Marcia C. Schenck | Potsdam University (original) (raw)
Articles by Marcia C. Schenck
World History Connected, 2022
Shifting the Means of (Knowledge) Production: Teaching Applied Oral History Methods in a Global C... more Shifting the Means of (Knowledge) Production: Teaching Applied Oral History Methods in a Global Classroom is an open access publication, see https://journals.gmu.edu/index.php/whc/article/view/3327/1914
CIM Paper Series Nr. 6 , Feb 2014
Diese Untersuchung beleuchtet die verschiedenen Leistungen der Programmkomponente für Rückkehrend... more Diese Untersuchung beleuchtet die verschiedenen Leistungen der Programmkomponente für Rückkehrende Fachkräfte (RF-Komponente) des Programms Migration für Entwicklung (PME) auf der Basis eines zehnwöchigen Indonesienaufenthalts von Oktober bis Dezember 2012. Das Bestreben dieser Programmkomponente
des Centrums für internationale Migration und Entwicklung (CIM) ist die temporäre oder permanente Wiedereingliederung von indonesischen Rückkehrenden Fachkräften in den indonesischen Arbeitsmarkt und damit verbunden die Nutzung ihres einzigartigen Wissens.
Das zentrale Ziel dieser Studie ist es, zwei Schlüsselkonzepte der RF-Komponente empirisch zu untersuchen. Die zugrundeliegenden Annahmen lauten, dass die Rückkehrenden Fachkräfte erstens als
Agents of Change und Multiplikatoren durch ihre in Deutschland erworbenen Erfahrungen und Expertise zu der Entwicklung Indonesiens beitragen und zweitens dank ihrer sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Verbindungen als Brückenbauer zwischen Deutschland und Indonesien agieren.
Für die empirische Untersuchung wurden das Leistungsangebot und die zwei Schlüsselkonzepte der RF-Komponente mit den Erfahrungen und Sichtweisen der Akteure vor Ort kontrastiert. Die Erfahrungen
in Indonesien wurden auf der Grundlage von 64 Interviews mit Rückkehrenden Fachkräften, Alumni, Arbeitgebern und anderen Personen aus dem sozialen Umfeld der Fachkräfte erhoben.
Die Interviews ermöglichten eine kritische Würdigung der einzelnen Leistungen der Programmkomponente: Der Gehaltszuschuss wird als zentrales Element wahrgenommen, das auf vielfältigste Art
und Weise zur Verbesserung der Lebenssituation der Rückkehrenden Fachkräfte beiträgt. Reise- und Transportkostenzuschüsse sowie die Unterstützung durch Arbeitsplatzausstattung wurden ebenfalls
positiv bewertet, wobei insbesondere letztere aufgrund komplexer Antragsverfahren und Überführung der Ausstattung in den Besitz des Arbeitgebers auch kritisiert wird. Zudem wurde deutlich, dass
zusätzliche Leistungen wie Vernetzungsreisen und Weiterbildungsmaßnahmen oder Vorstellungsreisen
in Indonesien bislang nur selten in Anspruch genommen werden.
Darüber hinaus zeigt die empirische Untersuchung, dass das Potential der Rückkehrenden Fachkräfte als Brückenbauer zwischen Indonesien und Deutschland häufig noch ungenutzt bleibt. Zum
einen haben die Rückkehrenden Fachkräfte selbst nur ein vages Verständnis ihrer eigenen Rolle als Brückenbauer, zum anderen mangelt es ihnen an ausreichender Vernetzung. Vielmehr steht in
Indonesien der multidirektionale Prozess der Wissenskreation im Fokus. Es wurde deutlich, dass Rückkehrer ihre in Deutschland gelebten Erfahrungen an ihre indonesische Lebenswelt anpassen und dadurch idiosynkratrische neue Ideen und Ansätze verfolgen. Wissen wird nicht nur transferiert, sondern transformiert.
Um die Potentiale der Rückkehrenden Fachkräfte noch besser zu fördern, empfiehlt sich eine kontinuierliche Weiterentwicklung der Komponente. Hierfür liefert die Studie wichtige Empfehlungen: So
sollte z. B. die Alumni- und Vernetzungsarbeit gestärkt werden, um die Potentiale der Rückkehrenden Fachkräfte als Agents of Change und Brückenbauer noch besser zu aktivieren.
African Economic History, 2016
Migration between select “Third World” and “Second World” countries were often organized around b... more Migration between select “Third World” and “Second World” countries were often organized around bilateral labor migration regimes. As a result, individuals from Angola and Mozambique who came to work and train in East Germany are categorized as labor migrants; an analysis of workers’ motivations to migrate is missing. On the basis of oral history interviews collected in Angola and Mozambique, this article examines the myriad reasons for which young Angolan and Mozambican men and women temporarily relocated to East Germany. These reasons included economic, educational, emotional, and security considerations. The migrants’ complex understandings from below are discussed through the categories of labor, educational, war and emotional migration, providing an important corrective to the top-down designation as “labor migration.” Rather than abandoning the term altogether as an analytical category, this article suggests that it may serve as a shorthand, provided that scholars take seriously the motivations for migration, rather than obliterate these motivations through an uncritical use of the term. This approach challenges the prevailing conceptions of migrants as passive participants in socialist labor migrations, as well as the limited conceptions of labor migration often adopted by outside observers.
Labor History, 2018
This article discusses the chronology of nostalgia expressed by former Angolan and Mozambican wor... more This article discusses the chronology of nostalgia expressed by former Angolan and Mozambican worker trainees in East Germany. By shedding light on the different forms in which nostalgia was expressed in interviews with migrants who returned to their country of origin, the article examines the migrants’ longing for working abroad prior to leaving and for their home countries while living abroad. The focus lies on the returnees’ nostalgia for aspects of their lived experiences in East Germany, a phenomenon I call Eastalgia. Struggling economically, socially, and emotionally after their return to Angola and Mozambique, many former worker trainees longed for the consumption opportunities, mobility, organization, and modernity of their East German experience. I argue that labor migrants who returned to Mozambique employ both Eastalgia and a glorification of Samora Machel’s socialist Mozambique to criticize the current government for its failure to develop the country according to the expectations shaped by their experiences in East Germany. Finally, I compare and contrast different forms of Eastalgia in Mozambique and Angola with regard to temporality, locality, individual and/or collective, public and/or private, and restorative and/or reflective longing. The former worker trainees’ voices provide new insight into the emotional dimensions of migration and teach us that memories of migrations actively continue to shape the lives of many of the former migrants.
L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques, 2018
In this contribution to global mobile lives and scales in global history, Korean cultural studies... more In this contribution to global mobile lives and scales in global history, Korean cultural studies researcher Jiyoon Kim, University of Tokyo, and German historian Marcia C. Schenck, Princeton University, draw on their respective dissertation research. Experimenting with a conversation
style, we discuss the issue of scale in global history and elaborate on what working with subjects who move transnationally through a Cold-War-influenced world means for our projects on, in Schenck’s case, Angolan and Mozambican labor and education migrants to East Germany in the late 1970s and 1980s. As for Kim, she studies South Korean youth travelers and tour participants who journeyed abroad before and after the full liberalization of overseas travel in 1989. Shedding light on two different sides of the iron curtain, the chronological overlap produced similar insights into the “hot cold war” and the importance of the state in relation to mobility. In explicitly discussing global mobile lives of non-elite actors as a methodological approach to the writing of global history, we engage with issues of scale, units, archives, collaboration and the relationship between history and the present for and in which the historian is writing.
Stichproben, 2018
This research note suggests that the " Black East " could be a unit of analysis as well as an alt... more This research note suggests that the " Black East " could be a unit of analysis as well as an alternative theoretical framework that helps shift the research focus too often neglected actors in the history of the Eastern bloc and African history alike. Much like Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic was an imperfect unit of analysis, it nevertheless did important work in constituting the Atlantic as a hybrid world and deconstructing England as a cohesive cultural community. Similarly, the „Black East“ emerges as amalgam, a temporal and geographic space that entangled African and Eastern bloc histories from the macro to the micro level. The “Black East,” however, necessarily remains a simplification and thus becomes useful especially through its deconstruction. What can be understood as “Black” and what as “East”? Organizing research under the slogan of the “Black East,” – or better in the spirit of its deconstruction – might enable writing entangled histories of Cold War interactions between the “Second” and the “Third World” and in the process bringing the hitherto distinct research fields of African history and Eastern European history closer together.
