Google Doodle celebrates the 93rd birthday of an Afro-German singer-songwriter Fasia Jansen

Google Doodle celebrates the 93rd birthday of an influential Afro-German singer, songwriter, and political peace activist Fasia Jansen, who aided in advancing the post-war peace movement in West Germany, on June 6, 2022.

Who was Fasia Jansen?

Fasia Jansen was born in 1929 in Hamburg as the illegitimate child of her father, the Liberian emissary Momolu Massaquoi, and her mother, Elli Jansen, a representative at the Liberian consulate.

Being fifteen-year-old Fasia Jansen experienced both the severity of the SS and the despair in regards to the detainees – experiences that had a decisive affected her life. During this time, she developed a heart condition which she suffered until the end of her life.

In 1970, Fasia Jansen joined the Brecht Ensemble in Berlin for three months. Afterward, she recognized the atomic bombings of Japan as having affected her decision to seek an activist musical career and as motivating her expanded commitment to the German peace movement.

Fasia Jansen showed up at various Easter marches, including for 1966 along with Joan Baez, played in the big strikes before the Krupp, Hoesch, or Thyssen factory gates and at the UN World Women’s Conference in Nairobi, and performed at the Burg-Waldeck Festivalon.

Fasia Jansen’s father was additionally the grandfather of the journalist and writer Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi. Albeit both experienced childhoods in nearness to each other, they didn’t have a clue about one another personally.

In 1991, Fasia Jansen got the Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany for her contribution to the German peace movement from 1960 through 1980.

To some extent because she was infatuated with Josephine Baker, Fasia grew up with fantasies about being a dancer and, at age eleven, she went into a dance academy. However only two years after her entry, in 1942, she was ousted because of her skin color and her educator’s fears of getting into trouble with the Reich for teaching a black child.

Fasia Jansen got various penal orders for sedition and protection from state power, yet additionally more than once offers to sing hits and in this way become commercially effective.

In 1945, Fasia Jansen would sing to Holocaust survivors in a hospital in Hamburg; after two years, in 1947, she joined an ensemble that performed socially and politically critical music on the roads.

In 2014 the municipal comprehensive school in Alt-Oberhausen was named Fasia-Jansen-Gesamtschul.

Fasia Jansen was additionally an influential supporter of the women’s movement in the Federal Republic and globally, and she supported activism surrounding labor battles in the Ruhr Valley in 1970.

Jansen had started singing with different prisoners and internees during the war, igniting her change to a career as a singer/songwriter and political activist during the postwar peace movement in West Germany.

Fasia Jansen was exceptionally near her stepfather, a communist condemned by the Nazi party.

Her father, Momolu Massaquoi was the grandfather to renowned columnist and writer Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi, making Fasia Jansen Hans-Jürgen’s auntie, even though they are never known to have met. Jansen was born after her dad Momolu Massaquoi got back to Liberia and never knew him.

In the youthful Federal Republic of Germany, Jansen attempted to handle the experiences from the camp and maintain the memory of the dead and their goals.

After her expulsion from the dance academy, Fasia Jansen had to work as a cook at the Neuengamme concentration camp alongside French, Ukrainian, and Italian detainees of war. Her work permitted her to keep up with her German citizenship and stay away from deportation.

It was in the Neuengamme concentration camp that Fasia Jansen started singing with political detainees who worked vigorously close to her. Singing together assisted them with survive this horrible period.

After the repulsions of World War II, Fasia Jansen dedicated her life to making strong music to fight treacheries all over the place — from the Vietnam War to work infringement in the Ruhr Valley. Jansen likewise became a strong advocate for the Women’s Rights Movements in Germany and beyond.

Fasia Jansen became popular during the 1960s, in the wake of performing Unser Marsch ist eine gute Sache (Our March is a Good Thing) alongside the renowned singer Dieter Süverkrüp during Easter March in resistance to the nuclear arms race. Her song Verbrannte Erde in Deutschland (“Burnt Earth in Germany”), became a significant anthem for the anti-nuclear movement in Europe.

In 1991, the government awarded her the medal Verdienstkreuz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, perceiving her work to remake a more fair Germany. Today, there is a road, a municipal school, and an African education center named in her honor.

On June 6, 2022, Google featured a Doodle on its homepage for celebrating Fasia Jansen’s 93rd Birthday.