Introduction

Abstract

This monograph explores the ‘Black Horror’ campaign as an important chapter in the popularisation of racialised discourse in European society. Originating in early 1920s Germany, this first international racist campaign promoted through modern media, targeted occupying French troops from colonial Africa on German soil and used stereotypical images of ‘racially primitive’, sexually depraved black soldiers threatening and raping ‘white women’ in 1920s Germany to generate widespread concern and panic about their presence. The campaign quickly developed a momentum of its own and became an international phenomenon in Post-War I Europe, spanning the political divide and incorporating trades unionists, Christian groups, women’s organisations and key public figures including Edmund D. Morel, Francesco Nitti, and Bertrand Russell. It had followers throughout Europe, the US and Australia. My book examines the campaign’s racist logic and hereby explores how it combined race, gender, nation and class as categories of social inclusion and exclusion, which reinforced one another and formed a racist conglomerate of interlinked discriminations. It offers English readers a rare in-depth insight into a widely forgotten chapter of popular racism in Europe, and sets out the benefits of a historically reflexive study of racialised discourse and its intersectionality.