‘We Are Workers, Not Inmates!’

The Politics of Space in Mozambican Workers’ Company Dormitories in East (1979-1990)

Lea Marie Nienhoff

‘We Are Workers, Not Inmates!’: The Politics of Space in Mozambican

Workers’ Company Dormitories in (1979-1990)

Master dissertation submitted in fulfillment of the requirements to obtain the academic degree of “Master of Arts” at the Department of Urban Studies of the University Basel

Author: Lea Marie Nienhoff Matr. Nr.: 17-062-811

Supervisors: Prof. Kenny Cupers Dr. Anna Selmeczi

Submitted: 24 August 2019

Cover Photo: Muloga, Charanda, Felix, and Cabay in front of a company dormitory, obtained through Lázaro Magalhães António Escoua, photography from private archive.

Contents

Introduction 4

Chapter 1: Modes of Producing Space 18

Chapter 2: From Brotherhood to Exploitation 24

Chapter 3: The Contract Workers’ Space 35

The workplace 35 The hotplates and showers 39 The buildings 41 The bed and a niche for oneself 48 The broken windows 52 The neighborhood 54 The dance floor 56 The soccer pitch 60 The abstract space 62

Chapter 4: A Community of Care, Resistance and Imagination 68

Making life more humane 68 Expanding space through networks 78 ‘The dormitory is ours!’—On political consciousness 82 Hopes and imaginations make place 87

The Network Travelled—Concluding Remarks 89

Appendix 94

Bibliography 104

Figure 1: Company Dormitory of VEB Braunkohlewerk Borna No names on the doorbells, most apartments are empty today.

EARTH PIECE Listen to the sound of the earth turning.

Yoko Ono, Grapefruit, Tokio 1964

The desire to touch the past, to uncover something, to critique society is a yearning to understand better why things are the way they are.

Acknowledgements

My gratitude goes to those who shared their memories and perspectives with me and accompanied my walks through Maputo. I am also grateful to the Josef and Olga Tomcsik foundation that supported me with a travel grant for my journeys to the East of Germany and Maputo. A very special thanks to my friends who supported me during my research and critically commented on early ideas and the manuscript itself.

I am deeply indebted to my supervisors Dr Kenny Cupers and Dr Anna Selmeczi for their insightful commentary.

Introduction

Avenida Vladimir Lenine, Karl-Marx-Straße, Avenida Mao Tse Tung, Straße der Solidarität, Praça Berlin - Mozambique and (East) Germany connects far more than street names in the post-socialist present. In the memories and lives of former contract workers in Mozambique, the GDR continues to exist.1 Many identify themselves today as “Madjermanes”—“the Germans.”2 In and around the Jardim 28 de Maio that is also known as Park of the Madjerman in the very center of Maputo, Germany appears in remarkable guises.3 The hairdresser that built up his independent business in a corner of the park put up posters of German celebrities. Someone’s hat has the colors of the German flag, someone else is wearing German Christmas socks and here and there people greet each other in German and make jokes. Every day Madjermanes bring out a large German flag from their storage, marking out “their” territory and transnational belonging. The year 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the wall on November 9, 1989. Around 15,300 Mozambican contract workers experienced the celebrations in 1989 in their homes in Rüdersdorf, Suhl, Plauen, Dresden, Berlin and other

1 The term “contract workers” translated from the German Vertragsarbeiter was only established as the common term for East Germany’s migrant workers after the fall of the wall. In the debate about the future of the foreign workers in a reunified Germany the ministry of the interior argued that their legal status would be synonymous to those of the “factory contract workers” in that had to leave the country after the end of the contract. Today the term “contract workers” completely replaced other terminologies, such as those of the GDR bureaucracy of “foreign workers” (Ausländische Werktätige) or “Mozambican workers” (Moçambiquanische Werktätige). I use the common term “contract workers,” however I also address them as “migrants” or simply “workers” to highlight that Mozambicans were part of the GDR society. On the change in terminology, see Uli Sextro, Gestern gebraucht—heute abgeschoben. Die innenpolitische Kontroverse um die Vertragsarbeitnehmer der ehemaligen DDR (Dresden: Sächsische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1996). 2 The term appears as a self-assertive label of the group as well as a deprecating label imposed on them from outside. I will use the spelling “Madjerman” proposed by Marcia C. Schenck, which is related to its expression in Shangaan. Theresia Ulbrich applies the spelling “Madgermanes”, which is also regularly used in German media but has often been confounded with “mad German.” One of my interviewees spelled it to me as Madgermane, “the Germans,” in plural and Mudgermane, “the German,” in singular. Further variations might occur according to the different native languages of Mozambique. Cf. Marcia C. Schenck, “Socialist Solidarities and Their Afterlives: Histories and Memories of Angolan and Mozambican Migrants in the German Democratic Republic, 1975-2015” (PhD diss., unpublished draft, publication in preparation, Princeton University, 2017); Theresia Ulbrich, “‘Madgermanes’ - Moçambicanische VertragsarbeiterInnen in der DDR und ihre Rückkehr nach Moçambique: Zur kollektiven Identität der Madgermanes” (Magister thesis, Universität Wien, 2009); Lázaro, interview by author, 9 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique. 3 I will refer to the park as “the garden,” because Madjermanes themselves mostly address it as “jardim.”

4 places all over East Germany.4 The “” and the subsequent reunification of the German states, experienced as a joyful moment of history by most Germans, began for contract workers from Vietnam, Cuba, Angola and Mozambique with uncertainties about their workplace and legal status.5 In the subsequent year the majority of Mozambican contract workers returned to a country unsettled by the ongoing civil war.6 Among them, those who had stayed in Germany for almost a decade and who had to leave behind not only partners and friends but often also the family they had created. Today, lovers of the time are trying to find each other again and children born in Germany are searching for their fathers in Mozambique.7 In the hurried process of contract workers were not well informed about their rights and possibilities and were financially incentivized to leave the country.8 This dissertation is a historical ethnography on the spatial practices of Mozambican workers in East German cities and towns. It is a story of young men and women who made themselves a home in and beyond the company dormitories that were the only places in which they were permitted to reside. Aiming to recover past experiences of Mozambican migrants the leading questions are: How did the space contract workers inhabited effected their lives and social relations? And, how did practices of placemaking and forms of resistance expanded the limited space of company dormitories for Mozambican migrants? I will analyze the materiality of the spaces Mozambican contract workers inhabited and the social processes that shaped the workers’ struggle for their rights and the recognition of their humanity. These are the relations that constitute the politics of space. The dissertation offers an analysis that seeks to encompass the structural features of spatial production and

4 For information on the number, see Mike Dennis and Norman LaPorte, eds., State and Minorities in Communist East Germany (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), XV. 5 Almuth Berger, “Die ausländerpolitischen Vorstellungen des Runden Tisches und ihre gesellschaftliche Situiertheit,” in Die ‘Gastarbeiter’ der DDR: Politischer Kontext und Lebenswelt, ed. Almut Zwengel (Münster, Berlin: LIT, 2011), 15. 6 About 12,300 workers left Germany and returned to Mozambique in 1990. See Andreas Müggenburg, Die ausländischen Vertragsarbeiter in der ehemaligen DDR: Darstellung und Dokumentation (Berlin: Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für die Belange der Ausländer, 1996), 18. 7 Several Madjermanes have told me of their search and of how they have helped friends from Germany and Mozambique to find each other. Children of former contract workers have organized themselves in a Facebook group to support each other, and the German Mozambican Network Reencontro familiar tries to reconnect the Mozambican parent with the German children. The number of children of Mozambican-German couples is not known and varies in existing accounts from 1,500 to 10,000. See Pia Siemer, “Vertragsarbeiter in der DDR: Die Spuren der Madgermanes,” taz, January 26, 2018, https://taz.de/Vertragsarbeiter-in-der-DDR/!5475457/. 8 Christiane Mende, “(Arbeits-) Migration aus der Volksrepublik Mocambique in die Deutsche Demokratische Republik (1979-1989/90)” (Magister thesis, Humboldt University Berlin, 2010). 5 at the same time the practices of placemaking by which workers transformed their places of destination. Pursuing to capture memories of Mozambican workers’ daily life in East Germany, I conducted interviews with former contract workers in Germany and Mozambique. Archival sources further allowed me to triangulate the workers’ perspective with reports, pictures, and protocols filed by the companies’ authorities. Studying the historical space of company dormitories, I realized that I cannot tell this story without having visited the sites of former company dormitories in Germany. My research journey brought me to the places Mozambican contract workers left in 1990 and to the places occupied by Madjermanes in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, today. From 1979 to 1989 22,669 Mozambican contract workers came to East Germany to work in state-owned companies. The majority of workplaces were allocated in chemical factories, manufacturing industries, and the mining and energy sector.9 Mozambicans elected to go were between eighteen and twenty-five years old when they boarded the plane to arrive at Berlin-Schönefeld Airport.10 From the taxiway they were allotted to buses that brought them to their first workplace and therewith to their first accommodation—a distribution in which they had no say. In the back of factory premises, often beyond residential areas, accommodations catered room for groups of around 30 to 200 Mozambicans. The first place was usually not the last to which they would be transferred, but the principles would be similar. Rooms were shared and assigned to one without say, given a minimum of 5 m2 for each person and a bed. Men and women were strictly separated.11 Visitors had to be registered and had to leave the dormitory by 22.00 the latest. The workers themselves had a night curfew—exceptions had to be authorized.12 Supervisors, group leaders and company directors controlled the organization of the dormitory and the workers’ activities. These were the formal contours of the space in which Mozambican contract workers lived. The inhabitants however gave to it their own

9 For an overview about the geographical distribution of Mozambican contract workers and the industries they were assigned to, see Appendix, p. 104. BArch DQ 3/2131, “Bericht über die Realisierung des Abkommens,” 1989, Bundesarchiv, Berlin, Germany. 10 According to Article 13 of the contract Mozambicans had to be in the age from eighteen to twenty-five and have completed four years of elementary school when send to Germany. The allowed age was raised to twenty-seven in 1989. See, official government agreement, in Heyden et al., Mosambikanische Vertragsarbeiter, 336; BArch DQ 3/2131, “Jahresprotokoll 1989.” 11 The separation by gender applied even to married couples. 12 BArch DQ 3/638, Part 1, “Heimordnung für das Betriebswohnheim Insel des VEB Papierfabrik Dreiwerden,” 01.07.1980. 6 definition of place. They transformed the space and expanded their room for maneuver by circumventing the rules and resisting control. When the workers left the company dormitories in 1990 the emptied buildings surrounded an uncanny atmosphere. In the company dormitory of Suhl-Heinrichs one Mozambican couple “turned off the light.”13 They were the last to leave the building and some of the very few that decided to stay, while most of their 224 colleagues were on their way back to Mozambique. Arriving as young adults in 1980 they had served several contracts in different cities of Germany, ten years later and after the fall of the wall they wanted to settle on their own terms and for the first time since their arrival they were allowed to rent their own place and live together as a couple. Former accommodations, layered with the traces of Mozambican contract workers’ struggles to make a place, have in many cases been renovated and transformed into low-rent apartments or cheap hotels, others have been torn down or left empty, perpetually dilapidating.14 The missing presence of this history in the localities and collective memories in Germany today reflects a non-visibility of the contract workers, which was also pertinent in the daily lives of GDR citizens, as has been observed by scholars and writers.15 In light of this, I seek to theorize the large presence of East German places and memories thereof in Mozambique, and the vanished traces of the contract workers’ placemaking in Germany today.

Mozambican contract work in historical scholarship

In historical scholarship the workers’ accommodations have thus far engendered two fundamentally differing perspectives.16 One stresses the isolation of the workers in the dormitories and invokes an image of confinement. The other is formulated as a response to this description, seeing the housing conditions in light of the general scarcity of housing in East Germany and emphasizing the support

13 Adelino, interview by author, 20 February 2019, Suhl, Germany. 14 For observations on the sites of former contract workers’ accommodations and photographs, see “Company Dormitories from Once,” Appendix p. 98. 15 Landorf Scherzer, Die Fremden (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2002); Zwengel, Die ‘Gastarbeiter’ der DDR; Müggenburg, Die ausländischen Vertragsarbeiter. 16 For a reading of the workers program in the realm of control and marginalization, see Zwengel, Die ‘Gastarbeiter’ der DDR. For the perspective that prioritizes the GDR’s support for the economic, technical and educational development of Mozambique, see Ulrich van der Heyden, Wolfgang Semmler and Ralf Straßburg eds., Mosambikanische Vertragsarbeiter in der DDR-Wirtschaft: Hintergründe, Verlauf, Folgen (Münster, Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2014). Both of the monographs build their arguments on a thin empirical evidence. 7

Mozambicans experienced. While the first narrative neglects the agency of the workers themselves and the possibility of meaningful intercultural relationships, the second narrative belittles the difficulties the workers faced in their homes and workplaces. More recently Marcia C. Schenck has published several articles that provide a reading of the history of Mozambican contract work that includes the perspective of the migrants.17 My own research continues this approach while focusing on the daily lives of contract workers in East Germany and on the places they inhabited. Young Mozambicans were trading ground between two states and restricted by a system of control in their dormitories and workplaces. Therefore, I propose to set the accommodation of contract workers in the GDR in the global and historical context of company dormitories—to see them as spaces that are supposed to ensure a compliant labor force.18 Similarities between East German company dormitories and South African compounds come into view. The focus on the spatialized control of migrant workers’ lives and productivity makes it possible to extend critical analysis of migration regimes from the Third World to the Second World, crossing two putatively separate economic spheres. Differences in socialist and colonial capitalist modes of production diffuse when looked at through the lens of the politics surrounding migrants’ spaces.19 Further, Mozambican workers’ actions of resisting control and claiming their rights as ‘workers’ in a socialist society can be catalogued as an example of how African workers confronted the continuity of exploitative relations following the end of colonial rule.

