Chapter 2

African American Intellectual and Musical Migration to the Kaiserreich

Upon embarking on the North German Lloyd steamship for Germany in 1887, the young violinist Will Marion Cook made a terrible discovery: “I was a rotten sailor.” A recent Oberlin graduate, Cook was on his way to Berlin to study music. As the ship glided across the ocean, his body protested violently against the lurching motions it was forced to endure. In spite of his futile attempts to acquire sea legs, he wrote in his unpublished memoir that his trip to Germany was nonetheless “beautiful to [him].”¹ Cook, who later became a prominent figure in African American musical entertainment in the early twentieth century, studied violin at the Royal Academy of Musical Performing Arts in Berlin. A student of Frederick Doolittle at Oberlin, Cook was standing on that boat to Germany in part because he came to believe that he could not continue studying in the United States as a Black man. Before Cook embarked on his passage to Berlin, Doolittle had suggested that he matriculate at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. But the city of Cincinnati’s recent reputation for racial violence—and the conservatory’s reputation for not accepting Black students—did not inspire confidence in the young performer. After much discussion with Doolittle, and after raising money in Washington, DC, with the help of Frederick Douglass, Cook booked a ticket to Germany.²

Considering how sick the journey made him, one might expect Cook to have expressed regret for stepping onto the wretched boat. But breathing fresh air between bouts of nausea, Cook felt surprisingly relaxed and calm. As far as he was concerned, he “was getting away from prejudice, ignorance, [and] oppression, and on [his] way to a real land of promise.” In retrospect, he understood that his statement might cause “European immigrants to smile at this idea which reverses the order of things,” but, he continued, “Many Negroes have felt exactly as I did on leaving the U.S.A.” Cook could not believe how well Germans treated him on board and once he landed at the port of Bremerhaven in Germany. Although he knew barely any German, once the ship docked, he recalled, “The conductors and everybody were so helpful, so polite, that I asked myself, ‘Is this heaven?’ ”³

Was Germany heaven for African Americans? Many certainly thought so. They compared Germany and America in their writings and conversations: Could they have been able to live in the United States as freely as they lived in Germany? The answer was usually a conclusive no. In Germany, African Americans could stay in any hotel they wished, visit any restaurant or café, and enter an opera house with full confidence of admission. Many walked through the streets of Leipzig, Berlin, and other cities with a newly discovered confidence rooted in their sense of Germany as a liberated space. Their text-based archives—letters to family and friends back in the United States, student newspaper chronicles, and memoirs they wrote commemorating their experiences in Europe—confirm what many scholars have concluded about Black internationalism across the Atlantic: Europe appeared to offer African Americans a new cartography of hopes and dreams, a place where they could reimagine the ties that bound together race, culture, and nation.

This chapter examines the lives and musical experiences of African Americans in the Kaiserreich, focusing especially on how they navigated new musical worlds. African American musical experiences in Imperial Germany were shaped by the politics of Black longing or Black desire. In her book Territories of the Soul, Nadia Ellis states that Black migration sometimes has less to do with the particular destination of migration and more to do with Black desires to leave.⁴ The title of the recent publication Anywhere But Here: Black Intellectuals in the Atlantic World and Beyond also makes this clear. Examining individuals and communities seeking better lives and realities for themselves “anywhere but here,” the authors argue that the history of Black intellectual endeavors “gives us insight into the elaborate, and sometimes contradictory, processes of self-determination, identity formation, cultural preservation, and political consciousness.”⁵ Similarly, Robin D.G. Kelley posits that the concept of exodus in historical Black thought represented aspirations of Black self-determination and departure free from white interference. The term ultimately “provided Black people with a language to critique America’s racist state and build a new nation, for its central theme wasn’t simply escape but a new beginning.”⁶ And indeed, young African American men and women were eager to leave American shores and enter into what they believed to be a musical and cosmopolitan world in Germany. Their own longings and desires brightly colored their experiences attending concerts or taking music lessons in cities such as Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin.

Even though Black desire for a better life determined much of Black travel and migration in modern history, Europe also held a particular attraction for Black people as a specific site of cultural exchange. The continent appealed to African Americans by offering a tantalizing zone of intellectual and cultural activity that they believed they could not find elsewhere. In The Practice of Diaspora, Brent Hayes Edwards argues that for Black people across Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, the European metropole “provided a special sort of vibrant, cosmopolitan space for interaction that was available neither in the United States nor in the colonies.”⁷ For a promising young Black artist or intellectual looking beyond America’s shores for stimulation and growth, no place looked or sounded quite so appealing as the European continent.⁸ Considered the most important site to participate in cutting-edge international discourse, Europe in the minds of many African American elites was the fountain of knowledge from which they could develop their intellectual faculties. As a dynamic site of knowledge production and as a supposedly more racially egalitarian environment, Europe, African Americans believed, offered them a safe haven in which they could learn and grow as thinkers and artists.

