Our mission is both to show the historical presence of Black people and to understand how racialized ideas of history, national belonging, and citizenship have been produced and adapted over time. By challenging these and drawing attention to other ways of thinking about who belongs in society, we can undermine the exclusionary ideas that continue to trouble us today.

Browse through our Collection of hundreds of historical documents, images, and multimedia sources, or check out our Interactive Maps. You can follow our links to Activist organizations and also enjoy creative projects and reporting in Videos. Whether you’re a teacher looking for material for a lesson, a researcher looking for new perspectives, an artist looking for inspiration, or someone just looking to learn more about Central Europe’s connection to the Black Diaspora, you’re welcome here. Let us know what you think!

In our extensive Collection, you can find a wide range of sources that trace the history of the Black Diaspora in Central Europe from as early as 1000 AD until the present day. The sources include paintings, photographs, letters, excerpts of novels, sculptures, newspaper articles and much more. We have organized them into historical categories: 1000-1500, 1500-1750, 1750-1850, 1850-1914, 1914-1945, 1945-1989, and 1989-today. Small icons indicate what type of source you find when you follow the link (text, image, etc). Most of our sources and introductions can be found in both English and German; we are still working on making the website fully bilingual.