Afro-Germans,multidirectional memory and French colonial aphasia: The legacy of the First World War in Galadio by Didier Daeninckx

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of mnemonic traces in Galadio, Didier Daeninckx’s 2010 novel. I demonstrate that by fictionalizing the history of the persecution of Afro-Germans under National Socialism, the novel exposes antiblackness as a neglected phenomenon of the Third Reich. Synchronously, applying Michael Rothberg’s theoretical framework, the article discusses the dialogue between Jewish and Afro-German legacies of violence in the novel, as well as the intricate relation between colony, camp and what Paul Gilroy defines as camp mentality. Furthermore, I argue that Daeninckx engages with French colonial aphasia: in my interpretation, his oblique approach to the French imperial past conveys its simultaneous presence and absence, which is key to disabled memory. Finally, I focus on the ethics of commemoration in Galadio, which claims space for black soldiers in French collective memory of the two world wars, yet at the same time challenges imperial loyalties and homogeneous approaches to French national identity.

Introduction

This article provides an analysis of Galadio, a novel published in 2010 by French popular fiction writer Didier Daeninckx. The author, who defines himself as ‘un écrivain du social’ [a writer of the social] and ‘un écrivain affecté’ [an affected writer] (Daeninckx, 2019), often blurs history and fiction to explore the lacunas of (French) collective memory. Daeninckx’s creative output has been classified as an example of ‘historical realism’, exposing histories of oppression, which have been obscured ‘in the interest of institutions and individuals’ (Reid, 2010: 54). ¹ A central theme of his work is the complicity of the French state in the Holocaust, as well as a valorization of ethnic diversity in France (Reid, 2010: 46; 49). In Galadio, the author focuses on the fictional story of Ulrich Ruden, called in secret Galadio, the illegitimate child of a German woman and a tirailleur sénégalais [Senegalese rifleman] who was stationed in the Rhineland after the First World War. In 1939, caught in a climate of rising hatred and discrimination against non-Aryans, Galadio by miracle evades involuntary sterilization and is forced to contribute to Nazi propaganda cinema. As a member of a film crew, he travels to Africa, where he undertakes a long journey in an attempt to find his father. Finally, the protagonist joins the French army and returns to Europe.

The article argues that Galadio represents an important intervention in both German and French national memory. I analyse the protagonist’s search for identity as a child of black and white parentage in Nazi Germany and Africa, and his final prise de conscience that enables him to oppose the Nazi regime. By exploring the history of Afro-Germans ² in the Third Reich, I contend, Daeninckx challenges ‘the hegemonic discourse on the Nazi era that has written out or downplayed the presence of antiblackness and Negrophobia’ (Lusane, 2003: 4). The article also explores the multiple facets of racism towards the Afro-Germans as similar to, yet different from, the biopolitical measures applied to the Jewish population. I approach the contact between Daeninckx’s Afro-German and Jewish characters as a source of unexpected alliances and solidarities. By engaging with how and why the histories of the two groups are intertwined in the novel, I hope to move closer to the vision of memory articulated by Michael Rothberg, which builds upon a relational dialogue between disparate legacies of violence. Furthermore, I argue that Galadio implicitly addresses the problematic remembrance of the colonial past in France, which Ann Laura Stoler (2016) refers to in terms of colonial aphasia. In my reading, the exploration of the persecution of Afro-Germans under National Socialism leads therefore to another forgotten history, that is, that of French colonialism and its impact on French identities today. I apply Paul Gilroy’s concept of camp-thinking to the pathologies of race and nationalism in the context of the Third Reich and the French Empire. Finally, I show how Daeninckx commemorates the two world wars using colonial war memory in a particularly complex and thought-provoking way.

Galadio: A Rhineland Bastard

Among the occupation troops that the French sent to the Rhineland after the First World War, there were between 20,000 and 45,000 soldiers of colour, who came primarily from Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Senegal and Madagascar. Although the majority were North Africans, the Germans tended to represent all of them as ‘black’ and denounced the Schwarze Schande [the Black Shame] as evidence of their humiliation and victimization by a vindictive France. ‘The Black horror of the Rhine’ became the object of heated debates in Great Britain and the United States. The political goal of this international campaign was to criticize the treaty of Versailles and to elicit racial solidarity with Germany, thus isolating and condemning France, who had betrayed the white race. ³ In Germany, the campaign represented the Black Shame as a biological, moral and cultural threat to all Germans and used it to promote a vision of Volksgemeinschaft, national unity, beyond social and political conflicts. The Africans were defamed by the German nationalist right as blood-thirsty sexual beasts who terrorized the local population. The alleged rape of German women by Africans was the principal atrocity highlighted in popular culture, ranging from newspapers and magazines, fiction, theatre and cinema to postcards, stamps, posters and commemorative medals. In these violent erotic fantasies, the violated German woman became a symbol of the imperilled German nation and white civilization. Most of these accusations were untrue; on the contrary, there were several examples of fraternization between the black troops and the local population. Between 500 and 800 mixed-race children, called the ‘Rhineland bastards’, were born of consensual unions (Fogarty, 2008: 274–282; 117; Lusane, 2003: 65–71; Wigger, 2017: 2–10; 24–26; 33; 193).