To get there, African American classical musicians used the same networks they had built in the United States. And their endeavors paid off: with the support of friends, teachers, and patrons, they joined musical communities in Leipzig and Berlin. While abroad, the social worlds they inhabited were dictated by the rules of classical music. Black classical musicians went through the rituals of taking sample lessons with potential teachers, auditioning for conservatories, studying with teachers, rehearsing for performances, and attending operas or concerts in their spare time.

While attending to the rigorous requirements demanded of all classical musicians, Black classical musicians also navigated the politics of race. The specter of Jim Crow haunted their daily lives, determining where they could live and with whom they could interact. Yet German musical culture also informed their own nascent racial politics, inspiring some to rethink the relationship between race and culture. Black musicians’ experiences in German-speaking Europe were transformative in ways they had not expected.

Transatlantic Networking Comes to Germany

They came in droves. Steamers bound for Bremen or Vienna were full of Americans on their decks, determined to study classical music in Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna. Ethel Newcomb, an assistant to the pianist Theodor Leschetizky, observed these boisterous pilgrims warily. “From the steamer chair one watched with curiosity these bands of aspirants, proclaiming loudly their different ideas and shouting that they were on the way to Vienna and fame,” she writes.⁹ To Newcomb, these incoming students knew nothing of the tests they would be forced to endure in Europe’s most musical city, nor of the requirements necessary to study with a famous teacher.

But many Americans had arrived under a long-standing belief: only when they embraced the music of Germany could they themselves become better musicians in America.¹⁰ More than five thousand American students studied music at German conservatories between 1850 and 1900. The Leipzig Conservatory of Music, founded by Mendelssohn in 1843, became the beacon of light attracting the most American students, with almost thirteen hundred students attending the institution in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹¹

Figure 6. African American pianist Bertha Hansbury poses with her colleagues in Berlin, 1909. The back of the photograph states, “After her graduation from the Detroit Conservatory of Music, Bertha Hansbury studied in Berlin, Germany, for a year. 1909.” Courtesy of the E. Azalia Hackley Collection of African Americans in the Performing Arts, Detroit Public Library.

Although it is difficult to state with certainty how many of these American musicians invading German conservatories were Black, some names and profiles exist in published sources and scattered about various archives. One of the first Black Broadway musicians, William H. Tyers, studied composition in Germany in the 1890s along with Will Marion Cook.¹² Cook’s fellow violinist Felix Weir also resided in Germany in the late nineteenth century, perhaps at the encouragement of his German music teacher in Chicago. The violinist Ella Thomas studied at the Berlin conservatory in 1905, and William Kemper Harreld, also a violinist, studied in Berlin in the 1910s with Siegfried Eberhardt.¹³

A majority of the students who went to Central Europe were instrumentalists, and pianists outnumbered them all. Among the many Black pianists studying in Central Europe were Leota F. Henson, a niece of the Fisk Jubilee Singer Frederick Loudin, who studied in Leipzig in 1884, and Hazel Harrison, who took lessons with several teachers in Berlin intermittently for a decade (1904–14); Portia Washington also studied in Berlin from 1905 until 1906; Bertha Hansbury, a native of Detroit, studied in Berlin in 1910; Carl Diton studied with Edward Bach and Anton Beer-Walbrunn in Munich in 1910, and Raymond Augustus Lawson studied with Theodor Leschetizky and toured Germany between 1911 and 1912.¹⁴ A young and enthusiastic pianist named Floyd Dunston wowed Leopold Godowsky in Berlin, where he studied between 1902 and 1903. “He was a great favorite with all the staid old German professors, who advanced him at once from the first year’s work to the second, and the outlook seemed most brilliant.”¹⁵ Unfortunately, Dunston died in Berlin of typhoid fever before he could advance to the next step in his career. Eddie Moore, another budding prodigy who had studied piano in Stuttgart, also died in Germany in 1896.¹⁶

A few vocalists also attended music schools in Germany and Austria. The baritone J. Elmer Spyglass, a graduate of the University of Toledo Conservatory of Music in Ohio, moved to Germany in 1915 to study and perform, where he resided until his death in 1957. The tenor Sidney Woodward, who won the friendship of the famed opera singer “Madame” Lillian Nordica in 1892, studied at the Dresden Conservatory in 1896 and traveled around giving concerts in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Russia, and the soprano Annis Hackley, a sister of the soprano and political activist Emma Azalia Hackley, resided in Düsseldorf in the 1910s.¹⁷

