"Don’t Mythologize Me": Monumentalization and Refusal in Audre Lorde’s Berlin Years, 1984-1992

Abstract

"In the spring of 1984, I spent three months in Berlin conducting a course in Black american [sic] women poets and a poetry workshop in English for German students. One of my aims for this trip was to meet Black German women. I’d been told there were quite a few in Berlin, but I had been unable to obtain much information about them in New York." (Lorde 56) So wrote Audre Lorde (1934-1992) as an introduction to her diary entries published in the essay collection A Burst of Light (1988). Lorde—who frequently defined herself using the terms “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”—is well-known today for her poetry and prose works in addition to her intersectional against racism, sexism, homophobia, and other injustices in the United States. However, more recent scholarship on Lorde has grown to cover her activist legacy extending beyond the U.S., from the Caribbean islands to South Africa. In this paper, I focus on Lorde’s time in Germany throughout the period 1984-1992, commonly known as her “Berlin Years.” Dagmar Schultz, then an assistant professor of North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin), first met Lorde at the 1980 United Nations World Women’s Conference in Copenhagen and proposed the latter for a semester-long visiting professorship at the Free University (Schultz 199). Although Lorde made her first trip to Berlin in 1984, the connections she formed with both Black and white Germans there—especially with

Black German women—compelled her to keep returning for multiple months every year until her death of cancer in 1992 (199).