THE INTERCONNECTIONS OF DISCRIMINATION: Gender, class, nation, and race and the ‘Black Shame on the Rhine’

Relations between race, nation, class, and gender as categories of social inclusion and exclusion have been the subject of contemporary international debates in the social sciences. While some scholars advocate keeping these categories separate and apart, an increasing number of studies focus on their volatile intersections.

Such studies investigate how ‘racism and sexism build one system’, and examine the ‘reciprocal determination’ between racism and nationalism in connection with class structures (Balibar and Wallerstein 1990: 63f, 14). Some authors see ‘no difference between racist and sexist practice’¹ (Hall 2000: 8) and discuss how ‘power relations of gender have intertwined with those of class, race, and sexuality’ (Pierson et al. 1998: 1). Others argue that racism is constituted in the context of societal constructions of gender, class, nation, culture and race, and examine these as overlapping and flexibly combinable categories of integration and exclusion formed under concrete historical conditions (Hund 2002, 2006, 2007).

Within this intensifying debate it is widely accepted that the concepts of racism, nationalism, sexism, and class-related discrimination are interlinked. Their underlying ideologies are seen as mutually informing each other, while making use of their key categories reciprocally (Wigger 2007: 28). However, the exact modalities of these linkages are controversial. Some researchers focus on two categories (e.g. Yuval-Davis 1997; Christie 1998; Planert 2000); others discuss the relations between three or more categories, for example race, class and gender (e.g. Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; Boris 1999; Dhruvarajan and Vickers 2002; Andersen and Hill 2006 [1992]).

A few authors try to separate the categories analytically. Such attempts manifest themselves in the thesis that ‘“the three worlds of inequality” (race, class and gender) are somehow separate from each other’ (Back and Solomos 1996: 16). They understand them as distinct concepts of difference or discrimination that can be discussed independently from one another, even though they may also complement each other (see Wigger 2007: 28).

Other researchers draw a predominantly summative relation between race, nation, gender, and class. However, rather than examining commonalities and differences between them, they mainly discuss each category on its own. William M. Dugger, for example, understands the four categories as different ‘modes of inequality’ which can be dealt with separately.² Pierre-André Taguieff goes even further and attacks what he sees as an incorrect equation of the categories in the current scholarly discussion of racism. An undermining of their meaning would pretend that ‘all categories of social exclusion are identical as excluded: class = gender = race […] = minorities = oppressed nations or ethnic groups’ (Taguieff 2000: 76).

Attempts to analytically separate the categories have been criticized rigidly by Floya Anthias, Nira Yuval-Davis and others. Yuval-Davis and Anthias examine manifold, complex connections between these concepts. Their book Racialized Boundaries reflects upon the unsettled discussion of the categories. Investigating intersections and contradictions between them, they argue unequivocally that ‘racisms cannot be understood without considering their interconnections with ethnicity, nationalism, class, gender and the state’ (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992: VIII).³

A growing number of scholars concentrate on links between three or more categories, while assessing these differently. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, for example, see connections between racism, sexism, and nationalism in the context of class structures, and reflect their specific historical links in a ‘dialectic of the unity of contradictions’ (Balibar and Wallerstein 1990: 63f). Other research similarly stresses the importance of class in the analysis.⁴

Some studies place the category gender in the centre and focus on the role gender played in the historical constructions of nation, empire and colony. Referring to several links between power relations of gender, class and race, they suggest studying modern women's history in a ‘matrix of these interlocking categories’ (Pierson et al. 1998: 1). Others focus on the cultural aspects of race (Donald and Rattansi 1992), examine the interconnection of race, sex and gender in representations of ‘the Other’ (e.g. Gilman 1992, 1986, 1985; see also Flax 1995; Zack 1997; Hall 2000), or study the ‘gender ironies’ of nationalism (Mayer 1999).⁵

Wulf Hund's recent monographs on racism (2006, 2007) offer a complex analysis of categories of difference. His work discusses different aspects of racist discrimination reflecting on their connection with the concepts race, nation, gender, culture and class (Hund 2006: 95ff). Stressing the importance of these categories and their discursive interlocking for a historically competent analysis of racism, Hund shows racism to be a modus of ‘negative societalisation [Negative Vergesellschaftung]’ based on domination (Hund 2006).

The perspectives of such more complex studies obviously vary a great deal.⁶ They follow a wide spectrum of research questions, and discuss the categories from several different analytical angles. The different contributions to the debate do to some extent overlap; at the same time they both, contradict and complement each other. Despite such contradictions and variations, most scholars agree that complex connections exist between concepts of social integration and exclusion. Their work shows that categories like race, nation, gender, a nd class cannot be isolated from one another, and need to be analyzed in their social and historical contexts as well as in their complex interrelations.

