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Rassismus in der DDR und den neuen deutschen Bundesländern wurde und wird noch immer überwiegend durch einen analytischen Fokus auf die weiße, ostdeutsche Mehrheitsgesellschaft erforscht. Im Vordergrund dieses Artikels stehen hier jedoch die oral histories mosambikanischer und angolanischer Vertragsarbeiter*innen, die zwischen 1978 und 1990 in der DDR arbeiteten, lebten und liebten, sowie ihrer in Ostdeutschland geborenen mixed-race-Kinder. Obwohl alltägliches rassistisches Wissen, Staatsinteressen und die Solidaritätsdoktrin binationale Beziehungen zwischen Vertragsarbeiter*innen und DDR-Bürger*innen einschränkten, lebten sie ihre Beziehungen selbstbestimmt, nutzten Handlungsspielräume in ihrem Interesse aus und maßen ihren Beziehungen subjektive Bedeutung innerhalb ihrer eigenen, intersektionalen Wissenshorizonte bei. Die Widerstandsstrategien der zweiten Generation schließen die Suche nach dem mosambikanischen Elternteil und die Neuverhandlung der Beziehungen mit ostdeutschen Familienmitgliedern ein. Gemeinsam beleuchten die Erinnerungen beider Generationen die Wirkungsweisen rassistischen Wissens vor und nach 1990 aus einem konkreten, nicht-weißen Fokus und werfen dabei neue Fragen und Herausforderungen für die DDR-Rassismusforschung auf. Research on East German racism before and after 1990 continues to focus on the experiences of the white majority. This paper focuses on the oral histories of Mozambican and Angolan worker trainees who came to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) between 1978-1990 to work, live, and love, and those of the mixed-race children who emerged from their relationships to East German women. The racial knowledge pervading social interactions, state interests, and socialist notions of solidarity, limited the ability of the workers to freely live in mixed-race relationships, but never fully determined their experiences. Instead, Mozambican and Angolan worker-trainees exerted some degree of agency, pursued individual agendas, and resisted their racially constructed positions, in part through engaging in mixed-race relationships. While their children experienced racialised stereotypes much earlier in their biographies, they too were able to challenge and resist East German racist knowledge. Their strategies often took them on journeys searching for their Mozambican parent and of challenging close East German family members. Together, the oral histories of both generations before and after 1990 illuminate the complex ways in which racist knowledge operates and bring up new questions and challenges to existing research on racism in (East) Germany.

Recensé : Jochen Lingelbach, On the Edges of Whiteness: Polish Refugees in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War, Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2020, 306 p.

While academic mobility has generally been positioned in the literature as a ready, at-will movement of people and ideas, this chapter demonstrates how the conditions of mobility and immobility “all at once” impact knowledge production and exchange. By offering a more nuanced window into the experiences of scholars in exile, this chapter challenges dominant discourses of academic mobility and draws on lessons learned from within liminal spaces of knowledge production to elicit more response within higher education communities. Context-rich examples reveal the interpersonal tensions and cultural shifts—including gender, ethnic and race-based stereotypes and discrimination—that affect intellectual outputs, further problematizing the conceptualization of knowledge production in human capital terms. Lessons gleaned from Scholars at Risk (SAR) and related programmes suggest support structures that amplify scholars’ agency; more broadly, higher education should consider ways of adapting to its diverse knowledge producers, rather than supporting the acclimation to its current environment.

This article traces the experiences of Angolan students who attended East German institutions of higher education between Angolan independence and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Based on oral histories collected in Luanda from twenty-one returned Angolan students in 2015, triangulated with archival material from Angola and the GDR, it argues that students negotiated between accommodation and resistance in their everyday life at the university and beyond. Conscious of the importance of academic success and adaptation to the East German learning culture, Angolan students drew a line when regulations infringed on their personal freedom and responded by engaging East German officials in discussion or simply by circumnavigating the rules. The life history of a female student illustrates how she negotiated between responsibility to formal learning and personal needs within a controlling society. When one considers the conditions of Angolan student life in East Germany as a whole, it becomes apparent that the East German notion of the model foreign student did not map onto the complexities of Angolan student lives. This article sheds light on the student migration of a generation of Angolan post-independence technocrats, many of whom studied in the former East during the Cold War. Through the eyes of Angolan educational migrants, we see the limits and possibilities of the lives of foreign students in the GDR.

This article discusses the chronology of nostalgia expressed by former Angolan and Mozambican worker trainees in East Germany. By shedding light on the different forms in which nostalgia was expres...