The past in the present

In the aftermath of reunification the slogan “We are the people” that was first chanted by GDR citizens that had the courage to demonstrate for democracy and

17 See Marcia C. Schenck, “A chronology of nostalgia: memories of former Angolan and Mozambican worker trainees to East Germany.” Labor History 59, no. 3 (2018): 352-374; “From Luanda and Maputo to Berlin: Uncovering Angolan and Mozambican Migrants’ Motives to Move to the German Democratic Republic (1979-1990),” African Economic History, Vol. 44 (2016): 202- 234.” 18 To date such spaces have particularly been studied for industrial capitalist societies and the colonies. See exemplary John Rex, “The Compound, Reserve, and Urban Location—Essential Institutions of Southern African Labour Exploitation,” South African Labour Bulletin 1, no. 4 (1974): 4-17. For a broader perspective on how the question of housing was related to the development of industrial capitalism, see Allen Scott and Michael Storper, eds., Production, Work, and Territory: The Geographical Anatomy of Industrial Capitalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986). 19 However, it must be emphasized that the history of company dormitories for foreigners begins only in the mid 1970’s when East Germany slowly began to adopt strategies and politics of capitalist societies. 8 freedom in an authoritarian state, transformed. Since reunification it has become an affirmation of an imagined Germanness that appeals to an ethno-nationalism and is used to justify racist attacks.20 Mozambican contract workers had experienced racism in everyday encounters since their arrival.21 But from November 1989 onwards racist violence became more frequent and more radical. Scholars speak of a Vereinigungsrassismus (reunification racism) that unfolded. One of the victims of the violence in 1990 was an Angolan contract worker that was killed in Eberswalde.22 Another event residing in collective memory is the attack on the dormitory of Mozambican contract workers in Hoyerswerda. On May 1, 1990, German youth wanted to beat up “the blacks.” The Mozambicans sought cover and security in their dormitory. A group of Germans standing in front of the dormitory shouted their abuses and insults towards the house and started to throw stones into the windows. Around 1500 neighbors and bystanders expressed their support or simply followed the event.23 In the following days the dormitory was outright besieged until the Mozambican workers were carted away, leaving their home, to be brought outside town. The outbreak of racist violence changed how Mozambicans experienced the space they inhabited. In those days, the dormitory became their refuge because moving in public space was accompanied by fear. Racist violence was suddenly so dominantly present in their lives that it became for many the cause to leave the country.24 Having to move out of the dormitory and therewith to some extent out of the support community became not a liberating but a frightening vision in these days. Lázaro considered the situation:

“The contract was over, the government agreement too. What shall I have done? When I got problems with Germans or skinheads…Who is going to help me? Or, where shall I go? Where shall I live and with whom? We were more than hundred and we had problems with Germans and when I am alone…?”

20 “We are the people” used to mean “the sovereign” and was embedded in the experience of self- emancipation. On how the meaning of the slogan changed, see Norbert Frei, Franka Maubach, Christina Morina, Maik Tändler, eds., Zur Rechten Zeit: Wider die Rückkehr des Nationalismus (Berlin: Ullstein, 2019), 183. 21 See Mende, “(Arbeits-) Migration”; Landorf Scherzer and Anna-Lena Schmitt, “Mosambikanische Vertragsarbeiter. Ausgrenzung und Rassismus als tägliche Erfahrung,” in Die ‘Gastarbeiter’ der DDR. 22 Mende, “(Arbeits-) Migration,” 4. 23 For details, see the online documentation Autofocus Videowerkstatt e.V., Hoyerswerda-1991.de, accessed June 23, 2019, https://www.hoyerswerda-1991.de/start.html; Christian A. Thiel, “Nach der Fete wollten sie ‘Neger aufklatschen’,” taz, May 7, 1990, https://taz.de/!1769330/. 24 Schönmeier, “Qualfizierung,” 218-190. 9

From today’s perspective, the hasty agreement on the return of contract workers from 1990 that has been drafted in the wake of rising racial violence, is graded as an expulsion by former contract workers.25 And, it is documented from the time that even the German government declared that they cannot guarantee the safety of Mozambicans.26 While I do not want to write a conclusive account of the development of racism in East Germany, the immediacy of present events undeniably shapes my research agenda. On August 27, 2018, around 6000 people gathered around the iconic seven-meter-tall head of Karl Marx in Chemnitz.27 The day signaled a peak of protests organized from a rightwing populist party (Afd) and social movement (PRO CHEMNITZ). The nationalist xenophobic attitudes that were mobilized this day were apparent in the slogans the crowd collectively chanted: “Foreigners Out,” “We are the people,” and the slogan “For every dead German a dead foreigner” circulated among the protesters.28 The racist slogans, the images of marching right- wing protesters and the violence that surfaced reminded observers of the outbreak of racist violence after reunification in the early 90’s.29 Today, xenophobic attitudes and racist violence occur in higher frequency in the New States than in the Old .30 In articles and publications on this issue, the isolation of foreign workers in company dormitories is a recurrent line of argumentation. Harry Waibel has argued that the exclusion of the contract workers has “facilitated the conditions for racism and neo-nazism” in the East.31 Almut Zwengel sees the lack of integration outside the workplace in relation to the

25 In a letter by ATMA it is described that the date and time of the return was not communicated and discussed with the contract workers, with the consequence that some could not say good bye to their German friends, partner, and children. Letter by ATMA, “Bittschrift und Antrag auf Intervention,” August 2018, shared with me by ATMA, Maputo. 26 Hermann W. Schönmeier, “Qualifizierung als Rückkehrvorbereitung ehemaliger Vertragsarbeiter aus Mosambik,” in Die ‘Gastarbeiter’ der DDR, 218. 27 Samuel Misteli and André Müller, “Ein Toter, Hetze gegen Ausländer und dann ein Leck – eine Chronologie zu Chemnitz,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, September 9, 2018, https://www.nzz.ch/international/chemnitz-ein-ueberblick-ueber-die-ereignisse-ld.1415760. 28 Ibid.; Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, “2018 Chemnitz protests,” accessed June 23, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Chemnitz_protests. 29 Der Spiegel Staff, “The Riots in Chemnitz and Their Aftermath,” Spiegel Online, August 31, 2018, https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-riots-in-chemnitz-and-their-aftermath-the- return-of-the-ugly-german-a-1225897-2.html. 30 Statistics on racist violence related to federal states of former East Germany, see “Gewalt gegen Flüchtlinge 2017: und Sachen traurige Spitzenreiter – Auch bundesweit kein Grund zur Entwarnung,” press release Pro Asyl, December 28, 2017, https://www.proasyl.de/pressemitteilung/gewalt-gegen-fluechtlinge-2017-brandenburg-und- sachsen-traurige-spitzenreiter-auch-bundesweit-kein-grund-zur-entwarnung/. 31 Harry Waibel, Die braune Saat. Antisemitismus und Neonazismus in der DDR (Stuttgart: Schmetterling Verlag, 2017). 10 strengthening of racial stereotypes.32 Further, the authors of Zur Rechten Zeit assert that East Germany had been not yet a country of immigration, because the “rigid social isolation [of foreign workers] suppressed the chance to become neighbors and fellow citizens at the outset.”33 These statements point to the housing of foreigners, and its remoteness to residential areas as means that are used to comprehend the hostility towards immigrants in East Germany. This dissertation complicates this argumentation. Simply following it would mean to gloss over the complex ways in which former contract workers created a place and participated in the East German society until German reunification. Former contract workers in Mozambique call themselves Madjermanes—their identities are grounded in their experiences in Germany. We should start seeing them as having been at home in the GDR. The history of Mozambican contract workers poses the question, what belonging means, and how the conceptualization of foreigners in Germany is connected to the state’s responsibility for migrants’ safety and legal rights. In this case, Germany’s responsibility for former Mozambican contract workers. After a conference on the situation of former contract workers, held in in February 2019, a memorandum was published that appeals to both states to recognize their responsibility for the injustices occurred.34 Mozambicans were misled by the non-transparent contracts they were given to sign. Drawn to apply for contract work in East Germany by the promise to receive education, hopes were betrayed for those who received the meager “polytechnical education” of only three months before they entered the workplace. Workers had to transfer part of their income (25% to 60% in the last four years of the contract) to Mozambique—a sum of money that they expected to receive upon return and have not received since. The rights of Mozambican contract workers have been truncated in various ways. By highlighting the workers strategies and their agency in making a living and creating a home in these conditions is not to downplay the injustices and oppression they experienced, but to argue that they have been at home in the GDR and belong to the legacy of the country that ceased to exist. These considerations are relevant

32 Almuth Zwengel, “Kontrolle, Marginalität und Misstrauen? Zur DDR-Spezifik des Umgangs mit Arbeitsmigration,” in Die ‘Gastarbeiter’ der DDR, 15. 33 Frei et al., Zur Rechten Zeit, 212. 34 “Magdeburger Memorandum der Tagung ‘Respekt und Anerkennung’,” Magdeburg 2019, http://www.oekumenezentrumekm.de/attachment/97805e02a6bf11de99800bf9f2dbda49da49/0 d06803dacd74eb985db-586bb8297025/memorandum-deutsch1.pdf. 11 for Germany’s response towards the memorandum’s claim. And they are relevant for how Germany conceptualizes immigrants and refugees today.

Mozambicans in East Germany were migrants into the East German society and company dormitories became, in their own words, “our place”, “our dormitory”— the anchor of their community. By focusing on this historical space, I hope to make visible (1) the ways in which Mozambicans were not only ‘guests’ in the GDR society but created and claimed their own place within it; how workers spatial practices were (2) grounded in the very locality as well as in the networks of Mozambican workers; and how company dormitories (3) spawned the capacity for collective action and resistance to control.

Sources

The dissertation rests equally on oral history interviews and archival documents. An additional source are observations and photographs from research in Germany and Maputo. I further draw on popular sources that have been published to illuminate the history of the Mozambican contract workers and their struggle as Madjermanes in Mozambique.35 I have reviewed files from three different archives, the East German state archive, the company archive of the VEB Fahrzeug- und Jagdwaffenindustrie Ernst Thälmann Suhl (VEB FAJAS) and the archive of Associaçados Anticos Trabalhadores Moçambicanos na Alemanha (ATMA) an association that represents and supports former contract workers.36 My study includes documents on various companies of different size that employed Mozambicans. To scrutinize the content of documents from the state archive in the context of a specific case, I chose to do a broader research on VEB FAJAS, a large state-owned company producing motorcycles with a comparably high number of Mozambican contract workers. The state and the

35 Biography of a former contract worker: Ibraimo Alberto, with Daniel Bachmann, Ich wollte leben wie die Götter: Was in Deutschland aus meinen afrikanischen Träumen wurde (Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2014); Series of interviews around Mozambican contract workers in Suhl: Scherzer, Die Fremden; Coffee table book with pictures of former contract workers in their everyday life and homes in Mozambique: Malte Wandel, Einheit, Arbeit, Wachsamkeit: Die DDR in Mosambik (Heidelberg, Berlin: Kehrer, 2012); And a graphic novel on Mozambicans’ memories of East Germany and their return to Mozambique: Birgit Weyhe, Madgermanes (Berlin: Avant Verlag, 2016). 36 ATMA is an association founded by former contract workers themselves that has the objective to defend their rights and interests in Mozambique and to create an open space for dialogue among its members and with other civil society organizations. Letter by ATMA, “Petição e Pedido de Intervenção” (Petition und Antrag auf Intervention),” August 2018, shared with me by ATMA, Maputo. 12 company archive provide a good source material on the company that I could read against and complement with statements from German neighbors and colleagues from 1982 (published in Die Fremden) and a personal interview with a former Mozambican group leader at VEB Fajas. The analysis of social and spatial practices in Suhl-Heinrichs, the district in which the company and the dormitory were located, runs like a red thread through Chapter 3. The most comprehensive collection of documents on the implementation of the agreement between Mozambique and East Germany are the files from the Ministry of Work and Wages, the so called Staatssekretariat für Arbeit und Löhne (SAL), in the state archive. From the files I have particularly chosen to analyze the periodic reports, which had to be submitted to the ministry to give account on the performance and conduct of Mozambican contract workers. Under headlines such as “Relation towards GDR workers and the population of the territory,” “Work performance and discipline” or “Security and order in the accommodations and fulfilment of the dormitory norms” company directors reported about difficulties and achievements. When Mozambican workers ‘violated’ the dormitory rules or showed a ‘deviant’ behavior they were reported to the ministry authorities. Many of the events that are filed as “misconduct,” “rule violation,” or “special incidents” in the SAL archive can be read as individual and collective actions of claiming rights and autonomy.37 The files contain detailed protocols of contract workers’ objections and struggles against the limitation of their rights. This makes the archival documents particularly helpful. However, the “special incidents” that were reported have nonetheless likely glossed over aspects that did not fulfil the contract’s guideline. A “good report” in the sphere of the communist party was “critical, but not so critical that the system was questioned.”38 The reports had to be self-critical, but not as self-critical that they could harm the author, in this case the company director. When reasons for the behavior are specified, they often rely on racialized stereotypes that further allowed authorities to shift the blame on the Mozambican “culture.” Hence, these sources have to be read with the internal hierarchies in mind and with caution regarding the authorities’ description of Mozambicans’ activities. Nonetheless,

37 The category “Besondere Vorkommnisse” (special incidents) is part of every company report to the ministry and contains the order of particular events such as fights, nightly lady visitors or work- related injuries. 38 Stefan Wolle, Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR 1971-1989 (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2013), 165. 13 reports provide a good source to understand how East German authorities reacted towards non-compliance to the rules and they convey the extent to which the party reached into all aspects of social and individual life as an instrument of political indoctrination.39 Oral history can set a personal perspective against the formal reports and present how the workers evaluate and interpret their experiences in their own categories.40 Forms of non-compliance to the rules were often seen by the workers themselves in relation to their “youth” rather than as form of resistance. Their today’s perspectives on conflicts and struggles around company dormitories are shaped by a nostalgia for their lives in East Germany and the access to food, housing and work that it provided. Struggling to find work and to have a shelter in Mozambique since their return, former contract workers emphasize their positive experiences and cherish the good memories of East Germany.41 The analysis of the oral testimonies is based on interviews and conversations of different lengths and forms.42 The association ATMA gave me the opportunity to use their network in order to find interview partners. Most interviews were semi- structured, beginning with questions about the interviewee’s childhood and how they made the decision to apply for contract work and education in Germany, followed by questions about everyday life, friendships, work experiences and particularly the accommodations in the GDR, and finally their personal commitment to the community of Madjermanes.43 Additional observations were captured in field notes, such as observations from weekly demonstrations and gatherings, and the use of the garden. I have conducted nine oral history interviews. From nine persons, two were female,44 four had been group leaders assigned to the position by Frelimo, six of