As Clarence Lusane demonstrates in his important study Hitler’s Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans and African Americans in the Nazi Era, the location of the Afro-Germans in the Third Reich was vulnerable and uncertain. Some of them were the object of open contempt and discrimination, while others grew up in relative peace. In general, the Germans tended to see the ‘Rhineland bastards’ as the embodiment of their defeat during the First World War. Moreover, Hitler, who equated ‘race-mixing’ with physical and intellectual degradation, claimed that blacks were uncivilized brutes; as a result, the Schwartz Deutsch were considered biologically and morally inferior (Lusane, 2003: 75). However, unlike Jews, the Afro-Germans did not represent a substantial community and did not dominate any economic area, and therefore it was impossible for the Nazis to connect them to the economic crisis (Lusane, 2003: 26). Yet, having first considered exterminating or deporting the Afro-German population, the Nazis eventually decided to sterilize the offspring of French colonial soldiers: ‘Informed by the global eugenics movement, German scientists allied with Hitler, in lieu of extermination, determined that Afro-Germans (and some other Blacks) not be allowed to reproduce’ (Lusane, 2003: 14). The purpose of the Nazis was to ensure, for the future of the German nation, that the generation of Afro-German children who lived under National Socialism would definitely be the last one (Lusane, 2003: 143). With time, the situation of Afro-Germans became increasingly precarious: as their passports had been confiscated, they were unable to leave Germany and were banned as non-Aryans from a variety of jobs and occupations (Lusane, 2003: 88; 99). Although at the beginning of the war they were often employed as forced labourers, after 1943, many of them were sent to and died in concentration camps (Lusane, 2003: 132).

In Galadio, Daeninckx imagines an adolescent protagonist who, before early 1939, when the novel begins, has not yet developed any genuine understanding of his racial difference. In Ruhrort, the harbour district of Duisburg where he grows up, Galadio does not know any other black children. The juvenile protagonist realizes that the colour of his skin is a source of conflict in his family when Ludwig, his mother’s brother, who will later denounce them to the Nazis, declares that his nephew represents ‘le fruit pourri de la défaite’ [the rotten fruit of defeat] (Daeninckx, 2010: 33). ⁴ Faced by the ignominy of the birth of a mixed-raced grandchild, Galadio’s grandmother, already devastated by the death of her husband, who was killed by the French at the Marne, almost loses her mind. Ostracized by her family, Irmgard Ruden, Galadio’s mother, devotes herself to her son and runs a fashionable store in the centre of the city. Nevertheless, when Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, she is fired and forced to accept low-paid menial jobs at the local foundry as a punishment for her racial transgression. If Galadio is vaguely conscious of the tensions caused in his family by his black body, he identifies himself with his German peers, and, at the age of 17, expects to become a member of the Hitler Youth. To his surprise, he is suddenly excluded from the school sports team; entry to the swimming pool is forbidden from now on to individuals of Jewish or African ancestry (22). It is only when his new history teacher, a facially disfigured veteran of the First World War, lectures the pupils about the necessity to preserve the purity of German blood (26) that Galadio feels unsettled and begins to perceive the Nazi propaganda discourse as a direct menace.

In his first-person narrative, Galadio also records the sudden persecution of the so-called Swing Boys at school. However, he does not realize that he could feel a special bond with them as enthusiasts of Afro-American music. By mentioning the Swing Boys, Daeninckx refers to the campaign launched against jazz by Joseph Goebbels. The Nazi Minister of Culture saw the ‘Negro music’, which gained popularity in Germany after the First World War, as tasteless, decadent and degenerate (Lusane, 2003: 184). As Paul Gilroy (2004) suggests, ‘From this point of view, its popularity among Europeans debased and corrupted not only their proper art and culture, but their racial selfhood, which was invaded and diseased by the jazz “bacillus”’ (p. 294). German jazz lovers opposed the ban by listening to their favourite music in private and attending clandestine jazz performances. Young people, especially boys, called Swing Boys or Swing Babes, openly displayed their resistance to the Nazis by wearing long hair, dressing in a flamboyant manner and swing dancing (Lusane, 2003: 187–188). Galadio perceives the local Swing Boys as extravagant, wealthy and privileged; he does not realize the connection between jazz and Negrophobia in the cultural landscape dominated by the Nazis. When the boys are arrested, having been discovered listening to jazz at school, the protagonist applauds the local head of the SS, who insists that ‘la musique enjuivée, négrifiée, encourage les actes contre nature et les perversions en tout genre’ [the Jewified, Negrified music encourages acts against nature and all kinds of perversions] (31). ⁵ He is thus complicit in the condemnation of Afro-American music, unaware of the fact that the war against jazz has been shaped by the same ideology which will soon target his black body as a threat to the purity of the Aryan race.

