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- Title
Liebe in Zeiten der Vertragsarbeit Rassismus, Wissen und binationale Beziehungen in der DDR und Ostdeutschland.
- Authors
Wetzel, Johanna M.; Schenck, Marcia C.
- Abstract
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.
- Subjects
GERMANY (East); MOZAMBIQUE; SOCIAL interaction; GERMANS; ORAL history; SOLIDARITY; STEREOTYPES; RACISM; SOCIALISM
- Publication
Peripherie, 2022, Vol 42, Issue 165/166, p31
- ISSN
0173-184X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3224/peripherie.v42i1.03