Joane Nagel's work, for example, looks from a social-constructionist perspective at intersections and boundaries linked to social categories race, ethnicity and sexuality and discusses their connection in diverse contexts such as war, tourism, and globalisation.⁷ However, she does not make explicitly plausible why she considers ‘ethnicity as the core concept’ and ‘race and nationalism as two major forms of ethnicity’ (Nagel 2003: 6). She shows ‘that race, ethnicity, and nationalism are crucial components of sexual and moral boundaries and systems’ and treats sex as ‘a core constitutive element of race, ethnicity, and the nation’ (Nagel 2003: 255). Writing the book in a relatively loose ‘comparative historical interpretative style’, she wants to ‘leave for others the work of conducting in-depth case studies, designing large-scale historical or international investigations’ (Nagel 2003: 6).

Ann Laura Stoler's Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power examines the discursive interplay and ‘protean character’ (Stoler 2002: 8) of race, gender, culture, and class in different colonial and imperial contexts of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, and in the ‘making of colonial structures of dominance’ (Stoler 2002: 16). Her analysis explores the relations between gender representations and the social construction of racial boundaries. It shows in the context of Europe's colonial imperialism how ‘the making of racial boundaries turned on the management of sex’ (Stoler 2002: 16). She stresses the importance of gender distinctions, prescriptions and politics in the formation of colonial racial categories and what she terms the ‘racialized politics of classification’ (Stoler 2002: 8). Stoler elaborates convincingly the ways in which ‘imperial authority and racial distinctions were fundamentally structured in gendered terms’ (Stoler 2002: 42) and understands racism to be ‘a central organizing principle of European communities in the colonies’, underlying a ‘class-based logic’ of differentiation between colonisers and colonised (Stoler 2002: 13). Her work pleads for a historically oriented discussion of structural links between social categories of inclusion and exclusion in the colonial order of things.⁸

Inspired by this complex debate and particularly by Stoler's insights and Nagel's call for in-depth case studies and historical international investigations, I researched the relations of representations of race, nation, gender, and class in a sociological-historical case study focusing on a predominantly European historical context. My recently German-published book, ‘Die “Schwarze Schmach am Rhein”. Rassistische Diskriminierung zwischen Geschlecht, Klasse, Nation und Rasse’ [‘The “Black Shame on the Rhine”. Racist Discrimination between Gender, Class, Nation and Race’]. reflects historically upon the interplay of these categories in an international racist campaign in 1920s Europe. In this article I provide an excerpt of the main dimensions and results of this research project in the field of historical sociology.⁹ Clarifying its contribution to the contemporary debate about the relations between race, nation, gender, and class, I will also discuss some of its wider analytical and theoretical implications.

After World War I, the use of French colonial troops from different African colonies in the Allied occupation of the German Rhineland (between 25,000 and 40,000) provided the grounds for massive German protests, and the rise of an international racist campaign against their garrisoning in Europe. In Germany and in different European countries, these soldiers were stigmatised as a ‘Black Scourge’ or ‘Black Shame’ and represented as a dangerous, racially primitive, alien element in ‘civilised’ European territory.

Excessive uncontrollable sexual drives were attributed to the colonial troops and they were wrongly accused of raping German women on a large scale. Despite evidence provided by Allied investigators, proving these troops to be – apart from a few isolated cases – well-behaved and not involved in sexual atrocities, they were targeted as a dangerous ‘racial threat’ to German women. Moreover, their mere presence in ‘the heart of Europe’ in peace time, and the fact that France allowed them to oversee a ‘white people’, were attacked as a ‘crime against civilisation’.

Initialised by the German government in 1919 as a propaganda effort with clear anti-French dimensions, the campaign soon developed an unexpected dynamic of its own. Being spread by national and international media, it crossed political and geographical boundaries. Unsurprisingly, supporters could be found in extreme right-wing, nationalistic German circles. However, the campaign was also conducted by groups and individuals of different political and social backgrounds, including liberal, left-wing, and a wide range of German and international women organisations, MP's of different parties, trade unions, and Christian groups. Prominent German figures like Prince Max von Baden, Professor Lujo Brentano, or the German social-democratic president Friedrich Ebert also raised their voices against the ‘shameful black occupation’.

Massive protests against the ‘Black Disgrace’ rose in Germany and several European countries, and even reached the USA, South Africa and Australia. In the early 1920s the campaign reached its peak. The use of black troops on the Rhine became the topic of parliamentary debates, medical congresses, and several protest meetings and petitions organised by different social and political organisations. Even the German parliament passed resolutions against what was publicly condemned as an offence against the laws of civilisation, while governmental organisations published reports about several alleged atrocities perpetrated by black soldiers.

