Guest lecture tells the legacy of Black life and art in the Holocaust

A recent lecture on “Black Life in a Nazi Internment Camp: The Art of Josef Nassy,” examined the invisibility of the Black wartime experience and highlighted art as a form of memory that helps us better understand Black perspectives of Nazi internment. The April 17 talk was led by Sarah Phillips Casteel, an English professor at Carleton University.

The event was organized by Associate Professor of German Natalie Eppelsheimer with the support of Academic Coordinator Danielle Denis and was co-sponsored by Black Studies, History, History of Art and Architecture, and International and Global Studies.

“I was very happy about the turnout. I had sent dozens of invitations and email reminders to colleagues and students, but in the busy month of April, one never knows how many people will come to a talk,” Eppelsheimer wrote in an email to The Campus.

Eppelsheimer and Casteel met for an authors’ workshop last fall, which prompted Eppelsheimer to invite Casteel to give a talk at Middlebury about her research and new book, titled “Black Lives under Nazism: Making History Visible in Literature and Art,” released in February.

Drawing on her book, Casteel discussed how one of the most significant visual documents of the Black experience in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe is the works of Nassy, a Caribbean artist. During his internment, he created a series of drawings and paintings that depicted Black prisoners’ experiences that written records typically omit. Nassy was, to many people’s surprise, supplied with art materials and used different modes of visual material to relay suffering. 

Throughout the talk, Casteel helped the audience understand that Nassy’s work and history might help us rethink definitions of the Holocaust. Nassy was arrested in Europe, but since it was unknown that he was Jewish, he was arrested as an enemy national in German-occupied Belgium. Nassy — who was Black, Surinamese and Jewish — spent the war in an internment camp, not a concentration camp, which is an important historical distinction that is not widely understood. According to Casteel, the term “Holocaust survivor,” conceals the diversity of the experiences it seeks to represent and assumes a single narrative. 

Not only is the Black experience in internment and concentration camps unrecognized, Casteel said, but the Allies deliberately removed Black soldiers from their war victory narratives. Casteel used this point to illustrate how European forces — whether they were German or not — believed maintaining white hierarchy was crucial. Black prisoners of war were put in a complex situation where they were not necessarily better off outside of Germany.

Kate Lawson ’26.5 was particularly captivated by this point.

“The ones that stayed in the internment camp made the choice that they would rather be in Nazi Germany then have to go back to being subjected to the racism in America that felt worse than their subjection in Germany, so I thought that was important to help us have a better historical understanding and see the ways that Nazi Germany wasn’t just an isolated political event, but it’s really interconnected to the colonial project and racism in the U.S. and abroad,” Lawson said.

Assistant Professor of Black Studies Viola Huang, who also teaches German language courses, attended Casteel’s talk, and believes that Casteel’s work gives a voice to all of the groups who were targeted by the Nazis.

“On the one hand, this reminds us that the suffering of all these marginalized groups at the hand of the Nazis was connected. And on the other hand, studying the specific and unique ways in which different groups were targeted and treated helps us understand more clearly the ideological contours of Nazi ideology — both of which are also important insights into our present political moment,” Huang wrote in an email to The Campus.

Middlebury’s German Department has been working towards making their courses more intersectional and inclusive. For instance, Eppelsheimer’s course “Colonialism and Racism” considers the experiences of BIPOC people in Germany and its colonies throughout history: under the Weimar Republic, during the Nazi regime and most recently during the German Black Lives Matter movement. Eppelsheimer also teaches “Literary Responses to the Holocaust,” a class in which students engage with a variety of authors, including Afro-German authors who grew up or were young adults during the Nazi regime. 

Recently, students have also applied what they have learned to their own work. At the Spring Student Symposium last Friday, students in the German Department presented their research about Mozambican guestworkers in East Germany and the legacy of German colonialism on the Namibian LGBTQIA+ community.

“I think it is wonderful to see that students are interested in these topics and that they continue to engage with issues related to Germany’s colonial legacies and Black Germany in several research and thesis projects that go beyond the courses they took,” Eppelsheimer wrote.

Not only does the German Department continue to carefully review and re-think German textbooks that do not effectively include the experiences of people of color, but it has also begun to attract a more diverse group of students, including students of color and international students, according to Huang.

The more the German department takes an intersectional approach to their teaching and continues to attract a diverse group of students, the more future engagement in lectures like Casteel’s there will be, according to Eppelsheimer.

“The great feedback I have received from students and colleagues has shown me that we might want to organize [more of] such talks, which bring the neglected, marginalized and/or silenced topics such as Black lives under Nazism and different academic disciplines into conversation more often,” Eppelsheimer wrote.