Vortrag
Making (No) Difference. Transnationally Adopted Children in West Germany, 1960s to 1980s

Bettina Hitzer hält bei der Tagung "In Search of the Migrant Child: Entangled Histories of Childhood Across Borders" den Vortrag "Making (No) Difference. Transnationally Adopted Children in West Germany, 1960s to 1980s".

Abstract:

Making (no) difference. Transnationally Adopted Children in West Germany, 1960s to 1980s Intercountry adoption occurred later in West Germany than in many other Western European countries. Especially in the early years, intercountry adoption was closely linked to certain ideas about humanitarian involvement in the so-called Third World. The first children were brought to West Germany for medical care in the wake of the Vietnam War, some were adopted later. Soon South Korea became the main country of origin. Other important countries of origin during the 1970s and 1980s were India, Sri Lanka, and countries in Latin and South America. In this article, I explore what physical otherness meant to adoptive parents and adopted children of the time. It is based on a series of narrative interviews I conducted with adoptive parents and adoptees in 2022. On the part of many adoptive parents, the desire not to see difference was prevalent. Even though adoption as such was usually addressed early on - in keeping with the advice literature - the desire and effort to make physical difference seem insignificant was paramount - certainly also based on anti-racist beliefs. At the same time, little was usually known about the children's origins; vague and often stereotypical explanations were supposed to suffice to justify the release for adoption and to convey knowledge about the country of origin. In turn, many of the children refused to talk about their adoption. Some also reported that in their early childhood and elementary school years they could not see how they should look categorically different, while at the same time they found the lack of physical resemblance to their adoptive parents painful. In retrospect, some reported that seeing old family photos almost shocked them, because it was only at that moment that they realized how much they looked "different." The article attempts to situate these memories in the contemporaneous historical context of the 1970s and 1980s, in the specific intermingling of humanitarian engagement, antiracism as negation of difference, and an undercurrent of (neo-)colonial views and practices.