The Nuremberg Laws issued in 1935 included a whole series of racist and discriminatory regulations, including the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, the Reich Citizenship Law, the Universities Law, the Civil Service Law. The laws affected not only Jews, but also Roma and Sinti (“Gypsies”) as well as Africans and Asians – something that is still relatively unknown. That got Germany into diplomatic difficulties with Japan and with Arab and Indian allies, in fact everybody that they characterized as “non-Aryans”. The law on “race defilement” (Rassenschande) was a constant threat, especially for us younger “Afros”. We were derisively called “mongrels” (Mischlinge) or “mulattos”. That was derived from the Portuguese mulo, the cross between a donkey and a horse, which was unable to reproduce. The various so-called “races of mankind” are perfectly able to reproduce, because they all have the same origin, the same roots. But in those days it wasn't just the Nazis who tried with all their might to deny the fact.

My mother's two sisters, who had adopted my half-brother Herbert, both worked. Aunt Else was a dressmaker and worked at home. She was often ill and depended on the support of her younger sister Elfriede, known as Friedel. Aunt Friedel worked in the office at Siemens. It was simply unthinkable that she should burden herself with a black boy – especially under the conditions of the Nazi period. I couldn't expect that. My fate was the ben Ahmeds.

Uncle Mohamed was to some extent protected by the fact that he had Spanish citizenship, and Aunt Martha, who wasn't married to him, along with her sons, Günther and Herbert, still counted as citizens of the Reich under the Nuremberg Laws. They got by with a combination of pragmatism and opportunism. As a Moroccan and a Muslim Uncle Mohamed had sympathy with anti-Semitic ideas and on that score he never had trouble with the Nazis. On top of this, as a citizen of a state that was not hostile to the Nazis he was safe from official persecution or harassment as long as he behaved himself. He couldn't read or write himself, but he subscribed to the Völkischer Beobachter. I often had to read parts of it aloud to him. When we were called upon to show the flag we hung out the swastika.

During one daylight raid by American bombers on Berlin in July 1944 Wassili and I were out in the streets, as we always were if there was a raid while we were transporting the food pails. That was how we did it after our first flight from the air raid shelter, in spite of the danger that we might be arrested as potential looters. Looting was punishable by death. But we relied on the fact that policemen were only human and would rather take shelter themselves in an air raid. So we sat down on the curb by a piece of waste land and scanned the sky above us for possible threats.

The bombs seemed to be a long way away. This time we were able to distinguish clearly between the flak guns and the falling bombs. Then we suddenly saw a leaflet drifting down past the wall of one of the tenements opposite. Leaflets were very precious to us forced laborers, since we were always hoping to learn the truth about the world situation. In those days of course it didn't occur to me that the Allies, like the Nazis, were mixing truth with propaganda in their leaflets.

So the two of us dashed across the road to catch the leaflet. We heard the sound of a falling bomb. That meant we had to take cover immediately. But there wasn't any, except for a house wall. We threw ourselves to the ground. There followed a fairly heavy explosion and thick dust made it impossible to see. When the dust had settled, we saw a five meter-wide crater on the spot where we had been sitting. We patted ourselves down – nothing missing. We looked at each other, grinned and laughed aloud. We were covered with dust and dirt, but still alive! There was no trace of our leaflet. A piece of paper had saved our lives. From that moment on I was convinced that there was a God guiding my steps who wanted me to survive.

Butzbach, our new, unchosen home town, had also been hit by a few bombs during the war, and the railroad station and some of the oldest houses in town had been destroyed. There were barracks in Solms Castle, which had originally belonged to the Counts of Solms- Licht and was occupied by the US Army until 1990. When we were there there were still two shoe factories, a cannery and a few small manufacturing businesses providing work and bread for people from the town and the region. Today the town is part of the Frankfurt commuter belt. In those days it was a typical Upper Hessian small town, tranquil and resistant to change. There was even a novel about it by Ernst Gläser, titled Jahrgang 1902, which describes its mentality and social atmosphere very well. Gläser was born in Butzbach in 1902. But after the war even Butzbach had to face up to new developments and new attitudes that didn't necessarily conform to views and habits of the old residents. Refugees, expellees and the occupying troops were slowly but surely giving the old town a new face.

Butzbach lies in the Wetterau on the eastern edge of the Taunus mountains. The first mention of it in the historical record is in the Codex Carolina of 773. Matthäus Merian's Topographia Hassiae of 1646 contains an engraving and a description of it. The description makes reference to a “Heuneburg”: “Near the city on the high road to Giessen is a place called the Heuneburg where people have found old walls and coins. It is believed that the Huns, who laid waste to the whole of Europe with their General Attila, built a fortress here.” In fact it's a Roman castellum with its surrounding camp settlement, and it must have been quite important given that it stood directly on the border with the non-Roman Chattia/Hessen to the east. The limes – outer border of the Roman empire – ran past it. The castellum and its settlement were abandoned by the Romans in the first half of the third century CE, probably because of intensified attacks by the Germanic tribes.

