that, in post-Hitler Germany, the Nazi government may have been ousted, but Naziism was no less pervasive. Racism, a core tenet of Nazi belief, was as widespread as ever. I do not possess the details of that liaison, but I do know that after trying and failing several times to abort me, my mother, a Nazi sympathizer, hid me in the attic of my home for the first four years of my life. I was not permitted to socialize with my siblings, and was given an ill-luck name in hopes I would die young. I was the only Black child in the entire region surrounding my small Bavarian town.

Along with my father’s skin I inherited the full freight of judgement cast against it by Nazi rationale. Once, my mother took me to the post office with her to pick up her pension check. The post woman asked my mother if it was true that I couldn’t sit in a chair, and only squatted on the floor; my mother was furious to have been so humiliated, and when we returned home, I was punished. When my sisters were teenagers, and would go out to meet boys, I was not allowed to be seen with them for fear I would scare off potential suitors.

When I would tell people about these experiences as an adult, they would often react with disbelief; something in the human condition resists acknowledging such atrocities. As I navigated my own forays into courtship and dating, I grappled with identity in ways that resonated with neither the Black nor the white cultures through which I moved.

I was fair as a baby and became darker as I grew older.  In summer, my skin would brown as I played outside. My mother would become furious, hustling me indoors. My first crop of baby hair was soft and wispy, but in time my hair became more kinky and unruly. My siblings, several years older than I, bore no resemblance to me. They were white, fair, and blonde. The only moment of kindness I can recall from them came from my eldest sister, Irmgard. I had tried to run away, and was brought home by police; my mother’s retaliation was to lock me in a room and try to starve me. Irmgard brought me food when my mother was distracted, and I lived.

The adults in my extended family embodied the same banal and devastating racism. Babette, my mother's younger sister, never said my name; she only referred to me as “the Black one.” She would hit me with a dirty, wet rag when I tried to enter her house. Maria, my mother’s oldest sister, had a sense of humor that was, in a word, cruel. In general, we were never allowed to talk back or complain. And so I would have to listen as she spun tales of how I was found in a ditch or refered to my hands as paws. I recall her asking me if my blood was white. I did not respond.  

What stays with me, about Maria in particular, is how intelligent I knew she was; and yet she persisted in joining the racist behavior of the rest of my family. She inflicted pain, but I would not give her the satisfaction of showing her my pain. Maria seemed to find it funny, but I knew she knew better, since she was the smartest one in the family.

Babette, meanwhile, was married to Michael, who was–I suspected and later confirmed–a proud Nazi and one of Hitler’s so-called “100,000 Men,” his most enthusiastic members of the SS. They lived across the alley from us when I was a child, and visited frequently. One evening, when I was eight or nine, I was pretending to sleep on the kitchen sofa, which was partially hidden by a cabinet. I had a habit of tucking myself there to listen and learn what I could from the muddled conversation of adults. That night, I overheard Michael telling my mother that if he had a Black child like me he would kill her. 

My mother’s silence in that moment has stayed with me for the rest of my life. I knew, profoundly and completely, that I would have to be responsible for defending my own life. Today, each time a new report reaches me of the death of a Black American at the hands of police, my uncle’s voice rings in my ears. As I watch protestors flood the streets, holding high signs that say “White Silence Is Violence,” the silence of that kitchen surrounds me again. It never leaves you, that embedded feeling that you are your only recourse for survival; it becomes the constant mechanism of your daily life.

And of course, I did survive. Eventually I met and married an American soldier–though unlike my father, he was white–and moved with him to the United States, where we started a family together in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. When our first son, Jerald, was born, I was shocked to see his fair features, blonde hair, and blue eyes. My husband–and even my husband’s parents–had brown eyes. 

All my life, I moved through whiteness as an excluded party. I never knew anything else. Even in the U.S., where progress was being made toward racial equity, I was still the only Black person in my husband’s white family. It was so hard not to feel that my son’s whiteness somehow underscored my exclusion. 

When my second son, Brian, was born brown-skinned like me, I felt a special connection to him. Finally, I had a family member who felt truly part of me; in whom I could recognize myself. As I attempted to shepherd both my sons through their upbringing, and as we moved from state to state, adjusting to new communities with new iterations of racism, I felt compelled to shield my younger son from the sort of pain and harm I had weathered as a child. It was clear to me that my two sons belonged to two different worlds, with two different justice systems. The racism of my childhood had followed me, through years and across an ocean and even through the sweeping changes propelled by civil rights activists. It was a chimera, shifting shape and eluding grasp, dwelling underground.