For the benefit of the reader, this is the moment when Daeninckx makes Galadio research the story of the Rhineland occupation at the local library. By reading the archival journals of 1921 and 1922, the protagonist is able to place the disgrace connected with the ‘souillure du métissage’ [stain of miscegenation] (41) against a larger historical background. Having acquired this new (self-) knowledge, Galadio confronts his mother, who reveals to him the identity of his father, Amadou Diallo, a tirailleur sénégalais from the village of Sinéré, near Mopti, in French Sudan (today’s Mali). Galadio learns that his father spent only a few months in Duisburg in the spring of 2021 and was soon redeployed elsewhere; Irmgard never received any reply to the letters that she sent to her lover in Africa. It is then that the protagonist begins to realize that his hypervisibility puts him at risk. His mother’s attempts to protect him by calling him Ulrich, his German grandfather’s name, instead of Galadio, his African uncle’s name, are futile: ‘Je suis noir, tout le monde le voit! Pourquoi cacher mon nom? C’est comme si avant de sortir je me mettais de la farine sur la figure!’ [I am black, everybody sees it! Why hide my name? It is as if before going out I covered my face with flour!] (42). The protagonist thus begins to accept the conception of identity devised by Nazi propaganda, which excludes him as a non-Aryan from the German national community.

The encounter of the Afro-German with the Jews in Galadio

From the beginning of Galadio, the discrimination of Afro-Germans is juxtaposed with the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, referring to the interlacing of different histories, is illuminating in this context. In Daeninckx’s novel, the histories of the Jews and of Afro-Germans are in fact entangled with each other and Galadio offers interesting suggestions on ‘how to think about the relationship between different social groups’ histories of victimization’ (Rothberg, 2009: 2). Although indoctrinated against the Jewish community at school, Galadio resists the dominant discourse of anti-Semitism through his friendship with his Jewish neighbours, the Baschingers, and his romantic relationship with their daughter Déborah. At the same time, since he does not know any other black person and cannot relate to any black community, the explicit analogies between Jews and blacks in the Nazi propaganda enable him to identify, at least partially, with his Jewish neighbours. Both are victims of what Gilroy (2004) refers to as camp mentality or camp-thinking, in which ‘“race” and nation became closely articulated, with each order of discourse conferring important legitimation on the other’ (p. 82). Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that Daeninckx does not equate anti-Semitism with the Nazi variant of antiblack racism. Early in the novel, Galadio learns from Déborah about the long series of discriminatory laws that the Jews have been subjected to under National Socialism. By enumerating the bans imposed on the Jewish population, Daeninckx signals at the same time that they do not apply directly to Afro-Germans. As Lusane (2003) contends, ‘In the discourse produced by Hitler and the Nazi leadership and its theoreticians, it is clear that a particular type of antiblackness gaze and praxis evolved that overlapped with anti-Semitism but had its own character, argument, and sociohistoric significance’ (p. 3). As a result, the Jews and the Afro-Germans in Galadio share a ‘common, if unequal, history’ (Rothberg, 2009: 313). Furthermore, the romance between Galadio and Déborah serves to construct a vision of solidarity between the Jewish family and the Afro-German protagonist. Hunted by the SS after he refuses to submit to medical examinations, the black fugitive finds shelter with the Baschingers. Both Galadio and his Jewish friends, although dehumanized by the Nazi, reimagine their humanity by showing empathy and love to others who share their precarious position as ‘life that does not deserve to be lived’ (Agamben, 1998: 137). Consequently, this ethical encounter throws into relief what Moses and Rothberg (2014) refer to as ‘differentiated solidarities’, which allow us ‘to distinguish different histories of violence while still understanding them as implicated in each other and as making moral demands for recognition’ (p. 33).

