Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World

Published by Berghahn Books 2015

Comrades of Color

East Germany in the Cold War World

Edited by: Quinn Slobodian

Volume 15 in the series Protest, Culture & Society

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781782387060

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Quinn Slobodian is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College and the author of Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany.

Reviews

“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

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	V
Figures Publicly Available Download PDF	VII
Introduction Quinn Slobodian Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I Race Without Racism?
Chapter 1 Socialist Chromatism: Race, Racism, and the Racial Rainbow in East Germany Quinn Slobodian Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
PART II Aid anders?
Chapter 2 Through a Glass Darkly: East German Assistance to North Korea and Alternative Narratives of the Cold War Young-Sun Hong Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
Chapter 3 Between Fighters and Beggars: Socialist Philanthropy and the Imagery of Solidarity in East Germany Gregory Witkowski Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
Chapter 4 Socialist Modernization in Vietnam: The East German Approach, 1976–89 Bernd Schaefer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	95
PART III Ambivalent Solidarities
William “Bloke” Modisane to Margaret Legum, 1966 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
Chapter 5 Bloke Modisane in East Germany Simon Stevens Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
Chapter 6 African Students and the Politics of Race and Gender in the German Democratic Republic Sara Pugach Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	131
Chapter 7 Ambivalence and Desire in the East German “Free Angela Davis” Campaign Katrina Hagen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
Chapter 8 True to the Politics of Frelimo? Teaching Socialism at the Schule der Freundschaft, 1981–90 Jason Verber Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	188
PART IV Socialist Mirrors
“The Black Façade of the Universities of German Revisionism” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213
Chapter 9 The Uses of Disorientation: Socialist Cosmopolitanism in an Unfinished DEFA-China Documentary Quinn Slobodian Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
Chapter 10 Imposed Dialogues: Joerg Foth and Tran Vu’s GDR-Vietnamese Coproduction, Dschungelzeit (1988) Evan Torner and Victoria Rizo Lenshyn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
PART V Internationalist Remains
Chapter 11 Affective Solidarities and East German Reconstruction of Postwar Vietnam Christina Schwenkel Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267
Chapter 12 La Idea de Carlos Marx Tracing Germany in the Cuban Imaginary Victor Fowler Calzada and Jennifer Ruth Hosek Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	293
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	318
Protest, Culture, and Society Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	326

Language: English
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 336
Keywords: History: 20th Century to Present

eBook

Published: December 1, 2015
ISBN: 9781782387060