The stereotype of the ‘Black Shame’ was popularised, and an everyday-life racist discourse on the topic arose – fed by modern media. The imagined black outrage on the Rhine was propagated by several colportage novels¹⁰ as well as in short stories, plays, movies, caricatures, and on postcards, medals, posters and stamps (Figures 1 and 2). German national and local newspapers of all shades attacked the ‘Black Peril’ in a flood of sensationalist articles, and protest organisations, such as the German League against the Black Shame or the Hamburg Association for the combat of the Black Shame, joined their efforts.¹¹

On an international level the campaign found many prominent and politically diverse supporters. Edmund D. Morel, a merchant, British liberal journalist, critical expert on colonial questions, and later Labour MP was the central figure of British protests. Morel targeted the French nation, and accused its black troops on the Rhine of presenting an ‘abominable outrage against white womanhood, the white race, and civilisation’.¹²

He managed to mobilise British public opinion against what he termed the ‘Horror on the Rhine’ in his bestselling pamphlet,¹³ with the help of German governmental institutions and several organisations in Britain (Figure 3). Even though he had earlier in his life led a successful campaign against the inhuman treatment of the ‘native’ people in Belgian Congo, he was obviously far from seeing Blacks as equals. For him and many other campaigners, they were simply ‘Barbarians’ belonging to a ‘race inspired by nature’ and threatening the white German women with their ‘tremendous sexual instincts’.¹⁴

Popular British intellectuals and military representatives, parts of the liberal and left-wing press, and a diverse range of organisations, among them the International Labour Party, the Union of Democratic Control, and the British section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, supported British protests against the use of black troops on the Rhine. They also became a topic of parliamentary debates, as MP's of different parties openly protested against black soldiers’ alleged sexual atrocities, reminding the government that public opinion condemned the use of black troops against white people, and that they would behave outrageously in the Rhineland.¹⁵

The use of colonial troops from Africa received similar attention in several other European countries and the US. It was debated in national parliaments and in newspapers all over Europe. Diverse political, social and Christian groups, and individuals in Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and other European countries became concerned. They organised protest meetings, published pamphlets, and prepared protest notes (Figure 4), in which they expressed their solidarity with the German nation against the ‘Black Disgrace’.¹⁶ Prominent figures, like the former liberal Italian Prime Minister Francesco S. Nitti, the Swedish social-democratic president Hjalmar Branting, the South African president Smuths, Bertrand Russell, Pope Benedict XV and his successor Pius XI supported the protests.¹⁷

In the United States the ‘Black Shame’ was debated in Congress, and aroused attention in the Presidential election of 1920, when some voices suggested that candidate Warren Harding ‘should be voted for, because he would do his best to get those niggers out of Germany’.¹⁸ Different American Churches mobilised their members to protest, and a league called ‘American Campaign against the Horror on the Rhine’ (founded by Irish-Americans and German-Americans) organised a mass protest rally against the ‘Black Disgrace’ in New York, with 12,000 people attending. The populist ultra-nationalist German-American actress, Ray Beveridge, even became one of the major proponents of the campaign, and travelled Europe to propagate the topic internationally in protest meetings.¹⁹

The campaign against the ‘Black Shame’ has been the subject of scholarly discussion for some time. It is mentioned in two general works on racism, Racism and Society by John Solomos and Les Back, and The Racial State by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann. The former refers to it as an example of German nationalism and Nazi-racism (see Back and Solomos 1996: 172). The latter reflects upon the international character of the campaign, uniting politicians of different proveniance and also British people in the ‘interest of white solidarity’ (Burleigh and Wippermann 1998: 128).

A number of different, predominantly historical studies look at the campaign in more detail, opening up a wider, more differentiated perspective. With different interpretative emphases, they discuss its contents, development, motives, and international character. Many earlier articles interpret the protests mainly as an instrumental political propaganda campaign of German postwar diplomacy and focus on its strategic dimensions. The examples of historical sources they investigated show clearly that protests were indeed linked to political interests, and that some protesters exploited the use of colonial troops politically, intending to discredit France internationally, and mobilise public opinion against the occupation and the Treaty of Versailles (see Reinders 1968; Nelson 1970; Marks 1983; Gräber and Spindler 1992).

A few studies, many of them more recent, have shown that the content and development of the campaign transcendend this horizon of interpretation (see for example Lebzelter 1985; Campt 1996; Melzer 1998; Koller 2001; Maß 2001, 2006). They started to ask what gender images, images of colonial soldiers and other images of the enemy (Feindbilder) were propagated in the campaign. This research indicates that the protests intended to stigmatise the black troops racially, and to present them as a French threat to the German woman, the German nation, and the white race. Some scholars see the German woman representing the victim or ‘whore of black sexuality’ in the campaign, and point towards an ideological connection between her alleged rape, Germany's ‘national honour’, and the ‘purity of the entire white race’.

