Slobodian, Quinn (ed.) Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 572 multivalent than Hellbeck’s in analysing individual attitudes towards official ideology. For example, she posits a ‘vast’ (p. 133) range of motivations for participation in volunteer activities and speculates that petitioners’ evocations of the housewarming trope suggests ‘genuine faith’ or ‘clever manipulation’ or possibly both at once (p. 149). This book will be of great interest to scholars interested in the Khrushchev era and post-war Soviet society more generally. It is informative, well researched and much enlivened by vivid descriptions of everyday life. Adrian College, Michigan Deborah A. Field Slobodian, Quinn (ed.). Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World. Protest, Culture and Society. Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, 2015. viii + 325 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. $120.00: £75.00. This edited volume focuses on encounters between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and people of colour, taking the latter as its subjects. It contributes to a growing body of literature which examines the connections and identifications between the Second World and the Global South during the Cold War. The volume adds to this literature by providing a number of valuable case studies which explore the global significance of a state which retains a reputation for parochialism and insularity. More significantly, it attempts to challenge this ‘provincial myth’ (p. 3) of the GDR by focusing on the accounts of individuals from the Global South. This is a noble and original goal, and the volume is at its best when these accounts are at the fore. The inclusion of primary sources from South African, Chinese and Cuban authors toward this aim are illuminating. Challenging myths of East German provincialism does not necessarily mean accepting the GDR’s official claims to internationalism, and much of this volume is taken up with the limitations of such a claim. The first section of the volume, a chapter by editor Quinn Slobodian on race in the GDR, shows that despite the ruling Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) claims to have eliminated racism, it continued to produce stereotypical depictions of difference that privileged whiteness. In a similar vein, section three deals with what Slobodian calls ‘ambivalent solidarities’. Sara Pugach’s article on the politics of race and gender show that African students who came to study in the GDR were subject to racist stereotypes of ‘lasciviousness’, (p. 132) although she contrasts the stigma attached to Afro-German children in the West (where such children were often sent to orphanages) with their relative acceptance in the East. Katrina Hagen shows how campaigns in the GDR to free Angela Davis REVIEWS 573 mobilized citizens through exoticized and objectifying imagery, while Jason Verber’s contribution on the experience of Mozambican children who came to study in the GDR at the behest of the ruling Frelimo party suggests a clash between the values of the SED and Frelimo, which was nevertheless suppressed for the sake of solidarity. In between these two sections, the second section of the volume traces examples of ‘socialist aid’ carried out in the Global South in the name of the GDR. This is an area that remains largely unexamined, which is particularly notable considering that discernible differences are traceable between socialist aid programmes and liberal-capitalist variants. These accounts display a narrative of Utopieverlust (the loss of utopia) that is typical to many features of the GDR, as an early utopian idealism is replaced by political pragmatism. Young-Sun Hong shows how East German reconstruction projects after the Korean War saw led to the development of transnational identities and affinities between German aid workers and Koreans which were however ‘slowly eroded by official decree’ (p. 54) as the politics of the two nations diverged in the late 1950s. A similar narrative can be seen in Gregory Witkowski’s analysis of the imagery of solidarity in the GDR, which sought to transcend established visual conventions of Western charity, but often failed in this task. Likewise, Bernd Schaefer shows how aid programs between the GDR and Vietnam often provided important support, but culminated in the problematic employment of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese workers in East Germany under exploitative conditions in the 1980s. Particular attention is devoted to...