The Quotidian and The Reproduction of Hate
After completing her undergraduate degree, Angela Davis set sail for Germany as “Watts was burning” to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy. Upon arriving in West Germany, she looked for a room to rent; however, she kept facing agencies who told her, “Es tut uns leid, aber wir haben keine Zimmer für Ausländer.” Essentially, they told Davis they did not rent rooms to foreigners, and Davis points out that this statement, to her, implied, “Our rooms are only for good Aryans,” not a Black American.
Thinking about this experience, Davis points out that her arrival in West Germany comes twenty years following the end of World War II and twenty years, in the grand scheme of historical time, is not that long. She writes, “half the people I saw on the streets, and practically all the adults, had gone through the experience of Hitler. And in West Germany, unlike the German Democratic Republic, there had been no determined campaign to attack the fascist and racist attitudes that had become so deeply embedded.” Davis points out that the “historical closure” of World War II happened and the Nuremberg trials occurred and Adolf Eichmann’s trial occurred, but those things, those reparative acts, did not suddenly wipe clean the deep rooted “fascist and racist attitudes” of the people she interacted with on a daily basis in 1965.