Coming to Central Europe from the United States was no easy task, and procuring the necessary funds to travel and live abroad was a significant hurdle. African Americans performing in Germany on professional contracts naturally used their booking agents and managers to successfully purchase tickets on steamships to Germany and reserve hotel rooms. African American students used a variety of means to study in Germany. Some received scholarships from institutions in the United States; others relied on private donations and fundraising efforts from within Black social or musical worlds. In a 1934 interview for Etude, for example, the African American composer Nathaniel Dett marveled at the fundraising efforts of Emma Azalia Hackley. “Evidence of the powers of this extraordinary woman is the fact that she was able to establish and maintain ‘foreign scholarships’ by which she sent abroad two promising Negro students, Carl Diton, pianist, Clarence Cameron White, violinist, for extended study,” Dett recalled. “So far as I know, this achievement has never been equalled [sic] by any member of my race and becomes all the more remarkable when it is remembered that this good woman was herself of limited means.”¹⁸

Figure 7. A studio portrait photo of the soprano Annis Hackley, taken in Düsseldorf, Germany. The autograph on the front states, “With best wishes to Mr. Harreld. Düsseldorf, Germany. March 26, 1910.” The back of the photo bears the printed statement: “Photogr. Atelier ‘Elite,’ Düsseldorf, Schacowstrasse 62. Telephon 1150. Crefeld, Hochstr. 62.” In Hackley’s handwriting, the text states, “I suppose you have quite forgotten me. I would have sent you a p.c. long ago but I did not [undecipherable] here to find you as I heard you were away until a few weeks ago [undecipherable] know if you read this or not. Send mail to this address and it will be sent on to me. Sincerely, A. Hackley. 6618 Vernon Ave. Mrs. Annis Hackley, Chicago, Ill.” Courtesy of the E. Azalia Hackley Collection of African Americans in the Performing Arts, Detroit Public Library.

Other students came to Germany with more money in their pockets and powerful networks at their disposal. During her stay in Berlin between 1905 and 1906, for example, Portia Washington relied on her wealthy father, Booker T. Washington, to take care of her expenses. After she had exhausted the travel funds he had given her, Washington received a loan from the German Colonial Society, an organization that had commissioned her father to help construct cotton plantations in its German colonial holdings in Africa; the society had provided her with support and a promise of guardianship prior to her departure.¹⁹ Washington benefitted from her father’s close relationship to German colonial officials to stay afloat in Berlin as a piano student. The fact that an African American woman had access to funds inaccessible to German colonial subjects speaks to the privileged position her family held in German society.

Letters of introduction were essential for musical networking in Germany and Austria, and Black students were not immune from this custom. Washington’s teacher in the United States, Annie Peabody, had studied piano in Germany with Martin Krause, a Liszt protégé. Peabody wrote a letter of introduction to her former teacher, and after he agreed to hear Washington play, Washington sailed to Germany in the summer of 1905 on the Germania.²⁰ Writing from his residence in Munich in July 1911, the pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch sent a quick note to Theodor Leschetizky, his former teacher and mentor in Vienna, to inquire about the abilities of Raymond Augustus Lawson, a Fisk student. A few days later, Leschetizky wrote back one line, stating, “I greatly enjoyed discovering in Mr. Lawson a fine talent on the piano.”²¹ Via telegram, Gabrilowitsch reached out to Lawson with his phone number and set up a trial lesson. Gabrilowitsch then became Lawson’s teacher during his stay in Germany.²²

Hazel Harrison’s piano teacher in the United States, Victor Heinze, convinced the pianist Ferruccio Busoni to teach Harrison during her stay in Berlin in 1904. Later, in the summer of 1912, Busoni then wrote to the pianist Egon Petri to advocate for Harrison as a pupil:

These letters, often exchanged between former pupils and their teachers, most likely made entry into the world of music instruction in Central Europe easier for Black students.

After settling into their homes in Germany, most students needed to audition to enter conservatories or to be admitted to a private studio. Rarely, it seems, did they experience rejection from formal study because of their auditions. Instead, most teachers identified the students’ musical potential. Will Marion Cook’s story in Berlin offers one such example. Upon arrival in Germany, he provided the customary letter of introduction from his Oberlin professor to a fellow musician and alum settled in Germany that set the course for his musical development in the city. First, the alum recommended that he study with the violinist “Herr Moser” (possibly Andreas Moser) before auditioning to the music school.²⁴ Cook took her advice and prepared his audition for the conservatory.