Africa, 2019
This article traces the experiences of Angolan students who attended East German institutions of ... more This article traces the experiences of Angolan students who attended East German institutions of higher education between Angolan independence and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Based on oral histories collected in Luanda from twenty-one returned Angolan students in 2015, triangulated with archival material from Angola and the GDR, it argues that students negotiated between accommodation and resistance in their everyday life at the university and beyond. Conscious of the importance of academic success and adaptation to the East German learning culture, Angolan students drew a line when regulations infringed on their personal freedom and responded by engaging East German officials in discussion or simply by circumnavigating the rules. The life history of a female student illustrates how she negotiated between responsibility to formal learning and personal needs within a controlling society. When one considers the conditions of Angolan student life in East Germany as a whole, it becomes apparent that the East German notion of the model foreign student did not map onto the complexities of Angolan student lives. This article sheds light on the student migration of a generation of Angolan post-independence technocrats, many of whom studied in the former East during the Cold War. Through the eyes of Angolan educational migrants, we see the limits and possibilities of the lives of foreign students in the GDR.
Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 2020
African Economic History, 2016
Migration between select “Third World” and “Second World” countries were often organized around b... more Migration between select “Third World” and “Second World” countries were often organized around bilateral labor migration regimes. As a result, individuals from Angola and Mozambique who came to work and train in East Germany are categorized as labor migrants; an analysis of workers’ motivations to migrate is missing. On the basis of oral history interviews collected in Angola and Mozambique, this article examines the myriad reasons for which young Angolan and Mozambican men and women temporarily relocated to East Germany. These reasons included economic, educational, emotional, and security considerations. The migrants’ complex understandings from below are discussed through the categories of labor, educational, war and emotional migration, providing an important corrective to the top-down designation as “labor migration.” Rather than abandoning the term altogether as an analytical category, this article suggests that it may serve as a shorthand, provided that scholars take seriously the motivations for migration, rather than obliterate these motivations through an uncritical use of the term. This approach challenges the prevailing conceptions of migrants as passive participants in socialist labor migrations, as well as the limited conceptions of labor migration often adopted by outside observers.
Africa
This article traces the experiences of Angolan students who attended East German institutions of ... more This article traces the experiences of Angolan students who attended East German institutions of higher education between Angolan independence and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Based on oral histories collected in Luanda from twenty-one returned Angolan students in 2015, triangulated with archival material from Angola and the GDR, it argues that students negotiated between accommodation and resistance in their everyday life at the university and beyond. Conscious of the importance of academic success and adaptation to the East German learning culture, Angolan students drew a line when regulations infringed on their personal freedom and responded by engaging East German officials in discussion or simply by circumnavigating the rules. The life history of a female student illustrates how she negotiated between responsibility to formal learning and personal needs within a controlling society. When one considers the conditions of Angolan student life in East Germany as a whole, it becomes...
Peripherie Nr. 165/166, 42, 2022
Research on East German racism before and after 1990 continues to focus on the experiences of the... more 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.
Africa Today, 69 no. 1-2, 2022
Africa Today, 69 no.1-2, 2022
Using documents assembled in connection with the 1967 Conference on the Legal, Economic and Socia... more Using documents assembled in connection with the 1967 Conference on the Legal, Economic and Social Aspects of African Refugee Problems, this article discusses African refugee higher-education discourses in the 1960s at the level of international organizations, volunteer agencies, and government representatives. Education and development history have recently been studied together, but this article focuses on the history of refugee higher education, which, it argues, needs to be understood within the development framework of human-capital theory, meant to support political pan-African concerns for a decolonized continent and merged with humanitarian arguments to create a hybrid form of humanitarian developmentalism. The article zooms in on higher-education scholarships, above all for refugees from Southern Africa, as a means of support for human-capital development. It shows that refugee higher education was both a result and a driver of increased international exchanges, as evidenced at the 1967 conference.
Labor History
Abstract This article discusses the chronology of nostalgia expressed by former Angolan and Mozam... more Abstract This article discusses the chronology of nostalgia expressed by former Angolan and Mozambican worker trainees in East Germany. By shedding light on the different forms in which nostalgia was expressed in interviews with migrants who returned to their country of origin, the article examines the migrants’ longing for working abroad prior to leaving and for their home countries while living abroad. The focus lies on the returnees’ nostalgia for aspects of their lived experiences in East Germany, a phenomenon I call Eastalgia. Struggling economically, socially, and emotionally after their return to Angola and Mozambique, many former worker trainees longed for the consumption opportunities, mobility, organization, and modernity of their East German experience. I argue that labor migrants who returned to Mozambique employ both Eastalgia and a glorification of Samora Machel’s socialist Mozambique to criticize the current government for its failure to develop the country according to the expectations shaped by their experiences in East Germany. Finally, I compare and contrast different forms of Eastalgia in Mozambique and Angola with regard to temporality, locality, individual and/or collective, public and/or private, and restorative and/or reflective longing. The former worker trainees’ voices provide new insight into the emotional dimensions of migration and teach us that memories of migrations actively continue to shape the lives of many of the former migrants.
Books by Marcia C. Schenck
Edited Volume with De Gruyter, 2021
This open access edited volume firmly places African history into global history by highlighting ... more This open access 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. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110623543/html
Palgrave Macmillan, 2023
This open access book is about Mozambicans and Angolans who migrated in state-sponsored schemes t... more 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.
This thesis situates the current ‡Khomani claims to land in their historical context. Examining t... more This thesis situates the current ‡Khomani claims to land in their historical context. Examining the nexus between land, economic choices, power, and identity, I analyze the construction of the "Bushman myth "in South Africa as it relates to the ‡Khomani San of the Northern Cape. The myth refers to stereotypical depictions of “Bushmen” based on invented traditions. These traditions are depicted as atavistic manifestations of a historically immutable Bushman ethnicity. Stressing their timelessness and isolation, the Bushman myth thus disregards the San’s internal dialectics and fluid social worlds as well as their historical and local relationships to non-San; nevertheless it has come to define the life of the so-called Bain’s Bushmen and their descendants during the last 80 years. By tracing the development, application, and appropriation of the Bushman myth and its power to define traditions, I hope to contribute towards a much-needed discussion in the present about multiple identities and ‡Khomani ethnicity.
Motivated by a desire to understand the difficulties the ‡Khomani community is facing today, I set out to trace the development of San identity and its relationship to land and the political economy through the past 150 years. My thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the Northern Cape in South Africa from Cape Town to Upington and on the ‡Khomani land in January and summer 2008. I conducted 42 unstructured and semi-structured interviews with community members and others ranging from lawyers, government officials, to NGO consultants, and engaged in participant observation. The archival work is based on government records, newspaper articles, correspondence, and ethnographic studies collected in six South African archives.
