Voluntariness and international Solidarity in the GDR and in the post-socialist Transformation (1970 – 2000)

• Applicant: Dr. Carsta Langner
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 413222647

The sub-project examines voluntariness in the former GDR and the subsequent post-socialist transformation society. It explores appeals and campaigns for voluntary participation in a state socialist system using the example of international engagement. The sub-project emphasizes that the call for "international solidarity" in the socialist dictatorship should not be understood unilaterally as propaganda. Therefore, the sub-project analyzes the relationship between state appeals for solidarity and individual motives for volunteering. It also sheds a light on to which extent the government appeals affected the process of political and social upheaval in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In its analysis the sub-project furthermore focuses on migrants in the GDR as addressees of state appeals for voluntariness and as politically active subjects in the society in transition. On the one hand, the state-controlled discourse calling for international engagement and solidarity with the Global South is examined. On the other hand, the sub-project uses praxeological approaches to analyze how the calls for engagement resonated in everyday life. To do this, it undertakes various historical deep drillings in order to illustrate the organization of donations and aid campaigns and to reconstruct their willful appropriation. The sub-project examines the production of voluntariness as a social practice on the basis of governmental (here primarily those of internationally oriented mass organizations) and non-governmental sources. The wide source repository allows for a multi-perspective contemporary history and includes not only written records. Within the diverse archival material the documents of the Solidarity Committee and the League of Friendship of Nations are of central importance. However, media representations of the Global South (e.g. in films, on posters and everyday objects), which were meant to encourage solidarity practices, are also included in the analysis. The archival holdings are supplemented by biographical interviews. The sub-project is of utmost significance for the research unit. First, it explores voluntariness in a dictatorship and expands the research focus on illiberal societies. Second, it analyzes continuities and ruptures of voluntary engagement in political transformation periods. Third, it focuses on migrants from the Global South, includes transfer processes from colonized states in its analyses and draws on insights from postcolonial approaches.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2983: Freiwilligkeit