In this wider discussion of the ‘Black Shame’, the elements gender, nation, class and race began to appear in different constellations and contexts. None of the studies chose to make interrelations between these categories the main analytical focus. However, neither do they ignore them as elements of the ‘Black Shame’ discourse. Despite mainly focusing on other dimensions of the campaign, they refer to the categories from different perspectives. These are sometimes mentioned separately, other times combined in assumptions and hypotheses.

Gisela Lebzelter's insightful article from 1985, for example, was the first to interpret the ‘Black Shame’ as a nationalist-racist myth, and to discuss the role of the victimised German woman and the dogma of white supremacy in the campaign. She also implicates the significance of class for the analysis, referring to the intended national integration effect of the protests (Lebzelter 1985). A range of more recent articles similarly point out the significance of gender and racial images in the campaign. They examine the accusation of large-scale rape in the campaign (Marks 1983; Koller 2001), or discuss the ‘Black Shame’ as a ‘trauma of the white man’ (Maß 2001). A few studies state that the campaigners used the German woman figuratively as a medium of imagined ‘black threat’ (Campt 1996), and a possession of the German nation that had to be ‘kept free of foreign influences’. They also study images of men and racist images of colonial soldiers in the discourse (Koller 2001; Maß 2001). The exact modalities of connections between the categories are not investigated.

Some authors address race and nation together or see the idea of an insuperable contradiction between Blacks and Whites as the campaigns central motive (Martin 1996). The ‘Black Disgrace’ stereotype is hereby described as element of a racialising process (Campt 1996) and different studies are aware of its strong anti-French, nationalist dimensions (Campt 1996; Koller 2001; Maß 2001). A few studies, among them the well-researched monograph of the Swiss historian Christian Koller on the use of colonial troops in European warfare (Koller 2001), similarly suggest that gender images, racial images and nationalist motives were connected in the campaign.²⁰ However, given that the main focus of these studies is a different one, and that many of them are short research articles, none of them, including Koller's monograph, explores these interrelations in depth.

The above outlined research has undoubtedly made an important contribution to a recently more complex discussion of the campaign.²¹ Many studies, more or less implicitly, point towards the relevance of the elements race, nation, gender, and class for an appropriate study of the ‘Black Shame’ discourse. They nevertheless leave vastly open the important question concerning the concrete connections of the addressed categories. That is why I decided to make an in-depth analysis of the interplay of these elements in the campaign the focus of my analysis. My purpose is to understand more closely the mechanisms underlying the interlinking of sexist, racist, nationalistic and class-related patterns of social inclusion and exclusion in the racist discourse on the ‘Black Shame’.

In this respect, the category gender is of central importance in the campaign, and so in its connections with the other categories is the main focus of this article. The image of the white woman as victim of black sexuality forms the central pattern of the ‘Black Disgrace’ construct, connecting sexist with racist patterns of discrimination. The construction of a ‘Black Shame’ contrasts the image of the white woman represented as a ‘purity ideal’ with the racialised image of the black soldier, stigmatised as representative of a primitive race of barbaric savagery with dangerous and uncontrollable sexual instincts. Degrading the colonial troops, the campaign attributes them with a brutish rather than human character, or places them racially on the lowest scale of human evolution. Such attempts to dehumanise the colonial soldiers become particularly clear in various ‘Black Shame’ caricatures portraying black soldiers as gorillas, or chimpanzees.

The proponents of the protests moreover accused the French colonial troops wrongly of raping German women on a large scale. Different dimensions in the discussion of the ‘Black Shame’ make clear that women in the occupied German Rhineland ‘were predominantly not real vict ims of colonial troops, but symbolic victims of the campaign’ (Wigger 2007: 196). Regardless of the fact that sexual incidents involving colonial soldiers only occurred in a few isolated cases, the campaign attacked the rape of German women by black troops as a mass phenomenon.

The sexist dimensions of the atrocities the colonial soldiers were accused of, indicate similarly that it was the proponents of the campaign who victimised the German women. Representations of ‘black lust’ and its ‘white victims’ in the discourse clearly show pornographic dimensions. Protagonists of the ‘Black Shame’ debate were able to spread their violent sexual fantasies under the false pretence that it would be other – black men – who laid their hands on white women. Being able to project their own fantasies on the ‘Blacks’, they could, unabashed, write about women being defiled to death, or becoming the helpless victims of sadism, perversions, sex murder, and brutal sexual violence. However, it was their own sexual fantasies and not those of colonial troops in which women's bodies were tortured, torn open, sucked, and abused.