BA thesis, summa cum laude in history
Chapters by Marcia C. Schenck
Navigating Socialist Encounters Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africa and East Germany during the Cold War, 2021
1I ntroduction: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africaa nd East Germany during the Cold W... more 1I ntroduction: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africaa nd East Germany during the Cold War The Arusha Declaration of February 5, 1967confirmed the intention of Tanzania's ruling party TANU (Tanganyika African National Union) to "build as ocialist state."² The declaration affirmedthat TANU plannedtopursue apolicy of nationalization of major industries,b anks, and insurance companies.³ Twom onths after the declaration, the Tanzaniant rade unionistS alvatory Kaindoah wrote an enthusiastic letter to share the news of developments in his country with the Fritz Heckert Trade Union College, in the East German town of Bernau whereK aindoah had studied: Dear Director of the College, Dr.K ampfert, Iamvery glad when Iamwritingthis lettertoyou now,beinginacountry which is in away liquidatingt he exploitation of man by man and on the wayt oS ocialism. Well done with your dailyw ork. How glad werey ou, when youh eard that our country nationalizeda ll the banks and other big industries?⁴ Kaindoah, at thattime employed at the TanzanianNational Institute for Productivity in Dar es Salaam, seemed to suggest thatthe Arusha Declaration meant the This introduction is the result of ac ollective thinkinga nd writingp rocess of all four editors. Givent he ongoingb enchmarkization of current academia,i ti so fi ncreasingi mportance which author'sname comes first.Inorder to mitigate the effects of this development,wehavedecided to use an alphabetical order for the edited volume and an alphabeticallyr eversed order for the introduction. The introduction also owes much to the valuable comments,c orrections, and advice of anumber of people. We want to thank the twoanonymous reviewers, Nele Fabian, Inge-borgGrau, and Arno Sondereggerfor their careful reading and helpful suggestions.Wealso want to thank the members of the GDR working groupatLeipzig University and Innocent Rwehabura for their comments. Last but not least we aregrateful to Pieter Cordwell for skillfullyeditingthe text and to MalteK öppen for streamliningt he footnotes, cleaningupthe bibliography,and creatingt he index.
Global South Scholars in the Western Academy
Navigating Socialist Encounters
1I ntroduction: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africaa nd East Germany during the Cold W... more 1I ntroduction: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africaa nd East Germany during the Cold War The Arusha Declaration of February 5, 1967confirmed the intention of Tanzania's ruling party TANU (Tanganyika African National Union) to "build as ocialist state."² The declaration affirmedthat TANU plannedtopursue apolicy of nationalization of major industries,b anks, and insurance companies.³ Twom onths after the declaration, the Tanzaniant rade unionistS alvatory Kaindoah wrote an enthusiastic letter to share the news of developments in his country with the Fritz Heckert Trade Union College, in the East German town of Bernau whereK aindoah had studied: Dear Director of the College, Dr.K ampfert, Iamvery glad when Iamwritingthis lettertoyou now,beinginacountry which is in away liquidatingt he exploitation of man by man and on the wayt oS ocialism. Well done with your dailyw ork. How glad werey ou, when youh eard that our country nationalizeda ll the banks and other big industries?⁴ Kaindoah, at thattime employed at the TanzanianNational Institute for Productivity in Dar es Salaam, seemed to suggest thatthe Arusha Declaration meant the This introduction is the result of ac ollective thinkinga nd writingp rocess of all four editors. Givent he ongoingb enchmarkization of current academia,i ti so fi ncreasingi mportance which author'sname comes first.Inorder to mitigate the effects of this development,wehavedecided to use an alphabetical order for the edited volume and an alphabeticallyr eversed order for the introduction. The introduction also owes much to the valuable comments,c orrections, and advice of anumber of people. We want to thank the twoanonymous reviewers, Nele Fabian, Inge-borgGrau, and Arno Sondereggerfor their careful reading and helpful suggestions.Wealso want to thank the members of the GDR working groupatLeipzig University and Innocent Rwehabura for their comments. Last but not least we aregrateful to Pieter Cordwell for skillfullyeditingthe text and to MalteK öppen for streamliningt he footnotes, cleaningupthe bibliography,and creatingt he index.
World History Connected, 2022
Shifting the Means of (Knowledge) Production: Teaching Applied Oral History Methods in a Global C... more Shifting the Means of (Knowledge) Production: Teaching Applied Oral History Methods in a Global Classroom is an open access publication, see https://journals.gmu.edu/index.php/whc/article/view/3327/1914
CIM Paper Series Nr. 6 , Feb 2014
Diese Untersuchung beleuchtet die verschiedenen Leistungen der Programmkomponente für Rückkehrend... more Diese Untersuchung beleuchtet die verschiedenen Leistungen der Programmkomponente für Rückkehrende Fachkräfte (RF-Komponente) des Programms Migration für Entwicklung (PME) auf der Basis eines zehnwöchigen Indonesienaufenthalts von Oktober bis Dezember 2012. Das Bestreben dieser Programmkomponente
des Centrums für internationale Migration und Entwicklung (CIM) ist die temporäre oder permanente Wiedereingliederung von indonesischen Rückkehrenden Fachkräften in den indonesischen Arbeitsmarkt und damit verbunden die Nutzung ihres einzigartigen Wissens.
Das zentrale Ziel dieser Studie ist es, zwei Schlüsselkonzepte der RF-Komponente empirisch zu untersuchen. Die zugrundeliegenden Annahmen lauten, dass die Rückkehrenden Fachkräfte erstens als
Agents of Change und Multiplikatoren durch ihre in Deutschland erworbenen Erfahrungen und Expertise zu der Entwicklung Indonesiens beitragen und zweitens dank ihrer sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Verbindungen als Brückenbauer zwischen Deutschland und Indonesien agieren.
Für die empirische Untersuchung wurden das Leistungsangebot und die zwei Schlüsselkonzepte der RF-Komponente mit den Erfahrungen und Sichtweisen der Akteure vor Ort kontrastiert. Die Erfahrungen
in Indonesien wurden auf der Grundlage von 64 Interviews mit Rückkehrenden Fachkräften, Alumni, Arbeitgebern und anderen Personen aus dem sozialen Umfeld der Fachkräfte erhoben.
Die Interviews ermöglichten eine kritische Würdigung der einzelnen Leistungen der Programmkomponente: Der Gehaltszuschuss wird als zentrales Element wahrgenommen, das auf vielfältigste Art
und Weise zur Verbesserung der Lebenssituation der Rückkehrenden Fachkräfte beiträgt. Reise- und Transportkostenzuschüsse sowie die Unterstützung durch Arbeitsplatzausstattung wurden ebenfalls
positiv bewertet, wobei insbesondere letztere aufgrund komplexer Antragsverfahren und Überführung der Ausstattung in den Besitz des Arbeitgebers auch kritisiert wird. Zudem wurde deutlich, dass
zusätzliche Leistungen wie Vernetzungsreisen und Weiterbildungsmaßnahmen oder Vorstellungsreisen
in Indonesien bislang nur selten in Anspruch genommen werden.
Darüber hinaus zeigt die empirische Untersuchung, dass das Potential der Rückkehrenden Fachkräfte als Brückenbauer zwischen Indonesien und Deutschland häufig noch ungenutzt bleibt. Zum
einen haben die Rückkehrenden Fachkräfte selbst nur ein vages Verständnis ihrer eigenen Rolle als Brückenbauer, zum anderen mangelt es ihnen an ausreichender Vernetzung. Vielmehr steht in
Indonesien der multidirektionale Prozess der Wissenskreation im Fokus. Es wurde deutlich, dass Rückkehrer ihre in Deutschland gelebten Erfahrungen an ihre indonesische Lebenswelt anpassen und dadurch idiosynkratrische neue Ideen und Ansätze verfolgen. Wissen wird nicht nur transferiert, sondern transformiert.
Um die Potentiale der Rückkehrenden Fachkräfte noch besser zu fördern, empfiehlt sich eine kontinuierliche Weiterentwicklung der Komponente. Hierfür liefert die Studie wichtige Empfehlungen: So
sollte z. B. die Alumni- und Vernetzungsarbeit gestärkt werden, um die Potentiale der Rückkehrenden Fachkräfte als Agents of Change und Brückenbauer noch besser zu aktivieren.
