“Where Hands Touch” (2018) is a British film about Leyna (Amandla Stenberg), a 16-year-old Black girl who falls in love in 1944 with Lutz (George MacKay), a Nazi soldier. Inspired by historical events, Amma Asante of “Belle” (2013) writes and directs.
File under: Films that open with a James Baldwin quote. In this case:
“There are days when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it.”
Like “Belle” (2013), which Asante also directed, it is about a mixed-race girl who is cut off from the Black side of her family and comes of age in an infamously White world (Nazi Germany for Leyna, high-society England in the 1700s for Belle). The White side of her family tries to protect her, but the violently racist and dehumanizing nature of both societies is made plain (throwing Black slaves overboard, turning Jews into ash). Can she find love in the arms of a White man? Is she a fool? Is she a Tragic Mulatto stereotype? Is she a Shakespearean Juliet?
To historians she is a Rhineland bastard, the offspring of a White German woman and a Black soldier of the Tirailleurs Senegalais (the West African troops that France sent to occupy the Rhineland after Germany lost the First World War). Thanks to Hitler’s policies for people like her, Leyna is kicked out of school. She must also get a doctor’s note to prove that she can never have children.
Internalized racism: At one point Lutz plays Billie Holiday’s “Let’s Call A Heart A Heart” (1936) – what Leyna called “nigger music”. She is a young, idealistic, patriotic German. She is anti-Semitic and wants to join the Hitler Youth, like Lutz – but cannot because she is only half Aryan.
First they came …: Leyna at least has the good sense to know that if the government can round up Jews today, it can be her tomorrow. And so it was. First they burned her citizenship papers. And then they came for her.
That Baldwin quote comes from a television interview he gave right after meeting Robert Kennedy on May 24th 1963:
“There are days, this is one of them, when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. How precisely you’re going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here. And to be here means you can’t be anywhere else. I’m terrified at the moral apathy – the death of the heart – which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.”
A fair summary of Leyna’s experience of Nazi Germany.
My favourite scene: When Black American soldiers liberate her labour camp and a pair of black hands lift her out of her nightmare.
– Abagond, 2020.
See also:
- films
- Amma Asante
- James Baldwin
- Billie Holiday
- internalized racism
- The N-word
- Tragic Mulatto
- Hitler
- Tirailleurs Senegalais
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That is the dilemma about WW2. Many of the vindictive historians with expertise claim that everybody in the Nazi regime had full control of themselves and could choose to leave and that their was no reprimanding of any sort for disobeying orders. In other words the possibly “coerced” wasn’t a possibility. Von Braun was a genius and the father of NASA yet he wasn’t the coerced? This Nazi Soldier in this story must be mind boggling…
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TYPO ALERT. “She is a young, idealistic, patriotic Germans(sic).”
Another Asante bio pic about an ebony in ivory land. Can’t wait to see her do Maharani Bamba, Lady Duleep Singh’s life. The mind boggles at the thought of the opulence of the sets and music, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Indian, etc, for that film. Wacky the wacktress, if you’re still lurking, you could write the script. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamba_M%C3%BCller)
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I saw the trailer for this and immediately knew I could not watch this. It looks absurd.
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Why is my comment in moderation? Check Twitter I tweeted you.
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@ gro jo
Thanks!
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@ Mary
“Trailer” is moderated because of “trailer trash”.
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I remember hearing about this film a few years ago. A black girl falling in love with a Nazi. This is just a remake of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. I wouldn’t waste a penny on this garbage. They’re trying so hard to normalize the racist horrors from the past. I’ll pass!
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The fact that the director (a black woman) would even think to director something like this is an absolute insult to black people.
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More from the delusional, dysfunctional, likely mentally ill class of ignorant black females. Literally nothing to see here. A quick look at Wikipedia reveals that every movie she’s ever made tries to humanize racists who attacked black people.
Also, Hitler and his Nazis HATED black people as much as he hated Jews. The only thing that save Black Germans from the concentration camps was their small numbers (roughly 30,000 around that time in a population of 65 million). But still they were dehumanized and reviled by the Nazis.
And lets not forget the fact that they practiced for the Holocaust on Black people in Namibia 30 years prior by committing a Genocide against the Herrero.
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Sounds like an Imitation of Life redux.
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@ Lou Nar
The Nazi’s went way beyond dehumanization and revulsion of bi-racial children and young adults. Under the Nazi regime, hundreds of so-called “Rhineland Bastards” were systematically sterilized under eugenics laws modeled on US law and practices.
According to Martin Smith on the site, Afrikan Heritage:
http://www.afrikanheritage.com/the-holocausts-forgotten-black-victims-the-rhineland-bastards/
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Why would a bi-racial person in Nazi Germany go as far as becoming a “…patriotic German… anti-Semitic and wants to join the Hitler Youth…..”
These young people were born and raised in Germany, with German mothers. Culturally and socially they were Germans—and they wanted to belong. Not too hard to understand. Their shabby treatment from other Germans notwithstanding.
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Reblogged this on Steph's Blog and commented:
Why would anyone want to make a disgusting movie like that? It’s an insult to Black women and Black people.
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“Why would anyone want to make a disgusting movie like that?” Because she wants validation and acceptance from White people. The director is even married to a German (Who, if you look hard enough, very likely has Nazis in his family) Its pathetic, but sadly, not surprising
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