Such rape scenarios are indications of everyday life violence against women in a patriarchal society, and documentations of the campaigners disposition to victimise, torture, and humiliate them (see Wigger 2007: Chapter 3.11).²² They also show that campaigners divided German women along class lines, and discriminated against German women of lower classes. Imagined rape victims staged in novels and pamphlets on the ‘Black Shame’ were clearly marked as women from a lower-class background. Women of the higher classes were also portrayed as threatened by ‘black lecherous troops’, but were not made imagined rape victims. Authors of colportage literature were, on the basis of coeval ideas of racial hygiene and eugenics, obviously convinced that these women were and had to be treated as ‘superior’. They were particularly concerned to keep the bodies of upper-class women free from alien degradations. ‘Black Disgrace’ novel plots involved German men who did everything to protect them, even being ready to kill ‘black soldiers’ to keep them away from the daughters of ‘better’ German families.²³

Campaigners made very clear that women of different classes were meant to fulfil different roles in the German national community: upper-class women characters in colportage literature were portrayed as conscious passionate defenders of the honour of white womanhood. Authors showed what they expected them to do to avoid a ‘contamination’ of their bodies, and imagined upper-class women, swollen with national and racial pride, choosing Lucretia-like to die as martyrs in avoiding sexual intercourse with French troops. Working-class women were represented as conscious of their ‘inferiority’. Aiming at protecting upper-class women by all means, they were staged as ready to sacrifice themselves to avoid their alleged ‘superiors’ being raped by black troops.²⁴

In the campaign, female bodies were also used allegorically as a national and racial metaphor. The sexist and racist image of the helpless white German woman, threatened by ‘primitive black fiends’, was found to be a suitable allegory for the German nation, ‘raped by its enemies’, and ‘chained by the Treaty of Versailles’. The staged sexual atrocities of ‘racially inferior’ black troops on German women were presented as threatening a genealogically and racially defined German national body (Volkskörper) through contamination and segregation. In this intersection of patterns of discrimination based on gender, race, and nation, the ‘threatened purity’ of the woman was ideologically equated with a German nation imperilled in its purity. In this context, putative sexual contacts between black soldiers and German women were condemned as threatening the German people with biological decline through a ‘mulattoisation’ and ‘syphilitisation’.

The danger of biological decline was intensively promoted in the campaign. It was embedded in a wider international discourse on eugenics, ‘racial purity’ and ‘racial hygiene’,²⁵ and a German tradition of attacking the imagined dangers of colonial racial miscegenation and decline in academic, legal, journalistic texts, and literature. Fatima El-Tayeb's recent study showed how aggressively the German legal system opposed colonial inter-racial marriages. While condemning them (with reference to the coeval eugenic discourse) as ‘racial shame’, it introduced rigid legal orders with the intention of keeping ‘the German race and custom’ pure, and of maintaining the ‘white man's powerful position’ (El-Tayeb 2001: 120, 93). Nils C. Lösch (2001: 72f) argued that the German anthropologist and ethnologist Eugen Fischer, in his studies of the so-called ‘Rehebother Bastards’, combined their enhancement with a warning against thinking of them as equal to Whites, as this would lead to ‘racial mixture’, and – connected with this – a decline of culture. Amadou Booker Sadji clarified how sexuality between Europeans and Africans and associated problems of ‘racial mixture’ became a matter of obsession in colonial literature (Sadji 1985).

If white womanhood and German nationhood were intertwined in the campaign, how did the categorial use of women operate as a metaphor for a disarmed and defenceless nation? This role fitted well with coeval gender stereotypes on the basis of which women were regarded as the ‘weaker sex’ requiring male protection.²⁶ Campaigners found women suitable for representing a helpless nation as the element of weakness was already embedded in the female stereotype. This stereotypical image of feminine weakness and vulnerability could easily be equated with the image of a threatened, weakened, devastated, German nation, ‘which was helpless because its men had been emasculated through disarming’ (Wigger 2007: 198).

Making the rape of German women by an ‘inferior race’ an allegory for a desecrated people premises a racially based perception of the German nation, and a racially defined national body. Women were suitable for representing a jeopardised German people, as the concept of the German nation was genealogically defined, and racially imprinted. This concept of nation could be linked with the German woman because it defines nation on the basis of blood and lineage. Metaphors of national contamination and desecration would not work outside a concept of nation linked to the idea of purity. ‘A nation can only become damaged through the sexual intercourse of its women, if it defines itself genealogically, and perceives itself as a unity based on the elements blood, the people (Volk), and lineage’ (Wigger 2007: 198).

Campaigners moreover represented the German woman symbolically as an allegory for a ‘threatened white race’. Her body was figuratively transformed into a symbol for both a German nation under attack and an endangered white racial and cultural community. A 1920 s caricature showing a naked ‘white woman’ carried off by a colonial soldier represented as a big gorilla illustrates how this allegory linked discrimination patterns based on gender, race, and nation.