African Economic History, 2016
Migration between select “Third World” and “Second World” countries were often organized around b... more Migration between select “Third World” and “Second World” countries were often organized around bilateral labor migration regimes. As a result, individuals from Angola and Mozambique who came to work and train in East Germany are categorized as labor migrants; an analysis of workers’ motivations to migrate is missing. On the basis of oral history interviews collected in Angola and Mozambique, this article examines the myriad reasons for which young Angolan and Mozambican men and women temporarily relocated to East Germany. These reasons included economic, educational, emotional, and security considerations. The migrants’ complex understandings from below are discussed through the categories of labor, educational, war and emotional migration, providing an important corrective to the top-down designation as “labor migration.” Rather than abandoning the term altogether as an analytical category, this article suggests that it may serve as a shorthand, provided that scholars take seriously the motivations for migration, rather than obliterate these motivations through an uncritical use of the term. This approach challenges the prevailing conceptions of migrants as passive participants in socialist labor migrations, as well as the limited conceptions of labor migration often adopted by outside observers.
Labor History, 2018
This article discusses the chronology of nostalgia expressed by former Angolan and Mozambican wor... more This article discusses the chronology of nostalgia expressed by former Angolan and Mozambican worker trainees in East Germany. By shedding light on the different forms in which nostalgia was expressed in interviews with migrants who returned to their country of origin, the article examines the migrants’ longing for working abroad prior to leaving and for their home countries while living abroad. The focus lies on the returnees’ nostalgia for aspects of their lived experiences in East Germany, a phenomenon I call Eastalgia. Struggling economically, socially, and emotionally after their return to Angola and Mozambique, many former worker trainees longed for the consumption opportunities, mobility, organization, and modernity of their East German experience. I argue that labor migrants who returned to Mozambique employ both Eastalgia and a glorification of Samora Machel’s socialist Mozambique to criticize the current government for its failure to develop the country according to the expectations shaped by their experiences in East Germany. Finally, I compare and contrast different forms of Eastalgia in Mozambique and Angola with regard to temporality, locality, individual and/or collective, public and/or private, and restorative and/or reflective longing. The former worker trainees’ voices provide new insight into the emotional dimensions of migration and teach us that memories of migrations actively continue to shape the lives of many of the former migrants.
L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques, 2018
In this contribution to global mobile lives and scales in global history, Korean cultural studies... more In this contribution to global mobile lives and scales in global history, Korean cultural studies researcher Jiyoon Kim, University of Tokyo, and German historian Marcia C. Schenck, Princeton University, draw on their respective dissertation research. Experimenting with a conversation
style, we discuss the issue of scale in global history and elaborate on what working with subjects who move transnationally through a Cold-War-influenced world means for our projects on, in Schenck’s case, Angolan and Mozambican labor and education migrants to East Germany in the late 1970s and 1980s. As for Kim, she studies South Korean youth travelers and tour participants who journeyed abroad before and after the full liberalization of overseas travel in 1989. Shedding light on two different sides of the iron curtain, the chronological overlap produced similar insights into the “hot cold war” and the importance of the state in relation to mobility. In explicitly discussing global mobile lives of non-elite actors as a methodological approach to the writing of global history, we engage with issues of scale, units, archives, collaboration and the relationship between history and the present for and in which the historian is writing.
Stichproben, 2018
This research note suggests that the " Black East " could be a unit of analysis as well as an alt... more This research note suggests that the " Black East " could be a unit of analysis as well as an alternative theoretical framework that helps shift the research focus too often neglected actors in the history of the Eastern bloc and African history alike. Much like Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic was an imperfect unit of analysis, it nevertheless did important work in constituting the Atlantic as a hybrid world and deconstructing England as a cohesive cultural community. Similarly, the „Black East“ emerges as amalgam, a temporal and geographic space that entangled African and Eastern bloc histories from the macro to the micro level. The “Black East,” however, necessarily remains a simplification and thus becomes useful especially through its deconstruction. What can be understood as “Black” and what as “East”? Organizing research under the slogan of the “Black East,” – or better in the spirit of its deconstruction – might enable writing entangled histories of Cold War interactions between the “Second” and the “Third World” and in the process bringing the hitherto distinct research fields of African history and Eastern European history closer together.
Africa, 2019
This article traces the experiences of Angolan students who attended East German institutions of ... more This article traces the experiences of Angolan students who attended East German institutions of higher education between Angolan independence and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Based on oral histories collected in Luanda from twenty-one returned Angolan students in 2015, triangulated with archival material from Angola and the GDR, it argues that students negotiated between accommodation and resistance in their everyday life at the university and beyond. Conscious of the importance of academic success and adaptation to the East German learning culture, Angolan students drew a line when regulations infringed on their personal freedom and responded by engaging East German officials in discussion or simply by circumnavigating the rules. The life history of a female student illustrates how she negotiated between responsibility to formal learning and personal needs within a controlling society. When one considers the conditions of Angolan student life in East Germany as a whole, it becomes apparent that the East German notion of the model foreign student did not map onto the complexities of Angolan student lives. This article sheds light on the student migration of a generation of Angolan post-independence technocrats, many of whom studied in the former East during the Cold War. Through the eyes of Angolan educational migrants, we see the limits and possibilities of the lives of foreign students in the GDR.
Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 2020
African Economic History, 2016
Migration between select “Third World” and “Second World” countries were often organized around b... more Migration between select “Third World” and “Second World” countries were often organized around bilateral labor migration regimes. As a result, individuals from Angola and Mozambique who came to work and train in East Germany are categorized as labor migrants; an analysis of workers’ motivations to migrate is missing. On the basis of oral history interviews collected in Angola and Mozambique, this article examines the myriad reasons for which young Angolan and Mozambican men and women temporarily relocated to East Germany. These reasons included economic, educational, emotional, and security considerations. The migrants’ complex understandings from below are discussed through the categories of labor, educational, war and emotional migration, providing an important corrective to the top-down designation as “labor migration.” Rather than abandoning the term altogether as an analytical category, this article suggests that it may serve as a shorthand, provided that scholars take seriously the motivations for migration, rather than obliterate these motivations through an uncritical use of the term. This approach challenges the prevailing conceptions of migrants as passive participants in socialist labor migrations, as well as the limited conceptions of labor migration often adopted by outside observers.
Africa
This article traces the experiences of Angolan students who attended East German institutions of ... more This article traces the experiences of Angolan students who attended East German institutions of higher education between Angolan independence and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Based on oral histories collected in Luanda from twenty-one returned Angolan students in 2015, triangulated with archival material from Angola and the GDR, it argues that students negotiated between accommodation and resistance in their everyday life at the university and beyond. Conscious of the importance of academic success and adaptation to the East German learning culture, Angolan students drew a line when regulations infringed on their personal freedom and responded by engaging East German officials in discussion or simply by circumnavigating the rules. The life history of a female student illustrates how she negotiated between responsibility to formal learning and personal needs within a controlling society. When one considers the conditions of Angolan student life in East Germany as a whole, it becomes...
Peripherie Nr. 165/166, 42, 2022
Research on East German racism before and after 1990 continues to focus on the experiences of the... more 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.
Africa Today, 69 no. 1-2, 2022
Africa Today, 69 no.1-2, 2022
Using documents assembled in connection with the 1967 Conference on the Legal, Economic and Socia... more Using documents assembled in connection with the 1967 Conference on the Legal, Economic and Social Aspects of African Refugee Problems, this article discusses African refugee higher-education discourses in the 1960s at the level of international organizations, volunteer agencies, and government representatives. Education and development history have recently been studied together, but this article focuses on the history of refugee higher education, which, it argues, needs to be understood within the development framework of human-capital theory, meant to support political pan-African concerns for a decolonized continent and merged with humanitarian arguments to create a hybrid form of humanitarian developmentalism. The article zooms in on higher-education scholarships, above all for refugees from Southern Africa, as a means of support for human-capital development. It shows that refugee higher education was both a result and a driver of increased international exchanges, as evidenced at the 1967 conference.
