Last of the Conquerors

Last of the Conquerors

Last of the Conquerors is a 1948 novel by African-American novelist William Gardner Smith. It concerns African-American GI's serving in US occupied Germany after World War II. The protagonist, Hayes Dawkins, has an affair with Ilse, a white German woman. Together, he and Ilse struggle against racist Army officers and policies to sustain a relationship that some white soldiers condemn (although there are also many friendly whites who help them).

Last of the Conquerors depicts post-Nazi Germany as more racially tolerant than America. While this depiction may or may not be accurate, Smith's novel is offering a critique of Marshall Plan rhetoric claiming that American society should be a model for the world, while African-Americans continued to suffer under the Jim Crow system at home and in the military (an inconsistency noticed noticed by many other writers, American and German, at the time).


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