39 There was no area of society, writes Mary Fulbrook, that was uncontrolled by the state. In this respect the contract workers were dealt with in a similar manner to East German citizens— “education, the media, sports and leisure, even the family, were all to be controlled and manipulated by the state.” Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR 1949-1989 (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 19. 40 Oral history can be understood as the practice to interview eyewitnesses about past events. See Alun Munslow, The Routledge companion to historical studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 197. 41 Cf. Schenck, “A chronology of nostalgia.” 42 All the interviews were conducted from February to May 2019. I had verbal authorization from my interviewees to use the interviews for my thesis and to quote them with their personal names. All interview quotations cited are my translations from German into English. 43 In many cases the interviews took two to three hours, and with two of my interviewees I met several times. 44 I had the opportunity to interview two women who received a three-year education as technical draftswomen in the GDR. 14 my interview partners are active members in the committee that organizes the political and civic activities of the Madjermanes, and eight of my interview partners are living in Maputo, one in Germany. From all the contract workers I interviewed, only one worked less than seven years in the GDR. Therefore, the study particularly depicts the experiences of those who went on several contracts, those who spent a significant part of their youth in Germany. In regard to my source material it has also become a study that is primarily about the experiences of Mozambican men.45 The constraints and control that Mozambican women experienced took place in the same space, but their personal, sexual and political concerns were also very different—research on the particular experiences of female contract workers in the GDR is still outstanding and would be an important project to continue.46 However, contract workers, linguistically and in practice, were men and women. The way someone remembers the past shapes oral history. But it is also in the ethnographic practices of the historian who “can make ‘listen, record and narrate’” that the process of history-making reveals its fictive character.47 Oral sources, other than documents, are always acts.48 They result from the interaction between the researcher and the narrator. It would be negligent to ignore the heavily constructed character of oral histories. Instead, I like to say with Alessandro Portelli that “the narrators are the co-authors” of this text.49 I aim to incorporate Mozambican voices into the inner-German discourse and have therefore refrained from interviewing former East German authorities and colleagues. Here, the individual experience of Mozambicans comes into focus, and the local life-worlds of the GDR, or the “socialist world,” become pluralized.50 In the interpretation and comparison of the sources, of voices and archival documents, hermeneutics are involved. As the author of this text, I offer a particular reading of this history. I hope to mitigate the risk of presenting an authoritative account of the past by being aware that this story represents only a partial perspective. As Donna Haraway writes:

45 Mozambican women are less reported about in the archival documents. Unfortunately, I did not have the possibility to interview female contract worker of the time that stayed on several contracts. 46 I could not find an exact number of women who came as contract workers to Germany. Ibraimo Alberto writes that based on a report by SAL there were 1,522 Mozambican women living and working in East Germany in April 1990 (out of 15,895 in total). In Alberto, Leben wie die Götter, 142. According to Schönmeier among all Mozambican contract workers 10% were women and 90% men, in Schönmeier, “Qualifizierung,” in Die ‘Gastarbeiter’ der DDR, 207. 47 Munslow, The Routledge, 197. 48 Alessandro Portelli, The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2003), 14-16. 49 Ibid., 1. 50 Natalia Khanenko-Friesen and Gelinada Grinchenko, eds., Reclaiming the Personal: Oral History in Post-socialist Europe (Toronto, London: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 5. 15

The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly (…).51 I do not visit the sources with a neutral mind, neither do I have the intention to write a colorless report, I interpret the sources and craft a story—that could be told in various ways.

Methods

To develop a broader analytical perspective, we need ideas and theories that direct our thinking and asking in the ethnographic encounter, in the field as well as in the archive.52 We need theories that seek to understand how everyday life is accomplished and how social and spatial order is negotiated. The integration of theory into the analysis, I pursue by coding the transcripts, documents, events, and ask: “What might this be a case of?”53 Paul Atkinson guides one to search “for some larger class of phenomenon that it might represent or illuminate, some more generic process that give rise to a particular instance, or some underlying pattern that might give rise to our observation.“54 The interpretation of studied life is driven by moving back and forth between data and theory. Theories that inspire new questions or new observations must not be sociological in nature, they can derive from abstractions and personal experiences.55 In this dissertation, I set out to write a historical ethnography of company dormitories to understand the making of these spaces in historically situated contexts. In addition to speech and texts, an ethnography captures people’s activities and interaction “both formal and diffuse, of modes on control and constraint, of silence as well as assertion and defiance.”56 From an ethnographic perspective, buildings and landscapes can be read as texts and interpreted in relation to the power relations in which they exist.57 Some historians have maintained their

51 Donna Haraway, “Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective,” Feminist studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 586. 52 Paul Atkinson, Thinking ethnographically (London: Sage, 2017). 53 Atkinson describes this as “abductive reasoning” that originates in grounded theory approaches. Grounded theory has become a leading approach in the social sciences. Central to this approach is the aim of generating new theory from data, instead of testing existing theories. 54 Atkinson, Thinking ethnographically, 3. 55 Stefan Timmermans and Iddo Tavory, “Theory Construction in Qualitative Research: From Grounded Theory to Abductive Analysis,” Sociological Theory 30, no. 3 (2012): 174. 56 John and Jean Comarroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 11. 57 Ibid. 16 doubts and caution to use social theories to explain historical phenomena—to “sociologize” history.58 However, this study does not present history in the form of gross generalizations but rather in the form of a palimpsest of macro- and microhistories of everyday life.59 However, we should adopt the historian’s alertness and understand theories as “sensitizing concepts”60 that inform research but do not predefine the interpretation of one’s findings. In the first chapter, I will define some of the major theoretical concepts that assisted in the coding and interpretation of my findings, primarily the role of space and place in social relations.

58 Martha C. Howell and Walter Prevenier. Werkstatt des Historikers: eine Einführung in die historischen Methoden (Köln: Böhlau, 2004). 59 The dissertation follows the tradition of writing labor history as social history. This tradition is shaped by historians of the everyday that studied people’s experiences and perceptions of social structures and asked how they coped with and challenged social constraints. See, e.g. Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964); Kaletso E. Atkins, The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843-1900 (Ann Arbor: Portsmouth, London, 1993). 60 Atkinson, Timmermans and Tavory refer to Herbert Blumer, “What is Wrong with Social Theory?” American Sociological Review 18 (1954): 3-10. 17

Chapter 1: Modes of Producing Space

This dissertation charts the story of young Mozambicans brought together in East German company dormitories that created a home in a space of constant temporariness. The analysis of space acts as a lens through which to look at the practices of governments, local authorities, and the contract workers themselves. The use of dormitories and public spaces, and the social relations taking shape within them, formed migrants’ lives. The aim of the research is to explore the politics, formal and informal, loud and quiet, that produced the space contract workers inhabited. Space is constantly being produced in social practices.61 It is produced by the people themselves; they produce their lives, histories, consciousness as well as spaces. As such they also produce political dimensions of space that contain relations of power and ideology.62 Henri Lefebvre has emphasized the role of space in social reproduction and has offered maybe one of the most encompassing conceptualizations of space, by including “the space in and around the body (biological reproduction), the space of housing (the reproduction of labor force), and the public space of the city (the reproductions of social relations).”63 Spaces can be made out of bricks, and borders, housing and territory. But the concept of space denotes more than that, it entails “all possible spaces, whether abstract or real, mental or social.”64 Lefebvre’s theory offers a grip on the relationship between power, society and space. I follow Lefebvre in his conviction that ‘spatio-social’ analysis should “stress the use of space, its qualitative properties.”65 However, I do not purport to apply his theory to all aspects of my research, I draw loosely on various elements of his theory.66 With Lefebvre I understand space as socially produced in relation to

61 This observation goes back to Henri Lefebvre. See Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson- Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 62 Ibid., 68. 63 Hayden’s description of Lefebvre’s concept grounds the different scales in places or entities. Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place (London, Cambridge: MIT Press), 1995. 64 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 299. 65 Ibid., 404. 66 It remains to be said that Lefebvre’s analytical categories originated in a critique of capitalist societies and build on the legacy of Marxist ideas. On a short note, I find it important that Lefebvre maintained that state capitalism and state socialism are two types of systems with a “state mode of production” that is characterized by the logics of economic productivity and of the reproduction of the social relations of production. For a reading on how Lefebvre’s theory of space is shaped by Marxist analysis, see Stefan Kipfer, and Kanishka Goonewardena, “Urban Marxism and the post-

18 physical materiality, political-economic scales, and everyday practices of appropriation. Thinking society with Lefebvre as being structured through antagonisms and internal social conflicts, the challenge of studying space is to ask: Who produces space to what purpose? What is the role of space in this conflict? What kinds of spaces develop and how are they being transformed?67 The spaces of Mozambican migrants will be looked at by studying how producing this space was strategically used to further workers’ exploitation, control and subjection and simultaneously occupied through articulations of resistance against this process.

Politics of space

To analyze the spaces of Mozambican migrants, from the people who worked in the factories and mines of East Germany, from those who were sent by their own government to become a socialist vanguard of workers—involves politics. There are two different ways in which politics play into my analysis. On the one hand, politics refer to the strategies of the party and the state, the activities of Frelimo and SED officials, their policies and diplomatic relations, as well as the decisions of company directors in governing the contract workers’ space and livelihood. A limited access to space has often been one of the ways to constrain social reproduction and curtail the economic and political rights of a group.68 On the other hand, politics are activities associated with our everyday practices. It is about making choices and compromises based on social relations and the allocation of power and resources.69 In the context of dormitories, sharing an intimate and crowded space, sets off social processes to negotiate privacy and community that constitute a part of the politics of space. But what does it mean when politics are spatialized? What creates politics of space? Politics of space begin as soon as people inhabit spaces over time. Following Doreen Massey, we can assume that if spatial organization plays a role

colonial question: Henri Lefebvre and ‘colonisation’.” Historical Materialism 21, no. 2 (2013): 76-116; For an analysis of space in socialism with Lefebvre’s theory, see Daniel Kiss, Modeling Post-Socialist Urbanization. The Case of Budapest. (Berlin, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008).

67 Bernd Belina, Raum: Zu den Grundlagen eines historisch-geographischen Materialismus (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2013), 85. 68 Hayden, The Power of Place, 22. 69 It can be seen as the achievement of the women’s movement to have shown that the social arrangements structuring private life, such as intimacy and sexuality, as well as people’s access to the economy, should be seen as relations of power and subject to transformation. Cf. Craig Calhoun, ed., Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994), 206. 19 in the transformation of society “then space and the spatial are also implicated (…) in the production of history—and thus, potentially, in politics.”70 Politics are involved in all forms and scales of space that surround people’s lives. The lives of Mozambican migrants were shaped by the spaces of dormitories and workplaces, by public and private, physical and mental space, networks and territories. The politics of space I am concerned with, deal with the constant tension “between replication and transformation of social relations,” and therewith between the “acquiescence in the dominant oppressive order” or “resistance to that order.”71 How German and Mozambican authorities maintained control over spaces and the extent to which Mozambican migrants expanded the spaces they inhabited is at the core of my research. Here, the very potentiality of different spaces for empowering or limiting people’s actions comes into view. The notion of “expanding one’s space” is inspired by the scholarship of Mamphela Ramphele and Asef Bayat. In A Bed Called Home, Ramphele observed how South African migrant workers that were accommodated in, so called, hostels or compounds until the end of apartheid found individual and collective strategies to challenge the legitimacy of space constraints and assume greater control over their lives. Ramphele describes practical and imaginative strategies of South African hostel dwellers to expand the limited space of the hostel towards various simultaneous uses and experiences.72 In such a restricted space, she argues, people make “risk-taking affordable (…) by expanding their perceptions of the space around them as well as actually expanding that space.”73 Asef Bayat sees the practices of excluded groups to acquire basic necessities as a struggle to “expand their space.”74 This way of assuming power is not primarily about resistance or “gaining.”75 The politics of the urban poor who are the protagonists of Bayat’s study lie particularly in “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary,” a quiet activism that challenges the state’s power or the meaning of “order.”76 Bayat’s notion of “quiet encroachment” emerged out of a fine grained analysis of urban processes in the

70 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge, Malden: Policy Press, 1994), 254. 71 This conceptualization of the politics of space goes back to Mamphela Ramphele, A Bed Called Home: Life in the migrant labour hostels of Cape Town (Ohio, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and Ohio University Press, 1993), 126. 72 Ramphele, Bed Called Home, 13. 73 Ibid. 74 Asef Bayat, Life as Politics. How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 90. 75 Bayat, Politics of Life, 60. 76 Ibid., 56, 90. 20

Middle East and is not easily translatable into a different context. However, his way of including quiet and ordinary practices that aim to expand one’s space and livelihood in the study of politics are important for my understanding of the politics of space around company dormitories. As practices to expand one’s space I understand strategies to cope with space constraints, and to claim basic necessities, as well as collective actions that empower people by expanding their perspective.

