Courting China, Condemning China: East and West German Cold War Diplomacy in the Shadow of the Cambodian Genocide

Abstract

After the overthrow of Pol Pot and the genocidal Khmer Rouge in early 1979, a major international dispute erupted over who had the right to represent Cambodia in the international arena. Whereas the GDR immediately recognized the new regime installed by Vietnam (a close ally of the Soviet bloc and an arch-foe of China), West Germany gave staunch diplomatic support to the internationally reviled Khmer Rouge. This provoked a storm of public protest in the media and on the part of bewildered West German citizens, who took their leaders to task for supposedly compromising the country’s most basic human rights principles. This article looks at the geopolitical and economic reasons for the East and West German positions on the representation issue, ‘Holocaust’ discourse in the two postwar German states, and the role that each state’s relationship with China played in terms of its policies towards Cambodia and its understanding of what had transpired in there. It is based on unpublished archival sources, contemporary media reports, interviews with key actors, and a series of highly politicized documentaries about Cambodia made in the early 1980s by the internationally renowned East German filmmakers Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann. The article demonstrates how Cold War geopolitics and economic considerations were paramount in determining official German policies towards Cambodia and China on both sides of the iron curtain.