I had decided that when I finished my studies I would do something related to Africa. Exactly what, I didn't yet know, but I had journalism in mind. However, I still didn't know enough about the new Africa that was emerging from colonialism and its people. My observations and experiences with my African father and his “countrymen” in the diaspora of the Weimar Republic were already decades in the past and couldn't tell me anything about the future. In the Third Reich Africans and their children hadn't been considered “real” human beings, and in the USA African Americans (who weren't yet being called that) were also second-class human beings. All of this was constantly on my mind.

I had to know more. I applied to the Stiftung Mitbestimmung for a scholarship to spend a study year at the University of Paris. I got it. In November 1960 I began my studies as “auditor libre” at the Institut d'Hautes Études du Développement Économique et Social. The Institute had developed out of the former training college for French colonial administrators. When I was there, most of the students were future leaders from Africa's new francophone states. In the lectures and seminars and in many conversations with the young Africans the image of Africa that I had formed only from German colonial literature was completely transformed. Francophone African literature was also a great help.

I already knew about the African politician and writer Léopold Sédar Senghor when I went to Paris. I knew him from the translations of his works by Jan Heinz Jahn, a writer who had been making African literature known in Germany since the 1950s – more than fifty years after the anthropologist and Africa traveler Leo Frobenius had founded his “Africa Archive” in Munich. But it was only now that I realized what a man like Senghor meant to the new political and intellectual élite in Africa. I first heard the term négritude from African students. At first I was appalled, because in translation that would literally mean “negroidness” or “niggerishness”. I later learned that that was how it was seen by anglophone Africans, who largely rejected it.

The winter of 1944–45 was very cold and very long, especially in the eastern parts of Germany. People were hungry and cold and I was too. My stomach pains became almost unbearable. I could have gone to hospital. But my fear was too great, although there were still hospitals run by the churches. As it later turned out, my fear wasn't without grounds. In the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, I found documents showing that sterilizations were carried out in the Lutheran hospital in Cologne. Reiner Pommerin published a book about that in 1979, titled Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde: das Schicksal einer farbigen deutschen Minderheit 1918–1937 (The Sterilization of the Rhineland Mongrels: The Fate of a Colored German Minority 1918–1937).

People can get used to anything, even hunger and lack of sleep. I spent the last months of the Third Reich as usual: work every day from six in the morning to six at night, interrupted at least once by an air raid, then air raid duty, every night two more air raids, inspection rounds on the roof and on each level of the plant. Mainly to find any incendiary bombs, which could then be easily defused. Some of them did have fuses that ignited as soon as they hit the target, but normally, as long as the surrounding material hadn't caught fire, a bucket of sand was enough to eliminate the danger.

The Allies had reached the Rhine and the Russians East Prussia, from which people were fleeing in long treks. They reported terrible things. Could everything the Nazi propaganda was saying be true? Women and girls raped, civilians murdered? Wassili was convinced that none of it was true. The air raids were getting more and more intense. I had heard nothing about the conferences of the Allied leaders in Casablanca and Yalta, where Germany's fate was finally being decided. For me all that counted now was: how do I get through the next day?

In January 1945 refugees told us that the Russians had already reached Küstrin and the River Oder.

The Red Army leadership were great improvisors. While the fighting was still going on in Berlin, they were busy organizing everyday life in the suburbs. That was why my path to freedom went by way of a meat and sausage factory. It was in Friedrichsfelde and I had walked past it hundreds of times before. All unsuspecting, I was doing that very thing one day when a squad of Soviet soldiers stepped out of the gates and stopped me. I was caught unawares and reached for my passport; I still had my Alien's Passport. They forced me into the factory yard with their pistols drawn and handed me over to another soldier. At first I thought it was just an ordinary identity check. But he barked out the order to unload a truck full of part-butchered pork and beef carcasses. I was clearly not the only person to whom the Russians had issued a similar “invitation” to work; there were already a number of men standing in and around the truck. There were also some Italian former forced laborers or POWs there who had worked in the factory when it was still producing for the German war effort. They were also living in the plant.

