Erika Hügel-Marshall was born on 13 March 1947,[3] the child of a Bavarian woman and an African-American soldier, Eddie Marshall,[4] who returned to the US before her birth.
[5] Her parents had met just after the end of World War II, after a relaxation of laws forbidding military personnel from interacting with civilians.
[6] According to her, black soldiers treated native German children well, distributing food and clothing,[6] but her parents generally met in secret due to racist remarks from others.
[9] In 1952, when she was ready to start school, her mother was forced by social services to send her to the orphanage God's Little Cabin Children's Home.
This included being shouted at to stop crying for her mother, being force-fed her own vomit, and undergoing an exorcism, during which she was blindfolded and forced to repeat such phrases as "Satan, I cast you out" and "Lord Jesus, purify my black soul.
[12] Hügel-Marshall performed well at school, often finishing top of the class, and taught herself to swim,[13] but was still patronised by the nuns teaching her, who said "we never expected much from you".
"[22] She was empowered by the sense of community and became an activist for Afro-Germans, studying their history and asserting their legitimacy in a society that still assumed that all Germans must be white.
[25] She never gave up the hope of finding him and when, in 1990, she moved to Berlin, she met people who offered to help her trace her father and that side of her family.
[26] In 1993, at the age of 46, she finally met her father and his large American family in Chicago,[27] where she was welcomed and accepted as an equal.
Hügel-Marshall later said "here is my journey's end",[28] referring to the meeting, adding "I knew my survival in a white racist society was not for nothing".
[14] Hügel-Marshall has taught gender studies and psychological counseling in Berlin, having gained a degree in social pedagogics.
[37] In 2012, she attended the film's premiere at the Audre Lorde Legacy Cultural Festival in Chicago, together with her partner, filmmaker Dagmar Schultz.
[27] In 1998 Hügel-Marshall published her autobiography, Daheim unterwegs: Ein deutsches Leben,[38] chronicling her experiences surviving as a black woman in Germany.
[40] The book has won the Audre Lorde Literary award and has been read by Hügel-Marshall at public events across Germany, Austria and the US.
[29] It has been described as "an intensely moving journey in search of herself... a personal story, but also a microcosm of racism in contemporary Germany"[41] and "in many ways, paradigmatic for the Black-German experience.