In the early 1950s, Ika Hugel-Marshall lived in a small town in Bavaria with her mother, stepfather, and younger stepsister. Her family was white, and she assumed she was too, just as they all spoke German and lived in the same house. All the townspeople were white–the postman, the children she played with, the neighbors who invited her in for juice, the baker who sold her hot rolls–as was her beloved grandmother, her mother’s mother, who lived nearby. Ika–Erika–didn’t know that, as one of 92,000 “occupation babies” (children of locals and occupation forces), she’d been pronounced a national problem by the newsmagazine Das Parlament. Worse, she was of mixed race, and thus deemed “morally corrupt and of bad character.”
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In 1946 her mother had had an affair with Eddie Marshall, an African-American air force corporal who’d grown up in Louisiana and Mississippi. Hugel-Marshall doesn’t know many details of their meeting, or how they spoke to one another. She does know that shortly after her mother told Marshall she was pregnant, he was hospitalized (for hives) and later discharged. He returned to Chicago and his wife, Corene, to whom he never mentioned that he might have a child growing up in another part of the world.
Hugel-Marshall says the nuns at the home often beat her. They subjected her to an exorcism because of her mother’s sin. The other children shunned and taunted her. When she did well in her classes, the teachers either ignored her or accused her of cheating. She began to hate the color of her skin.
“If we would imagine the reverse situation,” says Schultz, “a black child coming from here to meet a white family in Germany, it would be hard to imagine them being that openhearted and generous.”