Some of the chunks of carcass – halves of pigs and quarters of cattle – were still frozen. It was a mystery to me how they could be kept frozen under those conditions. But Rummelsburg power station hadn't suffered much damage and the Russians had managed to get it up and running very quickly. When the truck was empty, I had to do other work, like clearing rubble. In the course of the morning more US-made Red Army trucks full of meat arrived, and we had to start unloading again. Under the supervision of the Russians, the Italians immediately processed and canned the meat and stacked up the cans. The sight of all the cans waiting to be transported onward made my mouth water. It was clearly rations for the Red Army.

There was an excellent soup for lunch and we could have as many helpings from the big cooking pot as we wanted.

There is such a thing as positive discrimination. Once Friedel and I were traveling with a Munich tour agency to Marseille, to pick up a ship to Dakar. There was a blind war veteran among the group, who had lost his luggage. The tour leader, who had to look after thirty other travelers, knew that I spoke French and asked me to help the man. The luggage turned up again, but Friedel and I arrived in the dining room too late and found that the tables reserved for our group were already fully occupied. We saw two free places at a table at which a couple of our age was sitting. In the presence of the tour leader, I asked politely whether we might join them. The man ignored me and snapped at the tour leader: What was she thinking, putting people at his table that he couldn't talk to? Friedel and I decided – not so politely any more – not to take a seat at his table. The poor tour leader clearly didn't know how to deal with the situation. She wanted to make up for it and asked whether she should see if there were seats for us with French-speaking guests. I was about to lose my temper, when two older ladies, who had heard everything, took the initiative and invited us to join them. That defused the situation.

Of course the tour leader had meant well with her suggestion. She wanted to spare us further discrimination from the Germans. But as far as I was concerned her actions were counterproductive, because they involved evading and caving in to prejudice. It didn't change people's behavior in any way. I would have much preferred to tell that man what I thought. There are innumerable examples of how good intentions can lead to negative consequences. In the Federal Republic, for example, the possibility of encouraging the German-born children of African American GIs to go to the USA so as to spare them the pain of discrimination in Germany was seriously considered for a long time

After I left school I looked in vain for an apprenticeship. I would have liked to train to be a cook, baker or confectioner, because then I would finally have had enough to eat. But there was nothing. The master craftsmen already had enough “Aryan” applicants. And they were probably afraid of conflicts with their own Trade Chambers if they started training non-Aryans. But they didn't tell me that; they just invented other excuses. If I'd known the real reasons for the rejections I would have understood them better. But I wouldn't have been any less angry.

Finally, after knocking on many doors, I found a place. The Hotel Excelsior was prepared to take me on as a bellboy, with a monthly salary the same as the other bellboys. The salary wasn't high and I had to hand all of it over to the ben Ahmeds. But there were also the tips I got from the guests. And so I had money of my own for the first time. I was expected to hand that over too, so they could “save” it for me. But my foster parents didn't know how much I was earning in tips. I always kept something back to buy books or sweets – as long as they were to be had.

The Hotel Excelsior in Berlin had an international reputation. It was in the Saarland Strasse opposite the Anhalter Bahnhof, and was linked to the station by a pedestrian tunnel. It advertised itself as “the biggest hotel on the continent”. That was surely true, for along with more than 600 rooms it had several restaurants, each with its own kitchen, including a Bavarian beer restaurant, the Thomas Cellar with seating for 1500, various salons with fine furniture, gleaming lamps and chandeliers, several elevators served by elevator operators, and a large reception area with expensive carpets. The hotel is long gone. It burnt down in the last days of the war, when Berlin was already surrounded by Soviet troops, and the ruins were demolished after the war. I was given a uniform that generations of bellboys before me had worn.

I was now nine years old. I was still reading everything I could get my hands on, even the reports and announcements in the Swiss newspapers about Germany – now calling itself “new” and “the Third Reich”. Most of the reports were critical or downright negative. Especially about the behavior of the assault squads of the SA, who were terrorizing their opponents. I now pictured my homeland Germany as a land of fear and horror. But when we returned to Germany in the autumn of 1934 at the end of our summer tour, my first impression was completely different. There was no more violence in the streets, no endless lines of people waiting at the State Employment Offices. I was utterly surprised: on the surface it was a peaceful new home, which at first seemed to me anything but hostile. Quiet and order prevailed. I would learn later that that was deceptive, and that in fact it was the quiet of the graveyard.

I would have loved to stay with the Knie Circus in friendly Switzerland, where I had made a lot of friends among the circus children and didn't have to go to school. But the ben Ahmeds wouldn't agree. They explained that the Youth Welfare Bureau wanted to see us back in one piece, and that there was nothing to be afraid of. Life in the new Germany was wonderful and everything would be fine.

And Berlin really did look transformed to me. The main reason for that was that we no longer lived in Prenzlauer Berg, but in the more respectable Karlshorst, deep in Berlin's southeastern suburbs.6 Land was being cleared for development there, and plots could be bought for low prices. The ben Ahmeds had seized the opportunity in 1931–32 and built themselves a villa that contained three apartments.