The resulting audition was a disaster. Playing a piece that was too technically demanding for him, he fell apart on the stage. “Crying and cursing beneath his breath, he tucked the violin under his arm and started to leave the podium,” Marva Carter writes. He was ready to call it quits when “a deep voice asked him if he could play anything else. It was the master teacher and founder of the Hochschule, Joseph Joachim himself!”²⁵ Encouraged by Joachim’s kindness and patience, Cook auditioned again, this time with Beethoven’s “Melody in F,” and earned a spot in the conservatory.

At her audition for Krause in Berlin, Washington decided on impulse to perform a recently published piece by the Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child,” instead of the standard repertoire of something baroque, classical, and romantic.²⁶ The dean of the women’s department of the Tuskegee Institute accompanied Washington to her audition in Europe, and reported back to the New York Times that “Prof. Krause was profoundly impressed and immediately accepted her as a pupil.”²⁷

Washington’s choice to perform a piece from Coleridge-Taylor’s 1905 24 Negro Melodies, op. 59 is a striking one. When she auditioned, the piece of music had only recently been published. A larghetto in E minor, the piece moves slowly at the beginning but gradually builds in tempo and becomes a thicker texture as the melody repeats in variation. The apex of the piece arrives around two thirds of the way into the composition, when the melody returns with Rachmaninoff-like grandeur, full of crashing chords and booming octaves in the bass register of the piano. Coleridge-Taylor’s piano piece takes a seemingly simple melody and makes it somehow dazzling and somber, a shiny musical mirage of loss and grief. Washington’s prospective teacher might have never heard anything quite like it. He enthusiastically agreed to teach Washington, but by October 1906, Washington’s fiancé had proposed to her and she had agreed to come back to the United States to marry. Much to the dismay of her teachers, Washington left Berlin a year before concluding her studies.

With high risk in coming to Germany came great reward. For students like Cook, studying at the conservatory greatly improved his musicianship. Under the tutelage of Joachim and other violin teachers, Cook writes, “I began to gain in technique all I had lost by beginning serious study of the violin so late in life.”²⁸ Studying under such an esteemed violinist would have most certainly brought Cook great prestige and made him appear more valuable or marketable as a budding instrumentalist.

Indeed, perhaps the greatest reward from studying in Central Europe was financial. Endorsements from German teachers proved to be valuable advertisements for students when they returned to the United States. For example, pianist Carl Diton received two endorsements from his teachers in Munich that appeared in newspapers and advertisements before his concerts. The first, from Edward Bach at Bavaria’s Royal Academy of the Art of Music, stated, “I am very glad to recommend Mr. Carl R. Diton most warmly for concert; a highly talented pianist whose technique is brilliant and whose feeling for form is very strongly developed.” The second stated, “ ‘Mr. Carl R. Diton is a very excellent pianist and can be highly recommended to perform anywhere.’—Anton von Beer-Walbrum [sic], composer, Munich.”²⁹ Similarly, Raymond Augustus Lawson used Theodor Leschetizky’s line—“Americans generally have technique; Mr. Lawson has poetry”—in his promotional materials as well.³⁰

Tapping into transatlantic classical music networks, African American classical musicians partook in the customs and rituals of formal introductions, sample lessons, and auditions necessary to gain teachers and improve on their musical instruments. Safely anchored in classical music, they learned to move fluidly in their new educational environments and build upon their knowledge previously gained in the United States.

Avoiding Jim Crow in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms

Mary Church Terrell hated Dresden. A young Oberlin student eager to study in Europe, she had come to the city in 1889 because she “had heard that the purest German is spoken in Dresden.” But upon arrival, all she heard was English, mostly spoken by white Americans. “The city was full of Americans and English,” she complained. “Wherever I turned on the streets, I heard my mother tongue.”³¹ Quickly realizing that a city full of white Americans “was no place for a colored girl,” she moved to Berlin, which had been her top choice for study anyway.

Even though Terrell loathed Dresden, the city gave her one of her first and most lasting treasures in Germany: opera. “In Dresden I received my first taste of German opera,” she gushed in her memoir, “for there the most noted singers were appearing at that time. I went alone, for it was never unpleasant for me to go anywhere unaccompanied.” When she landed in Berlin, the opera became part of her daily life. She entered the opera house, she confesses, “twice and sometimes three times a week” to partake in the ritual of finding one’s chair, sitting down, watching the curtain rise, and hearing the orchestra and singers narrate a musical adventure.³²

Classical music had brought many to Germany, and it thrilled Black students like Terrell. But it could not shield Black students from their encounters with Jim Crow. In Germany, African American students experienced racial hostility from white Americans, even though they were no longer in the United States. Although few writings from Black classical musicians exist to articulate it, the memoirs of Du Bois, Terrell, and Cook detailing their experiences in Germany in the 1880s and 1890s provide a few glimpses into daily life.

