Until today, East Germany is discussed and misunderstood as a homogenous, white society. Germany’s colonial past and the forms and modes of East German socialist internationalism have yet to find entry into historical accounts and public discourses. Nowhere are these questions more urgent than in the presence of international contract workers, political immigrants, and students, who were invited to East Germany to work and study, People of Color (PoC), and asylum seekers. These individuals and groups have left their mark on East German culture and society, assisted in writing the Wende. They and now their families keep defining East Germany's legacy.
This roundtable to which we have invited the offspring of East German PoC deals with questions of visibility, activism, racism and injustice. It is a new generation whose political activism highlights long ignored injustice and racism, assists in reuniting separated families, creates new communities and confidently includes their (lineage) stories and intersectional identities into present debates.
The conversation will take place in German, and it is free and open to the public. Register here! Contact: Katrin Bahr.
Participants:
Frances Kutscher is a 28-year-old mother of two. She lives in Cottbus (Brandenburg) where she works as a hairstylist. Frances is active in Solibabys, a group that joined forces with the organization Afropa in Dresden in 2019. Together they aim for building a network across Germany and Mozambique to better support family reunions of former Mozambican contract workers in East Germany and their children, promote and facilitate discussions and the coming to terms with what is a common chapter of East German-Mozambican history.
Dennis Chiponda is 29 years old and was born and raised in Senftenberg (Brandenburg) as the son of a contract worker. He identifies as a queer East German with Afro-Polish heritage. A student of political science, Dennis is active in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) where he engages with politics in East Germany confronting racism and other forms of discrimination. He lives in Leipzig where he is part of the group Grenzenlos. He is a member of the selection committee of the organization Jugendstil and the founder of the organization Leipzig Spricht.
Duc Vu Manh was born in Vietnam and moved to Germany as a young child. He considers himself a second-generation Vietnamese German. He did his undergraduate studies in art education at the Leipzig University and is currently studying for his master’s degree in Practical Research in Social Work and Early Education at ASH Berlin. He engages in socio-political issues of the Vietnamese diaspora in Germany in and through his artistic work. Duc thinks of art as a form of practice. For him, art is the foundation of encounters that allows for the telling of stories, in the sense of community, empowerment and recognition of the most diverse perspectives possible. Duc lives in Berlin.
Katharina Warda is 36 years old and grew up in Wernigerode (Saxony-Anhalt). She lives and works in Berlin as a freelance writer and is writing her PhD thesis on the politics of biographical narratives. Her main topics are East Germany, racism, classism and punk. In her project Dunkeldeutschland, she explores the post-reunification period from the social margins and illuminates blind spots in German historiography, based on her own experiences as a Black East German woman in the GDR and after 1989/90.
Moderators: Katharina Warda (Free University, Berlin) and Katrin Bahr (Centre College)
This roundtable is part of a webinar series organized by Third Generation Ost. Sparked by debates around the 30th anniversary of German unification last year, the webinar series Richtung Osten: Old Matters, New Chances, Different Perspectives tries to steer discussions in different directions. It seeks to examine Germany’s socialist legacy in transnational memories and to locate the experiences of a younger generation of former East Germans. Running from December 2020 through May 2021, the series features writers, filmmakers, scholars, teachers, and activists on the social and cultural connections between East Germany and other countries and the influence of these connections on current memory debates.
The event is supported by the German Studies Program and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at Centre College, the Department of Classical and Modern Languages at teh University of Louisville, the German Studies Program at University of Cincinnati, the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Northern Kentucky University, the Department of German Studies at the University of Arizona, and the Third Generation Ost USA network.