From space to place

As mentioned earlier, the politics of space unfold on different scales. Place is one of them. What can be described as place are “local articulations” of a broader spatial phenomenon.77 Place has been a prominent concept to describe people’s emotional attachment to the built environment and local communities.78 In her book Global Heartland, Faranak Miraftab has studied how migrant communities inhabit, use, and produce places to challenge racial hierarchies in institutions and public spaces and to create a sense of belonging in their new homes.79 What she calls practices of “local placemaking” encompass the activities of migrants that are dedicated to being recognized, to actualizing one’s rights, and to creating a stable space to settle and make one’s own.80 All of these activities involve a politics of placemaking. By investing in place construction (through material, representational and symbolic activities) people “empower themselves by virtue of that investment.”81 People build an affective relationship to places that can become the basis of their politics and recognition. Miraftab argues that the possibilities and challenges in placemaking are inextricably bound to the local context and the materiality of places. An observation that lead her to offer the following conceptualization of place:

Though place is porous and open and its making needs to be understood beyond its territorial bounds and meanings, place also has specific physical and sociohistorical characteristics, a certain materiality (…) that

77 This definition goes back to Doreen Massey. She further expanded the understanding of place towards networks and affective relationships that cross the boundaries of regions and neighborhoods. But it remains that there is a particular power to place, because shared time comes in the form of shared proximity. Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 4. 78 There is an existential link between the self, place and experience. See, Irwin Altman and Setha M. Low, eds., Place Attachment (New York: Plenum Publishing, 1992). 79 Faranak Miraftab, Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives, and Local Placemaking (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016), Kindle. 80 Ibid. 81 David Harvey, “From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the condition of postmodernity,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Gobal Change, eds. John Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, Lisa Tickner (London: Routledge, 1993). 21

needs to be taken seriously. (…) I engage in a range of tiny everyday actions and practices that take place not only locally but also transnationally and are critically influenced by the materiality of the place in which they occur.82 In this scale of trans-local geographies, place matters in my analysis. As I will show it mattered to which place the workers were assigned to, whether it was a bigger city, such as Leipzig, Dresden or Berlin or the small towns and villages. The architecture and state of repair of the buildings themselves mattered, and many other aspects that comprise the materiality of place. The characteristics of a place include relations of race and labor, of production and social reproduction—all of these are central to the politics of placemaking.83

The human agent in flows of time-space

The phrase might seem bizarre, but human beings do ‘make their own geography’ as much as they ‘make their own history.’84 Anthony Giddens argues that space and time play a fundamental role in all social events—they are a condition of human action. He was committed to breaking down the dualisms between objectivism and subjectivism, of structure and action, micro- and macrosociology that were entrenched in social theory.85 Instead of privileging the individuum or the society in analysis, or another side of these dualisms, Giddens aims to understand how they relate to each other. The scholarship of Faranak Miraftab and Mamphela Ramphele follow Giddens’ call in their venture to study the “macro-worlds” of structural forces and political hierarchies expressed in and through space as well as to study everyday practices, the “micro-worlds” of people at the workplace, in neighborhoods and public spaces.86 Here, neither the “sovereign self” nor “stifling structures,” are privileged above the other. Faranak Miraftab relates these scales further to her positionality, neither aiming to adopt a perspective “from below” nor from a “from above” but to move “between and across vantage points and analytic scales.”87

82 Miraftab, Global Heartland, 13. 83 Ibid., 209. 84 Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge, Oxford: Polity Press, 1984), 363. 85 Markus Schroer, Räume, Orte, Grenzen: Auf dem Weg zu einer Soziologie des Raums (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013), 108. 86 Miraftab, Global Heartland, 209; Ramphele, Bed Called Home, 2. Ramphele makes an important contribution to the theorization of the macro-level dimension by pointing towards the larger space nationally and globally which has a significant impact on power relations. 87 Miraftab, Global Heartland, 14. 22

The social theory developed by Giddens is not only inspiring for my methodological approach but particularly relevant for the interpretation of my findings. The question of how I think space has implications and consequences for how I conceptualize historical actors and subsequently for the historical narration that I offer. Giddens stresses “structure as the medium and outcome” of social conduct, a concept he describes as the “duality of structure.”88 Central to this understanding of structure is that the individuum is able to consciously act within them. Social structures do not always overwhelm and oppose the agent but form part of social actions which leads to the development of new structures.89 Space can be differentiated according to the extent to which actors can organize them or not, by the possibilities and constraints that spaces create.90 This perspective on space allows the researcher to not be blind for power structures as well as physical and territorial limitations in which people act. Ramphele’s approach to politics of space in South African labor hostels and Miraftab’s way of studying the politics of placemaking in contemporary migrant communities constituted my personal handbook in studying the spaces of Mozambican migrants. Their ethnographic studies of migrants’ lives offer theories to understand the effect of struggles over spaces. The seeming contradiction between setting East German company dormitories in relation to the colonial space of hostels that aimed to systematically discriminate and exploit part of the population and to emphasize at the same time migrants’ agency as workers and migrants, indicates the ambivalence in which Mozambican contract workers lived.

88 Giddens, The Constitution of Society, 374. 89 See, Schroer, Räume, Orte, Grenzen, 109. 90 Ibid., 114-115. 23

Chapter 2: From Brotherhood to Exploitation

In April 1981 the Mozambican trade union collective of the VEB FAJAS Suhl held a speech in front of their colleagues on the occasion of the 10th Congress of the SED. The party congress set the direction for the coming years. The ritualistic affirmation of the achievements of the socialist state was combined with an agenda for how the party seeks to transform the GDR into an even more perfect society. The trade union speech was written according to the party template in a positive celebratory language that translates Erich Honecker’s “10 Points for the Economic Strategy”91 into the lives of the Mozambican contract workers.

We are proud to seize the future tools for our political and practical work in the country of Marx and Engels and we are happy to have such good friends at our side. (…) We, the Mozambican workers, follow the goal of our company collective to reach the highest output with the highest quality in production. In this light, we want to call upon every Mozambican citizen in the GDR. We want to do everything for our current home, the GDR, to reach the best results in the production and further improve our knowledge and capabilities (…) for that in Mozambique too, Socialism will triumph.92 It is an irony of history that in times when the promises of socialism could less and less be taken as a serious legitimation of the dictatorial state, they were used once more to exploit people. The mid-1970s is understood as a turning point from GDR historians. After the early years of Honecker’s rule the population was increasingly aware that things would not get better.93 After the party’s orientation towards a socialist consumerism in 1971, the import from goods from the West that was paralleled by the oil crises, put increasingly pressure on the East German economy.94 The East German economy was “creaking and groaning” in the 1980s.95 The state was bankrupt and the export of products was seen as the only solution to reduce the debt burden towards Western banks.96 On the 10th Congress the imperative was to rationalize the production, to raise the efficiency—a constant grow in productivity.97

91 Kurt Erdmann, Der X. Parteitag der SED (Köln: Edition Deutschland Archiv, 1980). 92 BArch DQ 3/634, “Erklärung zum X. Parteitag.” 93 Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship, 146. 94 Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte Deutschlands im 20. Jahrhundert (München: Beck, 2014), 1049, 1078. 95 Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship, 38. 96 Herbert, Geschichte Deutschlands, 1052. 97 Kurt Erdmann, Der X. Parteitag der SED, 41.

24

Workers for the planned production target

To meet the planned production target, the GDR was in constant need of workers.98 What first was the large-scale introduction of women into the workforce was constantly expanded towards citizens of befriended socialist countries—the contract workers.99 The participation of Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian citizens in the job market was followed by Algerian citizens in 1974, Cubans in 1978, and Mozambicans in 1979.100 To recruit workers from the European Comecon states became increasingly difficult and the number of workers stagnated towards the end of the 1970s. Besides the countries need for the workers at home, the discontent of the migrant workers regarding the working and living conditions in the GDR resulted in disagreements between the states.101 In the 1980s further agreements on contract work were settled with Vietnam in 1980, the Mongolian People’s Republic in 1982, and Angola in 1985.102 Among those groups of migrants from non- European countries Mozambicans represented the third largest group.103 The conditions of the stay were defined by bilateral government-to-government contracts that differed for each country. In the case of Mozambican contract workers, the employment followed a rotation principle according to which the stay was limited to four years.104 The subsequent immigration of one’s family was not possible, marriage with East German citizens was inhibited, and permanent residency was not allowed for.105 The contract workers were primarily appointed to heavy backbreaking and monotonous jobs and could be send back to their home country if their work ethic, discipline or general behavior did not please the companies and the Ministry of Work and Wages (SAL).106 The official language and framing of the contracts however praised the existing “friendship and antiimperialist solidarity” that would

98 Wolle, Die heile Welt, 227-230. 99 Herbert, Geschichte Deutschlands, 1059. By the end of the 1980s more than 90% of women in working age were employed. 100 Zwengel, “Kontrolle, Marginalität und Misstrauen?,” 4. 101 Eva-Maria Elsner and Lothar Elsner, Zwischen Nationalismus und Internationalismus. Über Ausländer und Ausländerpolitik in der DDR 1949-90 (Rostock: Norddeutscher Hochschulschriften Verlag), 39. 102 Zwengel, “Kontrolle, Marginalität und Misstrauen?,” 4. 103 Ibid. 104 Official government agreement, in Heyden et al., Mosambikanische Vertragsarbeiter, 335. 105 Zwengel, “Kontrolle, Marginalität und Misstrauen?,” 5. 106 Bernd Wagner, “Migrationspolitisch relevante Akteure in der DDR,” in Die ‘Gastarbeiter’ der DDR, 29. 25 shape the wish to build up an economic and scientific cooperation.107 Notwithstanding, the contract workers were seen by the GDR government primarily as a cheap workforce that could sustain the country’s economic productivity.108 In a period in which the German “workers’ and peasants’ state” developed more and more into a consumer and leisure society, the contract workers were presented with an image of the disciplined assiduous socialist worker they had to fulfil. The speech of the Mozambican trade union at FAJAS Suhl expresses how the need for high productivity in the GDR comes to the Mozambican workers with a responsibility to give their best. To “work” in the GDR is presented here as a motivating force, as motor for progress and socialism in Mozambique. That companies were using Mozambican contract workers primarily to fulfil the production target became more and more overt during the mid and late 1980s. My interviewees and several archival documents pointed at changes in the course of the program to reduce the time of education for learning German and for gaining a technical education. In the jargon of company reports this was framed as a joint agreement: “Due to the utmost critical situation in the lack of manpower the company director decided in consultation with the Mozambican workers that the deployment of workers in the production will start ahead of time.”109 Practically that meant that workers started working at the machines with very little knowledge of the and technical training was only granted few.

A workforce in the name of solidarity

The rhetoric of the trade union speech builds up on the much invoked “solidarity” between communist forces throughout the world. Whether it was in the form of credits, military support, education programs or work contracts, the exchanges between Mozambique and East Germany were always connected to benefits for both countries but cloaked in the language of a high-minded international solidarity and propaganda.110 However, the demonstration of solidarity with Mozambique

107 Official government agreement, in Heyden et al., Mosambikanische Vertragsarbeiter, 335. 108 The government-to-government contract was created with the primary goal to strengthen the economic benefit of the bilateral cooperation for the GDR. For an analysis of the contract negotiations, see Mende, “(Arbeits-) Migration.” 109 BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2, “Bericht zur Kontrollberatung,” Suhl, 14.10.1980. 110 A comprehensive history of the diplomatic and economic relationship between the GDR and Mozambique offered Hans-Joachim Döring, ‘Es geht um unsere Existenz’: Die Politik der DDR gegenüber der Dritten Welt am Beispiel von Mosambik und Äthiopien (Berlin: Christopher Links Verlag, 1999), 10- 13. 26 through aid and assistance needs to be seen as a key feature of a strategic foreign policy more than as a humanitarian act. The socialist oriented Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) was formed in 1962 to strengthen the resistance against Portuguese colonial power. From this moment onwards the relationship between the GDR and Frelimo grew in several directions. Between 1962 and 1989 East German aid to Mozambique amounted to 148.2 million DDM (37.9 million Euro).111 The solidarity with liberation movements and recently independent countries in fighting colonialism and racism was set in explicit contrast to the “neo- colonialism” of the West and expected, at least semantically, to be a relationship among equals.112 East Germany’s political emphasis on the fight against fascism and militarism of the West was stylized as parallel to the struggle of the colonized people against imperialism.113 The concept of international solidarity rested on the vision of a global humanitarian socialism.114 In the GDR itself, however the SED was eager to produce and maintain a homogenous society by strengthening German patriotism, and precluding alternative political ideas as well as foreigners from being part in this society.115 The contract workers had to live in the paradox created by the vision of a solidary universal proletariat and the exclusive construct of an ethnically and culturally homogenous East German socialist identity. Toni Weis emphasized that the concept of “solidarity” in the socialist world assumed the membership in a shared moral and political community.116 At the core of this community of shared values were ideals about “work” and the working class’ liberation. In this Marxist-Leninist thinking liberation meant also the transformation of people into modern workers, but without the oppression of the capitalist system.117 Mozambican contract work in the GDR was framed as a work

111 Jason Verber, “True to the Politics of FRELIMO: Teaching Socialism at the Schule der Freundschaft, 1981-90,” in Comrades of Color: East Germany in the World, ed. Quinn Slobodian, (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2015), 193. 112 Toni Weis, “The politics machine: On the concept of ‘solidarity’ in East German support for SWAPO,” Journal of Southern African Studies 37, no. 2 (2011): 352. 113 Verber, “True to the Politics of FRELIMO,” 191. 114 From the 1950’s onwards this principle was turned from its more ethical content towards a strategy in the “global cold war”, when friendship and solidarity aid was offered to Third World leaders to influence their choice of ideological allegiance with one of the superpowers. See Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3. 115 Alan L. Nothnagle, Building the East German Myth: Historical Mythology and Youth Propaganda in the German Democratic Republic, 1945-1989 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999). 116 Weis, “The politics machine,” 357. 117 Westad, The Global Cold War, 40. 27 and education program assisting the creation of a “socialist vanguard workforce.”118 Young Mozambicans who made the choice to migrate as students or worker- trainees sought to be part of the “international battle for decolonization, progress and development.”119 Of course, there were other, more pragmatic reasons too, such as escaping the civil war that was waged in Mozambique and personal aspirations for a good education and better socioeconomic status.120 However, being a worker, with its meaning in socialist societies, was an important narrative around contract work and is an important source of identity and self-confidence for Madjermanes until today.121 Values of solidarity were more than just rhetoric. They were a prominent theme in the public realm of the GDR and shaped the way in which Mozambican contract workers were received and perceived. In the GDR, the principle of “international solidarity” was integral to the identification with the country and the party.122 East German press reported regularly about the struggle for independence in Mozambique or the oppressive South African apartheid state, teaching “solidarity” was part of the education, and writing a postcard to Nelson Mandela or making a donation for the ANC, SWAPO or Frelimo can not only be seen merely as an expression of state-decreed solidarity.123 However, this did not necessarily mean that the political solidarity translated into a personal solidarity and care in relationships between Mozambicans and Germans. Quinn Slobodian interprets the depiction of internationalist solidarity in images and propaganda by the SED and argues that the “egalitarian racist motif” showing profiles of nonwhite workers and students on stamps and staged photography, reproduced stereotypes of phenotypical and folkloric difference.124 And he goes on to argue that “it was difficult to see foreigners and people of color beyond their status as two- dimensional icons of the dominant state ideology.”125 In popular representations

