PROF. DR. BONAVENTURE NDIKUNG with MANUELA GARCÍA ALDANA

5 Block Sessions

Wednesdays 10:00 - 17:00

Dates:

24.04.2024

15.05.2024

12.06.2024

03.07.2024 

20.07.2024 Final Presentations / Rundgang

THE PRICE OF MEMORY AND THE COST OF AMNESIA

To look at Germany’s historical and contemporary relations with the world, is to go around the world with one eye shut or to try to tie a bundle with one hand. In the history of the HKW as a cultural institution that pivots international artistic, cultural and scientific discourses from Germany, the lens through which the world has been understood has been tainted with the shades of the Cold War, as well as an imagination and partitioning of the world into “old” and “new”. Indeed the title of the first symposium in 1957 hosted by the Congress Hall (which became the HKW in 1989) — gifted by the US government to the City of West Berlin as a site of international encounters, crafted as a symbol of ‘freedom’ and strategically placed across the border to East Berlin — was titled ‘The Old and the New Worlds’. The space extremes of the old and new could be metaphors for East and West, Communism and Capitalism, Colonised and Colonisers... etc. But how do we go beyond these dichotomies?

An all too often ignored part of modern and contemporary German post-war history includes the various waves of migration to Germany that shaped the country. For this reason, a city like Berlin can be proud to be one of the epicenters of the African, Latin American and Asian diasporas. In the context of Berlin and other former GDR cities, an important part of these diaspora communities are immigrants from countries such as Mozambique, Tanzania, Vietnam, or Cuba, to name but a few, who were part of the so-called „socialist brother countries“ — communist-oriented countries around the world

that entertained warm relationships with the former GDR until Germany’s reunification in 1990. It is important to shed light on how such relationships were possible and how they shaped and still shape Germany's demography, culture, economy, and politics to this day.

What is the price of memory and what is the cost of amnesia?

There seems to be a common feeling that the reunification of Germany led to the imposition of narratives, socioeconomic and psycho-political cultures prevalent in the part of Germany that had a larger leverage and sat on the longer arm of the seesaw of power. These assimilations, qua erasures, of histories and historical relations of the GDR with its allies around the world have, one can dare say, led to history amnesia, but also to an identity crisis as the bearings of the GDR have been massively dis- and misplaced.

To understand today why there is a lack of interest in people in cities of the former GDR to get vaccinated, to understand the historical rise in extreme right wing tendencies, racism and antisemitism especially from the former GDR territories, one would have to embark on a radical unpacking of the histories of the GDR , but not a navel-gazing history rather a history of the GDR in relation to the rest of the world and as we hereby propose in relation to the global south.

MAIN LITERATURE

● Ndikung, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng. Ecos der Brüderländer: What is the price of memory and what is the cost of amnesia? Or Visions and Illusions of Anti-Imperialist Solidarities.

● Weyhe, Birgit. Madgermanes.

● Franke, Anselm, et al. Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War. ● Zwengel, Almuth (ed.). Die „Gastarbeiter“ in der DDR. Politischer Kontext und Lebenswelt (Studien zur DDR-Gesellschaft; XIII).

● Dennis, Mike, and Norman Laporte. State and Minorities in Communist East Germany (Monographs in German History; 33).

● Winrow, G. The Foreign Policy of the GDR in Africa (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies).

● Naranjo, Lena Pérez. Cuban Migration in Germany: Analysis and Perspective Between Two Countries.

● Schleicher, Hans-Georg. „The German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the Liberation Struggle of Southern Africa.“ In Southern African Liberation Struggles 1960–1994: Contemporaneous Documents, edited by Arnold Temu and Joel das Neves Tembe.

● Glass, George A. „East Germany in Black Africa: A New Special Role?“ In The World Today, vol. 36, no. 8, 1980, pp. 305-312.

● Ndikung, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng. „Those Who Are Dead Are Not Ever Gone : On the Maintenance of Supremacy, the Ethnological Museum and the Intricacies of the Humboldt Forum.“

● Sternfeld, Nora. Gegendenkmal und Para-Monument. Politik und Erinnerung im öffentlichen Raum.

● Carman, John. „Where the Value Lies: the importance of materiality to the immaterial aspects of heritage.“