Labor History
Abstract This article discusses the chronology of nostalgia expressed by former Angolan and Mozam... more Abstract This article discusses the chronology of nostalgia expressed by former Angolan and Mozambican worker trainees in East Germany. By shedding light on the different forms in which nostalgia was expressed in interviews with migrants who returned to their country of origin, the article examines the migrants’ longing for working abroad prior to leaving and for their home countries while living abroad. The focus lies on the returnees’ nostalgia for aspects of their lived experiences in East Germany, a phenomenon I call Eastalgia. Struggling economically, socially, and emotionally after their return to Angola and Mozambique, many former worker trainees longed for the consumption opportunities, mobility, organization, and modernity of their East German experience. I argue that labor migrants who returned to Mozambique employ both Eastalgia and a glorification of Samora Machel’s socialist Mozambique to criticize the current government for its failure to develop the country according to the expectations shaped by their experiences in East Germany. Finally, I compare and contrast different forms of Eastalgia in Mozambique and Angola with regard to temporality, locality, individual and/or collective, public and/or private, and restorative and/or reflective longing. The former worker trainees’ voices provide new insight into the emotional dimensions of migration and teach us that memories of migrations actively continue to shape the lives of many of the former migrants.
Edited Volume with De Gruyter, 2021
This open access edited volume firmly places African history into global history by highlighting ... more This open access 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. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110623543/html
Palgrave Macmillan, 2023
This open access book is about Mozambicans and Angolans who migrated in state-sponsored schemes t... more 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.
This thesis situates the current ‡Khomani claims to land in their historical context. Examining t... more This thesis situates the current ‡Khomani claims to land in their historical context. Examining the nexus between land, economic choices, power, and identity, I analyze the construction of the "Bushman myth "in South Africa as it relates to the ‡Khomani San of the Northern Cape. The myth refers to stereotypical depictions of “Bushmen” based on invented traditions. These traditions are depicted as atavistic manifestations of a historically immutable Bushman ethnicity. Stressing their timelessness and isolation, the Bushman myth thus disregards the San’s internal dialectics and fluid social worlds as well as their historical and local relationships to non-San; nevertheless it has come to define the life of the so-called Bain’s Bushmen and their descendants during the last 80 years. By tracing the development, application, and appropriation of the Bushman myth and its power to define traditions, I hope to contribute towards a much-needed discussion in the present about multiple identities and ‡Khomani ethnicity.
Motivated by a desire to understand the difficulties the ‡Khomani community is facing today, I set out to trace the development of San identity and its relationship to land and the political economy through the past 150 years. My thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the Northern Cape in South Africa from Cape Town to Upington and on the ‡Khomani land in January and summer 2008. I conducted 42 unstructured and semi-structured interviews with community members and others ranging from lawyers, government officials, to NGO consultants, and engaged in participant observation. The archival work is based on government records, newspaper articles, correspondence, and ethnographic studies collected in six South African archives.
BA thesis, summa cum laude in history
Navigating Socialist Encounters Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africa and East Germany during the Cold War, 2021
1I ntroduction: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africaa nd East Germany during the Cold W... more 1I ntroduction: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africaa nd East Germany during the Cold War The Arusha Declaration of February 5, 1967confirmed the intention of Tanzania's ruling party TANU (Tanganyika African National Union) to "build as ocialist state."² The declaration affirmedthat TANU plannedtopursue apolicy of nationalization of major industries,b anks, and insurance companies.³ Twom onths after the declaration, the Tanzaniant rade unionistS alvatory Kaindoah wrote an enthusiastic letter to share the news of developments in his country with the Fritz Heckert Trade Union College, in the East German town of Bernau whereK aindoah had studied: Dear Director of the College, Dr.K ampfert, Iamvery glad when Iamwritingthis lettertoyou now,beinginacountry which is in away liquidatingt he exploitation of man by man and on the wayt oS ocialism. Well done with your dailyw ork. How glad werey ou, when youh eard that our country nationalizeda ll the banks and other big industries?⁴ Kaindoah, at thattime employed at the TanzanianNational Institute for Productivity in Dar es Salaam, seemed to suggest thatthe Arusha Declaration meant the This introduction is the result of ac ollective thinkinga nd writingp rocess of all four editors. Givent he ongoingb enchmarkization of current academia,i ti so fi ncreasingi mportance which author'sname comes first.Inorder to mitigate the effects of this development,wehavedecided to use an alphabetical order for the edited volume and an alphabeticallyr eversed order for the introduction. The introduction also owes much to the valuable comments,c orrections, and advice of anumber of people. We want to thank the twoanonymous reviewers, Nele Fabian, Inge-borgGrau, and Arno Sondereggerfor their careful reading and helpful suggestions.Wealso want to thank the members of the GDR working groupatLeipzig University and Innocent Rwehabura for their comments. Last but not least we aregrateful to Pieter Cordwell for skillfullyeditingthe text and to MalteK öppen for streamliningt he footnotes, cleaningupthe bibliography,and creatingt he index.
Global South Scholars in the Western Academy
Navigating Socialist Encounters
1I ntroduction: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africaa nd East Germany during the Cold W... more 1I ntroduction: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africaa nd East Germany during the Cold War The Arusha Declaration of February 5, 1967confirmed the intention of Tanzania's ruling party TANU (Tanganyika African National Union) to "build as ocialist state."² The declaration affirmedthat TANU plannedtopursue apolicy of nationalization of major industries,b anks, and insurance companies.³ Twom onths after the declaration, the Tanzaniant rade unionistS alvatory Kaindoah wrote an enthusiastic letter to share the news of developments in his country with the Fritz Heckert Trade Union College, in the East German town of Bernau whereK aindoah had studied: Dear Director of the College, Dr.K ampfert, Iamvery glad when Iamwritingthis lettertoyou now,beinginacountry which is in away liquidatingt he exploitation of man by man and on the wayt oS ocialism. Well done with your dailyw ork. How glad werey ou, when youh eard that our country nationalizeda ll the banks and other big industries?⁴ Kaindoah, at thattime employed at the TanzanianNational Institute for Productivity in Dar es Salaam, seemed to suggest thatthe Arusha Declaration meant the This introduction is the result of ac ollective thinkinga nd writingp rocess of all four editors. Givent he ongoingb enchmarkization of current academia,i ti so fi ncreasingi mportance which author'sname comes first.Inorder to mitigate the effects of this development,wehavedecided to use an alphabetical order for the edited volume and an alphabeticallyr eversed order for the introduction. The introduction also owes much to the valuable comments,c orrections, and advice of anumber of people. We want to thank the twoanonymous reviewers, Nele Fabian, Inge-borgGrau, and Arno Sondereggerfor their careful reading and helpful suggestions.Wealso want to thank the members of the GDR working groupatLeipzig University and Innocent Rwehabura for their comments. Last but not least we aregrateful to Pieter Cordwell for skillfullyeditingthe text and to MalteK öppen for streamliningt he footnotes, cleaningupthe bibliography,and creatingt he index.
Navigating Socialist Encounters
9S ocialist Encountersa tt he School of Friendship Education is our principal instrumenti nf ormi... more 9S ocialist Encountersa tt he School of Friendship Education is our principal instrumenti nf ormingt he New Man; am an, liberated fromo ld ideas,f rom am entality that was contaminated by the colonial-capitalist mindset;aman educated by the ideas and practiceso fs ocialism.¹ Mozambican President Samora Machel OpenAccess. ©2 021M arcia C. Schenck and FranciscaR aposo, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsA ttribution 4.0 International License.