118 Schenck, “Socialist Solidarities and Their Afterlives,” 10. 119 Ibid. 120 Cf. Schenck, “From Luanda and Maputo to Berlin.” 121 Zeca described how he negotiated his salary with the director of a factory in Maputo in the early 1990’s: “I am technician, you are just director. That is a difference! Who produces? The director or the technician?” He asked to earn almost double the amount of the director’s salary. His argument rests on the appreciation of workers in socialism. Zeca, interview by author, 23 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique. 122 Döring, ‘Es geht um unsere Existenz,’ 9. 123 Weis, “The politics machine,“ 358; Ilona Schleicher and Hans-Georg Schleicher, Die DDR im südlichen Afrika: Solidarität und Kalter Krieg (: Institut für Afrika-Kunde, 1997). 124 Quinn Slobodian, “Socialist Chromatism: Race, Racism and the Racial Rainbow in East Germany,“ in Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World, ed. Quinn Slobodian, (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2015), 24-27. 125 Ibid., 32. 28 there was an absence of a complex or embodied realization of people of color.126 This section touched upon the complexities that lie in the GDR’s framing of contract work within the narrative of international solidarity. The discourse of solidarity has decidedly shaped people’s interaction with foreigners in the GDR. While the ways in which certain stereotypes and behaviors were elicited by the discourse of solidarity are difficult to ascertain, it has always been quite clear what this discourse does not mean, as Toni Weis sets out: an integration of foreigners into East German society.127 That racism did officially not exist in the sanctioned public sphere of the GDR further complicated the situation for foreigners, who consequentially experienced racism happening outside of praising speeches in the secrecy of everyday encounters. Further connected to the framing of contract workers as students of socialism was a paternalistic attitude of GDR citizens towards contract workers, a thinking that is visible in the language of the company reports, depicting educating Mozambican contract workers in better behaviors as their duty. Seeing their country as the “(big) brother” of young nations in the battle for socialist freedom, implied presenting a self-image of superiority.128

At the dark end of solidarity

In the north of Mozambique, in the province of Tete, lie enormous reserves of coal. A Portuguese company started extracting the coal as early as 1870. With the independence of Mozambique and the withdrawal of Portuguese specialists, the production of coal was difficult to sustain, being hazardous for the mine workers.129 The mining of coal in Moatize became the biggest project of GDR technical assistance in Mozambique. As one of the core motives of the GDR engagement in the Third World was their constant resource scarcity; developing the mining sector came to the officials’ satisfaction. Between 1978 and 1990 the GDR sent around 500 specialists to Moatize, among them engineers, miners, doctors and educators. What started as a prestigious project had early setbacks. The envisioned economic cooperation in Moatize failed and it were the contract workers who had to suffer

126 Cf. Ellaine Kelly, “Music for International Solidarity: Performances of Race and Otherness in the German Democratic Republic,” Twentieth-Century Music 16, no. 1 (2019): 137. 127 Weis, “The politics machine,” 364. 128 Anna Saunders, Honecker’s children: Youth and Patriotism in East(ern) Germany, 1979-2002 (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), 84. 129 Döring, ‘Es geht um unsere Existenz,’ 185. 29 part of the drawback. By the time Mozambique was in debt to the GDR.130 The deal on the economic cooperation in Moatize was the following: “The GDR receives up to 50% of the extracted coal as the main asset to the repayment of the credits.”131 Since the coal was extracted and transported under the most difficult situations of a country in civil war, the produced amount did not suffice to reduce the debt burden substantially.132 Hans-Joachim Döring suspects that the so called “transfers” of Mozambican contract workers to their home country were used to pay off the debt in the GDR right from the beginning of the program in 1979.133 The transfer payments (25%-60% of the workers’ wages) were enlisted as an output from Mozambican exports. Money, of which the workers were told, they will receive once they return to Mozambique. Documents from 1988 make evident how workers’ transfers were used and accounted for the reduction of Mozambique’s debt. At that time Mozambique requested the deferral of payment from all their donors. The GDR’s response was negative, their leaders proposed an increase in the number of contract workers to continue the payment.134 Following from there, the largest group of Mozambicans entered the GDR in 1988 with 6.464 workers coming at once.135 The agreement on “economic cooperation” turned out in many cases detrimental to Mozambique and further harmed its economy. From 1987 until 1990 Mozambique was supposed to pay 260 Mill. US Dollar to the GDR.136 The economic relations created practically colonial conditions.137 Mozambique became dependent from the GDR. At the same time the GDR created an image of itself as being a “motherland” for Mozambique.138 Contract work—a term that had already

130 The debt particularly grew from receiving machinery, arms, and complete industrial plants. In Ibid., 155. 131 VVS B 2359/82, “Beschluß des Präsidiums des Ministerrates,” cited in Döring, ‘Es geht um unsere Existenz’, 196. 132 The coal could not be transported to the seaport as the roads and rails were used as target in the civil war. On the history and context of GDR engagement in Moatize coal mining, see Döring, ‘Es geht um unsere Existenz.’ For a personal account of a GDR worker in Mozambique: Walter Grabner, “12 Jahre DDR-Beteiligung am Project ‘Steinkohle Moatize’,” in Wir haben Spuren hinterlassen! Die DDR in Mosambik, ed. Matthias Voß (Münster, Berlin: LIT, 2005), 216-270. 133 Ibid., 233. 134 Ibid., 235-237. 135 BArch DQ 3/1813, “Entwicklung des Einsatzes mocambiquanischer Werktätiger in der DDR;” BArch DQ 3/2131, “Protokoll zu Änderung und Ergänzung des Jahresprotokolls für 1988.” 136 Hans-Joachim Döring, “Durch Solidarität zur Verschuldung?” Der Überblick – Zeitschrift für ökumenische Begegnung und international Zusammenarbeit 3, no. 35 (1999). 137 Döring, ‘Es geht um unsere Existenz’, 177. 138 Döring, ‘Es geht um unsere Existenz’, 177. 30 been used by Frelimo’s Portuguese predecessors after the transition from slave labor was to become a renewed pillar of the state’s economy.139 The growing dependence was also connected to South Africa’s termination of the contracts on Mozambican migrant workers, which resulted in great financial losses for the state and the population.140 While “solidarity” was called out at every occasion, “solidarity” was the answer to problems that emerged, and “solidarity” was the answer to critical questions, this history can also be told as one of exploitation of a group of people by two states at the same time. Madjermanes accuse the governments of Mozambique and Germany of having treated them as so called “Staatssklaven” (state slaves).141 A restitution of the money that Mozambican contract workers had to transfer is not yet in view.

Mozambique’s bankruptcy and civil war

With untapped coal reserves that are estimated to be the largest worldwide, Moatize promised to bring new wealth into the country, again in 2011, when international companies took over the mining production.142 However, hopes in high revenues are toppling again, since persisting infrastructure constraints are further delaying the development.143 It is uncertain how much the Mozambican government will profit from the mining, but it is improbable that former contract workers will get their money back, from the time when the mining sector collapsed in the 1980s and they paid off the state’s debt. By 1981 the internal war between Renamo (Mozambican National Resistance) and Frelimo had intensified. The Frelimo led government needed more and more credits and military equipment. In these circumstances, many sides of production were shut down and the “cooperation” with the GDR in joint development projects eased up. The GDR carried out more and more the role of a creditor and arms

139 Héctor G. Hernandez, “Migration and Forced Labor in the Social Imaginary of Southern Mozambique, 1920-1964,” African Economic History, Vol. 44 (2016): 134. 140 Döring, ‘Es geht um unsere Existenz’, 231. 141 Written speech of Victor Mthembu, “Internationale Konferenz für Respekt und Anerkennung,” February 2019, shared with me by ATMA, Maputo. 142 Marta Barroso, “Mehr Kohle für alle in Mosambik,” DW, January 12, 2013, https://www.dw.com/de/mehr-kohle-für-alle-in-mosambik/a-16424267. 143 “The coal sector: a reality check,” The Economist, January 26, 2015, http://country.eiu.com/article.aspx?- articleid=1262750710&Country=Mozambique&topic=Economy_1. 31 supplier.144 The war between Frelimo and Renamo was further fueled by the dynamics of the ‘battle of systems’ and the flow of money and resources connected to it.145 The historical, political and economic causes that made contract workers to “state slaves” in their own words, forbids a single-edge allegation. The GDR government, itself entrapped in high debts, was rigid when it came to Mozambique’s incapacity to pay off their redemption rate. While Mozambique, the newly independent state, was caught in a civil war from 1977 to 1992. Frelimo had established a militarized totalitarian state.146 The power was centralized in the party leader, Samora Machel, who aspired to re-structure Mozambique, while insurgent attacks did not cease. Mozambican citizens were seized for the purposes of the government – for defense and production. The youth was largely pulled into military, thousands of people were sent to re-education camps, for forced labor.147 People were forcibly removed to live in fortified communal villages and were dictated to build up an agricultural production in the absence of adequate tools and infrastructure. In this climate of war and coercion “[t]he prospect of having to live in communal villages, work in state farms for meager salaries or no pay whatsoever, and the ravages of the war prompted many to seek a better life elsewhere.”148 The possibility to seek “education and work” in Cuba or Germany enabled one to escape the war for a couple of years and tempted to dream of a “better life”.149 Or in the words of my interviewee: “Well, somehow one had to make it. Either going out of the country, I mean South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia…or you have to go to the army. At that time, I saw the notification that young people can go to Germany and so on. I thought that would be better, to go to Germany! I gave my name and then

144 Döring, ‘Es geht um unsere Existenz’, 173. 145 It is relatively unknown that Mozambican opponents in the civil war were present in divided Germany. In West Germany, Renamo enjoyed organizational support from political circles and the state intelligence service. Heidelberg hosted a Renamo congress in 1988 and a permanent office was established in the city. It is difficult to evaluate how much weight the engagement of both Germanies had in the unfolding of the conflict. However, it is certain that the continuity of the war and the subsequent destabilization of the country ultimately reinforced Mozambique’s dependence. See, Stephen A. Emerson, The Battle for Mozambique: The Frelimo-Renamo Struggle 1977-1992 (Pinetown: 30° South, 2013) 146 João M. Cabrita, Mozambique: The Tortuous Road to Democracy (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 85. 147 Ibid., 93. 148 Ibid., 213. 149 This motivation to apply for contract work in the GDR was mentioned by the majority of my interviewees. Maneca said very explicitly in an interview: “My motivation to stay in Germany was the war. The big problem was the war, the war was much too hard.” Maneca, interview by author, 12 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique. 32 everything happened automatically.”150 Despite the personal motivations of the workers, in the state’s gaze the workers within the country and outside the country were a calculated factor in the centralized, militarized organization of the country. To illustrate how Mozambicans were deployed by their government Figure 2, on the next page, shows the many transfers of Adelino Massuvira João who was constantly reallocated in his function as an interpreter, a role Frelimo had chosen for him. When speaking of the unions of teachers, women, students or workers that were established as “mass democratic organization” Samora Machel reached out to them as the “army of the party.”151 Frelimo and OJM were operating in East Germany like they were operating in Mozambique, because contract workers played a crucial part in this “organization.” Contract workers’ lives and those of their families were contingent on a brutal civil war and economic deprivation emanating from pre- and post-colonial conditions and guided by the global rift of the cold war. This was the framework in which the exploitative character of contract work was conducted and legitimized. It constituted the logics by which the decisions of governments and local authorities were driven, and the precarious, conflictual situation of Mozambique that shaped the worker’s individual decisions and demeanors. Nonetheless, Mozambican contract workers were more than icons of an official discourse, they were more than “human motors.” They actively made a living in the GDR and asserted their agency despite the limitations they were facing from various sites. The following chapter depicts the contours of the spaces contract workers inhabited, their materiality and locations, as well as the hierarchies and discourses that surrounded them. Moving from one space to another, the following chapter invites the reader to imagine the spaces that contract workers crossed in their daily life.

150 Ibid. 151 In João M. Cabrita, Mozambique, 87. After Samora Machel died in a plane crash in 1986, he was succeeded by Joaquim Chissano who moved towards a mixed economy and abolished Mozambique’s identity as a socialist country. How the change in the government of Mozambique influenced the contract workers living conditions and their financial plight later on, can only be speculated, since no research has touched upon this issue to date. 33

Figure 2: An economic cooperation that shaped Adelino’s personal geography.