By juxtaposing the history of the Afro-German protagonist and the Jewish family, Daeninckx points to the destabilization of the human and the logic of biopolitics in the Third Reich, and also searches for the origins of Nazi violence in the colonial past. In this sense, the opening scene of the novel, in which Galadio witnesses the confiscation by the SS of domestic animals belonging to the Jews, deserves special attention. In the eyes of the Nazis, the Jews have apparently contaminated their pets with their corrupted lifestyle; at the same time, the Jews are not fully human and are as disposable as their animals. The Jews and individuals of African descent are reduced by Nazi ideology to zoē, that is, the Agambenian bare life, and must all be eliminated to protect the German ‘nation’s biological body’ (Agamben, 1998: 142). Yet, it is important to stress that the sources of the dehumanization of the Afro-German character lie in the Black Shame propaganda and, reaching further back in history, in the colonial enterprise itself, and the association of blackness with savagery, bestiality and biological inferiority. The colonization of Africa is implicitly suggested in the novel: the French colonial adventure makes possible the stationing of tirailleurs sénégalais on the Rhine in the first place; the (failed) German colonial adventure inspires the Nazi cinematic production, reiterating the white man’s superiority over the Africans. Daeninckx thus signals the continuity between colonial violence and Nazi brutality, which are both based on a normative collapse of the distinction between the animal and the human. ⁶ The subsequent execution of the helpless animals (21) foreshadows the multiple facets of violence directed at those defined as infrahuman under the Nazi dictatorship. Galadio exposes the tragic consequences of camp-thinking in both colonial and nationalist contexts. Yet, it is important to stress that the camp does not function in the novel only as a metaphor for the pathologies of race, ethnicity and nationalism, but as a real institution of ‘radical evil, useless suffering, and modern misery’ (Gilroy, 2004: 85), which eventually engulfs the protagonist’s mother and his Jewish neighbours.

Significantly, Daeninckx places Nazi racial hierarchies at the centre of biopolitics and shows that the policies towards disparate racialized groups were different, if intertwined. ⁷ Whereas the Baschingers are deported to and murdered in a concentration camp, Galadio, denounced by his uncle and captured by the SS, is sent for forced sterilization to a hospital in Cologne. The sterilization procedure is represented by Daeninckx as extremely frightening, the more so that the adolescent protagonist remains ignorant of the purpose of the planned surgery. When he is made to appear in front of the Hereditary Health Court, his naked body is weighed, measured, touched and closely scrutinized. Ironically, at the last moment, Galadio is saved from the procedure by his heroic German ancestry, as the female surgeon turns out to be a childhood friend of his mother’s, whose father also died during the First World War. Lusane (2003) argues that “Sterilization was perhaps the worst action that could be taken by the Nazis against Blacks in Germany short of mass execution. It not only destroyed the future of individual Blacks but also sought to erase any future blackness on German soil.”

In Galadio, one of the black patients dies after the procedure, which highlights its lethal character. Although they are the objects of different deployments of power, both the Jews and the Afro-Germans are set outside the law in a limit zone, in which they can only exist as bare life. The apparently more ‘humanitarian’, gradual erasure of the latter functions in the same biopolitical continuum as the mass extermination of the former in the Nazi concentration camps, biopolitics becoming thanatopolitics, that is, a politics of death, under National Socialism (see Mills, 2018: 123).

The colony and the camp haunt the pages of Galadio; they define the horizons of violence in the novel and function as interlaced structures that delineate its origins and extremity. In their respective studies, Gilroy (2004: 60–61) and Stoler (2016: 68–121) demonstrate the close affinity between colony and camp as exceptional spaces sharing similar principles of population surveillance, coerced labour and systematic brutality. Gilroy stresses, moreover, the connection between the racialized hierarchies and a profit-oriented imperative in both the colony and the camp. Stoler (2016) in turn focuses on the circulation of disparate knowledge about population management within and across empires, showing how colony and camp ‘morph’ into each other (p. 77). As mentioned above, in Galadio, the extermination policies of the Third Reich echo another history of violence, namely that of imperialism, and the making of bare life in the colonies. Camp-thinking implements clear ‘patterns of thought about self and other, friend and stranger’ and creates visions of homogeneous ‘collectivities to which one can be compelled to belong’ (Gilroy, 2004: 82). In Galadio, camp mentality, obsessed with the purity of race, excludes the Jewish characters, the central protagonist and his mother from the German Volk, forcing them to accept monolithic identities as the undesirables of the nation.