The caricature demonstrates attempts to racialise and dehumanise the colonial soldier in the campaign. This simianised representation attributes him with primitivity, inhumanity, savagery, and brute instincts. He is carrying a naked white woman, whose nakedness and hanging posture signify her as helpless, a defenceless victim of the ‘brute’.²⁷ The title of the caricature ‘A Shame for the white Race, but it is happening in Germany’ indicates that the naked female body in this image served as an allegory for both a ‘tortured defiled German nation’ and a ‘threatened white race’. Linking racist and nationalist elements of discrimination, the caricaturist placed a French military helmet on the gorilla's head. This helmet signified nationality, and made this gorilla-image identifiable to represent a French colonial soldier.

Such racist scenarios made the German woman a ‘White Martyr’ of the ‘Black Disgrace’, whose defilement was not just constructed as contaminating and dishonouring the German nation, but also as violating every instinct for the preservation of the white race. Gender proved to be not only a flexibly combinable category, but was also used as a direct substitute for the category race, which it then superseded. This was possible because the coeval social construction of femininity already contained a racist element. The campaign called upon German women to keep their bodies free from alien influence, stay away from the ‘black troops’, and so defend their female honour (Frauenehre), national honour, and racial honour. Women were hereby used as symbolic markers of both national and racial boundaries.²⁸

The construction of women as representative of nation and race threatened in their purity was thwarted by the suspicion entertained by some campaigners that women were naturally libidinous. The phantasmagoria of the German woman as carrier and keeper of the purity and honour of the collectives nation and race collided ideologically with the predominant stereotype of femininity. It classified all women as voluptuous, and due to their sex suspected of mixing with ‘lecherous savages’ voluntarily. Opponents as well as some advocates of the campaign were, on the basis of this stereotypical commonplace, convinced that women were creatures ruled by sexual instincts, and saw nothing shameful in sexual relations with blacks. As with the allegedly ‘lecherous blacks’, they were supposed to be governed by drives and instincts, and hence constructed in direct opposition to the ideal of the ‘rational white male’ (Wigger 2007: 198).

Campaigners tried to align this sexist stereotype with their ideal of the woman as keeper of female, national and racial honour. They hereby drew upon the well-established societal distinction between ‘honourable women’ (ehrbare Frauen) and ‘dishonourable women’ (ehrlose Frauen). ‘The first category relates to the domesticated woman, who reins in her drives, and keeps her body free from alien influences. The second category stigmatised women who had relationships with colonial soldiers as inordinate and lecherous traitors of the white race’ (Wigger 2007: 199). Women from lower classes and poor backgrounds were doubly discriminated against. They were particularly suspected of lacking any sense of ‘racial honor’ and ‘moral decency’ and interfering with ‘primitive black troops’. French women were stigmatised along the same ideological lines (see Wigger 2007: Chapter 3.12). This discrimination of some women on the basis of divisions referring to ideas of nation, race and class demonstrates the intersection of different categories of inclusion and exclusion. It shows that racial, national, and class divisions intensively penetrate the construction of gender in the campaign.

Existing relationships between German women and colonial soldiers were condemned as ‘White Shame’ by campaigners and French critics alike. The ‘Black Shame’ discourse hereby discriminated against women and colonial soldiers on the basis of comparable patterns of inferiorisation and dehumanisation. Women who did not keep away from black soldiers were accused of losing their honour as white women, and of being – just as with Africans – prurient and unable to control their sexual drives. The campaign frequently admonished German women to watch their ‘racial honor’. A 1920 French caricature (corresponding with German critics of ‘morally loose’ German women) shows how society was meant to view women refusing to do so (Figure 5).

The caricature shows a German woman as a lecherous sow, presenting her sexual attributes to a black French colonial soldier in uniform, and obviously trying to seduce him. Ideologically, it is fully compatible with the image of the black man portrayed as an ape, carrying off the white woman. They are both images of an imagined bestial animalistic sexuality. On the basis of established stereotypes of black racial inferiority and lack of sexual control, and the stereotype of women lacking control over their instinctual drives, campaigners were prepared to attribute animalistic sexual qualities to both, black soldiers, and white ‘women without honour’ (see Wigger 2007: Chapter 3.12).

This closed interlinking of woman and race in the campaign worked on the basis of a predominant race-discourse. The stereotype of the white woman was an element embedded in this discourse, and the idea of her ‘purity’ played a central role in the context of European colonialism. In colonial nations like France, Great Britain, but also in the United States, which tried to stop sexual relations between black men and white women through lynching, the question ‘how to keep the white woman pure’ was well known.