Cabo Delgado Rostock + Niassa + + Jarmen, Dec. 1980

+ + Nampula Tete Schwerin Straßburg, Feb. 1981 + Neubrandenburg

+

Zambezia Potsdam

Manica + Frankfurt Sofala Berlin Magdeburg + + +

+ Beira, Aug. 1982 +

+ Cottbus

Halle + Inhambane + Leipzig Dresden Gaza Sep. 1983, Neustadt in Sachsen

+ Erfurt + +

+ + + Maputo Suhl Gera Karl-Marx-Stadt

+ + Maputo, June 1980 Suhl, July 1987

150km 60km

East German administrative districts (Bezirke)

This map shows the transfers of Adelino Massuvira João who was sent to Provinces of Mozambique East Germany in the function of an interpreter. In Neustadt he had the + Capital of administrative possibility to receive an education as locksmith. In Beira he had to work as district (Bezirksstadt) an interpreter for East German technicians. In Suhl where he was positioned Chief town of province (capital da província) as a group leader he decided to settle after reunification.

Based on an interview by the author, 20 February 2019.

34 Chapter 3: The Contract Workers’ Space

Space figures as a medium that links and regulates parts of daily life, such as labor, leisure and dwelling. It acquires its meaning by how it becomes a means, a strategy, and condition of social practice.152 From company managers, Mozambican group leaders to neighbors and contract workers themselves, various actors were involved in organizing and producing the historical space of company dormitories. The chapter explores: In what way did physical materiality and the location of a place shaped day-to-day activities? What kind of atmospheres and qualities are connected to the spaces in the memories of the workers? And, how did the workers respond to the conditions of their housing? Practices and rationalities of control/discipline and resistance/adaptation come into view that created the limits and possibilities for placemaking in the dormitories and in public space. The depiction of company dormitories as ensuring “a culturally rich, aesthetic life and the reproduction of the forces” is debunked as ideological phrase that has little capacity to depict the space contract workers experienced.153

The workplace

Work structured the days of Mozambican contract workers and it is at the core of their memory. I was in a conversation with Maneca in the Jardim 28 de Maio when someone walked past saying in a perfect German: “Well, well in the old days we always had work, always lots of work, and now we can only go for walks, up and down.”154 Another day, when I was sitting together with some Madjermanes at the hairdresser’s stand, one of their colleagues kept running past us with big and heavy pouches on his back. He faced me, smiling with his toothless face, walked towards me, struggling with the heavy weight and said: “I have to work, you see! You see, always work.”155 While today, having had work and a profession in the GDR gives some of them a sense of pride, it also becomes clear that it was their main activity and sometimes also hardship. Looking back at the time Eusébio says, “In Germany

152 Belina, Raum, 122. 153 In the German original: “Die Ausstattung sichert ein kulturvolles, ästhetisches Leben und die Reproduktion der Kräfte.” In BArch DQ 3/636, Part 2, “Bericht über den Einsatz,” Suhl, 3.8.1981. 154 Fieldnotes by author, 12 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique. 155 Fieldnotes by author, 1 June 2018, Maputo, Mozambique. 35 we worked really hard. It was also not easy. I mean, I worked nearly always!” He gives it some laughter and adds, “You gain personality through hard work, too.”156 The individual contract worker had no say in his or her allocation of workplace. They could not decide either on the location nor the profession or task they were assigned. By arriving at a new place, the workers were handed over a company ID and a dormitory ID.157 At the same instant their passports were handed over from a Mozambican authority to the company director and locked into a safe until the end of the worker’s contract.158 From that moment onwards and for the coming four years the workers would “belong” to the company and therewith to the accommodation that was provided for them. One’s legal existence in East Germany depended on one’s place in the dormitory and at work. A core principle of the dormitory rules was that living outside of the collective accommodation was prohibited.159 Being always somehow in the working environment when being in the dormitory was central to the ways in which contact workers were managed. The two- or three-shift system that was in place in most of the factories regulated not only who would work when but also reduced the amount of people spending time in the dormitory at the same time. Dormitories were crowded places, often having ten rooms on a floor, and rooms were shared by two to sometimes six workers.160 Hence, the shift system was also an instrument to regulate workers lives in the dormitories. Regular days began with the German supervisors making a round through the rooms to wake up those who were working the morning shift and ensuring that they arrive on schedule.161 The first were to wake up around 5:00 a.m. and be at work around 7:00 a.m. the latest. To get to work often meant simply to cross the company site, or to go through the main gate. In other places workers were picked up from a private bus of the company and brought to work. At work Mozambican contract workers were part of a Brigade, a small community of workers.162 The

156 Eusébio, interview by author, 24 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique. 157 BArch, DQ 3/2133, “Rahmenrichtlinie zur Durchführung des Regierungsabkommens,” 01.07.1980. 158 BArch, DQ 3/2131, “Richtlinie zur Durchführung des Abkommens,” 31.10.1988; Contract workers also described this practice, e.g. Zeca, 23 April 2019. 159 BArch, DQ 3/2133, “Rahmenrichtlinie.” 160 According to the official directive up to four workers were allowed to share a room, however in lack of space, former contract workers reported to me that it could happen to share a room with up to six colleagues. BArch, DQ 3/2131, “Richtlinie.” 161 z, interview by author, 9 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique; Maneca, 12 April 2019. 162 In socialism the brigades had an important social function. Cf. Vietzke, Konfrontation und Kooperation. 36 workplace was the foremost environment in which Mozambicans got to know Germans. This was the space in which they encountered racist attitudes and degradation for the first time, but also the space in which they experienced workers’ companionship later on. One former group leader spoke to me about his weekly unannounced visits at the workplaces: “Yes, yes, every day, always conflicts. ‘My colleague from Mozambique did not clean up, my colleague from Germany did not clean up. He did that or that blah blah blah.’ There were always conflicts, we were young, we also wanted to have girls.”163 It was part of the tasks of a group leader to review Mozambicans’ work and to mediate when problems came up. His depiction of the everydayness of conflicts at work draws attention to the working environment as a space that was not just shaped by hard work, machines and hierarchies, but also one in which the contract workers had to assert oneself and settle disputes with their colleagues. Beyond that, the workplaces were also places in which Mozambicans learned German, flirted and found recognition for good work. When a brigade finished its shift, the foreman came to control the production results. “We had produced yarn and you had to put the yarn on the scale, so they know how much yarn you made.” Every day after work, each of the workers had to put the yarn he or she produced on the scale, Mozambicans and Germans alike, “that’s how it was,” says Maneca. In the GDR economy everything was counted in percentage, workers were under pressure to reach 100% or more.164 The production performance of the contract workers was also surveyed in the reports to German and Mozambican ministries. In the annual report from 1984 at FAJAS Suhl it is noted that “the work performance of our Mozambican colleagues can be regarded as good. Their norm fulfillment lies in the average of 98, 8%.”165 In the GDR those workers with an outstanding working discipline and production results were honored with certificates and could enjoy better treatment from authorities.166 That was particularly true for Mozambican contract workers. The sphere of production and the sphere of social reproduction were wedded to each other. The company

163 Lázaro, 9 April 2019. 164 Cf. Vietzke, Konfrontation und Kooperation, 24-25. 165 BArch DQ 3/636, Part 2, “Jahresbericht VEB Fahrzeug- und Jagdwaffenwerk Ernst Thälmann Suhl,” 9. 1. 1985. 166 The VEB Thüringer Schokoladenwerk praises in its report the positive effect of public comparison and appraisal of individual production results in increasing the productivity. This practice was not uncommon in order to create incentives to work hard. In BArch DQ 3/638, Part 2. 37 director was held responsible for the dormitory and monitored it accordingly.167 Those with an exemplary work discipline were often less rigidly controlled in their free time—they could better get away with it.168 This organization of work, the supervisory surveillance by several authorities and the incentives, made it vital for Mozambican contract workers to work hard. Negative reports on one’s performance could cause trouble with Frelimo officials, and above that always lingered the fear to be sent back to Mozambique.169 The other part of the group went to work when their colleagues already came home from their day work. “Those people that did the night shift could have breakfast and lunch at home, and after 1:00 p.m. they went to the company, started working at 2:00 p.m., and worked until 8:00 p.m. That’s how it always was.”170 Raimundo remembers the work schedule as if it had been yesterday. Albeit the regularity of the shift system was constantly subverted by the extra shifts served by the contract workers. These were based on individual agreements between the company directors and the workers and sidestepped the government-to- government contracts. Workers had their own interest in doing extra shifts since these were the only hours of their work they were fully paid.

You didn’t pay breakfast and lunch, that was all free for the extra shift. And you got 100% of the earned income of that day straight in your pocket. If you did that on two weekends, two Saturdays, you had exactly the same amount as the worker-trainees at the end of the month…you could buy something for yourself, something nice, a nice perfume, and the rest of the money you could send to your family in Mozambique.171 At the end of the week the company often announced that the plan has not yet been fulfilled and that the work must be continued. The archive documents that Mozambican workers were in some cases also working double shifts.172 The

167 BArch, DQ 3/2133, “Rahmenrichtlinie.” 168 This becomes apparent in reports of rule violations in the archive. If the worker is known as always fulfilling the production norm his/her mistake is more likely to be excused. It is also an experience Zeca shared with me, in Zeca, 23 April 2019. 169 In the early years of the program workers were afraid to be put in prison back in Mozambique, if they had “caused trouble” and were send back. In Alberto, Leben wie die Götter, 109. More spread however was the fear to have to go into army when being send back, as Maneca and Eusébio expressed in the interviews. Removal could only take place when the Mozambican representative agreed. However, archival documents suggest that they seldomly objected to it, probably due to Mozambique’s less powerful position. 170 Raimundo, interview by author, 25 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique. 171 Zeca, 23 April 2019. Zeca even sold his vacation to the company. He worked the days of his vacation to make a bigger income. 172 BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2, “Protokoll über die am 11.3.1981 durchgeführte Kontrollberatung.” 38 company needed people to work, and Mozambicans needed money for a better livelihood and for the support of their families. However, working an extra shift was a choice only to a certain extent. Workers were under pressure to comply. Adelino describes the practice of working overtime in relation to their accommodation:

Well, yes, we didn’t have neighbors. The neighbors, the inhabitants were in the city center and we, we were really at the outskirts, and next to the company. This was probably how we were needed. We were employed how we were needed, when our [German] colleagues had gone home, and the production halted, the production manager came over to the dormitory. ‘The machine can’t stand, come on and do it!’—Like, working overtime.173 In his reflection the location of the dormitory at the factory premises made up an integral part of the system that encompassed their lives and created the conditions of their exploitation. Through company dormitories one’s private life and social reproduction could not be disconnected from the sphere of production.

The hotplates and showers

When the workers were getting ready for their shift bathrooms were crowded. In most of the accommodations there were one, sometimes two, bathrooms on a hallway shared by all. In those buildings that used to be for worker-trainees it was common to have a collective shower room, around six urinals (in the men’s tract) and two to three toilets in a bathroom.174 The impossibility to use the bathroom in private reflects the workers’ struggles to live a dignified life in the dormitories. And when the workers had a female visitor over, which bathroom could she use? From the perspective of the authorities that is reflected in the archive the greatest problem about the bathrooms were to keep them clean. They established rules prescribing how often the bathrooms should be cleaned. Trying to keep them sterile they established such rules as “personal toiletries have to be taken back to one’s room each time” and “the bathroom should only be entered with bathing shoes.”175 Beyond the difficulties to keep the bathrooms clean with so many people using

173 Adelino, 20 February 2019. 174 Observation from visiting former worker-trainee dormitories in East Germany that were built along a normed blueprint. 175 BArch DQ 3/638, Part 2, “Protokoll über das Ergebnis der Kontrolberatung Papierfabrik Dreiwerden am 19.2.1981.” 39 them, the facilities were sometimes not sufficient for the size of the group and did not even fulfill the norm.176 The reports of FAJAS Suhl entail several instances of showers and basins being out of order because drains are blocked.177 The fact that the notice found its way into the report, suggests that the drains were not quickly fixed. The lack in basic facilities is equally blatant in the provisions of the communal kitchens in the dormitories. In the dormitory of the brick factory Zehdenick the number of stoves was planned to be augmented from two to three stoves for thirty contract workers.178 Several other reports note that the capacity for cooking is limited due to defunct hotplates.179 In many companies it was earmarked that the workers were dining in the factory canteen. The price for the food provision was directly deducted from their wages regardless of whether they preferred to cook for themselves or make use of the canteen.180 The reports suggest that firstly, the dormitories were ill-equipped for allowing the workers to prepare their own food. Secondly, hotplates were often defunct. Authorities saw the lack of experience and care of Mozambicans with electric stoves as the main problem. From this position they, thirdly, were often unwilling to enhance and repair kitchen facilities.181 At the dormitory Schimmersburg were no kitchen facilities were installed at all workers protested by collectively refusing the canteen food, throwing it in front of the canteen staff and entering the company kitchen, taking pots and pans and cook for themselves.182 They demanded to be able to cook their own food. The anger that was involved in their revolt against canteen food shows how much it mattered to be able to make one’s own food. With being able to cook for oneself also comes a feeling of independence, it means that one has a choice where, what and with whom one wants to eat. German food was not to everyone’s taste and hence being able to cook Mozambican food in their own kitchen was important for workers’ wellbeing.183 However, being able

176 “Number of showers need to be increased” in DQ 3/638, Part 2, “Niederschrift über die Kontrollberatung am 25.7.1980;” “Sanitary facilities do not correspond to the number of workers” in Ibid., “Protokoll über die Aussprache im Wohnheim Schimmersburg am 2.2.1983.” 177 DQ 3/636, Part 2. 178 BArch DQ 3/634, Part 1, “Protokoll,” Zehdenick, 25.02.1981. 179 BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2. 180 Zeca, 23 April 2019; Lazáro, 9 April 2019. 181 One of the spurious arguments found in the documents is the insufficient cable size, see BArch DQ 3/638, Part 2, handwritten note, 20.01.1983; The general tone of accusation in several notes on defunct hotplates further suggests that authorities did not regarded functioning stoves as part of their responsibility. 182 BArch DQ 3/638, Part 2, “Brief des Generaldirektors an Genossin Popp,” Saalfeld, 26.10.1982. 183 Zeca, 23 April 2019. 40 to cook in the communal kitchen did not yet represent everyone’s individual choice. And, cooking was only allowed in the communal kitchen. Reports convey that this rule was challenged by workers who had bought themselves a small hotplate and wanted to cook in their room. Whether the workers cooked in their rooms or not, they usually took their food to the room.184 We can suspect that rooms often fulfilled the function of small households. As the space in the kitchen was often scarce, Maneca and Adelino describe how they arranged a rotation principle among those sharing a room and then everyone took turns with cooking. For the group of contract workers at Schimmersburg the fight for receiving a kitchen lasted three years. Two months before they had collectively stormed the canteen kitchen, several workers refused to receive the meal voucher that were introduced by the company management to have a better control over food rationing. “They aimed to force the serving of food without meal voucher,” wrote the company director who saw the activity as an act of rebellion.185 The workers took collective action after they were no longer willing to accept not being able to cook for themselves. The fact that electric stoves were scarce in a large number of dormitories and nonexistent in some shows the curtailment of the domestic character of the workers’ space. Where kitchen facilities were accessible workers had to find arrangements due to the insufficient space and number of stoves. The negotiations over the use of communal facilities form part of the politics of space that shaped the workers’ daily lives.

