Abstract
Comrades of Color broadens readers' understanding of the GDR (German Democratic Republic) beyond the nation or even the Soviet bloc through an interdisciplinary examination of its interactions with the Second World and the global South. Expanding traditional conceptions of the GDR and its place is not inherently new or unique; nevertheless, this volume offers readers a distinctive lens through which to examine the intersection of German history, race and the Cold War. As Quinn Slobodian argues, race in East Germany – and after the Third Reich – has largely been overlooked, despite a large and complex literature on West Germany. This volume situates itself not only within a growing scholarship on socialist relations with the rest of the world, but also against a longer German past. In the twelve chapters that follow the introduction, the contributors explore the idealism of equality in Marxism and its often disconsonant racialized practices in the GDR and abroad.
Slobodian conceptualizes race in the first chapter, which ties together the thematic and geographic range addressed in the rest of the volume. He introduces the term ‘socialist chromatism’ to explain the SED's (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) interpretation of race. Contending that while it officially did not ‘exist’ in the GDR, Slobodian asserts that racialized understanding continued to shape both party leaders and average East Germans perceptions. Even in official depictions, he continues, ‘the white man appeared as the first among equals’ as ‘skin color and other markers of phenotypic difference [were used] to create (overly neat) division between social groups within a technically nonhierarchical logic of race’ (pp. 23–4). In teasing out East German policies of solidarity and aid, and the memories thereof, Slobodian and the other contributors illuminate the complexities of race within and beyond the socialist world.
Several of the chapters engage with the GDR's foreign aid and solidarity campaigns in the context of Cold War Asia. North Korea and Vietnam are fruitful choices for such an endeavour. As Young-Sun Hong demonstrates in the case of North Korea, efforts in rebuilding the city of Hamhung served to showcase East German technical knowledge and technological prowess. As tensions between the two countries' agendas grew and projects stalled, however, East Germans in North Korea found themselves caught between appreciation for the country they helped rebuild and the larger political tensions that plagued their regimes' respective views on how to best build socialism.
Bernd Schaefer, Evan Torner, Victoria Rizo Lenshyn and Christina Schwenkel all focus on East German–Vietnamese relations. Schaefer delves into East German foreign aid and elucidates challenges similar to the ones Hong raises about aid and rebuilding after wars that brought communist parties to power. Schaefer, however, highlights how the GDR's position had changed by the 1980s, becoming increasingly pragmatic rather than idealistic. Evan Torner and Victoria Rizo Lenshyn use film production to illustrate how international solidary became a negotiated space for the East German DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), its Vietnamese counterpart in the film Dschungelzeit. Chronologically last, Christina Schwenkel studies the erasure of 40 years of East German–Vietnamese diplomacy, but argues its legacies continue in participants' memories, trade agreements and more, even if it is based on a now discredited past.
Another set of authors delve into East German solidarity campaigns to highlight the tension between supporting other socialist and aspiring socialist countries and ingrained racial prejudices. Sarah Pugach and Jason Verber's chapters focus on university and school-age students who came to the GDR for technical – and moral socialist – training. Both historians explore primarily African students' experiences, and particularly, the intersection of race and gender. For Pugach, hypersexualized images of African men and promiscuous German women created particular challenges, especially when official directives conflicted with local German perceptions. Verber investigates the Schule der Freundschaft and Mozambican students' lives there, which exemplify conflicts between the SED and the Frelimo over the role of female students and pregnancy, even as East German officials mediated tensions between locals and residents at the school.
Katrina Hagen and Simon Stevens examine East German solidarity through the cases of Angela Davis and Bloke Modisane, respectively. Despite the overwhelmingly successful ‘Free Angela’ movement, Hagen elucidates how Davis's emphasis on race in her political statements proved problematic for the SED. To avoid drawing attention to this discrepancy, the SED omitted references to statements in press releases and publications. Stevens touches on how the same recipients of East German aid felt uncomfortable in the GDR, comparing it to the oppressive regimes they sought to overthrow.
Another set of authors address such disparate topics as the role of Church versus official Solidarity campaigns, an unfinished DEFA project on China, and Cubans' receptions of films about the GDR after the fact. Gregory Witowski explores the overlap and tensions between East German Churches' charity and official solidarity campaigns, while Slobodian further investigates DEFA's attempted cooperation with China. Lastly, Victor Folwer Calzada and Jennifer Ruth Hosek offer impressions of films about the GDR, such as Good-bye Lenin (2003), in Cuba.
The chapters in the edited volume provide nuanced cases of East German idealism and the limitations of its practice, which belied a variety of racial prejudices and tensions. Still, the contributions are quite disparate in the amount of detail and argument they offer. Some are incredibly polished, while others are little more than a collection of ideas, which leads to a sense of inconsistency. Regardless, the interdisciplinary and extended geographic scope of this edited volume successfully furthers a number of interrelated fields relating to the role of the GDR and the socialist world in the Cold War, race and their continuing legacies.