Chapter 15 ‘Sometimes things begin with the wrong book’: Images and Intertexts in Darryl Pinckney’s Black Deutschland
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Abstract
African-American writer Darryl Pinckney’s recent novel Black Deutschland constitutes an interesting case for the imagological and intertextual analysis of literature. Set in Berlin of the 1980s, the novel introduces British writer Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and his autobiographical Christopher and His Kind as its basic hypotext and as a kind of literary travel guide for the homosexual, African-American protagonist hoping to repeat Isherwood’s romantic and bohemian lifestyle in the Western part of the divided city. While references to Isherwood’s experiences in the waning Weimar Republic constitute a structural foil to the protagonist’s life in a city whose political structure is – again – only a few years from irreversibly changing, the intertextual structure of Black Deutschland is much more complex and multifaceted. Defining the references to the African-American literary genre of the black expatriate finding love in Europe as a second core intertextual reference point, this article relates references to Isherwood and the allusions to African-American writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, and James Baldwin. While the two intertextual traditions merge into a concordant image of a romantic, bohemian Berlin promising ‘black boys’ the opportunity to find the love of ‘white boys’, this article shows that this intertextual image of Berlin is put in stark contrast to the actual, disappointing experiences of the novel’s own protagonist in the German metropolis.