In Germany, African American students had to find ways to live outside the shadow of Jim Crow. Du Bois recalled the difficulties of searching for housing—not because of white German discrimination but because of protests from white Americans. He cringed whenever a well-meaning landlord eagerly told him that new Americans were coming to stay in the building. “The landlord would hasten to inform me beamingly that ‘Fellow Americans had just arrived,’ ” he shared in his memoir. Ignorant of American race relations, the landlord believed he or she was sharing positive news with their Black tenant. But how Du Bois wished to avoid such confrontations! “If there was one thing less desirable than white ‘fellow Americans’ to me,” he acerbically stated, “it was Black ‘fellow Americans’ to them.”³³ In Berlin, white American women urged Terrell’s prospective landlord to reject her as a tenant, much to the landlord’s concern. Terrell did not take the apartment the landlord offered her despite the white Americans’ protests, and, she wrote, “I learned afterward on good authority that my countrywomen would have made it decidedly unpleasant for me if I had gone to that pension to live.”³⁴

Life on the campus of a university or a music school might have also reinforced Jim Crow politics in the Kaiserreich. Cook discovered that he was not the only American student at the Royal Academy of Musical Performing Arts in Berlin during his stay. During his first year, eleven Americans attended the school of music, and his class of Americans almost doubled the next year, with nineteen students. With whom would Cook have felt safe enough to interact? The other American students represented all geographical regions of the United States, ranging from cities such as Santa Barbara and Oakland on the West Coast to New York and Washington, DC, on the East Coast, from southern states to growing industrial cities in the north like Milwaukee and Detroit. Cook leaves no indication in his memoir that he bonded with his fellow American peers. One might assume the opposite in some cases: he might have avoided female violinists like Curri Duke from Lexington, Kentucky, or Dora Becker from Galveston, Texas.³⁵ Interacting with white American women may have been out of bounds, even in another country.

White European students were not necessarily more welcoming. The British composer Ethel Smyth, recently popularized again as a feminist icon, shared racist sentiments about Black students while a student at the Leipzig Conservatory of Music in the late 1870s. In October 1877, for example, she wrote to her sister Nina, expressing her shock upon meeting her classmates. “My dear, there are two real live mulatos [sic] and one nigger here! The nigg negress (for she is of the fair sex) is by way of being a great dresser. Nature manages her hair of course (and I’m sure no art could manage it), but [she wears] long gold earrings and most skittish bonnets and … gloves on all occasions.”³⁶ Smith’s condescending comment about a Black woman’s hair perpetuated transatlantic notions of beauty and whiteness by rendering the Black woman’s looks inferior.

Networking with fellow Black classical musicians was most likely vital, whether that meant attending an opera together or hosting friends for tea, as William Kemper Harreld and his wife did for Hazel Harrison and Alain Locke.³⁷ Portia Washington’s experiences give us a striking example of Black networking. She relied heavily on her friend and fellow pianist Harrison for advice on acclimating in Berlin. Both college-aged African American women, they shared the same Berlin landlady and most likely exchanged information on pianists and technicians in the city. Washington also hosted dinner parties for other African American musicians. At one dinner party she hosted in Berlin sometime between 1905 and 1906, Washington met the singer Abbie Mitchell and the two immediately became friends, being musicians of the same age and both Black women seeking success in a foreign country.³⁸ Washington fostered Mitchell’s love of German lieder, and the two of them played together for fun frequently thereafter.³⁹

Black students strove to find community outside of these friendships with other Black musicians, and musical spaces became especially important for facilitating cultural exchange and empowerment. In a concert hall, African Americans learned the dictum and decorum of German culture. But musical spaces were also important for their intellectual and social development. Going to the opera was one such socially transformative experience. The opera house, Terrell discovered, was an international meeting ground, a transnational site of exchange where she “became acquainted with the youth of many lands.” Terrell and a friend of hers from Russia “usually attended the opera together and sat in the peanut gallery, which was frequented by students, from whose comments I learned much more about the operas and music on general principles than I could have acquired in any other way.”⁴⁰ Historically, the opera house was also a space that reinforced class hierarchy. Ticket prices determined where people sat, which functioned to enforce social boundaries. But in this case, the student section was also a place of community building and friendship making. It was invaluable to Terrell because it brought her into contact with fellow students who shared their musical knowledge with her in the form of gossip, whispers, and informative comments.