A better future,The one that now I own,Like a bee I suck roses;The rest does not matter,I embraced Germany.-Regina, February 27, 2007Introduction1Regina's poem expresses the intensity of emotions that accompanied her move from the People's Republic of Mozambique to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in the winter of 1988.2 She migrated as a young Mozambican woman to work and receive vocational training on East Germany's factory floors. What is notable about Regina's poem is that it claims ownership of her new future, despite the fact that she arrived in Berlin as part of a bilateral agreement between socialist states that regulated her contract length, place of employment, housing, pay, and, to a certain extent, even monitored her free time and regulated her personal relationships. Yet Regina embraced her new life in in the face of multiple challenges, including learning to communicate in a new language and navigate a foreign culture, while acclimating to an industrial work routine. Regina's poem is about her individual expectations, dreams and desires; it is about the human aspects of migration.3This article focuses on a key time in the lives of Angolans and Mozambicans who migrated to East Germany, namely the decision-making process that preceded their migrations.4 Multiple reasons led young Angolan and Mozambican men, and to a lesser degree women, to actively sign up, or consent to being recruited, to work and receive technical training thousands of miles away from home. Focusing on this decisive moment in the migrant's lives prior to departure sharpens our understanding of the complex decisions they faced. Such an approach challenges both prevailing conceptions of migrants as passive participants as well as wooden definitions of "labor migration." As the migrants' memories reveal, it was not clear to all young people why they were sent North, and their decisions were often based on hearsay and imperfect information. Economic considerations, which fuel labor migration the world over, predictably played a significant role, sustaining dreams of material independence and servicing filial duties to help support families in war-torn nations. Yet migrants' motivations were far more diverse. Young people were drawn by the promise of education, of laying the foundation for their own careers through the acquisition of skills while also preparing to aid their native country's development. The motive of escaping the myriad consequences of civil war, from the risks of military service and the violence of combat, to the privations of the conflict economy, also featured prominently. Moreover, emotional motivations were important to some migrants, who followed personal ties abroad to reunite with a partner or family member, or who signed up for a second contract to stay with their newfound family in East Germany. In the future migrants' imagination, East Germany came to stand not just for a commercial paradise and safe haven; it was also part of a notion of "Europe" as an imagined space of possibilities that bundled notions of adventure, prosperity and the good life. This article demonstrates that the Angolan and Mozambican migrants to East Germany were as much educational migrants, war migrants, aspirational migrants and emotional migrants as they were labor migrants. Examining the myriad reasons that led the young to board the planes from Luanda and Maputo to East Berlin allows us to question the assumption that this labor migration was primarily about finding work elsewhere, and opens up the historiographical category of labor migration to reflect its complexities on the ground.In part, international labor migration to East Germany-which in addition to migrants from within Eastern Europe encompassed migrants from Algeria, Angola, China, Cuba, Mozambique, and Vietnam-was justified by official government propaganda precisely by packaging the labor migration as labor and educational migration. …

In this contribution to global mobile lives and scales in global history, Korean cultural studies researcher Jiyoon Kim, University of Tokyo, and German historian Marcia C. Schenck, Princeton University, draw on their respective dissertation research. Experimenting with a conversation style, we discuss the issue of scale in global history and elaborate on what working with subjects who move transnationally through a Cold-War-influenced world means for our projects on, in Schenck’s case, Angolan and Mozambican labor and education migrants to East Germany in the late 1970s and 1980s. As for Kim, she studies South Korean youth travelers and tour participants who journeyed abroad before and after the full liberalization of overseas travel in 1989. Shedding light on two different sides of the iron curtain, the chronological overlap produced similar insights into the “hot cold war” and the importance of the state in relation to mobility. In explicitly discussing global mobile lives of non-elite actors as a methodological approach to the writing of global history, we engage with issues of scale, units, archives, collaboration and the relationship between history and the present for and in which the historian is writing Dans cet article conçu comme une conversation, Jiyoon Kim, doctorante coréenne en études culturelles de l’Université de Tokyo, et Marcia C. Schenck, doctorante allemande en histoire à l’Université de Princeton, discutent la question des vies mobiles globales et la question des échelles en histoire globale à partir de leurs propres sujets de thèse. Elles y développent ce que cela implique, pour leurs projets respectifs, de travailler sur des acteurs qui se déplacent de façon transnationale dans un monde marqué par la Guerre Froide. D’une part Schenck analyse les migrants Angolais et Mozambicains partis travailler et étudier en Allemagne de l’Est pendant la fin des années 1970 et les années 1980, et, d’autre part, Kim étudie des jeunes voyageurs et des participants de groupes de touristes Sud Coréens à but éducatif qui ont séjourné à l’étranger avant et après 1989, date qui marque la libéralisation complète par le régime du voyage outremer. Bien que traitant de cas situés de part et d’autre du rideau de fer, le chevauchement chronologique conduit à des conclusions semblables sur la “guerre froide chaude” et l’importance du rôle de l’Etat en matière de mobilité des personnes. La discussion explicite du concept de vies mobiles globales en tant qu’approche méthodologique pour l’écriture de l’histoire globale permet ainsi de réfléchir aux questions d’échelles, d’unités d’analyse, d’archives, de travail collaboratif et à la relation entre l’histoire et le temps présent pour lequel et à partir duquel l’historien écrit

Der Umgang mit einem schwierigen Erbe 2019 befasste sich die internationale Tagung »Respekt und Anerkennung« mit der Entwicklungszusammen­arbeit Mosambik-Deutschland unter dem Schwerpunktthema Vertrags­arbeit. Anlass war der 40. Jahrestag des 1979 geschlossenen Staatsvertrages der VR Mosambik mit der DDR. Der nun erscheinende Tagungsband enthält u. a. Beiträge zu den Themen »Die Lebenswege der SchülerInnen der Schule der Freundschaft in Staßfurt«, »DDR-­ExpertInnen in Mosambik«, »Wie aus Vertragsarbeitern Madgermanes wurden« und »Auf dem Weg zu Respekt und Anerkennung: Sind wir für die Versöhnung?«. Ein Dokumentenanhang ergänzt den Band. Mit Beiträgen von Katrin Baar, António Daniel, Hans-Joachim Döring, António Frangoulis, Rainer Grajek, Adelino Massuvira João, Lázaro Magalhães, Dinis Matsolo, Francisca Raposo, Marcia C. Schenck, Ralf Straßburg, Mathias Tullner und Cesare Zucconi.