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Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World

2019; The MIT Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/jcws_r_00867

1531-3298

Radoslav Yordanov,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Wolfgang Becker's multi-award winning film Good-Bye Lenin (2003), which is discussed in the final chapter of this collective volume, plays on the dissonance between the new ways of life that followed German reunification in 1990 and the difficulty some had in relinquishing the past's illusions about a socialist ideal that was never realized under the German Democratic Republic (GDR). To help the viewer understand this subtle theme, the film lends an important emotional charge to a makeshift speech delivered by a taxi driver who bears an uncanny resemblance to East German Army Major-General Sigmund Jähn, the first German to fly into space (in 1978 for an eight-day mission to the Soviet Salyut 6 space station). Reading from a television screen, Jähn's doppelganger captures the sense of moral longing that for years had made Christine, the terminally ill mother of the film's protagonist, believe in Communism generally and in the GDR's version in particular: “We know that our country is not perfect. But what we believe in has inspired people all over the world. Socialism does not mean walling yourself in. Socialism means approaching others, living with them. Not only to dream about a better world, but to make it so.” (The full text is reproduced in both English and the German original in Jennifer Marston William, Cognitive Approaches to German Historical Film: Seeing Is Not Believing [London: Palgrave, MacMillan: 2016], pp. 50, 58.) In so doing, the taxi driver pinpoints the belief that made not only Christine but many others like her in East Berlin, Maputo, Hanoi, and Pyongyang swear to the principles of socialist solidarity during that time of bipolarity, when the East was separated from the West by walls and ideologies.Quinn Slobodian's edited collection Comrades of Color reflects this milieu, attempting to bring together an internationalist worldview that mixes promises of a brighter future, fraternal solidarity, and entangled visions of the other, with memories and nostalgia of a common past. The volume includes contributions from a dozen scholars with intimate knowledge of the GDR's dealings with the Third World during the Cold War. In conceptually framing the collection, Slobodian notes that “writing and recounting the history of the world from Germany, and of Germany in the world, remains a matter of intimate politics” (p. 11). This approach sets the volume apart from more institutional-oriented studies of diplomacy and international relations between the Soviet-bloc countries and the Third World. Slobodian and his collaborators seek to “understand how the high-minded internationalism of speeches and propaganda translated into everyday life” (p. 1). Accordingly, the essays in Part I present a rich palette of case studies delving into issues of race “without racism,’ including solidarity campaigns in support of Angela Davis; film co-productions with Vietnam and China; urban planning in North Korea and Vietnam; training activities for students from Mozambique, and entangled visions of the “other.”At the same time, the catchy title of the volume brings to the foreground the touchy subject of race and racism in East Germany, where the leaders of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) insisted that the GDR was free of any racial prejudices either domestically or internationally. The volume benefits immensely by juxtaposing the East German regime's desire for socialist development at home and abroad with the complications that arose from interactions with a challenging and often unknown world.The essays in the second part (“Aid Anders?”) form the core of the volume by analyzing broader issues of assistance and solidarity. Young-Sun Hong examines the reconstruction of the Hamhung industrial region in North Korea in chapter 2, claiming that East Germany invoked such experiences as a showcase of its technological achievements and as a “mirror” in which to “see their own future reflected” (p. 55). In the next chapter, Gregory Witkowski finds that through the umbrella of solidarity—another tool of a Communist state's internationalist duties—the GDR aimed to separate itself from the West while engaging with the rest of the world (p. 80). In chapter 4, Bernd Schaefer explains East Germany's appeal to developing countries, arguing that the GDR's development assistance, although smaller in quantity than the aid provided by the Soviet Union, was often valued more highly because of its relative lack of asymmetry and patronization (p. 95). The essays in this section thus deal with the donor's outlook on aid and solidarity, depicted here as symbolic