Marie Nejar 1930-2025

Marie Nejar died last month at the age of 95. As far as the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (ISD) is aware, she was the last Black survivor of Nazi Germany.

As she writes in her 2007 autobiography – whose German title, Mach nicht so traurige Augen weil du ein Negerlein bist (‘Don’t make such sad eyes because you are a little n*****’), is an indictment of German publishing then and now – Nejar was born in Mülheim an der Ruhr in 1930. Her mother, Cécile Nejar, was a musician who performed on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. Her father, Albert Yessow, was a Ghanaian seafarer working aboard the Victoria.

Several months pregnant, Cécile travelled south to the Cologne area, to play the accordion or violin at venues there and to give her child up for adoption so she could return to the stage in Hamburg. But Cécile’s mother, Marie Nejar (neé Wüstenfeld), found out about her granddaughter and adopted her when she was two. Marie arrived in Hamburg a few months before Hitler took power, and grew up in her grandmother’s care on Taubenstraße in St Pauli. Despite the relative cosmopolitanism of the area, she experienced seething, daily racism, but kept most of it to herself, ‘to spare Oma’. Her grandfather, Joseph Nejar, a Black Creole man from St Pierre, Martinique, had died in 1912.

Marie was invited to join the Bund Deutscher Mädel(‘League of German Girls’) in 1940, when she was ten. Excited at the prospect of singing and doing gymnastics with her peers, she went to the recruitment event with her invitation in hand. But she was curtly rejected because her ‘mother slept with a n*****’. ‘It was the greatest humiliation in my life until that point,’ she writes in her autobiography. Her mother died the same year. The cause of death was given as a gallbladder infection, but this was a euphemism for an abortion that went wrong. She sought medical attention but was rejected on racist grounds and bled to death.

Marie inherited a few of Cécile’s records, among them Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong. Their relationship had been strained and she did not mourn her mother long. In 1942, Marie was cast as an extra in a Nazi propaganda film by a young Black woman who had known and worked with Cécile. A letter signed by ‘the patron of German film’, Joseph Goebbels, gave her permission to take fourteen days off school to shoot Münchhausen at UFA studios. Black children and adults were being recruited from all over the country and brought to Potsdam to act in Nazi propaganda films and stage productions. None of them had a leading role, which were reserved for ‘Aryans’ with shoe polish on their faces. Still, the acting, directly or indirectly, saved more than a few of the ‘exotic’ extras from the Gestapo.

Even after the war, the practice continued in a different form. Marie sang the soundtrack to the popular film Toxi (1952), also a propaganda film of sorts. Toxi (played by Elfie Fiegert) is the daughter of an African-American GI who comes to collect her at the end of the film. For most of the movie, a white family argues about what to do with Toxi after a relative leaves her at their door on Christmas Eve.

Marie’s mournful, insistent chorus – written by Bruno Balz (lyrics) and Michael Jary (music) – ‘Ich möcht’ so gern nach Hause geh’n’ (‘I really want to go home’) refers to a home elsewhere, not in Germany, although both Marie and Elfie were born in Germany and had never lived anywhere else. Nejar’s autobiography romanticises her experiences in the film industry and the smoothing out of the historical record can be jarring. Still, she became an accomplished performer who went on group tours of Germany, Austria and Switzerland as a twenty-something ‘child star’ with the stage name ‘Leila Negra’ (again, an indictment of sorts). She was not quite a household name, but audiences knew her distinctive voice and could hum along to many of the tunes.

As a child, Marie never questioned why her grandmother had raised her. But after a performance in Mülheim she was approached by a woman from the audience. ‘You were just like my own child, before they took you away,’ said the woman who had been set to adopt her. With neither her mother nor her grandmother alive to explain, Nejar reckoned with being an unwanted child. ‘My whole body was in pain,’ she wrote.

As a child Nejar had been stripped of her German citizenship by the Nazis’ Nuremberg Race Laws. After the war, with the help of her grandfather’s Martinican papers, and some insistence, Marie was able to secure French citizenship with permanent residence in Germany. She would otherwise have become stateless. She left the stage when she was 27 and trained as a nurse, working in Hamburg until she retired.

Ten years ago, at an ISD thirtieth anniversary event, Marie slowly walked onto the stage alongside Theodor Wonja Michael (1925-2019). The last two known Black survivors of Nazi Germany received roaring applause from the audience (which I was part of). They stood solemnly for a few seconds. I imagine they were slightly embarrassed by it all. Neither chose to be born and live in Germany, or to be one of the people on whom Black Germans would come to project their cumulative sense of belonging and claim to their own country. In interviews, Nejar was both amused and confused by other people’s confusion at her German-ness. One reason for the tears in the audience that evening was that most Black Germans, for many reasons, don’t grow old, at least not in Germany. Seeing two elderly Black Germans on stage struck a nerve.

There is no Windrush Generation here. Germany instead has a history of sending Black people away. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, thousands of Black children were adopted internationally and sent off (mostly) to the US. Hundreds had been castrated in Nazi Germany. Both groups were burdened with such shame that it would be understandable if they severed all association with Germany. Little has been done to come to terms with all this in a country that’s often celebrated for its culture of memory. German Blackness has for decades been marked by absence, especially the absence of elders. Nejar inadvertently stood in for every Black German Oma who could have been here but no longer was. Now that she too is gone, for many Black people in Germany it feels as if an anchor has been lost.