The campaign's protests against the alleged threat of contamination of the white woman in Germany referred to an internationally widespread racial ideology of racial purity and contamination. Drawing on the sexist definition of the woman as a creature governed by drives, it is linked to the conviction that white women surrounded by black men in the colonies should not be given a choice. Colonial societies tried hard to oversee and control the sexual behaviour of white women, linking the persecution of the sexuality of black men with attempts to control the sexuality of white women. Such control attempts become visible in colonial discussions and legislation, which persecute sexual assaults of black men against white women as particularly severe crimes, and tried to prevent relations between them.

In her discussion of European women and racial boundaries, Ann Laura Stoler recognises the connection between the persecutions of black men's sexuality and attempts to control the sexuality of white women in the colonial context. Colonisers warned of the danger of a ‘Black Peril’, which they argued had to be kept in check through legislations against rape and sexual assaults. These laws were racial laws in so far as they neither prosecuted cases of the rape of black women, nor rape incidents in which the perpetrator was a white man. A wide range of attempts and regulations trying to control women's behaviour and sexual relations indicates that they were also formulated in a sexist context (see Stoler 2002: 55–61).

Joane Nagel likewise identifies attempts to control white female and black male sexuality in American history. White male strategies to hinder both ‘sexually crossing the color line’ (Nagel 2003: 110) were frequent and historically varied, and included violent assaults against white women as well as the lynching of black men for what was supposed to be sexual misconduct (Nagel 2003: Chapter 4). Nagel suggests that they corresponded with theories of a ‘dangerousness of black male sexuality’ and of ‘white women's sexual looseness’ and an alleged ‘degeneracy of lower-class white female sexuality’ (Nagel 2003: 110).

The ‘Black Shame’ campaign made similar attempts to control white women's sexuality. In accordance with colonial societies, it presented them as the necessity of fighting back the sexuality of black men, constructed as aggression. Attempts to control the sexual life of women in the occupied Rhineland were numerous, and showed in the threatening, stigmatising, correction, condemnation, and exclusion of women who did not avoid contacts with colonial and other soldiers of the Allied occupation forces. Campaigners warned German women not to interfere with colonial soldiers, and threatened them with proscription and prosecution. Love relationships between them were treated as national and racial disgrace. Women who engaged in contact with colonial troops were denounced as stigma (Schandmal) of the German nation and white race, and excluded from both imagined communities. ‘On the basis of the stereotypical sexist perception of females being unscrupulous, the antagonism of the “black rapist” and his “white woman victim” is in the campaign underlain by the antagonisms of male self-discipline and primitive lecherousness’. The first combines women of different ranks. The second unites them with alleged lower races to produce a counter-image of the white man (Wigger 2007: 199).

In this racist construction, women refusing to play the victim of black violence were running the risk of being scaled-down to the low level of ‘primitive black soldiers’. Women who did not take the appeals for a ‘keep clean of the white race’ seriously became real victims of denunciation and assaults, with which campaigners tried to induce their appreciation of their honour as white women. The only women who could rely on the national German community were women who did not interfere with colonial soldiers, and were therefore seen as ‘honourable women’. All others were denounced as doomed and dangerous for the German nation. To make their exclusion from the German people and the racial community visible, campaigners marked women's bodies as impure, batted and painted them with black colour, and disfigured them. Children from relations between German women and colonial soldiers (around 550) were discriminated against as ‘Rhineland Bastards’ in the 1920s, and subjected to a terrible act of racially motivated sterilisation by the German Fascist regime in 1937 (Figure 6).²⁹

The campaign's central ideological motif of the white woman threatened by primitive black soldiers was applied on different levels. On a national level it served as an ideological call to promote national unification beyond existing divisions and class tensions, and to exclude ‘traitors of national solidarity in the own reigns’ (see Wigger 2007: Chapter 3.4). On an international level, it was used to call for the solidarity of the international community with the German nation, allegedly defenceless, threatened and tortured by French occupation, the Versailles Treaty and ‘Black Shame’. In this context, the campaigners accused France of deliberately humiliating Germany, and questioned its status as a ‘white civilised nation’ (see Wigger 2007: Chapter 3.3).

Moreover, protesters shared the conviction that using black troops for garrisoning a civilised European nation and member of the ‘white community’ would seriously compromise the dogma of white supremacy and domination, and damage the ‘white civilization’ as the order of the world.³⁰ German and international campaigners were appalled that ‘savages’ were given permission to ‘dwell like Masters in Europe’, and thus would become used to the ‘for coloured tribes astounding triumph, to be aloud to tyrannise a white people within the once feared Europe’.³¹

This research project has some wider implications for the study of different categories of social inclusion and exclusion, and for the analysis of racist discourses. It shows the complexity of racist discrimination, and clarifies the flexible interconnection of different dimensions of inclusion and exclusion in historical context. The campaign's ideological distinction between honourable women (helpless, threatened by black troops), and women without national and racial honour (lecherously interfering with them) along class lines, illustrates the intensive historical correspondence and discursive interlinking of sexist, racist and class-based patterns of discrimination. The campaigners could with reference to the coeval stereotype of women as the weaker sex, flexibly underlie the image of the honourable German woman with that of the allegedly shameless woman, ruled by an ‘animalistic, lecherous nature’, and engaging in voluntary sexual relations with ‘primitive black men’.

