Instead, he served an apprenticeship as a machinist and pursued his hobby, boxing, which later made him good friends with boxing legend Muhammad Ali. As a non-Aryan he was refused entry into the Hitler Youth and a higher education. Facing increasing racial hostility, Massaquoi tried to blend into Nazi society but was doomed to failure because of his dark complexion. Things got worse when Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power in January 1933. When political turmoil broke out in the ambassador’s homeland in 1929, he and his son, Al-Hajj Massaquoi, returned to Liberia, leaving Bertha Baetz and her son Hans-Jürgen in Germany.Īccustomed to the luxurious lifestyle of their African protector, Massaquoi and his mother soon had to face the harsh reality of their new lower-class daily existence. The son of the German nurse Bertha Baetz and the Liberian businessman Al-Hajj Massaquoi, Hans-Jürgen spent the first years of his life with the family of his paternal grandfather, Momolu Massaquoi, the Consul General of Liberia in Germany. (Nov.Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi was born on Januin the city of Hamburg, Germany. Thoughtful and well written, Massaquoi's memoir adds nuance to our comprehension of 20th-century political and personal experience. He tells of life after the war, of befriending black American soldiers, of moving to Liberia in 1948 and of his subsequent move to America in 1950, where he came to feel that racism was as prevalent as it had been under the Third Reich. Massaquoi and his mother survived both Nazi rule and the devastating 1943 British bombing of Hamburg.
He sought intellectual escape from German nationalism through reading books by Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle and James Fenimore Cooper in his idealization of African-American athletes Joe Lewis and Jesse Owens and by learning how to play jazz and his involvement with the ""swingboys"" officially condemned as purveyors of ""degenerate"" music and dance.
The Reich's racial politics were so steadfastly drummed into German schoolchildren that the young Hans quickly acquired an anti-Semitic outlook only to realize that he was also subject to discrimination as a non-Aryan. Soon after his birth in Hamburg in 1926, the author's father returned to Liberia to bolster his family's failing stature in national politics, leaving his wife and son to grapple with everyday life amid the rise of fascism in Germany. In a unique addition to the literature of life under the Third Reich, Massaquoi, a former managing editor of Ebony magazine, chronicles his life as the son of a German nurse and Al-Haj Massaquoi, the son of the Liberian consul general to Germany.
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