So, I shifted, too. From my first years in the attic and the hardships that followed, I became a student; a wife; a mother; a model; an entrepreneur; a restaurateur; a food manufacturer. The pinnacle of my professional and creative career came in the form of my own atelier in northern California where I designed bespoke clothing and consulted as a fashion coach. Among my national clientele were some of Hollywood’s glitterati and influencers; but among my community, the glinting chimera of racism laid in wait. After a lengthy legal battle during which small-town politics and racism dominated the courtroom, I was forced out of my building and out of the town I had made my home.

For years, I collected small bits of writing, haphazardly triggered memories which came to me in odd moments. After the loss of my business in California, I was ready to travel back to Bavaria to reckon with the chimeras of my past. 

In August of 2018, a few months after my conversation with Beate, I was walking along a street in Augsburg, Germany when a white woman in her mid-thirties came up behind me and rammed her body into mine, violently knocking me from the curb. 

“Get out of my way, n––r,” she spat as she hurried past. 

Little did I realize, my past would be revitalized and living out in the open, running into me on the street.

Although Germany has made much of its efforts to become more progressive, there has been a relapse of racism on a vast scale, and an increase in the overt attitude of white superiority–especially among younger generations. The generation of German grandchildren today, who are in their thirties and forties, tend to know the facts of the Holocaust, and make a public show of rejecting the ideology of the Nazis more strongly than their parents’ generation. However, as a general rule, they only tend to acknowledge it as a political issue, not a private, personal affair with legacies that extend to generational wealth.

From my vantage point straddling these two countries, I recognize there is a parallel between this phenomenon, and what has come to pass in the United States over the course of the last century and a half. It’s clear to me that the rise of Trumpism in the U.S. is the resurgence of white supremacy; or perhaps, its inevitable return from beneath the surface, where it has lingered, like the nationalist Nazi mindset in Germany, waiting for the right circumstances in which to breed. 

In my own family, attempts at reconciliation have been mixed. One sister still rebuffs all of my attempts to speak with her. In most conversations, I am, even today, accused of being too sensitive. “You should feel privileged that you’re allowed to live here,” one of the aforementioned German grandchildren said to me, a few years ago. 

But there was one moment of relief: five years ago, Irmgard finally apologized to me, and shared that she felt ashamed for all the years she was not strong enough to help me. She speaks openly, now, about the injustice and cruelty to which I was subjected. It was a moment of healing; the first and only time I felt heard by a family member. 

Watching the Republican National Convention, I was dismayed–though unsurprised–to hear President Trump stoke the fears of white mothers, warning that their neighborhoods would be inundated by low-income residents taking advantage of fair housing law, presumably to be ushered in should Democrats occupy the White House. It was easy to infer that the President was referring to people who look like me. As I watched, I felt that familiar sense of constriction and exclusion. I could feel the attic of my childhood closing around me. 

As I consider my relationships with the two countries where I have lived, I’m increasingly fearful at the resonances I see in both today. I see the reinvigorated, emboldened return of overt white supremacy gaining strength on both sides of the Atlantic. I think of the Black and Brown babies born in this country for whom childhood has become a frightening landscape. What is resilience without a happy ending? Can I celebrate the strength that allowed me to carry myself away from the cruelty of my childhood, amidst the horror of watching a resurgence of the philosophies that encouraged it?

My sister told me last week that police in Dusseldorf knelt on the neck of a fifteen-year-old boy in imitation of George Floyd’s murder. I don’t know what to do with the urgency I feel when she tells me this–an urgency that seems absent from so many people in both of my countries–except to tell my story, and hope something in it will move them.

-Marta Kappl

Marta is an entrepreneur who founded and operated numerous businesses over the years, mainly in northern California. Most recently, she was a fashion designer who created couture for men and women, and provided style consulting services for private clients as well as corporations. Marta started her working life in the public sector in El Paso, Texas, where she held positions ranging from social service director to drug and alcohol counselor. She was born in Weiden, Germany, and studied at the University of Texas, FIDM and The Fashion Institute in San Francisco, and at UC Berkeley Extension, where her focus was marketing. She currently resides in Norwalk, Connecticut, where she is at work on her memoir.