Unlearning camp mentality in Galadio

Nevertheless, while initially Galadio finds it difficult to think beyond the racialized clichés of camp mentality, with time he learns to redefine his identity by building connections with other people of colour, in ways unexpected by the Nazi ideologues. Paradoxically, it is within the biopolitical space of the hospital, where the future of Afro-Germans as a group is to be terminated, that Galadio meets for the first time other black individuals and begins to develop a sense of being part of a black community. His new acquaintances come from Dusseldorf, Koblenz and Ludwigshafen, and their fathers travelled to Europe from Cameroon, Madagascar and French Sudan. While the Germans might perceive them as a homogeneous group, Daeninckx insists on the different ancestry of the Afro-Germans in the novel. Furthermore, it is in the hospital that Galadio is selected by the film crew from the Babelsberg Studios to perform in a number of cinematic productions. This new job is enforced on him after the (fake) sterilization procedure and he is literally incarcerated on the film set, yet the cinema industry provides him with a temporary sanctuary from the brutality of the Nazi state. According to Lusane, colonial propaganda films served to legitimate and glorify the German presence in Africa. By portraying the Germans as heroes, the blacks as their willing servants, and France and England as their mutual enemies, they were supposed to help the Nazis reclaim the lost German colonies (Lusane, 2003:147). Accordingly, every morning, together with some fifty other extras, having been made up and tattooed, Daeninckx’s protagonist appears naked on the film set. These Afro-Germans who never visited Africa are made to dance to the rhythm of tam-tams, assuming identities that are entirely alien to them. Nevertheless, while Galadio feels objectified on the film set, at the same time the cinema enables him to unthink the tenets of camp-thinking by making him realize that identity can be fabricated and performed (Ennaili, 2015: 27). Moreover, by becoming acquainted with a variety of people of colour, African Americans, Mongols, Malays, Martinicans, the Malagasy and others (93), the protagonist is able to see beyond the racial stereotypes imposed by Nazi propaganda. Eventually, when the shooting in Africa proves a disaster and the crew is evacuated from Guinea Bissau, Galadio decides to stay behind and to travel four thousand kilometres to French Sudan, thereby acquiring a new form of agency.

Galadio’s extraordinary mobility symbolizes his displacement and cultural dispossession, and his efforts to reconstruct a fluid sense of self by crossing various routes, rather than growing roots, on the African continent. Initially, the protagonist undertakes his peregrinations throughout Africa from Portuguese Guinea, through Senegal, to French Sudan, however implausible they seem, in the hope of reconnecting with his African past: ‘Mon avenir n’est pas vers l’océan, mais à l’intérieur des terres. Je laisse la distance se creuser avec la moitié allemande de mon existence avant de bifurquer, de me fondre dans la moitié africaine’ [My future is not towards the ocean, but in the interior of the land. I allow a distance to appear with the German half of my existence before cutting it off and melting with my African half] (pp. 115–116). And yet, when, having travelled by boat, by train, by bus and on foot, he finally arrives in the tiny village of Sinéré, he is disappointed to discover that his father never returned to Africa and never learnt that he had a son. Suffocating in the miserable village, after a few months Galadio is hired as a cook on a ship travelling on the Niger river. He continues his exploration of Africa by becoming acquainted with Africans of different backgrounds, from the poorest rural population to the educated évolués, who follow French customs and laws. Now it is he who supports his new family in lieu of his father. However, he still suffers from alienation and is unsure of where he truly belongs. The liminality of the river in the novel, as an alternative space to the conflicted nation-states, Germany and France, highlights the instability of the self, and counters the discourse of the Nazis, who conceptualized identity as unsullied and rooted in one place.

The protagonist’s quest for identity is brutally interrupted when he learns that his father was killed at Chasselay (145). Daeninckx refers here to one of the little-known incidents of 1940, when German units cruelly executed over 3000 black African soldiers from the French colonies. Witnesses confirmed that German soldiers saw the Africans as infrahuman brutes who should not fight in a European war, and treated them with particular cruelty, eager to prove their alleged bestiality (Olusoga, 2014: 202–203). Galadio’s father thus falls victim to an intense racial hatred that has its roots in the First World War. Significantly, the death of the father is a catalyst of change for the protagonist, who embraces anti-Nazism as Amadou Diallo’s legacy and joins the French army. Having participated in numerous battles and having been cited for bravery, he arrives in Duisburg only to learn about the deportation of his mother and the Baschingers to concentrations camps. While the death of Irmgard Ruden, as well as Déborah’s parents and brother, has been confirmed, Galadio hopes that his sweetheart has been liberated by the Soviets or has left for Palestine: ‘Je suis certain d’une chose: l’encre n’a pas séché sur le nom de Déborah. Je l’attends ici à Duisbourg, comme ma mère avait espéré le retour d’Amadou Diallo, son amour venu de Sinéré’ [I am sure of one thing: the ink has not dried on Déborah’s name. I am waiting for her here in Duisbourg, like my mother, who hoped for the return of Amadou Diallo, her beloved from Sinéré] (154). Galadio’s hope challenges the logic of mass extermination and enables him to imagine, against all odds, a common future with Déborah. ⁸ However, the analogy between the protagonist and his mother, both awaiting their disappeared beloved, points to the circularity of violence and the tragic outcome of (missed) transracial encounters.

