The Subjects of Solidarity: Race, Internationalism, and the Making of East German Socialism, 1961-1996
PhD project
This dissertation examines how the German Democratic Republic (GDR) constructed racialized understandings of the Global South through its official culture of socialist internationalism (1961–1996), and how that construction shapes racial politics in eastern Germany today. Despite claiming to have eliminated racism through socialist state-building, the GDR's visual and print culture — posters, youth magazines, church publications, solidarity campaigns — reproduced racial hierarchies inherited from earlier German colonial visual traditions. I argue GDR anti-racism functioned as a "political grammar" narrating state virtue while leaving racial thinking intact. Focusing on East German youth as both targets and subjects, the project traces how internationalism was taught and enacted — from the Solidarity Committee to Bummi magazine to the "Free Angela Davis" campaign — into the post-1990 period, when socialism's collapse coincided with surging racist violence and AfD support. Drawing on Hunt's political-culture framework, Foucault, and postcolonial theory, the dissertation argues the GDR's antifascist self-image was constitutive of, not opposed to, its racial legacies.
Ashleigh N. Williams is a PhD student at George Mason University (USA), studying 20th century Germany, race and gender. Her specific research foci are the experiences of Black Germans, migrant populations, women, youth and state socialism in (East) Germany’s post-World War II period. At the ZZF Potsdam she is continuing the research on her PhD project "Race, Internationalism, and the Making of East German Socialism, 1961-1996" and is Visiting Fellow in Department V: Globalizations in a Divided World.