Comrades of Color

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.

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.

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