Many readers will pick up this book looking for the story of a Holocaust survivor, and it is certainly one of the few works of testimony that give us first-hand insights into what black people experienced in the Nazi “racial state”. Readers should start at the beginning and read on to the end, however, since what Theodor Michael has done is to tell three overlapping stories from the privileged perspective of a long life fully lived: a German story, a black story and a story of global diasporic consciousness. Equally important, he is self-consciously inserting himself into a continuous chain of storytelling in which black Germans explain their history to each other. German and black, he is first of all a member of the generation born of the collapse of the German Empire, which was shaped most certainly by the crises of the 1920s and 1930s and the horrors of National Socialism, but went on to build West German society after the second collapse of 1945. Black and German, he is able to tell that German story from the perspective of the members of the first Black German community. He thereby adds a German voice and a German dimension to what we know about the experiences of the first and second generations of African colonial subjects who settled in Europe. Personal testimony and historical research have taught us a good deal about travelers and migrants from Africa who arrived and stayed in the European nation states from colonial empires that survived into the mid-twentieth century – those of Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal – and also about the persistent connections between African Americans and Europe. Theodor Michael's story reminds us that the experiences of African diasporic subjects were always transnational and that black Germans were always part of Black Europe.

Theodor Michael's German story begins as the story of an immigrant family doing its best to get on in Berlin's proletarian milieu. Marginal even to this world in many ways, often relying on continued contacts with “home” and a network of “countrymen”, Theodor's father, Theophilus Wonja Michael, struggled with physical and psychological ill health after the death of Theodor's mother, and that precipitated Theodor and his brother and sisters into the care system and into the hands of foster parents.