Cook experienced a similar kind of camaraderie in his forays to hear the orchestra in Berlin. Living in the capital in the time of Paderewski, Joachim, and Hans von Bülow, he attended the orchestra, the opera, or smaller chamber or solo concerts. “In that time I had learned to love those hospitable, unprejudiced, pre-Hitlerite Germans, to worship Beethoven, Wagner, and Joachim.” During a promenade concert at the philharmonic in Berlin in the late 1880s, Cook became friends with a young Jewish German American named Max Adler who told Cook what to wear to the orchestra (“a white shirt with a high collar or people will ignore you”).⁴¹ Orchestra halls and opera houses made for good mingling spots, and in these spaces African Americans met people they might not have otherwise encountered.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s well-known musical experiences in Germany might be the most illustrative of how transformative Germany’s musical culture could be. As a young student in Germany attending performances of Weber’s opera Der Freischütz or a Beethoven symphony, Du Bois arrived at an epiphany that greatly changed his understanding of the world around him and made him the global cosmopolitan many historians now call him. He discovered that classical music was not rooted in white American values. In Germany, he writes, “Even I was a little startled to realize how much that I had regarded as white American, was white European and not American at all.” He instead confronted in Berlin what he considered to be the true origins of Western high art and culture. “America’s music is German, the Germans said; the Americans have no art, said the Italians; and their literature, remarked the English, is mainly English,” he writes. “Sometimes their criticism got under even my anti-American skin, but it was refreshing on the whole to hear voiced my own attitude toward so much that America had meant to me.”⁴² In Germany, listening to Beethoven symphonies and going to Wagner operas, Du Bois discovered that he could love and lay claim to the same cultural works as white Americans but on different grounds. There, Du Bois discovered that high culture did not belong to white Americans any more than it belonged to him. He could divorce his admiration for “the great masters” from white Americans’ veneration of the same musicians.

The musical experiences of Du Bois, Terrell, and other African American students in Germany were an important part of their process of self-discovery and even self-liberation. Much to their surprise, African American students discovered that the opera house or the concert hall in nineteenth-century Germany functioned as a transnational space of social formation that challenged what they had conceived of as possible. Listening to a choir and orchestra perform Mendelssohn’s “Jauchzet dem Herrn, alle Welt” was more than a musical experience. It was akin to an awakening, one that had first been rooted in the United States but later blossomed on German soil. The trick was to figure out how to take these experiences and convert them into tangible social and cultural change in the United States. For young students such as Du Bois wishing to adapt the cosmopolitanism of German philosophers and musicians, the challenge was, Kwame Anthony Appiah argues, “to take its power without its parochialism—to steal the fire without getting burned.”⁴³

Returning Home?

It was returning back home that was painful. As the waves lapped across the sides of their steamships, taking Black musicians to the Caribbean, to South America, or to the United States, people’s moods slipped constantly between states of excitement, gratitude, and longing, and feelings of dread or even terror. Homecoming, it turns out, was not a unidirectional experience. In fact, while many were fleeing Germany at the onset of WWI, Werner Jaegerhuber, later known as the grandfather of Haitian music, was just arriving. The son of a German American businessman and a mixed-race Haitian woman, Jaegerhuber fled to Germany when the United States invaded Haiti in 1915. He studied at the Vogt Conservatory in Hamburg and remained in Germany until 1937—when it became clear that he was not safe from Nazi racial persecution—and returned to Haiti.⁴⁴

Some Black musicians simply refused to return home. The Jiménez Trio, an Afro-Cuban chamber group comprised of a father and two sons (violinist José Julián Jiménez, pianist José Manuel “Lico,” and cellist Nicasio), first toured Germany in the 1870s. Most members of the Jiménez family refused to return to Cuba, settling down and raising families in Germany instead. José Julián unhappily returned to Cuba, but his son Nicasio settled in France and became a violin professor, where he died in 1891. Lico had a successful career in Germany; he performed for Wagner at the Villa Wahnfried in Bayreuth and also for Liszt in Weimar. He received warm praise from both.⁴⁵ The bright and clever young singer J. Elmer Spyglass simply left the world of classical music altogether, shrewdly realizing that he could have a financially solvent career in Central Europe as a Black entertainer of popular works. Others wandered off to Paris or London (like Frederick Loudin of the Fisk Jubilee Singers), renouncing their previous lives in the United States and committing to living abroad.