The buildings

The very materiality of company dormitories had an impact on the social processes inside the dormitory and posed either barriers to a self-determined life or possibilities. Dormitory rules were the same everywhere, but the size of the building and the amount of people sharing the space, its location and connection to public transport were different. I will present the three types that occurred most often throughout my research. The typology of company dormitories that resulted from it, sheds light on how the accommodations were used to segregate contract workers.

184 Eusébio, 24 April 2019. 185 BArch DQ 3/638, Part 2, “Informationen über ein außergewöhnliches Vorkommnis,” Saalfeld, 03.08.1982. 41

Worker-Trainee Dormitories (Lehrlingswohnheim): These buildings built for the purpose to house worker-trainees were often converted into contract worker dormitories.186 The rooms were planned for accommodating two to three persons, the building had collective bathrooms, thick walls against noise pollution, and a reception at the entrance to control who comes in and at what time. Worker- trainees were commonly under eighteen and were closely supervised at the dormitories. The architecture to control and to house a large amount of people was therefore already given. Those buildings were mostly adjacent to the company site and therefore rather at the outskirts of villages and cities. Regular Apartments and Worker Dormitories (Arbeiterwohnheim): These, usually, prefabricated buildings were larger and comprised either several small flats or rooms with private bathrooms. However, also if not constructed with this purpose several workers had to share rooms and flats. In some cases contract workers from different nationalities were housed in the same building, with each nationality occupying either one floor or one entrance—following the GDR rule of a strict division of nationalities. The archive suggests that this type of building was sometimes newly constructed for the purpose of housing contract workers. In that case they were located at the outskirt of cities.187 When regular apartment buildings were converted into worker dormitories they were usually within more central residential areas. Worker dormitories were usually the largest in comparison with other types. The size of the dormitory could have an effect on the amount of control, as Eusébio reports: “Well there were also such dormitories as in Riesa that was for the workers of the steel mill. It was an enormous building, a huge dormitory, and there the supervisors had no control at all. You could sleep over wherever you wanted. You could stay there for a month.” Functional buildings converted into dormitories: The GDR had a constant scarcity in infrastructure and housing provision, partly also due to the shortage of raw materials.188 We can assume that those buildings that were reused to accommodate contract workers were rather unattractive, probably former or

186 The three different types, their location, and structure are based on descriptions of the buildings in archival documents and complemented with information gained through interviews and observations at the sites. For pictures of dormitories, see Appendix, p. 99-101. 187 Also reported in a contract worker’s biography, see Alberto, Leben wie die Götter, 137. 188 Cf. Annemarie Sammartino, “The New Socialist Man in the Plattenbau: The East German Housing Program and the Development of the Socialist Way of Life,” Journal of Urban History 44, no. 1 (2018): 79. 42 temporary vacant spaces. Very different sorts of buildings were converted into dormitories, so it is worthwhile to offer some examples. In the small city Dornburg- Camburg in the north of Jena the Old Castle rebuilt last in 1522 under the Duke of Saxony had been used to accommodate contract workers. The building, standing out from the tip of the hill, was far from other residential areas and when the workers moved in, already in a process of decay. As the curator of the Thuringian castles confirmed to me in a letter: “At that time the castle was already in great need of rehabilitation and neither a representative nor a comfortable accommodation— rather an emergency solution (Notlösung).”189 Castles were generally not regarded an historic or cultural importance in East Germany.190 Another example is the vacation and schooling home “Schimmersburg” near Langenorla. The vacation home of the state-owned chocolate factory Saalfeld was used for around three years as company dormitory for Mozambican contract workers. The old building stood in the midst of fields and forest, more than two kilometers away from the next village. The building did not only lack access to public spaces and shopping opportunities but even the most basic facilities. A communal kitchen was not realized for years though constantly requested by the workers.191 Another kind of building that had been used were Baracken (barracks), usually makeshift one-story buildings that had been used as offices or storages before.192 Similar to other types of buildings the barracks were rather located in industrial areas. Of particular importance in the buildings used as dormitories was that supervisors could maintain a visual control over who passes the entrance to limit possibilities to circumvent supervisors. In several company reports changes of the architecture of the “entrance zone” of buildings are announced that should enable a better “organization and overview for the control- and entrance ministration.”193 The authorities of the dormitory in Zehdenick found it necessary to build a fence

189 Dr. Franz Nagel, email to the author, 16 April 2019. 190 Owners of castles had been expropriated in 1945. Since their former residents were usually seen as exploiter or fascists in East Germany, castles were not regarded worthwhile to preserve. Several castles were reused as e.g. asylums, hospitals or warehouses. See, Matthias Donath, “Schlösser im Osten,” MDR, December 4, 2014, https://www.mdr.de/heute-imosten/schloss_- interview100.html. 191 BArch DQ 3/638, Part 2, “Protokoll über die Aussprache mit den moc. Werktätigen zur Frage der Selbstversorgung im Wohnheim Schimmersburg,” 02.02.1983. 192 Reported by Manuel A. in “Viele habe ich erkannt: Gedächtnisprotokoll eines Kontraktarbeiters aus Hoyerswerda,” video file, online documentation Hoyerswerda 1991, directed by Helmut Dietrich, Lars Maibaum, Julia Oelkers, 1992, https://www.hoyerswerda- 1991.de/1991/betroffene.html; Adelino, 20 February 2019. 193 BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2, “Jahresbericht 1983.” For another example, see BArch DQ 3/636, “Bericht der bisherigen Tätigkeit,” 08.04.1981. 43 around the building to make access difficult from different directions.194 When taking into account the general need of refurbishment of many of the buildings the primacy given to changes of the entrance shows that East German authorities were prone to invest for a better control of the workers while neglecting in many cases the need for better living conditions inside the dormitories.

Differentials within spaces

At this point however it is also important to show some of the contrasting cases and positive exceptions in the nature of space at the dormitories. Reading between the lines of some of the reports, there have been cases in which company and dormitory directors actively tried to ameliorate the workers living conditions in the dormitories. In Zeulenroda a company director decided to build an entire new worker dormitory (Arbeiterwohnheim) for his Mozambican workers. When Zeca tells the story of the director, he speaks of him as a friend, as someone who valued his and his colleagues work. After four years of living in the worker-trainee dormitory and always sharing rooms, the workers could move into the new house in which everyone had a room for themselves with a kitchen counter. “Everyone had their own key and cleaning and these things…we coordinated ourselves…there was no control anymore: ‘What time are you coming home?’ That was no more. We were adult boys.” And Zeca says, “we didn’t demand it, it was him. It was the idea of the director: ‘We have to set these people free, now they are earning money…’” In their new homes, “life was good.” When a new group of Mozambican contract workers arrived Zeca told them “How you lived in Leipzig that has nothing to do with how we live here! Here, everyone lives his private life.” In other places it was particularly those workers who had received an education in their companies, those who carried the title Facharbeiter (skilled worker), those who had become Meister (foremen) and the group leaders and interpreters that could change for better accommodations. In Hoyerswerda skilled workers were assigned a private room. Above that the company felt responsible for providing space for couples to live together. David reports, that if one had a girlfriend “he had to tell where she lives and what she does and so on and so forth and then the company

194 BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2, “Protokoll zur Vorkontrolle,” 25.02.1981; The same kind of argumentation was made when a fence was planned to encircle the dormitory in Suhl-Heinrichs, in “Protokoll der Beratung des 1. Stellvertreters des Generaldirektors mit der Gruppenleitung am 17.03.1989,” 4-94-1221, Sign. 3351, Landesarchiv Thüringen. 44 organized you a room.”195 Those could also be outside of the dormitory in regular residential buildings.

A space of segregation

Zeca’s story of the company director that personally takes care about improving the workers’ living conditions stands out from the voices of other contract workers and archival documents that comment on the conditions and locations of company dormitories. Despite some exceptions, company dormitories have not only been put aside geographically, located at the outskirts, but also put aside in terms of care and regard. The living conditions in company dormitories can be understood as signaling that contract workers were not regarded as people of equal rights (as the contract pledged) but discriminated against. The living conditions created by the housing of contract workers and its asserted temporariness defined the migrants as ‘outsiders’ more than ‘guests’. Those who could not leave the dormitory for their girlfriend’s place (at least for some time) were forced to live in the poor environment of the dormitory. The physical materiality of company dormitories limited possibilities of placemaking and posed a barrier to the workers well-being. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that, as Eusébio says, each dormitory was different particularly because they varied on how strict the rules were handled, and on whether the German and the Mozambican authorities in the dormitory had become one’s friend or one’s foe. Different areas and different dormitories had their own challenges, but it is important to keep in mind the agency of those inhabiting them. How workers found creative strategies to cope with the constraints in the quality and the quantity of space they had available will be discussed in the following.

195 David, interview by author, 11 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique. 45

1. 2.

3. 4. Figure 3: The newly built company dormitory at Suhl-Heinrichs and Mozambican contract workers at VEB Fajas (1979-1981).

1. The dormitory’s supervisors leaning out of the window. 2. Mozambican Minister of Work and Justice visiting a dormitory room. 3. The dormitory in its neighborhood with the factory building in its back. 4. Part of the group of Mozambican contract workers that live and work in Suhl-Heinrichs.

46 5. 6.

7. 8. Figure 4: Daily Life at VEB Fajas and the visit of a Mozambican minister (early 1980s).

5. The workers sitting in front of the dormitory. 6. Dining in the company’s canteen. 7. Singing the national anthem on the occasion of the minister’s visit in front of the building. 8. Assembly of Mozambican contract workers.

47 The bed and a niche for oneself

Everyone owns a bed

There was one space in the dormitory that was everyone’s private space—one’s bed. It was not private in the sense of being a retreat from company or observation, but it belonged to oneself for the time of the contract. “Well, I can’t say that everyone had a room, everyone had a bed.”196 According to the official directive every worker received a bed, bedcover, bedlinen, two towels and a locker.197 For some, moving into a solid house and sleeping on a mattress was something new and something they first experienced as comfortable.198 But with the time the workers wanted to make their room, or their part of the room, more their own and change it according to their needs.

Designing, well, it was our…one has to maintain some privacy and that is why people used their wardrobes to put them in between and put up bedlinen to divide the rooms, to have something like a private sphere. In the center of the room then we put the table and chairs, everyone really with their small suitcase…I have the feeling that really once one settled in like that, with such a nook, that one felt at home in this room.199 Adelino describes how the nook of a room became one’s private space. To move the furniture around and virtually create partitions could effectively make a change for the people inhabiting the rooms. But it always depended upon the dormitory management if this practice was tolerated. In some places the rooms were strictly controlled according to orderliness and their compliance with fire safety regulations.200 Adelino was the only one of my interviewees who could tell of such practice. However, the reports give clues that the practice occurred in other places, too. In Dessau authorities complain that Mozambican workers insist on receiving more bedlinen, though they have already provided three sets per bed.201 A similar comment is found in the reports of the dormitory in Hinrichs where “it has proved difficult to secure a sufficient amount of towels and bedding for the need of the Mozambican workers.”202 Workers creative ways to draw boundaries through the room can

196 Adelino, 20 February 2019. 197 Source cited in Weyhe, Madgermanes, 27. 198 Ibid.; Alberto, Leben wie die Götter. 199 Adelino, 20 February 2019. 200 As documented for the dormitory “1. Mai” in Erfurt: “The colleagues want to furnish and design their rooms more individually. We conceded to these wishes. However, norms of hygiene and security must prevail.” BArch DQ 3/637, “Kontrollbericht,” Erfurt, 02.09.1982. Several examples of this practice, in DQ 3/634, Part 2. 201 DQ 3/636, “Ergänzung des Kontrollberichtes vom 10.10.1982,” Dessau. 202 DQ 3/634 “Bericht zur Kontrollberatung am 25.11.1981,” Rüdersdorf. 48 be seen as a strategy to cope with space constrains and to create a niche of home in an environment that aimed to prevent precisely that.203

Redesigning one’s nook maintaining ‘order and cleanliness’

To make a place for oneself through tiny interventions was always in conflict with dormitory rules. Another way of designing one’s nook according to one’s own desire was to hang up posters on the wall. In Raimundo’s photo album of the time are several pictures of his room corner with his bed and shelf. On the flowery wallpaper that was common at the time sticks an image of Katharina Witt, a figure skater, and of other East German stars. These minor changes of the room that allowed the workers to have a feeling of individuality yet violated the dormitory rules. “It is not allowed to put nails in the lockers or walls and to paint them,” was one of the common principles.204 Asking Raimundo how the dormitory manager handled this rule, he says “yes, it was forbidden, yes, but with the time…” and Eusébio responds with a grin on his face “our room, more private, yes we changed some things. That was just not good for the dormitory manager…. ‘We always have to paint this over and you stick these things again’,” he mimics the manager’s complaints. “But it was okay,” says Eusébio. The rooms changed over time. With the years the rooms were filled with personal belongings, fridges, and other furnishings. Things that made life easier in the dormitory and that they could take with them to Mozambique upon return. The workers were liable for the damages of the provided furniture which was considered Eigentum des Volkes (property of the people). Nonetheless, exchanging the furniture with one’s own was officially forbidden.205 Hence, the rooms filled, things piled up on top of each other. This development was annotated in the consultation of the company director with the group leader at VEB FAJAS: “The Mozambican youth increasingly buys high-quality consumption goods that, however, due to their size can’t be stored in the rooms without violating the principles of fire safety regulations.”206 With the time some dormitories started to allocate storage rooms for the goods.207 But such measures couldn’t conceal or thwart that workers were settling in.