The connection of these two representations in the campaign marks what Wulf Hund convincingly called a ‘predetermined ideological breaking-point’ (ideologische Sollbruchstelle) in the social construction of women, at which sexist discrimination passes into racist discrimination (see Hund, in Wigger 2007: 342). This breaking point was not just used in the French propaganda's rhetoric of a ‘White Shame’ on the Rhine, accusing German women of voluntary relationships with black soldiers. It was also an important element of the campaign against the ‘Black Shame’ itself.

The racist construction of the ‘Black Disgrace’ and the exclusion and dehumanisation of so-called ‘women without honour’ in this widespread international discourse shows that racism can neither be appropriately studied as a phenomenon limited to a certain historical period, nor as directed only towards the external, the outsider, ‘the other’. It can rather be understood as a modus of dehumanisation and exclusion underlying the ‘history of society formation based on domination (herrschaftliche Vergesellschaftung)’.³² As such it can also be applied within a society, and – as the campaign clearly shows – used to inferiorise and dehumanise some of its members.

On the basis of my analysis of the interlinking of race, nation, gender, and class in the ‘Black Shame’ discourse, I advocate to further engage in studies investigating relations between these categories in a historically reflexive way. My case study identified important structural interlinks between them, demonstrating their constant, intensive and flexible discursive correspondence. The close connections of patterns and processes of discrimination based on race, gender, nation, and class in the campaign indicate that the social constructions of these concepts are linked and should always be studied in historical context.

Reflecting back upon the current predominantly theoretical scholarly discussion of these concepts, my work contributes to the critique of studies limiting their focus to a single category without considering its wider discursive relations with other categories of difference. My analysis of the ‘Black Shame’ discourse supports, on the basis of empirical historical evidence, calls for a combined analysis of the dynamics and intertwining of different categories of social exclusion. The societal formation of racist discourses and representations of race cannot be adequately understood without engaging with their historical connections with other categories of difference. Investigating racisms from a historically reflexive, sociological perspective requires indeed a consideration of their intertwining with ‘nationalism, class, gender and the state’ (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992: VIII).

The ‘Black Shame’ discourse can hereby be seen as a historically and sociologically interesting example of the flexible ways in which ‘“genders”, “classes”, “nations”, “cultures” and “races” […] impart processes of social inclusion and exclusion’. It shows explicitly how different categories of integration and exclusion are ‘linked, overlap, and […] can be adjusted, and interwoven into complex ideological patterns’ (Hund 2002: 17).

Ideal-typical definitions of these categories – often attempting to keep them analytically separate – lack the potential to reflect adequately on their complex relations in modern European history. Studies focusing mainly on one of the concepts would benefit from exploring its relations with other categories of inclusion and exclusion. In correspondence with the work of scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler, Audrey Smedley, Catherine Hall, and Wulf Hund my research demonstrates the need to overcome what Wolfgang Wippermann critically addressed as a ‘lack of historical reflexivity’ in the current scholarly debate about the relations of categories of integration and exclusion. These are of a ‘protean character’ (Stoler 2002: 8), and embedded differently in different colonial, imperial, national and international historical contexts.

Representations of race, nation, gender and class did not historically develop independently from one another. They form the ideological basis for interlinked inequalities and discriminations in societies of the past and present. All four categories mark socially drawn, flexible, and interacting boundaries between humans, and ideologically underlie complex, connected processes of representation, social inclusion, exclusion, and discrimination in and between human societies.

Iris Wigger is a lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. Before that, she was a lecturer in the School of Sociology at University College Dublin (2005–2006), and a researcher and project-coordinator in the History Department of the University of Hamburg (2004–2005). Her main research and teaching interests are in the areas of historical sociology, racism, nationalism, and imperialism; and the historic interlinks of race, gender, nation, culture, and class, as categories of social inclusion and exclusion. She has published in the fields of historical sociology and racist discrimination. Her most recent publication is titled Die ‘Schwarze Schmach am Rhein’. Rassistische Diskriminterung zwischen Geschlecht, Klasse, Nation und Rasse [The ‘Black Shame on the Rhine’. Racist Discrimination between Gender, Class, Nation, and Race] (Münster 2007).