Comrades of Color

East Germany in the Cold War World

Quinn Slobodian

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781785337376
• eBook ISBN: 9781782387060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia del XX secolo

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Introduction
• Part I — Race Without Racism?
• Chapter 1 — Socialist Chromatism: Race, Racism, and the Racial Rainbow in East Germany
• Part II — Aid anders?
• Chapter 2 — Through a Glass Darkly: East German Assistance to North Korea and Alternative Narratives of the Cold War
• Chapter 3 — Between Fighters and Beggars: Socialist Philanthropy and the Imagery of Solidarity in East Germany
• Chapter 4 — Socialist Modernization in Vietnam: The East German Approach, 1976–89
• Part III — Ambivalent Solidarities
• William "Bloke" Modisane to Margaret Legum, 1966
• Chapter 5 — Bloke Modisane in East Germany
• Chapter 6 — African Students and the Politics of Race and Gender in the German Democratic Republic
• Chapter 7 — Ambivalence and Desire in the East German "Free Angela Davis" Campaign
• Chapter 8 — True to the Politics of Frelimo? Teaching Socialism at the Schule der Freundschaft, 1981–90
• Part IV — Socialist Mirrors
• "The Black Façade of the Universities of German Revisionism"
• Chapter 9 — The Uses of Disorientation: Socialist Cosmopolitanism in an Unfinished DEFA-China Documentary
• Chapter 10 — Imposed Dialogues: Joerg Forth and Tran Vu's GDR-Vietnamese Coproduction, Dschungelzeit (1988)
• Part V — Internationalist Remains
• Chapter 11 — Affective Solidarities and East German Reconstruction of Postwar Vietnam
• Chapter 12 — La Idea de Carlos Marx: Tracing Germany in the Cuban Imaginary
• Index