Abstract The onset of German colonial rule in Africa brought increasing numbers of black men and women to Germany. Pre-1914 the vast majority of these Africans can best be described as visitors or sojourners and the black population as a whole was a transient one. This makes recovering their presence in the archival record exceptionally difficult and it is not surprising that the existing historiography is dominated by biographies of well-documented lives. Through utilising a number of recently digitised archival materials, particularly the Hamburg Passenger Lists, this article draws upon a database with information on 1094 individuals from sub-Saharan Africa who spent time in Germany over the period 1884–1914 in order to widen our understanding of the black presence as a whole. It offers new insights and detail into the composition and character of this fluid population – where visitors came from, why they came to Germany, their age on arrival – as well as more accurate information on the temporal and spatial distribution of African visitors.

中文翻译：

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短暂的存在：德意志帝国的黑人游客和旅居者，1884-1914

摘要 德国在非洲殖民统治的开始给德国带来了越来越多的黑人男女。在 1914 年之前，这些非洲人中的绝大多数最好被描述为游客或旅居者，而整个黑人人口则是短暂的。这使得在档案记录中恢复它们的存在变得异常困难，现有的历史编纂以记录良好的生活传记为主也就不足为奇了。通过利用一些最近数字化的档案材料，特别是汉堡乘客名单，本文利用了一个数据库，其中包含来自撒哈拉以南非洲的 1884-1914 年期间在德国度过的 1094 个人的信息，以扩大我们对整个黑色的存在。