The Reinvented Life of Belle da Costa Greene

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Postwar responses to black occupation children represent a formative moment in the racial reconstruction of postfascist Germany. Military occupation between 1945 and 1949 produced some 94,000 occupation children. However, official and public attention fixed on a small subset, the so-called “farbige Mischlinge” or “colored mixed-bloods,” distinguished from the others by their black paternity. Although they constituted a small minority of postwar German births—numbering only about 3,000 in 1950 and nearly double that by 1955—West German federal and state officials, youth welfare workers, and the press invested the children with considerable symbolic significance.

The years after 1945 were constituent for contemporary German racial understanding, and postwar debates regarding “miscegenation” and “Mischlingskinder” were central to the ideological transition from National Socialist to democratic approaches to race. The term “Mischling,” in fact, survived the Third Reich and persisted well into the 1960s in official, scholarly, media, and public usage in West Germany. But its content had changed. Rather than refer to the progeny of so-called mixed unions between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans as it had during the Third Reich, immediately after the war it came to connote the offspring of white German women and foreign men of color. Thus “Mischling” remained a racialized category of social analysis and social policy after 1945, as before. But the definition of which races had mixed, as well as the social significance of such mixing, had fundamentally altered.

Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eleym and Atina Grossmann, After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 31-32.

The Reinvented Life of Belle da Costa Greene

The Reinvented Life of Belle da Costa Greene

Vanderbilt University
Nashville, Tennessee
2023-02-14 through 2023-05-14

2023-02-01

**Belle da Costa Greene, 1911**

Clarence H. White, 1871–1925; born West Carlisle, OH; died Mexico City, Mexico; active Ohio and New YorkPlatinum print
image: 23.8 x 17.1 cm (9 3/8 x 6 3/4 in.) mat: 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in.) frame: 51.4 × 41.3 × 3.8 cm (20 1/4 × 16 1/4 × 1 1/2 in.)
Princeton University Art Museum. The Clarence H. White Collection, assembled and organized by Professor Clarence H. White Jr., and given in memory of Lewis F. White, Dr. Maynard P. White Sr., and Clarence H. White Jr., the sons of Clarence H. White Sr. and Jane Felix White
x1983-447
artmuseum.princeton.edu

Spring 2023 Exhibition and Programming related to Belle da Costa Greene, famed librarian for J.P. Morgan and expert on incunabula.

One of the most well-known American librarians and experts in illuminated manuscripts (incunabula) in the early-mid twentieth century, Belle da Costa Greene helped build the renowned Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. Indeed, she was known as “the soul of the Morgan Library.” Greene also summered annually with the Vanderbilts in their “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island. She began her career as the personal librarian of financier John Pierpont Morgan, one of the richest men in Gilded Age America. She ended it as the library’s first director from 1924-48.

Born Belle Marion Greener in 1879, the green-eyed Greene was the daughter of the first African American graduate of Harvard College. She also belonged to the colored elite in Washington, DC. She accessed the rarefied worlds of the Morgans and Vanderbilts by “passing” as a white woman. In exploring her reinvented life, this month-long series of events will engage questions of race, color, class, gender, and passing.

For more information, click here.

Tags: Belle da Costa Greene, Belle Marion Greener, J. P. Morgan, John Pierpont Morgan, Morgan Library, New York, New York City, Vanderbilt University

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2023 at 02:22Z and is filed under Arts, Biography, Live Events, Passing, United States, Women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Mixed Race Studies

The Reinvented Life of Belle da Costa Greene

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