Remembering African Labor Migration To The Second World

This open access book is about Mozambicans and Angolans who migrated in state-sponsored schemes to East Germany in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. They went to work and to be trained as a vanguard labor force for the intended African industrial revolutions. While they were there, they contributed their labor power to the East German economy. This book draws on more than 260 life history interviews and uncovers complex and contradictory experiences and transnational encounters. What emerges is a series of dualities that exist side by side in the memories of the former migrants: the state and the individual, work and consumption, integration and exclusion, loss and gain, and the past in the past and the past in the present and future. By uncovering these dualities, the book explores the lives of African migrants moving between the Third and Second worlds. Devoted to the memories of worker-trainees, this transnational study comes at a time when historians are uncovering the many varied, complicated, and important connections within the global socialist world.

From a journalist and foreign correspondent, the harrowing history of how an economic crisis and far-right extremists catalyzed a shocking resurgence of violence in 21st-century Germany. Not long after the Berlin Wall fell, three teenagers became friends in the East German town of Jena. It was a time of excitement, but also of economic crisis: some four million East Germans found themselves out of jobs. The friends began attending far-right rallies with people who called themselves National Socialists: Nazis. Like the Hitler-led Nazis before them, they blamed minorities for their ills. From 2000 to 2011, they embarked on the most horrific string of white nationalist killings since the Holocaust. Their target: immigrants. Look Away follows Beate Zschäpe and her two accomplices—and sometimes lovers—as they radicalized within Germany’s far-right scene, escaped into hiding, and carried out their terrorist spree. Unable to believe that the brutal killings and bombings were being carried out by white Germans, police blamed—and sometimes framed—the immigrants instead. Readers meet Gamze Kubaşık, whose family emigrated from Turkey to seek safety, only to find themselves in the terrorists’ sights. It also tracks Katharina König, an Antifa punk who would help expose the NSU and their accomplices to the world. A masterwork of reporting and storytelling, Look Away reveals how a group of young Germans carried out a shocking spree of white supremacist violence, and how a nation and its government ignored them until it was too late.

This edited volume firmly places African history into global history by highlighting connections between African and East German actors and institutions during the Cold War. With a special focus on negotiations and African influences on East Germany (and vice versa), the volume sheds light on personal and institutional agency, cultural cross-fertilization, migration, development, and solidarity.

"This is the first comprehensive study of contemporary German literature's intense engagement with German colonialism and with Germany's wider involvement in European colonialism. Building on the author's decade of research and publication in the field, the book discusses some fifty novels by German, Swiss, and Austrian writers, among them Hans Christoph Buch, Alex Capus, Christof Hamann, Lukas Hartmann, Ilona Maria Hilliges, Giselher W. Hoffmann, Dieter Kühn, Hermann Schulz, Gerhard Seyfried, Thomas von Steinaecker, Uwe Timm, Ilija Trojanow, and Stephan Wackwitz. Drawing on international postcolonial theory, the German tradition of cross-cultural literary studies, and on memory studies, the book brings the hitherto neglected German case to the international debate in postcolonial literary studies"--Publisher website, July 5, 2013.

This is a masterful volume on remembrance and war in the twentieth century. Jay Winter locates the fascination with the subject of memory within a long-term trajectory that focuses on the Great War. Images, languages, and practices that appeared during and after the two world wars focused on the need to acknowledge the victims of war and shaped the ways in which future conflicts were imagined and remembered. At the core of the "memory boom" is an array of collective meditations on war and the victims of war, Winter says. The book begins by tracing the origins of contemporary interest in memory, then describes practices of remembrance that have linked history and memory, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. The author also considers "theaters of memory"-film, television, museums, and war crimes trials in which the past is seen through public representations of memories. The book concludes with reflections on the significance of these practices for the cultural history of the twentieth century as a whole.

This extensive survey of migration in the modern world begins in the sixteenth century with the establishment of European colonies overseas, and covers the history of migration to the late twentieth century, when global communications and transport systems stimulated immense and complex flows of labour migrants and skilled professionals. In ninety-five contributions, leading scholars from twenty-seven different countries consider a wide variety of issues including migration patterns, the flights of refugees and illegal migration. Each entry is a substantive essay, supported by up-to-date bibliographies, tables, plates, maps and figures. As the most wide-ranging coverage of migration in a single volume, The Cambridge Survey of World Migration will be an indispensable reference tool for scholars and students in the field.

“Regions of memory” are a scale of social and cultural memory that reaches above the national, yet remains narrower than the global or universal. The chapters of this volume analyze transnational constellations of memory across and between several geographical areas, exploring historical, political and cultural interactions between societies. Such a perspective enables a more diverse field of possible comparisons in memory studies, studying a variety of global memory regions in parallel. Moreover, it reveals lesser-known vectors and mechanisms of memory travel, such as across Cold War battle lines, across the Indian Ocean, or between Southeast Asia and western Europe. Chapters 1 and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.