In keeping with the tenets of socialist internationalism, the political culture of the German Democratic Republic strongly emphasized solidarity with the non-white world: children sent telegrams to Angela Davis in prison, workers made contributions from their wages to relief efforts in Vietnam and Angola, and the deaths of Patrice Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, and Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired public memorials. Despite their prominence, however, scholars have rarely examined such displays in detail. Through a series of illuminating historical investigations, this volume deploys archival research, ethnography, and a variety of other interdisciplinary tools to explore the rhetoric and reality of East German internationalism.
Quinn Slobodian is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College and the author of Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany.
List of Figures
Introduction
Quinn Slobodian
Chapter 1. Socialist Chromatism: Race, Racism and the Racial Rainbow in East Germany
Quinn Slobodian
PART I: AID ANDERS?
Chapter 2. Through a Glass Darkly: East German Assistance to North Korea and Alternative Narratives of the Cold War
Young Sun Hong
Chapter 3. Between Fighters and Beggars: Socialist Philanthropy and the Imagery of Solidarity in East Germany
Gregory Witkowski
Chapter 4. Socialist Modernization in Vietnam: The East German Approach, 1976-1989
Bernd Schaefer
PART II: AMBIVALENT SOLIDARITIES
William "Bloke" Modisane to Margaret Legum, 1966
Chapter 5. Bloke Modisane in East Germany
Simon Stevens
Chapter 6. African Students and the Politics of Race and Gender in the German Democratic Republic, 1957-1990
Sara Pugach
Chapter 7. Ambivalence and Desire in the East German 'Free Angela Davis' Campaign
Katrina Hagen
Chapter 8. True to the Politics of Frelimo? Teaching Socialism at the Schule der Freundschaft, 1981-1990
Jason Verber
PART III: SOCIALIST MIRRORS
"The black facade of the universities of German revisionism," The Red Flag of the University of Foreign Trade, 1968
Chapter 9. The Uses of Disorientation: Socialist Cosmopolitanism in an Unfinished DEFA-China Documentary
Quinn Slobodian
Chapter 10. Imposed Dialogues: Jörg Foth and Tran Vu's GDR-Vietnamese Co-Production Dschungelzeit (1988)
Evan Torner and Victoria Rizo Lenshyn
PART IV: INTERNATIONALIST REMAINS
Chapter 11. Affective Solidarities and East German Reconstruction of Postwar Vietnam
Christina Schwenkel
Chapter 12. La Idea de Carlos Marx: Tracing Germany through a Long Cuban Imaginary
Jennifer Ruth Hosek and Victor Fowler Calzada