Author Description

Daughter of a white German woman and an African-American serviceman stationed in Germany after World War II, Ika Hngel-Marshall tells her troubling and engrossing story in Invisible Woman.The day after he learned that he had impregnated the German woman with whom he was having an affair, Ika's father was relocated to the U. S. by the armed forces. Ika grew up with her mother, stepfather, and a younger sister. When she was seven, the state intervened in her happy family life, recommending that she, like other "occupation children," be placed in an orphanage. There she was subjected to the daily tyrannies of her caretaker, Sister Hildegard. Ika struggled to come to terms with life as a German - the only life she knew - among people who seemed bent on disavowing her existence. Not until she was in her late thirties did Hngel-Marshall meet other Afro-Germans who, as children, had shared fates similar to her own and who encouraged her to seek out and meet her biological father. In 1993, with the support of friends, she set out on a journey from Berlin to Chicago's South Side to discover a past - and a family - she had never known.