Honoring the Life of Ika Hügel-Marshall • March 13, 1947 – April 21, 2022
July 23, 2022 • 11:00 a.m. PDT (German video) and 11:30 a.m. PDT (English video)
This oral history is to honor the life of Ika Hügel-Marshall. She was an influential voice in the Afro-German movement since the 1980s.
We will be screening a slideshow/video about her life in both English and German.
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Ika Hügel-Marshall, private collection |
Ika co-edited the book Enfernte Verbindungen: Rassismus, Antisemitismus, Klassenunterdrückung in 1983 and wrote her autobiography, Daheim unterwegs: ein deutsches Leben, in 1998, translated as Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany, for which she received the Audre Lorde Literary Award.
Ika read from her book for the Gerlind Institute Oral History Series in 2007, and again in 2012, as part of the Berlin and Beyond Film Festival in San Francisco, in conjunction with the film, Audre Lorde – Die Berliner Jahre 1984 bis 1992 (Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984-1992), for which she co-wrote the script with Dr. Dagmar Schultz and Ria Cheatom. Together with Dr. Schultz, she toured with the film, appearing at screenings around the world.
She collaborated with Dr. Marion Kraft, the editor of Kinder der Befreiung, which was published in German in 2015, and in English as Children of the Liberation in 2020.
In 2020, Ika was interviewed for the BBC Witness History series. You can see that interview here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08wt0gp
In 2021 she co-edited a new book of May Ayim’s unpublished poetry, essays and interviews together with Nivedita Prasad and Dr. Dagmar Schultz.
I ka graduated in social pedagogics and worked for many years at a children’s home in Frankfurt. There, she cofounded Frauen in Bewegung e.V. (Women in Motion) with Senior Grandmaster Sunny Graff in 1985. They viewed martial arts as a means to teach self-defense, self-confidence, courage and solidarity. Ika was promoted to black belt in Tae Kwon Do in 1990.
After moving to Berlin, Ika offered self-defense/self assertion training for Black, Jewish, and immigrant women. She worked with the Orlanda Frauenverlag as a press agent and encouraged many Black Germans, especially women, to publish their work. In the 1990s, Ika and Dagmar led anti-racism workshops for white women. She and Dagmar were close friends with Audre Lorde and May Ayim.
Ika completed an additional training in counseling with a focus on diversity. She offered workshops for white parents of Black children, and she counseled Afro-German women. Next to her work at Orlanda Frauenverlag and her counseling activities, Ika was a lecturer–one of the first Black teachers–at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in counseling.
Together with May Ayim and Dagmar Schultz she engaged in a teaching/research project on eurocentrism at the Free University, the Technical University and the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences.
Ika was an accomplished artist. An exhibition with Ika’s artwork will open June 17 at 6pm in the Begine – Treffpunkt und Kultur für Frauen e.V. in Berlin. Potsdamer Str. 139. |