Navigating Socialist Encounters
Hier geblieben? Brandenburg als Einwanderungsland vom Mittelalter bis heute, 2022
Aus der gesamten sozialistischen Welt kamen Menschen zum Arbeiten, zur Ausbildung und zum Studium... more Aus der gesamten sozialistischen Welt kamen Menschen zum Arbeiten, zur Ausbildung und zum Studium in das heutige Brandenburg. Entgegen weit verbreiteter Annahmen war die sozialistische Ära des 20. Jahrhunderts keine Zeit der Unbeweglichkeit und der Isolation. Vielmehr war sie von globalen Migrationsbewegungen und Wissenstransfers, von Waren-, Technologie-und Kapitalströmen gekennzeichnet, die vor allem entlang der sozialistischen Achsen verliefen. Afrikanische Länder wie Mosambik, die erst vor Kurzem ihre Unabhängigkeit erlangt hatten, versprachen sich eine Zusammenarbeit auf Augenhöhe mit sozialistischen Staaten wie der DDR, die ihnen als vergleichsweise unvorbelastet galten, da sie über keine koloniale Vergangenheit verfügten oder zumindest dem Imperialismus und Rassismus abgeschworen hatten. ExpertInnen, Erziehende, Jugendbrigaden sowie technisches und militärisches Personal wurden von Norden nach Süden geschickt, während afrikanische SchülerInnen, Studierende, ArbeiterInnen, GewerkschaftlerInnen, JournalistInnen und Auszubildende gen Norden reisten. Diese jungen, unabhängigen Staaten, die dringend ausgebildete Arbeitskräfte aller Branchen zum Aufbau ihrer Nationalstaaten brauchten, waren daher auf temporäre Ausbildungs-und Arbeitsmigration in die sozialistische Welt, ob nach Kuba, in die DDR oder die Tschechoslowakei, angewiesen. Das Verhältnis der DDR zu MigrantInnen war von einem Widerspruch zwischen Theorie und Praxis gekennzeichnet. In der Staatstheorie und im offiziellen Sprachgebrauch der DDR wurden sozialistische Werte wie » proletarischer Internationalismus « und » Solidarität mit den Klassenbrüdern « großgeschrieben.1 Doch das gelebte Verhältnis vieler DDR-BürgerInnen zu den › Bruderländern ‹ und deren BürgerInnen blieb oft zwiespältig. Die Realität war von einem Sowohl-als-auch geprägt: von Trennung und
Navigating Socialist Encounters: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africa and East Germany during the Cold War, 2021
Introduction: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africa and East Germany during the Cold War... more Introduction: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africa and East Germany during the Cold War, with Eric Burton, Immanuel Harisch, Anne Dietrich, in Navigating Socialist Encounters: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africa and East Germany during the Cold War, Eric Burton, Anne Dietrich, Immanuel Harisch, Marcia C. Schenck (eds.). Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021, 1-58.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110623543/html
Socialist Encounters at the School of Friendship, with Francisca Raposo, in Navigating Socialis... more Socialist Encounters at the School of Friendship, with Francisca Raposo, in Navigating Socialist Encounters: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africa and East Germany during the Cold War, Eric Burton, Anne Dietrich, Immanuel Harisch, Marcia C. Schenck (eds.). Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021, 235-245.
©2021 Marcia C. Schenck and Francisca Raposo, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsA ttribution 4.0 International License.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110623543/html
Navigating Socialist Encounters: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africa and East Germany during the Cold War, 2021
Paths are Made by Walking Them: Memories of being a Mozambican Contract Worker in the German Demo... more Paths are Made by Walking Them: Memories of being a Mozambican Contract Worker in the German Democratic Republic, with Ibraimo Alberto in Socialist Encounters: Relations, Transfers and Exchanges between Africa and East Germany, Eric Burton, Anne Dietrich, Immanuel Harisch, Marcia C. Schenck (eds.). Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021, 247-262.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110623543/html
Für Respekt und Anerkennung: Die mosambikanischen Vertragsarbeiter und das schwierige Erbe aus der DDR, 2020
Ziel war es, die zukünftige Avantgarde der Arbeiterklasse Mosambiks und Angolas auszubilden. Theo... more Ziel war es, die zukünftige Avantgarde der Arbeiterklasse Mosambiks und Angolas auszubilden. Theoretisch diente das Programm sowohl dem Aufbau der für die Realisierung der angolanischen und mosambikanischen industriellen Entwicklung
erforderlichen Humanressourcen als auch der Befriedigung des ostdeutschen Bedarfs an Arbeitskräften, Rohstoffen und Produktivitätssteigerungen. Die Auszubildenden sollten in gemeinsamen Projekten im Herkunftsland vom Bergbau über die Landwirtschaft bis hin zur Textilindustrie eingesetzt werden. Wenige der ostdeutschen Wirtschaftsinitiativen in Angola und Mosambik wurden jedoch verwirklicht.
While doing field research in 2007, Tanja Müller was surprised to hear a Mozambican woman reminis... more While doing field research in 2007, Tanja Müller was surprised to hear a Mozambican woman reminisce about her “memories of paradise” as a pupil in the School of Friendship (Schule der Freundschaft, or SdF) in Straßfurt in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Her sentiment contradicted the prevailing view of recent German scholars that the school had essentially indoctrinated rather than educated its students. Curious, Müller went on to investigate the experience of Mozambican children at the SdF, their lives after returning home, and the legacy of socialist values in present-day Mozambique. Müller’s insightful study, Legacies of Socialist Solidarity: East Germany in Mozambique , is the first to examine the reintegration of nearly a thousand Mozambican adolescents, students at the SdF between 1982 and 1988. Their lives confronted an anachronism: at the behest of President Samora Machel, the children were immersed in values of socialism and solidarity in hopes of their becoming the v...
Labor
Zack Kagan-Guthrie. Bound for Work: Labor, Mobility, and Colonial Rule in Central Mozambique, 194... more Zack Kagan-Guthrie. Bound for Work: Labor, Mobility, and Colonial Rule in Central Mozambique, 1940-1965, in Labor: Studies in Working Class History, 18:2, 2021, 120-121.
Revue d'histoire contemporaine de l'Afrique
Recensé : Jochen Lingelbach, On the Edges of Whiteness: Polish Refugees in British Colonial Afric... more Recensé : Jochen Lingelbach, On the Edges of Whiteness: Polish Refugees in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War, Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2020, 306 p.
Labor: Studies in Working Class History, 2021
Zack Kagan-Guthrie. Bound for Work: Labor, Mobility, and Colonial Rule in Central Mozambique, 194... more Zack Kagan-Guthrie. Bound for Work: Labor, Mobility, and Colonial Rule in Central Mozambique, 1940-1965, in Labor: Studies in Working Class History, 18:2, 2021, 120-121.
Byrne, Jeffrey James: Mecca of Revolution. Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order. Ox... more Byrne, Jeffrey James: Mecca of Revolution. Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016. ISBN: 978-0-19-989914-2; XVII, 388 S.
Rezensiert von: Marcia C. Schenck, Interna- tionales Geisteswissenschaftliches Kolleg Ar- beit und Lebenslauf in globalgeschichtlicher Perspektive (re:work), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
International Journal of African Historical Studies, Jan 1, 2009
African Studies Review, 2015
African Studies Review, 2015
Symposium 70 Years of UNHCR and Refugee Convention Afrikas vergessene Flüchtlingskonvention 15.06... more Symposium 70 Years of UNHCR and Refugee Convention Afrikas vergessene Flüchtlingskonvention 15.06.2021 1969 entwickelte die OAU (Organisation für Afrikanische Einheit, heute die Afrikanische Union, AU) ihre eigene Flüchtlingskonvention, welche afrikanische Werte widerspiegeln sollte. Sie wurde am 10. September 1969 in Addis Abeba beschlossen und umfasste viele rechtliche Innovationen. Zur Formulierung dieser rechtlich ambitionierten Konvention konnte es durch das zeitliche Zusammentreffen von Dekolonisierungskämpfe und Werten der pan-Afrikanischen Solidarität in den 1960er Jahren kommen. Heute ist sie wieder in den Hintergrund getreten. Jedes Jahr begehen viele der rund 200.000, aus Dutzenden von Ländern des afrikanischen Kontinents stammenden Flüchtlinge im Flüchtlingslager Kakuma in Kenia den Weltflüchtlingstag am 20. Juni. Aber wenn man sie fragt, erinnern sich nur wenige von ihnen daran, dass dieser Tag auf den 20. Juni 1974 zurückgeht, an dem eine afrikanische Antwort auf eine internationale Flüchtlingskonvention in Kraft trat. Die Organisation für Afrikanische Einheit (OAU), 1963 als aufstrebende panafrikanische Organisation gegründet, begann nur ein Jahr nach ihrer Gründung mit Vorarbeiten zur Formulierung einer afrikanischen Flüchtlingskonvention. Die OAU-Konvention zur Regelung der spezifischen Aspekte von Flüchtlingsproblemen in Afrika wurde schließlich 1969 beschlossen und wurde 1974 ratifiziert. Wie Marina Sharpe, Tamara Wood, Emmanuel Opoku Awuku, George Okoth-Obbo und andere Wissenschaftler*innen und Expert*innen jedoch gezeigt haben, konnte die Konvention die Situation der afrikanischen Flüchtlinge auf dem Kontinent nicht wesentlich verbessern, da Probleme bei der Umsetzung aufkamen. Um das Zustandekommen der Konvention von 1969 zu verstehen, müssen wir den globalen historischen Kontext sowie das regionalspezifische Zusammenkommen von Entkolonisierungskämpfen und Vorstellungen von panafrikanischer Solidarität untersuchen.