On the ground floor there lived Erich Walzer with his wife, Käthe; one of Aunt Martha's brothers, Erich worked for the National Bank and had been badly wounded in the First World War. At first their daughter lived there too, until she married and moved out.

The Alps have fascinated me since that time when we were in Switzerland with the Knie Circus. Then, I was always looking up at the snow-covered peaks and yearning just to run as far as I could up the mountainside. Of course that was unthinkable. I wouldn't have been able to fulfill my duties in the caravan and the circus tent. In 1940, too, when we were filming on the Isarauen, the mountains seemed so close and I would gaze at them longingly.

When it was once again possible to travel by rail Friedel and I fulfilled a long-standing wish. It was still the time of the Reichsmark and the old ticket fares were still in force. We packed American cigarettes and coffee and headed off to Mittenwald in Upper Bavaria, at the foot of the mountains. The town had not been destroyed, but it was crammed with refugees, and that made for an uncomfortable atmosphere. But with our black market goods we found accommodation relatively quickly in a private house. Friedel had been collecting travel coupons and we always got something to eat in the restaurants. We had a fine time. We borrowed skis and learned to ski, we took long walks and hikes. In the evening we had long conversations with other young people over mugs of the non-alcoholic “hot drink”. Most important, we went dancing wherever the chance was on offer in the town or nearby. Our thirst for life was indescribable.

One day we went to a dance which was attended by almost the whole population of Mittenwald. That included the American soldiers who were stationed in Mittenwald to control the border crossing to Austria. These were duties that the military government assigned only to white units. In those days there was still racial segregation in the American army. It was only ended by US President Harry S. Truman at the outbreak of the Korean War – against the wishes of the military leaders. Friedel and I were dancing, when two American MPs came up to us and started forcing me to the exit. I protested loudly. It wasn't the first time that MPs had stopped me. After a swift check of my identity card they made it crystal clear to me that I didn't belong there and should clear off right away.

Up to then I hadn't tried to pick up on my experience with the circus and in films. It was show business that came to me. It started with a role in Sartre's play The Respectful Prostitute. Heinrich Bitsch, playwright and later the city officer for cultural affairs in Giessen, was managing the theater studio in the Amerika-Haus and producing contemporary works by French and American authors. One day, in the army canteen in Giessen, he asked me whether I would take on the role of the “Negro” in that play. There was no money in it, though, since he had practically no funding. When I told him that my small roles in films and the circus had given me some performing experience he was astounded. I accepted the offer; it would at least be a change from the boring routine of translation. The rehearsals took place in the evening and so didn't clash with my daytime work.

The production was a great success and got good reviews. Years later I acted in Konrad Wagner's production of the television version of the same play, together with Mady Rahl, Harry Mayen and Ernst Schröder. The broadcast, by the Hessian broadcasting agency Hessischer Rundfunk, won a television prize in 1957.

One day we heard in the Globetrotter that the Hessischer Rundfunk was planning to develop a television production unit and was looking for people. The Globetrotter was an old railroad lounge car standing on a bomb-site that had been turned into a café and hangout for performers. Of course we had all heard about television in the USA and assumed that this new medium would mean new work opportunities for actors. The people who were responsible for developing television in Germany immediately put a damper on our expectations. Stage actors weren't wanted for television. What they were looking for was fresh, natural types who didn't posture the way we did on stage. Talent scouts were already out looking for types like that on the streets. The “fresh, natural types” they collected were dragged into the studios and put in front of the cameras. At first they were all flops. The directors who took over the television productions had almost all started in theater, and when they were casting television plays they generally started by bringing in actors whom they knew from the theater.

One of the first television plays to be broadcast on German television was A Hero of Our Times by the American author D. Davidson. The Hessischer Rundfunk produced it 1955. It was about American soldiers returning to the USA at the end of the Korean War, after being POWs in China. The play just suited the Cold War mood. The director was Fritz Umgelter, a pioneer of German television drama. I played one of five American soldiers.

The Hessischer Rundfunk's first television studio was circular; it had originally been designed as the chamber for the Bundestag, the West German parliament, at the time when Walter Kolb, elected mayor of Frankfurt in 1946, was campaigning for Frankfurt to be the capital of the new Federal Republic. Rehearsals in those days were hardly any different from in the theater, except that they were considerably shorter and more intensive right from the start. The director rehearsed with us in the studio at the beginning, just as with a stage play. About a week before the broadcast the technical elements were added: the cameras were brought in and it was worked out precisely how the actors and the cameras would move.