Bärbel Kampmann

Bärbel Kampmann was born in Bielefeld, Germany, in 1946.[1][2][3] Her father was an African American soldier, and her mother was a German woman from Bielefeld.[4][5]

Her mother, Ilse Hilbert, had been a Nazi sympathizer, and her GI father left before Hilbert realized she was pregnant.[4] As a child, she was forbidden to talk about her father.[4][6] Her mother, along with her grandmother—who primarily raised her and often tried to protect her from racism—would try unsuccessfully to bleach her skin with Drula bleaching wax and hydrogen peroxide.[4][5]

She was one of the first Afro-descendent children born in Germany after the end of Nazi rule, and she experienced a great deal of racism and isolation in her youth, including physical violence from other children.[2][4][7]

After studying at a teachers' college in Cologne and working as a secondary school teacher, during which time she was an active trade unionist, Kampmann obtained a psychology degree from Ruhr University Bochum.[1][2] She worked as a clinical therapist, primarily serving black Germans and migrants.[5]

Kampmann settled in the German city of Gelsenkirchen, where beginning in 1986 she worked for the regional government to promote the welfare of migrant children and other young people.[1][2] She was then promoted to the government in the regional capital of Düsseldorf, where she worked on issues of integration and discrimination in the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs.[1][2][4]

Her work in the North Rhine-Westphalia government on anti-discrimination projects was used as a model across Germany.[2] These trend-setting efforts were noted for their then-novel emphasis on actually centering the perspectives of those facing discrimination.[1]

She was a well-known anti-racist activist within the Afro-German community, considered a central champion of integration in this period.[1][2][8] She was known for leading anti-racist workshops and founded the Gelsenkirchen Days Against Racism.[3][4][5] She was also involved with ADEFRA, a black women's organization in Germany, and the Initiative of Black People in Germany.[5][9] In addition to her anti-racist and pro-migrant activism, Kampmann was also markedly anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist.[6]

Kampmann wrote a number of essays on the experiences of minorities in Germany,[3][5] notably "Schwarze Deutsche. Lebensrealität und Probleme einer wenig beachteten Minderheit", in the 1994 book Andere Deutsche. Zur Lebenssituation von Menschen multiethnischer und multikultureller Herkunft.[10]

Kampmann's first marriage ended in divorce, in part due to the stigma against interracial relationships at the time. She later remarried, wedding fellow psychologist Harald Gerunde.[6]

In her late thirties, Kampmann traveled to the United States in search of her father, John T. Ballinger, whom she was eventually able to meet.[4][11] However, she found herself disillusioned with the United States and began traveling instead to Guinea, where she came to feel particularly at home.[5][6][11]

After falling ill, Kampmann died in 1999 in Gelsenkirchen, at age 53.[1][2][3]

Her husband Harald Gerunde wrote a biography of her titled Eine von uns: Als Schwarze in Deutschland geboren (One of us: Born Black in Germany) in 2000.[3][4][6][12]

In 2020, a street in Bremen was named in her honor.[8][13]