«What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we pretend to be strangers.»¹

These are the opening lines of Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood, a novel published in East Germany (German Democratic Republic, or GDR) in 1976 that considers from where we can remember and how we might be estranged from our pasts. Wolf was addressing the National Socialist period of her own childhood and her dissociation from it, from within a state whose doctrine of «lived anti-fascism» permeated all areas of public life. The exhibition, Echoes of the Brother Countries, What is the Price of Memory and What is the Cost of Amnesia? Or: Visions and Illusions of Anti-Imperialist Solidarities relates in several ways to these questions of memory in the face of political ruptures, of the «echo» of past visions of the future, and of the responsibility of the present towards its own shared or disputed past.

Germany prides itself on its memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) when it comes to its reckoning with its history pre-1945, but this is a partial view. Its socialist period, incomparable to its NS period, but forming a significant part of its twentieth-century legacy, has largely been absent from public discourse and memory culture. Contributing to this, the visible insignia of the GDR-past, such as the People’s Palace (which has been replaced by the reconstruction of the former imperial Hohenzollern Palace) in the heart of Berlin, have literally been erased, sanitizing Berlin of its socialist past, and creating a semblance of continuity with deeper (pre-Nazi, pre-1933) German time. It is therefore exciting to see HKW, one of unified Germany’s largest cultural institutions, in the second year under its new director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s tenure, investigate the echoes of Germany’s internationalist socialist past.

The idea behind Echoes of the Brother Countries can be summarised in the assertion that cultural institutions in the Federal Republic of Germany such as HKW will remain half blind and in silent amnesia if the entangled internationalist history of Germany is only viewed and discussed through the lens of the so-called West.¹ By paying attention to the predicaments of East German histories (and their afterlives), a more capacious picture becomes visible, including what architectural theorist Łukasz Stanek calls Global Socialism—a memory, or history of a form of global development wherein the aims were ostensibly towards cooperation, internationalism, anti-imperialism, and forms of distribution more fair than the rampant competition in the globalising, privatising and imperialist capitalist economy.²

The clause Visions and Illusions of Anti-Imperialist Solidarities invokes the memory of National Socialist and German colonial history—the «old worlds»—whose critical questioning became an asset of ideology rather than a lived memory culture in the politics of the GDR. Criticism of imperialism was an integral part of the political and cultural self-image of the GDR, however it was usually targeted against the United States or West Germany, rather than a critique of the GDR’s inner imperialist or nationalist remnants.¹ It is no coincidence that the Berlin Wall was heralded not only as «anti-fascist», but also as an «anti-imperialist protective wall». The forms of anti-imperialism that took place were outward facing and aimed towards making links with socialist and communist oriented nations and organisations but failed as anti-racist movements on a domestic-national level. HKW is interested in how transparent this was to the average GDR citizen, a question that orients our view of the memory landscape and brings its own echoes to the political surge behind the right-wing extremist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the current political climate.

Centering the Periphery

The so-called brother countries refer to those joined together through the 1955 collective defence treaty known as the Warsaw Pact organised against NATO, the Western military alliance. They represent a Cold War geography that can still be felt in the legacies of migration and cooperation, as well as in violence and discrimination, in Berlin and Germany more broadly. Echoes of the Brother Countries purposefully brings into view not only the everyday lived realities of the GDR, but the exhibition elevates its relations with the brother states, in particular the socialist and non-aligned states within the postcolonial world, such as Mozambique, Tanzania, Cuba and Vietnam, as well as anti-imperialist movements that worked with or were supported by the GDR’s institutions and policies. As well as celebrating «proletarian internationalism», the GDR gained international legitimacy through its relations with newly decolonised states, a necessary move in light of West-Germany’s Hallstein Doctrine (1955–72)—by which the FRG imposed economic and political sanctions on states that granted the GDR political recognition.

The exhibition highlights micro-historical accounts or minor memorialisations of the encounters that people from brother countries had with GDR cultural institutions, universities and art schools, and as contract workers within companies. It includes contemporary artworks that reflect on the memory of the GDR, works produced during that time, film screenings, sound archives, correspondences, political ephemera and a small accessible library. The exhibition stages these objects either as originals, accessible to read or watch, or printed on large, coloured fabrics.

Echoes of the Brother Countries is both a research project and an art exhibition. Through its sometimes corresponding, sometimes disintegrating forms, the exhibition opens multiple modes of engaging with GDR history and memory, but it is also difficult to navigate, occluding any wall texts, which means that the viewer has to browse the handbook in relation to all objects. While the fragmentary, multi-layered nature of the exhibits withstands a coherent curatorial narrative, it is certainly to be acknowledged that these micro histories from the so-called periphery are now being inserted and exhibited in the imperial core, in Berlin, at one of Germany’s major cultural institutions, and are following on from the increasing attention paid to GDR history and contemporary entanglements in the German cultural landscape in recent years.²

The Price of Memory

One of the central political foci of Echoes of the Brother Countries is the non-payment of sixty percent of wages that Mozambican migrants to the GDR, to this day, never received. Approximately 17,000 Mozambicans travelled to the GDR as «contract workers» after 1979. After reunification, they were expelled and forcibly repatriated without full payment for their labour. This led to weekly protests by madgermanes (playing on «made in Germany») that take place every Wednesday in Mozambique. These protests echo through the exhibition, cropping up in numerous texts, artworks and archives. Ndikung writes that «[t]hey had been assured that a substantial part of their wages would be transferred to personal accounts in Mozambique. But the money remained in the GDR, was offset against Mozambican state loans, and credited to the GDR on the hard currency market—which included the socialist-oriented Mozambique». Likewise, Cuban contract workers also received only forty percent of their wages, the other sixty percent being transferred to the Cuban state. These contract workers were betrayed by all parties, and as Ndikung points out, remain occluded from the iconic visual language of the global proletariat, as well as the political culture of «remembrance».