A wartime photograph of Magdalene Garber in the 1940s, likely taken in Berlin, Germany.
Magdalene (“Leni”) Garber was born to Joseph Garber, a Togolese man, and Johanna Maychrzak in January 1919 in Germany. Magdalene grew up in Berlin-Neukölln and worked as a performer from an early age. She was part of several ethnographic shows, including a variety of Mohamed ben Ahmed’s Afrika-Schau during the late 1920s through the early 1930s, and the German Africa Show (Deutsche Afrika-Schau) during the Nazi period. After the war, she married Jack Goodwin, an African American GI. She moved to the United States with her husband in 1946.
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