Colonial aphasia in Galadio

As mentioned above, through an intrigue apparently focused on little-known incidents in German history, Daeninckx also engages, though indirectly, with French colonial history. The novel was published in 2010 after a decade of intense discussions about the importance of colonial heritage for French national identity. Government officials, activists, historians, sociologists, teachers and writers have all contributed to this debate, also examining the relation of colonialism to other traumatic memories, notably those concerning the Vichy regime and the deportation of the Jews (see Blanchard and Veyrat-Masson, 2008). At the turn of the twenty-first century, French colonialism became the subject of guerres de mémoires [memory wars], a term coined by Benjamin Stora to denote the tensions ‘between different minority groups fighting for primacy over the official state narrative about the country’s colonial past’ (Lotem, 2021: 4; Stora, 2008). By invoking the devoir de mémoire, that is, the state’s duty to remember its victims, various communities sought the political acknowledgement of their traumatic history at the national level, often at the cost of obscuring the histories of other groups (Lotem, 2021: 129). Soon, with the proliferation of voices, memory, which was supposed to cement national unity, became a source of division and ‘a challenge to republican cohesion’ (Lotem, 2021: 131). As Françoise Vergès (2010) contends, ‘The memories of slavery and colonialism constitute[d] sources of reference for both sides of the debate, whether they acknowledge[d] or diminish[ed] the importance of the colony as a formative cultural and political site’ (p. 143). The vehement opposition of some French historians to the 21 May 2001 Law, which recognized slavery as a crime against humanity, illustrated their persistent refusal to confront the legacy of colonialism and the tendency to reduce Frenchness to the Hexagon. The 23 February 2005 Law on colonialism, which imposed on high-school teachers the duty to focus on the ‘positive values’ resulting from French presence in the colonies, caused a national uproar. The eruption of violence in the banlieues in 2005 showed how urgent it was for the marginalized children of migrant workers in France to rewrite colonial history (Bancel et al., 2005: 16–22; Vergès, 2010: 140–145; Lotem, 2021: 114–130). ⁹ According to Achille Mbembe (2020: 234–235), France became involved in the process of decolonization without decolonizing national history and memory [‘elle a décolonisé sans s’autodécoloniser’]. As a result, the mental frameworks that legitimated colonial domination are still functional in French society. ¹⁰

The obliqueness and circuitry of remembrance in Galadio might be therefore read as a deliberate mode of addressing what Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire (2005: 13–15) refer to as la fracture coloniale, that is, the French inability to integrate the colonial past and the consequences of decolonization. Stoler (2016: 128; 157) comments on this phenomenon in French national memory in terms of colonial aphasia. She argues that forgetting or amnesia would be misleading in this context, as the colonial past has not been entirely forgotten, but is present in France precisely in its absence. Aphasia refers to the difficulty in generating conceptual frames to understand the violence generated by French imperialism, which results in a ‘disabled’ form of knowing, colonialism being occluded and displaced, rather than ignored (Stoler, 2016: 128; 167). By recounting the story of his Afro-German protagonist in the Third Reich, Daeninckx obliquely alludes to the tragic results of French colonization, which made it possible for the French to deploy colonial troops in Europe during and after the First World War, and for Amadou Diallo to meet Irmgard Ruden. The connection between the stationing of the French West African soldiers in Germany, the Black Shame propaganda, the Nazi sterilization of the Afro-Germans, and the brutal murder of African soldiers in 1940 is only tentatively suggested in the novel. If we define aphasia as ‘a difficulty in generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts to appropriate things’ (Stoler, 2016: 128; italics in the original), the spectral presence of the French colonial past in the novel serves to render this cognitive deficit. What remains entirely muted in Galadio are the voluntary or coerced itineraries of individuals such as Amadou Diallo in the French army, as well as the daily violence in the French colonies, as part of a biopolitical order. While Daeninckx illustrates German imperial nostalgia through Galadio’s involvement in the colonial propaganda cinema, the larger panorama of French colonization of West Africa is missing in the novel. Consequently, the understated, absent/present French colonial connection can be read in reference to the impairment of knowing inherent in colonial aphasia, as well as the persisting difficulty in France ‘to conceive of the French colonial state and the metropolitan one as synthetic pieces of a racially inflected imperial formation’ (Stoler, 2016: 163).

Furthermore, the exclusion of Galadio and other characters from the German nation can also be interpreted as an allegory of the exclusions inherent in French national(ist) ideologies. In this vein, Leïla Ennaili (2015) reads Galadio as a response to the 2009 national debate on French identity following the creation of the French Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-development. The discussion tended to define who belonged to the French national community by excluding people of colour and descendants of immigrants. In an interview, Daeninckx (2011) declares that he saw the debate as an insult against the memory of colonialism and the Holocaust, which have tragically marked French history. He confesses that he wrote Galadio to expose the risks of such exclusionary policies: Nazism functions in the novel as a horizon of expectations for societies relying on rigid definitions of national identity. By undermining definitions of Frenchness tied to a monolithic nationality, the writer intends to show that there are many ways of being French, as well as to legitimate African presence in the Hexagon (Daeninckx, 2011; Ennaili, 2015: 20–22). As Ennaili (2015: 26) contends, the protagonist’s two names – Ulrich and Galadio – signify the unfixed and fluid nature of his identity, which fails to be stabilized even by his African experience. What is more, Galadio also shows that the Second World War and colonialism, both long occluded in French history, are crucial to the understanding of contemporary France.