Europe Now, 2018
It is 2014. The faded flag the German Democratic Republic used from 1959 to 1990 blows in the win... more It is 2014. The faded flag the German Democratic Republic used from 1959 to 1990 blows in the wind on a makeshift flagpole in the heart of Maputo. It consists of the tricolor: black, red, and yellow, and features the symbols of the worker and peasant state: a compass and hammer encircled with rye. Although East Germany has long since ceased to exist, twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 8900 kilometers to the South, a group of Mozambicans raises its state flag every single day in the country’s capital, even as it has become a museum relic in reunited Germany. ...
You can find the full blog entry here https://www.europenowjournal.org/2018/02/28/between-hammer-machete-and-kalashnikov-contract-labor-migration-from-angola-and-mozambique-to-east-germany-1979-1990/
“Ostalgie in Mosambik: Erinnerungen ehemaliger mosambikanischer Vertragsarbeiter in der DDR,” [Os... more “Ostalgie in Mosambik: Erinnerungen ehemaliger mosambikanischer Vertragsarbeiter in der DDR,” [Ostlagie in Mozambique: Memories of former Mozambican contract workers in the GDR] Südlink, 43:172, June 8. 2015, pp. 21-23.
Internationale Politik Sonderbeilage Mercator Kolleg 2013, Jan 2014
Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly, Apr 2014
Mosambik Rundbrief Nr. 88, Jun 2014
Curated and presented “Under the Shadow of the Camera: Reflections of the ‡Khomani San,” at Blanc... more Curated and presented “Under the Shadow of the Camera: Reflections of the ‡Khomani San,” at Blanchard Art Gallery, Mount Holyoke College. Featured photographs taken by ‡Khomani, from archives and my own, focusing on San -Western interaction, March 22 – 29, 2009.
Short Film Director: Jack Davis Producer: Marcia C. Schenck About 21.000 Mozambican labor migran... more Short Film
Director: Jack Davis
Producer: Marcia C. Schenck
About 21.000 Mozambican labor migrants worked and were educated in East Germany on government contracts in various industries between 1979 and the early 1990s. It was Mozambican President Samora Machel's vision that these skilled laborers would upon return home contribute to the development of the young independent nation. With the civil war in Mozambique and the transition from socialism to capitalism in both countries history derailed this endeavor. Today, many workers live a marginalized life, still waiting to be useful, waiting for a job and waiting for a percentage of the wages that were transferred to the Mozambican government during the 1980s. “Republic of the Mind” examines the memories of and nostalgia for East Germany and the People’s Republic of Mozambique through the eyes of a prominent Madjerman in the year 2014. He illustrates not only Mozambique’s failed socialist experiment but also the loss of idealism and nationalism in the years following the death of Samora Machel.
“Republic of the Mind” is part of a series of short documentaries by Jack Davis dealing with contemporary Mozambique called “Cosmopolitan Wild.” Each film in the series examines a different character or region of Mozambique through the lens of the country’s current economic, socio-political and environmental uncertainty, focusing primarily on questions of migration, memory and home.
Our aim as editors is to compile an open-access edited volume that shows the manifold and recipro... more Our aim as editors is to compile an open-access edited volume that shows the manifold and reciprocal
relations and their legacies between African and East German actors like governments, institutions,
contract workers, students, traders, trade unionists, freedom fighters, and many more. We especially
welcome contributions that emphasize African influences on East German institutions, governments,
ideology, economy, and the host society at large. Furthermore, we are interested in studies that engage
the East German sojourns in various African nations. While our focus remains on African and East
German relations, we also welcome contributions that discuss African relations with other socialist
countries by way of comparison.
This workshop aims to bring together historians and anthropologists to discuss new research that ... more This workshop aims to bring together historians and anthropologists to discuss new research that
chooses the factory as a unit of analysis. The focus is on inquiring new methodological and
epistemological perspectives on the subject in order to explore the historical and contemporary
dynamics of capitalism at the point of production in an interdisciplinary fashion. The workshop
aims to initiated a collaborative, interdisciplinary conversation preliminary to the preparation of
a thematic issue on factory as an object of inquiry to be submitted to journals such as History &
Anthropology or International Labor and Working‐Class History. Participants to the workshop will
contribute to establish an agenda for research, the themes to be explored in the issue and invited
to submit their papers for consideration.
Africa Today, Sep 1, 2022
Using documents assembled in connection with the 1967 Conference on the Legal, Economic and Socia... more Using documents assembled in connection with the 1967 Conference on the Legal, Economic and Social Aspects of African Refugee Problems, this article discusses African refugee higher-education discourses in the 1960s at the level of international organizations, volunteer agencies, and government representatives. Education and development history have recently been studied together, but this article focuses on the history of refugee higher education, which, it argues, needs to be understood within the development framework of human-capital theory, meant to support political pan-African concerns for a decolonized continent and merged with humanitarian arguments to create a hybrid form of humanitarian developmentalism. The article zooms in on higher-education scholarships, above all for refugees from Southern Africa, as a means of support for human-capital development. It shows that refugee higher education was both a result and a driver of increased international exchanges, as evidenced at the 1967 conference.
De Gruyter eBooks, May 25, 2021
9S ocialist Encountersa tt he School of Friendship Education is our principal instrumenti nf ormi... more 9S ocialist Encountersa tt he School of Friendship Education is our principal instrumenti nf ormingt he New Man; am an, liberated fromo ld ideas,f rom am entality that was contaminated by the colonial-capitalist mindset;aman educated by the ideas and practiceso fs ocialism.¹ Mozambican President Samora Machel OpenAccess. ©2 021M arcia C. Schenck and FranciscaR aposo, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsA ttribution 4.0 International License.
McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, Jan 15, 2023
History of Education, Feb 28, 2023
Völkerrechtsblog, Jun 15, 2021
1969 entwickelte die OAU (Organisation für Afrikanische Einheit, heute die Afrikanische Union, AU... more 1969 entwickelte die OAU (Organisation für Afrikanische Einheit, heute die Afrikanische Union, AU) ihre eigene Flüchtlingskonvention, welche afrikanische Werte widerspiegeln sollte. Sie wurde am 10. September 1969 in Addis Abeba beschlossen und umfasste viele rechtliche Innovationen. Zur Formulierung dieser rechtlich ambitionierten Konvention konnte es durch das zeitliche Zusammentreffen von Dekolonisierungskämpfe und Werten der pan-Afrikanischen Solidarität in den 1960er Jahren kommen. Heute ist sie wieder in den Hintergrund getreten.
De Gruyter eBooks, May 25, 2021
Entitled Land, Water, Truth, and Love Visions of Identity and Land Access: From Bain s Bushmen to... more Entitled Land, Water, Truth, and Love Visions of Identity and Land Access: From Bain s Bushmen to Khomani San this thesis situates the current Khomani claims to land in their historical context. Examining the nexus between land, economic choices, power, and ...