Others sat grimly in their cabins or moodily walked on the decks of their steamships sailing back to the United States. The ship’s return journey was often gloomy, as people forcibly and bitterly readjusted to a racial order they had previously left behind. Awkward silence accompanied many. Leaving to go back to the United States in 1894, Du Bois bluntly wrote in his diary, “There are five Negroes aboard. We do not go together.”⁴⁶ Returning to the United States in 1914 because war had broken out on the European continent, Hazel Harrison found herself on a ship with Alain Locke and the Harrelds, communing over their experiences in Germany and their intermingling joy and dread toward reentry to the United States.⁴⁷

Perhaps the most shocking outcome of these return voyages to the United States was that some African Americans came back to American shores passing as white. They used the long passage back to the United States to transform from Black men and women into socially acceptable white people who had just returned from European ventures. In his unpublished memoir, Cook recalls a fellow violinist named Ed Winn, the son of a barber in the town of Oberlin and a rival of Cook’s at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Cook writes, “Later Winn studied in Germany, returned to this country and, like [another Oberlin graduate] Hattie, passed for white.”⁴⁸ A white plantation owner in Texas named Philip Cuney, the grandfather of the African American musicologist Cuney Hare, sent his mixed-race daughter Jennie to Madame Nichol’s Institute for Young Ladies in Mannheim in the 1860s. Upon her return, Jennie passed into the white community and cut off all contact with her immediate family.⁴⁹ If Europe was a continent where anything felt possible for talented young Black men and women, such stories suggest that the United States was the opposite. Social rigidity and segregation shaped the lives of many African Americans in the United States, even as they worked hard to circumvent its damaging effects on their lives and to ensure that it did not limit their potential educational or musical outcomes.

African Americans who were not able to pass as white (or who chose not to) dreaded returning home. Why go? What good awaited them upon arrival? Terrell recounts trying to console a young African American student who did not want to return to the United States. Exceptionally gifted, he was nonetheless “listless” in Berlin. “When I urged this young man to avail himself of the marvelous opportunities and advantages he enjoyed,” she writes, his response was despondent: “What’s the use of my trying to do anything extraordinary and worthwhile?” His time in Germany had opened his eyes to how difficult his life would be upon returning to the United States. “A man must have some kind of racial background to amount to anything,” he insisted. “What have we done as a race? Almost nothing. We are descended from slaves. How can you expect a people with such a background as that to compete successfully with white people?”⁵⁰ His lament to Terrell was an expression of transatlantic racist thinking he had internalized. He tacitly accepted the Hegelian idea that Black people were a “people without history,” a race without accomplishments or intellectual and artistic achievements to justify their value as U.S. citizens.

Although Terrell tried to cajole this student in the throes of an existential crisis out of his feelings of defeatism, she acknowledged that he was not alone in such thinking. In the United States, African American travelers forlornly stated, Black people possessed little to no cultural value or cultural capital. They believed they were fighting a war for cultural advancement and socially equality in the United States with one hand tied behind their backs. In Europe, they could shake off their feelings of defeat, shirk off the burden of responsibility for their race, and live on a continent with no cultural expectations of them.

Even the few recorded incidents of overt racism by white Germans did not shake them. Rarely did African Americans admit to experiencing anti-Black racism in Germany. In the diary of the Fisk Jubilee Singer Ella Sheppard, for example, only a few jarring encounters appear in her account of daily life in Germany between 1877 and 1878. “During intermission they & others passed through the dining hall where we rested, stood looking at us curiously just as one would look at statuary & then passed on through the opposite door to make room for those in the rear to look,” she writes. “Their look was quite new and amusing. Nothing vulgar or insulting—only like such as one would give while studying an object.”⁵¹ Perhaps to some Black musicians in Central Europe, being an object of curiosity was better than being an object of disgust. Appiah observes that for W. E. B. Du Bois, “There was plenty of race prejudice about, but, for a change, it wasn’t personally directed toward him.”⁵²

Clarence Cameron White’s 1908 article, “The Negro in Musical Europe,” contains many of these arguments. His text makes explicit the convergence of Black longing, European cultural vibrancy, and musical universalism that dominated Black thinking during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article cites the careers of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Will Marion Cook, Abbie Mitchell, Felix Weir, Portia Washington, Amanda Aldridge, Harriett Gibbs Marshall, Annis Hackley, Gustav Sabac el Cher (an Afro-German military musician whom Clarence Cameron White calls “a bandmaster of the German army”), and Rachel Walker, among others, as evidence of Europe’s welcoming embrace of Black people. “As far back as 1862 the Afro-American made his appearance in Europe as music student,” White writes. The fact that Harrison performed in Berlin and won praise from “Europe’s most severe critics” and that the composer Harry Burleigh received warm applause from the king and queen of England “only goes to show that it is here more a question of fitness than of color.” In Europe, White insists, “the Afro-American can at all times be sure of a respectful hearing—not as a curiosity but as an artist.”⁵³

Most daringly, White employs the rhetoric of universalism to argue for Europe’s better reception of Black musicians over the United States. “On every side you find the European musician and music lover as well realizes that music is too broad and too universal to be circumscribed by the complexion of the skin or texture of the hair.”⁵⁴ Clarence Cameron White implies that while classical music in the United States operated along rigid racial fault lines, Europeans understood that classical music was simply too universal to be debased by racism. In Europe, universalism transcended petty racism.