Significantly, by imagining Galadio and his African father as soldiers in the French army, Daeninckx’s novel provides the missing link between Empire and the French experience of the two world wars. After the first global conflict, tirailleurs sénégalais were ‘firmly defined as external to the life of the nation’ and rarely commemorated in France (Rechniewski, 2018: 80). Daeninckx breaks with this simplified memory discourse and, to use Santanu Das’ (2018) expression, ‘challenge[s] the colour of war memory’ (p. 406), a process which gained prominence during the 1914–1918 centenary. As Ann Rigney (2021) suggests in her recent analysis of the role of the creative arts in the ‘(un)forgetting’ of the colonial soldiers of the First World War, ‘aesthetic experience [. . .] has a role to play in mnemonic change by disrupting our usual habits of identification and understanding of what is memorable’ (p. 14). Yet, if Daeninckx claims a space for black soldiers in French collective memory, the commemorative process is ambivalent in the novel. For, by leaving Amadou Diallo’s story in the shadow and never giving him a voice, Galadio points synchronously to the problematic nature of remembrance of the Great War. Furthermore, published in 2010, Galadio acquires a new significance after the shifts of focus that occurred in the centenary years, the new visibility of colonial soldiers in the public space, and of the war’s aftermath as an emerging field of study. In this light, Daeninckx’s novel moves beyond ‘the myopia of 1918’ (Winter, 2019) to explore the long-lasting sequels of the Great War and build connections with the traumas of the Second World War, offering a complicated and thought-provoking vision that bypasses racialized, as well as national, boundaries.

However, if it is the violent legacy of the 1914–1918 war that incites Amadou Diallo and his son to confront Nazism on the battlefield, Galadio’s motivation for enlistment has nothing to do with imperial loyalties and/or a sentimental connection to the French colonial Republic. Through the figure of Galadio’s father, Daeninckx expands the boundaries of French national memory by including West African soldiers in the national narrative of loyalty and heroic bravery. With Galadio, however, he challenges the French récit national in a more radical way, insisting on the contribution to the French war effort of an individual whose connection to France is convoluted and officially unrecognized. Since, according to Ennaili (2015: 23), the German and the colonial represented the two central figures of the Other in early twentieth-century French culture, Galadio is an embodiment of alterity per se. In a radical challenge to camp-thinking, Daeninckx makes his ‘Boche bronzé’ [tanned German] (148) participate in a crucial moment in French history, that is, the liberation of France from Nazi occupation. Consequently, commemoration in Galadio does not consist solely in an ‘instrumental’ approach to war memory with the purpose of fulfilling a multicultural agenda. It also involves ‘an ethical use of memory’, which, as Das (2018) defines it, necessitates ‘greater attention to the minutiae of history, in all its asymmetries and messiness, as well as to the moral and cultural complexities’ (p. 415).

Finally, it is significant to place Galadio in the context of late twentieth-century French fiction about the two world wars. As Omar Bartov (2000) suggests, ‘French confrontations with the past often begin with World War I, even if its impact is eventually read into explanations of more recent and morally more troubling episodes’ (p. 77). In novels, such as Claude Simon’s The Acacia (1989) and Jean Rouaud’s Fields of Glory (1990), which, after Dominique Viart (1999), can be classified as filiation narratives, fiction is combined with historical research to explore familial traumas linked to the two world wars. Like Simon and Rouaud, Daeninckx also explores his protagonist’s roots/routes, as well as his efforts to reconstruct the ties of filiation through his African travels. Moreover, both Simon and Rouaud use the motif of the father’s empty grave to signify a crisis in their protagonists’ search for identity, as well as the traumatic intrusion of a catastrophic past. ¹¹ Galadio’s quest for the lost father is also interrupted by the progenitor’s death, and the protagonist must bid farewell to a parent he has never met: ‘L’après-midi, dans le miniscule cimetière de Sinéré, au milieu des tombes de mes ancêtres, je rends hommage à un corps absent’ [In the afternoon, in the tiny cemetery of Sinéré, among the tombs of my ancestors, I pay homage to an absent body] (143). It is therefore imperative to include Daeninckx’s novel in this literary tradition and to place Galadio’s African father in this gallery of deceased progenitors; filiation can be thus understood in terms of aesthetic affinities with the potential to revise the hierarchies inherent in the literary canon. As Rigney (2021) points out, ‘Remaking collective memory begins with the disruption of old habits in the micropolitics of reading’ (p. 18). Given the popularity of the novel, ¹² Galadio might thus contribute to a realignment of memories of French colonialism and the two world wars and, by transforming prior schemes of knowledge, help heal French colonial aphasia and the fracture coloniale.