Labor History, Feb 16, 2018
This article discusses the chronology of nostalgia expressed by former Angolan and Mozambican wor... more This article discusses the chronology of nostalgia expressed by former Angolan and Mozambican worker trainees in East Germany. By shedding light on the different forms in which nostalgia was expressed in interviews with migrants who returned to their country of origin, the article examines the migrants' longing for working abroad prior to leaving and for their home countries while living abroad. The focus lies on the returnees' nostalgia for aspects of their lived experiences in East Germany, a phenomenon I call Eastalgia. Struggling economically, socially, and emotionally after their return to Angola and Mozambique, many former worker trainees longed for the consumption opportunities, mobility, organization, and modernity of their East German experience. I argue that labor migrants who returned to Mozambique employ both Eastalgia and a glorification of Samora Machel's socialist Mozambique to criticize the current government for its failure to develop the country according to the expectations shaped by their experiences in East Germany. Finally, I compare and contrast different forms of Eastalgia in Mozambique and Angola with regard to temporality, locality, individual and/or collective, public and/or private, and restorative and/or reflective longing. The former worker trainees' voices provide new insight into the emotional dimensions of migration and teach us that memories of migrations actively continue to shape the lives of many of the former migrants.
African Economic History, 2016
Migration between select "Third World" and "Second World" countries were often organized around b... more Migration between select "Third World" and "Second World" countries were often organized around bilateral labor migration regimes. As a result, individuals from Angola and Mozambique who came to work and train in East Germany are categorized as labor migrants; an analysis of workers' motivations to migrate is missing. On the basis of oral history interviews collected in Angola and Mozambique, this article examines the myriad reasons for which young Angolan and Mozambican men and women temporarily relocated to East Germany. These reasons included economic, educational, emotional, and security considerations. The migrants' complex understandings from below are discussed through the categories of labor, educational, war and emotional migration, providing an important corrective to the top-down designation as "labor migration." Rather than abandoning the term altogether as an analytical category, this article suggests that it may serve as a shorthand, provided that scholars take seriously the motivations for migration, rather than obliterate these motivations through an uncritical use of the term. This approach challenges the prevailing conceptions of migrants as passive participants in socialist
International Migration, May 18, 2023
Springer eBooks, Nov 24, 2022
We feel at home because we are surrounded by warmth and friendship. …We feel at home because we h... more We feel at home because we are surrounded by warmth and friendship. …We feel at home because we have more Mozambican students and trainees here than in any other European country. We feel at home because East Germany has always closely accompanied our revolutionary process. …Ours is the difficult but also commendable task of building our socialist fatherlands in areas marked by heavy confrontation between the social systems. This is a meeting between brothers in arms, an exchange of experience…The people of the GDR under the leadership of the SED are roses of solidarity, hope and the future. 1 Samora Machel, during a visit to East Germany in September 1980 The friendship between peoples is indeed the big star, the sun that rises on the horizon and overcomes the shackles of hatred, of division and war, created by oppression and exploitation. …Through this big star of friendship between peoples the blood of the people of East Germany and Mozambique is united. Through this big star of peoples' friendship, the broad road leading the way to socialism has become even wider. The distance between the Peoples' Republic of Mozambique and the German Democratic Republic has been overcome. 2 Erich Honecker, during the same visit Daphne Berdahl uses the phrase "social life of socialism" in "
Springer eBooks, Nov 24, 2022
One of my favorite photos shows the young Mozambican Juma Madeira posing on the hood of a friend'... more One of my favorite photos shows the young Mozambican Juma Madeira posing on the hood of a friend's car in front of his workers' hostel in East Germany (Fig. 1.1).
Springer eBooks, Nov 24, 2022
The transnational dimension of the labor migration programs between Angola, Mozambique, and East ... more The transnational dimension of the labor migration programs between Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany is vividly illustrated by Dito Tembe's 2021 painting Remembering the GDR (Fig. 8.1). Pedro Jeremias Tembe, alias Dito, was born in Maputo and lived in Schwerin between 1985 and 1989. There, he worked at the VEB Kombinat Lederwaren, a factory producing leather goods. The twenty-five-year-old Dito decided to leave Mozambique mainly for economic reasons and initially sought a way to migrate to South Africa, but eventually an opportunity to go to East Germany presented itself. In Germany, despite demanding shift work, he was able to carve out time to continue to paint. He also regularly attended courses in drawing and art at the cultural center in Schwerin. His passion for art and music connected him to East Germans and other international visitors, and he remains in contact with some of his old friends. These enduring friendships have enabled Dito to travel back to Schwerin several times to exhibit his work. 1 Since his return to Maputo, he has become a well-known painter. He, too, is hopeful that compensation payments will still be forthcoming and he still visits other madjerman in the park in downtown Maputo, whenever he can find the time to do so. The slogan "workers of the world" is inspired by Marcel van der Linden's
Springer eBooks, Nov 24, 2022
For the Mozambican and Angolan worker-trainees who came to East Germany, their involvement in pro... more For the Mozambican and Angolan worker-trainees who came to East Germany, their involvement in producing East German goods, and how they consumed what East Germany had to offer, was central to their experience and their understanding of their migration. Consumption and production are often discussed as two separate spheres, and consumption tends to be associated with consumer society, affluence, choice, and variety, all connected to market economies. However, if we look at the essential unity of people's lives, we see that this distinction is an artificial one. It is one of the many strengths of the oral histories that make up this book that we can see historical actors as both producers and consumers, often simultaneously. Communism held the promise of uniting production and consumption. 1 Companies-in East Germany the VEBs, Volkseigene Betriebe, publicly owned enterprises-were to be places not only of work but also of entertainment and education, consumption and production. Through their experience of both, the worker-trainees transcended stereotypical Cold War simplifications of Western consumption and Eastern production. The specifics of their experiences as producers and consumers were bound up with the status as foreigners and Africans, and their memories of both are heavily influenced by their experience after returning to Africa. This aspect of the dual experience of a socialist economy, and its contrast with economies of the global South both during and after the
Springer eBooks, Nov 24, 2022
Springer eBooks, Nov 24, 2022
Today we look with pride to our hoes, our scythes, our hammers, our books, our shotguns. We cheri... more Today we look with pride to our hoes, our scythes, our hammers, our books, our shotguns. We cherish our ploughs, our machines, our weapons. We pick up our weapons with strength and determination, these decisive weapons in our fight for the construction of socialism; the socialism that means definite abandonment of misery, ignorance, and superstition and all the evils of society. These are the weapons of all the workers in the world, with whom we are united and stand in solidarity in the same trenches, in the same fight against exploitation. 1 Mozambican president Samora Machel saw workers, soldiers, and peasants as the bearers of socialist progress. In 1979, when he made the above speech, the first Mozambican worker-trainees were sent to East Germany. 2 In common with many socialist-inspired postcolonial leaders, Machel Parts of this chapter draw on an article previously published as Schenck, Marcia C. "From Luanda and Maputo to Berlin: Uncovering Angolan and Mozambican Migrants' Motives to Move to the German Democratic Republic (1979-1990),"
Springer eBooks, Nov 24, 2022
This chapter follows the experiences of the Mozambican and Angolan workers who returned home from... more This chapter follows the experiences of the Mozambican and Angolan workers who returned home from East Germany in the early 1990s. By this time, the era of socialism had passed, and all three countries were transitioning into market economies. Initially many of the worker-trainees, now returnees, were hopeful and excited about their homecoming. Many expected lives as wage laborers in industry, allowing them to build their own houses and families while contributing to the economic development of their home countries. Unfortunately, ongoing civil wars and a painful transition from planned economy to free market made this a pipe dream. 1 Returnees found themselves catapulted into conflict and post-conflict economies that were unable to provide anywhere near the number of secure blue-collar employment opportunities that were required. In addition, returnees faced governments that had neither the interest nor the ability to take care of them. The homecoming of many workers was euphoric as they and their families and friends celebrated their reunions. The returnees came back as an elite (albeit temporary, as it would turn out) who brought otherwise unattainable goods from Europe and had a network of support between themselves. This distinguished them from those around them and acquired them clients and customers. To use Jean-Pascal Daloz's terminology, they were big men and big women, though on a small scale. 2 Despite the
African Studies Review, Mar 16, 2015