Description
Book Synopsis 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.
Trade Review “This volume is exemplary in a number of ways…The engaging topics and fine-grained analysis of the interactions of situated individuals and groups in and beyond the GDR make the essays ideal for use in upper-level undergraduate and graduate seminars.” • German Studies Review
“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… 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.” • Journal of Contemporary History
“This is an important volume, providing a number of helpful interventions to a growing field. It ought to be commended for its unorthodox inclusion of primary sources, as well as its broad interdisciplinary approach, which reflects the multi-faceted nature of the topic it approaches.” • Slavonic and East European Review
“This is far and away the most creative book available in English on East German foreign relations. Quinn Slobodian has pulled together fresh contributions from many of the leading experts on the GDR’s interaction with the Global South.” • William Glenn Gray, Purdue University
“Comrades of Color is an important and original contribution to debates about the entangled histories of the Second and Third Worlds during the Cold War. Thought-provoking and carefully curated, the essays in this exciting collection will be indispensable for research and teaching on the history of socialist internationalism.” • Celia Donert, University of Liverpool
Table of Contents 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
