A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American Gis, and Germany

Based on an award-winning international research project and photo exhibition, this poignant and beautifully illustrated book examines the experiences of African American GIs in Germany and the unique insights they provide into the civil rights struggle at home and abroad. Thanks in large part to its military occupation of Germany after World War II, America’s unresolved civil rights agenda was exposed to worldwide scrutiny as never before. At the same time, its ambitious efforts to democratize German society after the defeat of Nazism meant that West Germany was exposed to American ideas of freedom and democracy to a much larger degree than many other countries. As African American GIs became increasingly politicized, they took on a particular significance for the Civil Rights Movement in light of Germany’s central role in the Cold War. While the effects of the Civil Rights Movement reverberated across the globe, Germany represents a special case that illuminates a remarkable period in American and world history.

Digital archive including videos, photographs, and oral history interviews available at www.breathoffreedom.org

Maria Hohn teaches German history at Vassar College and is the author of GIs and Frauleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany.

Martin Klimke is a historian and research fellow at the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) at Heidelberg University, Germany and the author of The Other Alliance: Global Protest and Student Unrest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties. Hohn and Klimke are the recipients of the 2009 NAACP Julius E. Williams Distinguished Community Service Award for their research on the connection between the military service of African American GIs abroad and the advancement of civil rights in the U.S.

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