"Bigger in Nazi Germany": Transcultural Confrontations of Richard Wright and Hans Jurgen Massaquoi‪.‬

IN "How 'BIGGER' WAS BORN," (1) Richard Wright's commentary on his controversial novel Native Son (1939), the author creates transcultural confrontations which permeate his fictional and autobiographical writings. He claims that "more than anything else, as a writer, I was fascinated by the similarity of the emotional tensions of Bigger in America and Bigger in Nazi Germany and Bigger in old Russia" (Wright: 1991, 865). Wright's particular interest in communism and its repercussions for Bigger's personality has been analyzed by many scholars/This essay opens up a new discussion by focusing on Wright's ideas regarding the anti-democratic "other" across the Atlantic and the function of "Nazi Germany" in his oeuvre. Wright was a keen observer of Hitler's racist ideology and the practical consequences of the Nuremberg Laws for non-Aryans. However, he had to rely on mediated information regarding Hitler's racial terror program and German minority response patterns. Wright's conception of "Bigger in Nazi Germany" served particular purposes for African Americans at a specific socio-cultural and political situation and moment in the United States. I argue that Wright used "Nazi Germany" as a referent and a foil to come to terms with the shortcomings of American democracy from the perspective of an African American writer at the outbreak of World War II. It is crucial to understand that on the other side of the Atlantic, blacks with German citizenship fantasized about "America" and their "black brothers and sisters in the land of the free" in terms almost completely opposite. The cultural imaginary of the "other" in democratic and fascist political environments has hardly been addressed in the scholarship on Wright. In order to reveal democratic gaps in the American socio-cultural and political environment before and after World War II, I will reverse the perspective from Wright's "Bigger in America" to what he calls "Bigger in Nazi Germany." What did the construction "democratic America" mean to Afro-Germans growing up during the Nazi era? How similar were, indeed, the emotional tensions of racial outsiders in the United States and the Third Reich? As a point of reference, Hans Jurgen Massaquoi's autobiography Destined to Witness: Growing up Black in Nazi Germany (1999) will help to identify Wright's conception of "Bigger in Nazi Germany" and the experience of an Afro-German during the Third Reich as "false friends" in the linguistic sense: just as two words in foreign languages may sound the same or similar, the meanings may yet be quite different or even unrelated.