Conclusion

In an important act of recuperation, Galadio fictionalizes the African presence in Germany after the First World War by depicting the extraordinary destiny of the protagonist, the war on jazz, and the Nazi propaganda films featuring multiple black characters. The sense of community that Galadio acquires at the Babelsberg and Berlin Studios highlights the variety of people of colour in Nazi Germany and their hidden resilience under the Nazi regime. The complexity of black itineraries is also illustrated in the novel through the Afro-German protagonist’s further search for identity in French West Africa and his return to Europe as a soldier of the French army. Finally, his father’s ephemeral presence in the Rhineland in 1921 as a member of the occupation forces, and his cruel death at the hands of the Germans in 1940, point to the convoluted destinies of Africans in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. Both Amadou Diallo and his son become, to adapt Gilroy (2004), ‘black witnesses of European barbarity’ (p. 93), entrapped in modern genocidal catastrophes. They are rendered particularly vulnerable because of the Black Shame propaganda and the Nazi eugenic ideology. Amadou’s and Galadio’s uncompromising anti-Nazism and their heroic exploits in the French army are therefore particularly important because they restore political agency to a racial group conceptualized by the Nazis as bare life. Nevertheless, such remarkable biographies, as Gilroy (2004: 325–326) contends,

are not just welcome opportunities to recall the agency of Blacks in the world-historic struggle against Hitlerism. Though that act of recovery is itself an important gesture for Europe, they have acquired another, less transient significance. They are a valuable means to place black people and their battles against raciology and its codes in the same moral and political world that encompasses the righteous sufferings of the Jews and the industrialized genocide that attended the implementation of racial hygiene.

Racism and the different biopolitical measures applied by the Nazis to groups which they defined as undesirable because of their potential to contaminate the Volksgemeinschaft are at the centre of Daeninckx’s novel. The juxtaposition of the history of the Jews and the Afro-Germans in Galadio reveals crucial differences between anti-Semitism and antiblack racism in Nazi Germany, yet at the same time exposes a shared logic of hatred and racialization. The histories of suffering in Galadio thus form ‘asymmetrical constellations’ (Rothberg, 2009: 263), which bring into relief ‘connections in dissimilarity’ (Rothberg, 2009: 18). What is more, the contact between the Afro-German protagonist and the Jewish family serves to build up differentiated solidarities and offers a relational and dynamic approach to the remembrance of the past, which echoes further back to histories of colonialism. As Rothberg (2009: 102; 65) suggests, an ethics that reveals hidden traces of the colonial past in the history of the Holocaust not only exposes the imperial genealogy of the politics of bare life, but also encourages a rethinking of the biopolitics of the Third Reich in relation to a much more complex historical background.

Furthermore, the structure of the novel, in which mnemonic traces of the French colonial past transpire behind a plot set under National Socialism, renders the tensions in France resulting from colonial aphasia. Rather than use colonial war memory in an instrumental and simplified way, the novel commemorates the war effort of African soldiers in the two world wars by creating a complex vision of the past that highlights disturbing continuities, traumatic aftermaths and lacunas of memory. Accordingly, camp and colony function in Galadio as interconnected structures, producing the mental frameworks that I have referred to, after Gilroy, as camp mentality. Importantly, in his novel, Daeninckx challenges camp-thinking and imagines subtle ways of resistance to the politics of bare life. Through his protagonist’s refusal of dichotomies, and an emphasis on routes rather than roots in his identity quest, this left-wing author also addresses tensions in French society, resulting from an unintegrated colonial past. In the light of the debates about French identity in the 2000s, Daeninckx’s use of multidirectional memory serves to highlight convergences between histories of suffering, but also between histories of collective forgetting, notably of Vichy and colonial violence, as well as the problematic relation between memories of Shoah and colonialism in France. Galadio thus offers a thought-provoking critique of nationalist and racialized discourse, stressing multi-racial connections in the French past and present.

Yet, although Daeninckx creates a protagonist who actively opposes camp mentality by fighting against the Nazis, Galadio does not lay the dead to rest. The empty grave of Galadio’s father, the murder of his mother and his Jewish neighbours, as well as the disappearance of Déborah, all signal the impossibility of completing the work of mourning. The ultimate substitution of the missing African lover for the Jewish lover is deeply unsettling to the reader. The double figure of the missing beloved ‘embodies’ the multidirectional, aphasic, entangled shape of memory in Galadio. Its spectral presence/absence at the end of the novel signifies the traumatic disruption of time, the shocking circulation of violence between colony and metropole, and the pain of those who are left to rebuild their lives, bereft and shattered by the forces of history.