Toxi

85 min. | Director Robert Stemmle | 1952 | Germany | German with English subtitles | NTSC

Toxi is a 1952 West German drama film directed by Robert A. Stemmle and starring Elfie Fiegert, Paul Bildt and Johanna Hofer. The film's release came as the first wave of children born to black Allied servicemen and white German mothers entered school.

In the spring of 1952, West German moviegoers flocked to the feature film, Toxi, the fictionalstory of an abandoned Black German girl, making it one of the top ten box-office hits of the year. The film is notable for a number of reasons. It was the first feature-length film to explore the subjectof black occupation children born to white German women and fathered by occupation soldiers of color in Germany after the defeat of the Nazi Regime. In fact, Toxi was one of very few films to deal explicitly with the problem of race (Rassenproblem) in post-fascist Germany and call it by its name. Released to coincide with the start of the school year, the commercial film sought to generate profits as well as “social understanding” for black occupation children, as the oldest of that cohort reached school-age and began to make the difficult transition from the privacy of home to the public arena of the classroom. — Heide Fehrenbach