Audre Lorde’s Berlin

NYTimes •  July 21, 2019 •  By Charly Wilder

Following in the footsteps of the self-described “black feminist lesbian poet,” whose ideas caught fire in a city she cherished and criticized.

“I come here to read my poetry tonight as a black feminist lesbian poet,” said Audre Lorde, standing onstage in a dashiki and head wrap, to a mesmerized West Berlin audience at the Amerika Haus in June 1984.

At the time, the Wall was still standing, and the western part of the divided city was a hotbed of radical politics, Cold War angst and scrappy, state-subsidized bohemia. But it had never seen anything quite like Lorde, the poet, essayist and activist born in New York City’s Harlem to Caribbean parents in 1934, whose ideas about female rage, intersectional feminism and the political dimensions of self-care have perhaps never been as relevant or embraced as they are today. During Pride month in June, Lorde and her politics were frequently invoked, from acknowledgements at the Stonewall Inn rally in New York City to the official landmarking of her Staten Island home.

The 1984 trip was the first of many extended visits Lorde would make to Berlin, a city she depicted in poetry and prose, where she played a pivotal role in the birth of the Afro-German identity movement in the years before she succumbed to liver cancer in 1992 at age 58. Since her death, Lorde’s momentous influence on the American left has become clear. But she also lives on in today’s Berlin, now a truly international city grappling with what it means to be pluralistic and humane.

“The city itself is very different from what I’d expected,” Lorde wrote in her journal in June 1984. “It is lively and beautiful, but its past is never very far away, at least not for me.” She went on: “The silence about Jews is absolutely deafening, chilling. There is only one memorial in the whole city and it is to the Resistance.”

The past is still close in Berlin, but Lorde’s second observation seems almost inconceivable today. The Resistance memorial at Plötzensee, which inspired her 1984 poem, “This Urn Contains Earth from German Concentration Camps,” is now one of the least known Holocaust memorials in a city full of them — most notably the Stolperstein project and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe by Peter Eisenman. What would Lorde have thought to see the Amerika Haus, where she gave that first public address, on a recent night, as visitors filed into the modernist structure to view photographs of Holocaust atrocities, part of an exhibition on images of death? Since 2014, the Amerika Haus has been home to C/O Berlin, one of innumerable local venues now featuring the kind of culturally diverse, socially engaged material that Lorde often found lacking.

Audre Lorde City Tour

Where to find Lorde today
The best starting place for any Lorde pilgrim is audrelordeberlin.com, a comprehensive English-language website created by Dagmar Schultz, a German sociologist and publisher who helped secure Lorde a visiting professorship at the Free University of Berlin in 1984. The two women would become close friends, and Ms. Schultz recorded copious footage of Lorde’s time in Berlin, which eventually became a 2012 documentary, “Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984-1992,” screened regularly in art house cinemas in Berlin and beyond. The film and its supporting material, including photographs, interviews, letters and posters, now form the basis of the Free University’s Audre Lorde Archive, which can be viewed by appointment at the campus in Lankwitz. Much of this material is also on the website, as is an interactive map of significant locations.

During her first stay, Lorde lived in a red apartment building that still stands at Auf dem Grat 26, overlooking Thiel Park, a sloping stretch of green marshland near the university in the lush, villa-laden western district of Dahlem. The yellow phone booth that used to stand on the park’s edge figures in her haunting 1984 poem, “Berlin Is Hard on Colored Girls,” which mixes the language of border crossings with imagery evoking the African diaspora: “I cross her borders at midnight / the guards confused by a dream / Mother Christopher’s warm bread / an end to war perhaps … A nightingale waits in the alley / next to the yellow phone booth...” 

Through her lectures and workshops in 1984, Lorde began to connect with young German women of African descent — women like May Ayim and Katharina Oguntoye — who would later play important roles in what became known as the Afro-German movement. It was Lorde who coined the term, “Afro-German,” as she encouraged the women to tell their stories and forge an identity. The resulting co-authored 1986 book, Farbe Bekennen, translated into English as Showing Our Colors, tells the story of black German women reaching back to the Middle Ages, a story that had largely been ignored in the national discourse up to that point.

Audre Lorde © Dr. Dagmar Schultz