and political markers through which the GDR communicated with the world and identified itself on the international scene.The volume moves from this positive beginning to the third part, “Ambivalent Solidarities.” In this section the authors discuss how the realities on the ground did not always meet the political objectives of the center both at home and abroad. Writing to Langston Hughes from East Berlin, the South African writer Bloke Modisane compared the experience of being black in a small town in East Germany to “being caged in a zoo with children giggling at one” (p. 126). Similarly, in chapter 6, Sara Pugach reports that “African students were … welcome for the political benefits they could bring to East Germany” but “were never fully integrated into the East German state” (p. 148). On the other hand, Karina Hagen shows in chapter 7 that “East German support of Angela Davis in the early 1970s could be seen as an outward and highly politicized expression of a state-mandated anti-racism” (p. 177). This assertion may seem to be at odds with the other submissions in this part of the volume, but it adds an additional nuance to the theme of solidarity ambivalence, following the modes of polyvalence described in the previous section. Katrina Hagen's cogent essay highlights the psychological pains exhibited by SED leaders as they sought to dispel racial prejudices at home by displaying what they saw as moral rectitude abroad. However, regardless of the intention, the GDR's ventures into the Third World were not without ideological friction. In a discussion of the Schule der Freundschaft (School of Friendship) in Staßfurt, Jason Verber in chapter 8 shows the limits of the SED's abilities to ensure that other states “developed socialism along lines similar to the GDR” (p. 201).Although the third part of the collection looks at issues of solidarity at home, the next part, “Socialist Mirrors,” takes a step further away from daily life by venturing into the (mis)shared visions of the Other. Those visions, as the essays show, instead of bringing partners together, eventually set them apart. This section offers an original take on how the leaders of the Warsaw Pact states and Third World countries often failed to understand one another, evoking the creative helping of what Ricciotto Canudo once termed the seventh art; namely, the cinema. Slobodian in chapter 9 and Evan Torner and Victoria Rizo Lenshyn in chapter 10 demonstrate how film co-productions with China and Vietnam (in the form of Yo I and Dschungelzeit) foundered in the late 1950s and 1980s respectively. Both cinematic representations of the Other went astray through “mutual misrecognitions in the midst of a political climate turning toward internal repression in both countries [the GDR and China]” (p. 235), revealing in effect “how parity in transnational collaboration faded quickly to disparity” (p. 245).The final two essays in the volume, by Christina Schwenkel and by Victor Fowler Calzada and Jennifer Ruth Hosek, focus on the “internationalist remains.” Schwenkel examines the lasting effects of yesteryears’ solidarity, which permeate the now, claiming that “socialist assistance also enabled a more humanist ethics of solidarity to be put into practice, an ethics that was deeply political, optimistic, and future-oriented” (p. 285). In the most original submission in the book, the Cuban writer Calzada shares his first-hand experiences of life in the GDR, and Hosek highlights “Cuban identifications with and aversions to the GDR” (p. 295).Overall, Slobodian and his co-authors deliver a richly drawn account, which, though not pretending to be comprehensive (and rightly so), provides sufficient food for thought to interdisciplinary students of the Soviet bloc's expansion into the Third World. The book focuses on the GDR, but it should provide ample motivation for other scholars of international history, anthropology, area studies, and related fields to pursue similar questions regarding the other former East European Communist states’ relations with developing countries during the Cold War. This eclectic collaborative effort lives up to its editors’ ambitions to demonstrate that “overlapping geographies of region, race, and experience (of empire, world war, and colonialism)” ensured that the GDR and ideologically sympathetic Third World states were “never the homogeneous terrain implied by the Cold War analytic binary” (p. 3). Even though it is unclear who, specifically, had claimed that these states were a homogeneous terrain—perhaps someone somewhere did—this book makes clear that in fact they were heterogenous. The authors do not provide much depth about any specific topic, but the breadth of the case studies, as well as the book's interdisciplinary flare, admirably fulfills the editor's objective of placing the GDR's history in the larger context of the Cold War.