But did it? As we will see in the following chapter, German musical discourse did not reflect White’s own claims. Rather, by the time of White’s writing, classical music had become racialized in Europe. Indeed, what unified much of the writing on Black classical performers in the same era as White’s essay was the belief that music was a legitimate category for racial analysis. It is possible, however, to hold both White’s claims and the historical realities of anti-Black German racism in the same space. African American experiences in Central Europe illustrate how much they valued their experiences away from U.S. racism. At the same time, however, Central Europe also perpetuated its own growing discourse of music and Blackness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What is clear in both African Americans’ experiences in Central Europe and the way in which white Germans encountered them is that their privileged identity as Americans—just as much as their race—determined how they lived their daily lives.

What is so striking about African American students’ interpretations of Germany as a liberating space is that it starkly counters other Black experiences in Germany. At the same time that African Americans were attending the opera, German culture had begun the racist practice of placing Black bodies and Black cultures in zoos, culture shows (Völkerschauen), and minstrel shows. For example, Will Marion Cook lived in Berlin during the first five years of German colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa; Hazel Harrison performed with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1904, the same year as the Herero and Nama genocide, in which German colonial soldiers murdered thousands of Africans in German South West Africa. Existing side by side, then, are German discourses of race and Blackness and African American students’ quests for better lives.

However much those students might have expressed ambivalence about their lives in the United States, their treatment in Germany nonetheless reflected their privileged, elite status as Americans. Their Blackness was still an American Blackness, which meant that as they walked down Unter den Linden in Berlin or visited the St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig, they experienced Germany quite differently from Black Africans, many of whom arrived to Germany either because of racist commercial ventures (human zoos, ethnological villages, etc.) or due to increasingly fixed colonial ties. Marveling at German racial egalitarianism in the era of culture shows, African Americans lived in different social worlds from Black Africans.

The absence of Black Africans and working class Black diasporic men and women from African American travel narratives during the era of German colonialism is itself a revealing fact. Scholars such as Brent Hayes Edwards, Jacqueline Brown, Tina Campt, and others have convincingly demonstrated that far too often, many Black diasporic writings are documents of African American hegemony.⁵⁵ As much as African Americans abroad may have wished to promote a budding Black internationalism, their own texts might have perpetuated what Campt calls “a discourse that refers not so much to a relation of equity than of hegemony.”⁵⁶ Black Americans did not seek out Black diasporic peers as equals, nor did they see them as such. Rather, African Americans’ published reflections of their visits to Germany far too often reveal a “hierarchy between the privileged African American traveler to Germany and the Black German subject,” Maria Diedrich warns.⁵⁷ As privileged Black travelers rather than permanent Black residents, African Americans in Germany frequently omitted in their eyewitness accounts other kinds of Black diasporic experiences or dismissed them as peculiar. Instead, with razor-sharp focus, African American writings highlighted white German egalitarianism in order to indict white American racism.

American nationality in Central Europe came with its own privileges and powers, ones that perhaps even undermined Black Americans’ anti-racism and global cosmopolitan visions of musical and racial harmony. It explains why Black Americans experienced Germany as a liberating space, a spiritual and musical fatherland, and a site of blossoming international friendships. Their nationality (and occasional wealth) also explains why they were more easily able to circumvent impending racial stigmatization in Central Europe while Black colonial Africans could not, and why they might have been ignorant (perhaps willfully so) of German anti-Black racism, which was tied to the violence of colonialism. Simply put, many Africans in Germany—placed on display in ethnological exhibitions throughout the German countryside or working in cities—could not join African Americans in singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

We must draw the conclusion that these American travel narratives were not like those of other Black diasporic migrants to Germany. Their melodies of travel to Central Europe carried with them wealth, access, and knowledge that white Germans actively denied Black people from Africa. Their songs hummed different tunes of potential and progress, hymns of longing that were outside of the colonial project but tacitly affirmed it, in keys of hope and desire. Germans listened to them sing their tales in Central Europe. But how much did Germans comprehend what they heard? What, if any of it, could they or did they understand?