Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World

Abstract

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.”