203 Ramphele documented a similar practice in South African worker hostels. She writes, “in search for a semblance of privacy, some residents have made cloth or sacking curtains between beds.” Ramphele, Bed Called Home, 27. 204 DQ 3/638, Part 1, “Heimordnung.” 205 DQ 3/638, Part 1, “Heimordnung.” 206 “Protokoll über die Beratung des Generaldirektors am 29.6.1989,” 4-94-1221, Sign. 3351, Landesarchiv Thüringen, Meiningen, Germany. 207 This was realized after the abovementioned consultation and was also reported to me by several of my interviewees. 49

Mozambican contract workers were not only workforce and consumers, but young people making a living in a new environment and thereby they claimed spaces for themselves. The workers rooms were the only spaces inside the dormitories that entailed a sense of privacy. However, depending on the dormitory management, they were no less under control. That the rooms were not “theirs,” but always remained the property of the state was ensured by two central measures: Firstly, by what I call key politics. When leaving the dormitory one had to hand over his or her key at the reception of the dormitory, coming in one could receive the key in return.208 For all of the people sharing a room there was usually only one key, a second key of the room was with the supervisors, a third key with the dormitory manager.209 When the room was closed from the inside the key had to be taken out of the lock, so the room could always be opened from the outside.210 The key politics can also be seen as a demonstration of power by dormitory authorities. They resemble the handling of keys in hotels and simultaneously in places of control. Thereby the key politics in company dormitories communicate that workers were framed as ‘guests’ in the places that were becoming their home, and that they were not trusted. The second measure was the periodical room control according to rigorous conceptions of order and hygiene. The room ordinance in the dormitory of the paper factory Dreiwerden entailed: daily sweeping, daily dusting, making one’s bed, and putting private items into one’s locker when leaving the room.211 The group leader’s daily routine started with making a round through the rooms, sometimes on his own, sometimes with the dormitory manager. “Usually,” Lázaro says, “I looked into every room, if it’s okay.” Most important was the bed “that the bed was made properly and if the room was clean.” Again, it depended on many factors to what extent the rooms were controlled. Maneca and Zeca also tell me that with the time they took care of ‘order and cleanliness’ among themselves. To give one’s nook of the room something private and individual was not the easiest in this atmosphere of “room control.”

The place of music

Record players were a particular source of dispute between German authorities and the workers, and it had become a central feature of their lifestyle. Authorities created several rules in trying to ban the sound systems from the rooms but seemed to have realized after a

208 BArch, DQ 3/638, Part 1, “Heimordnung.” According to my interview partners that was a rule that was maintained during the entire time. 209 The regular practice described by Lázaro, 9 April 2019. 210 BArch, DQ 3/638, Part 1, “Heimordnung.” 211 Ibid.; BArch, DQ 3/638, Part 1, “Zimmerordnung.” 50 while that taking the record players away would cause too much trouble.212 Listening to music can be seen as another practice that produces place. Music possesses a “transformative effectivity, which disturbs the formal, measurable qualities (…) [of] space.”213 Beyond that, I propose to see the contract workers’ struggle for their music as a practice of placemaking. In sound lies the power to establish an emotional relation and familiarity with a place. Listening to music can connect one to the elsewhere or the local through shared rhythms and imaginaries. Music was a central element of daily life in the dormitory. “We listened to music from Mozambique and yeah we had…it was like a competition. Everyone put the music he wanted and then opened the windows.”214 Listening to music was a means to remember their Mozambican home and yet also a means to enter East German youth culture. They loved the Puhdys and Karate, popular East German bands of the time. And it happened not seldomly that one of my interviewees started to cite some lyrics of their songs during our conversation. Maneca describes how the record player was a symbol of having achieved something: “In the beginning, when we were trainees, we did not have the money to buy our own record player or something. We only had a small radio. But later we could buy our own radio and record player, we called it Deck (stereo system), everything together.” And he says smiling, “it had been really loud then.” Also, officially banned records circulated among East German and Mozambican youth. Zeca preferred hard rock music. Pink Floyd and the Dire Straits were his favorite bands. “When I was at home,” Zeca says, “I took my headphones and put my music.” You had to listen to it on headphones, “that’s how you had to do it.” “You couldn’t speak of Westmusik in public, otherwise it was said: “‘Who’s music? Who’s better? Who?’ and you said ‘Well, yes, the Puhdies, of course are the only….” The Puhdies were accepted from the Socialist Unity Party (SED), but punk and hard rock music were seen as an expression of chaos and individualism, an antithesis of collectivism and harmony, of the principles on which East German society should be built.215 Hence, listening to punk was seen as a provocation in the eyes of the state that criminalized any sort of subculture.

212 Justifications for a ban of personal players were that the building’s power grid would not suffice for so many devices or that fire safety regulations would prohibit the number of devices. 213 J. Ingham, M. Purvis, and D. B. Clarke. “Hearing Places, Making Spaces: Sonorous Geographies, Ephemeral Rhythms, and the Blackburn Warehouse Parties.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17, no. 3 (June 1999): 285. 214 Adelino, 20 February 2019. 215 Kate Gerrard, “Punk and the State of Youth in the GDR,” in Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc: Youth Cultures, Music, and the State in Russia and Eastern Europe, ed. William Jay Risch, (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015), 153. 51

Listening to music with one’s headphones could represent quiet moments of not conforming and created a space of freedom and dreams that the workers’ rooms were not admitted of. Listening to music could also expand one’s private space, shield oneself for a moment from roommates and other noises.

The broken windows

Seeing “destructions” as resistance

Looking at the contract workers interaction with the physical materiality of the dormitories and the traces they left on it, generates a testimony of its own. At the time, many of the buildings accommodating contract workers were in an advanced state of disrepair. Beyond their age and condition when workers moved in, the intense use of the buildings let to strong traces of usage and damages. Yet for the dormitory of Suhl-Heinrichs the reports file an amount of destruction of the dormitory property that cannot be sufficiently explained by intense use.216 In 1983 the director decided to hold the workers responsible for recourse and created a list of necessary repairs, among it: - Damages on 40 room doors: 2.780,- Mark - Damages on thermo glassed windows: 600,- Mark - Damage of chairs: 490,- Mark217 German authorities classified these as “willful” damages. They conclude from these occurrences that the group leader must in future be better instructed to “enforce order and discipline to assess particular activities in the dormitory and determine educational measures.”218 On a similar account, they demand a “better guidance” of the supervisors controlling the entrance and want to make structural changes to the entrance zone. Speculating about the incidence, I stumble upon the conclusion reached by the company director. Forty room doors were a large amount of room doors broken. To tighten measures of control on the workers movements as a reaction would make sense if the destruction of the doors were a strategy by the workers to challenge it. To destroy the lock of the room door made it possible to get into one’s room without asking for the key at the supervisors’ “reception”. Whether there was such a motivation behind the destruction can’t be ascertained. But it is likely that the destructions were related to negotiating and contesting

216 The destruction of windows and doors is documented for several subsequent years in BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2, and described by neighbors, in Landorf Scherzer, Die Fremden. 217 BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2, “Bericht über den Einsatz,” Suhl, 31.03.1983. 218 Ibid. 52 dormitory rules. In the dormitory Wolfen-Nord authorities reported: “To circumvent the control through the supervisors, flats are often closed off. Colleague J. intended to install a security lock.”219 Reading in Dunbar Moodie’s study of life in South African compounds, I came across a passage where he describes a similar phenomenon. Through his ethnographic observation he concluded that the violence against compound property is often a response to the “unjust or unresponsive” behavior of the authorities regarding the workers complaints. It was directed against compound property as “that represented the source of a grievance.”220 The destruction of property was thus not only an expression of discontent but at the same time a means to effectively strengthen the importance of a grievance. “If the complaint was about management injustices, compound offices might be destroyed (…). Breaking windows in the compound, however, was a standard expression of displeasure with white management.”221 In the result of such events, compound dwellers were given a hearing, because the authorities feared that the violence could escalate. Did Mozambican contract workers use the destruction of dormitory property as a lever against the management and demand the loosening of control? It is possible. But regardless of whether it resulted in the improvement of the workers’ situation it communicated a dissent. A dissent that comes across most strikingly in the archival note “On 29.9.1981 the front door of the dormitory manager was inscribed with ‘German pigs.’”222 Together with the “destruction of the people’s property” that took place over years, I read these incidents as an expression of grievance towards conditions in the company dormitory Suhl-Heinrichs.

Internal fights

Archival reports also document how fights among the workers caused damages within the dormitory and the destruction of furniture.223 The structural violence that pierced the contract workers’ lives is rather at the center of my observations, however it is important as well to have an awareness of the violence among Mozambican contract workers. Incidents of fights among the workers were understood by the authorities as being caused by either excessive consumption of alcohol or quarrels between colleagues of different regions. Ibraimo, speaking of the violence present in the dormitory, says “it was the narrowness, the

219 BArch DQ 3/636, “Vorlage für die Kontrollberatung am 5.6.1984,” Wolfen-Nord. 220 T. Dunbar Moodie, with Vivienne Ndatshe, Going for Gold: Men, Mines, and Migration (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 49. 221 Ibid. 222 BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2, “Bericht über den Einsatz,” Suhl, 30.11.1981. 223 BArch DQ 3/636, “Kontrollbericht,” Dessau, 1982. 53 many people, the constant noise, the stench and the monotony of life” for which fights became a valve. Despite the knowledge of the existence of violence among contract workers, it is difficult to make generalizations about it.224 But conflicts among the workers were a common phenomenon of which also my interviewees had stories to tell. Lázaro, who worked as group leader throughout the ten years of his stay in East Germany was often called to settle disputes that had started with “‘He stole my rice!’, or ‘Someone stole my watch!’.” There were always problems, he says, but when there were five, six people in one room it was worse, “then there were always problems, almost every day.” When everyone owns a bed in a shared room with roommates one cannot choose, the necessary arrangement and compromise easily leads to conflicts. Also, my interviewees describe that the source of conflict was often based in the animosities between different regions and ethnic groups that had prevailed in Mozambique. “Well, there was, yes there were conflicts and then the group leader had to bring these people together and say: ‘We are all important for Mozambique, not just you because you are from Gaza and you because you are from Inhambane, no, and here we are all foreigners, you and I!’ And so on and so forth…we had to do politics,” says David, former group leader of Hoyerswerda. With the independence of Mozambique, constructing the postcolonial nation as a unified community of people had become a core mission for the government of Samora Machel, and group leaders were instructed to teach that.225 According to my interviewees there were always some “troublemakers.” But it seems that the “politics” of the group leaders had a positive effect in this regard. The collective experience of, as David said to the workers ‘we are all foreigners’ welded together and it becomes apparent in the way my interviewees speak of ‘we,’ when sharing their memory, and of ‘we did it this way…’ that the differences among the workers in origin became less important. The Madjermanes of Maputo came from all regions of Mozambique and today their shared experiences of having lived in Germany, and the dormitories, draws them closer together than their regional ties.

The neighborhood

German citizens usually made themselves known through complaints and by a blatant disregard of the young Africans that had just moved into their neighborhood. Some

224 The conflicts among the workers have also been studied by Mende, “(Arbeits-) Migration,” 104. 225 Cf. Schenck, “Socialist Solidarities and Their Afterlives,” 3. This is very much in contrast to the aim of South African compound politics were tribal life and networks inside the compounds were strengthened to detain the proletarianization of workers and to reinforce workers’ status as migrants to the cities. 54 dormitories stood in industrial areas or amid plain fields, but others were adjacent to residential neighborhoods. However, having had German neighbors, seemed not to have made it easier for Mozambican workers to make a place in their new homes. In the first months after their arrival the workers spent most of their free time in the dormitories, but after a while they went out and explored their environment. Adelino and his group spent their first months in Jarmen, a small village with just around three hundred inhabitants and he speaks of how he experienced the environment as a young Mozambican:

It was cold, from the atmosphere…also from the climate, but I soon realized that there was a social coldness…In the surrounding, no one, nobody was interested in us. We were among us and people noticed, ‘ach, aha there are those young people.’ From a neighborhood…I can’t tell. There was no relationship. We were young, and I missed that young people would be interested in us. That they would say ‘Let’s play soccer together’ or something like that. That’s what I wished for. I was 19 at the time. But it wasn’t the case. Company dormitories were unlikely to be found in the popular living areas that young families and students moved into. Eusébio, who lived in several different dormitories, describes this to me from his perspective: “We were isolated, yes. There were not a lot of neighbors, if there were neighbors then like of old people rather…Then we had difficulties, yeah, because of our music.” That the sounds and noises posed a problem for the neighborhood has also been documented by Landorf Scherzer through the interviews he had done in the surrounding of the dormitory of VEB FAJAS in Suhl-Heinrichs. A neighbor told the author how he sometimes “cannot bear it any longer” when the Mozambican workers stand at the windows, have their music on and chat with each other, talk to those coming and going.226 In Suhl-Heinrichs were at times around 200 Mozambicans accomodated. It was situated in a very “idyllic and calm area” in the words of Adelino, group leader in Suhl- Heinrichs from 1987 to 1989. Almost after every weekend, Monday morning, Adelino was called in together with the dormitory manager to speak in front of the company director and give report about what had happened over the weekend, because neighbors had filed complaints, so called Eingaben (entries). “We explained: ‘Well yes there was a celebration, two or three celebrated their birthdays, we had friends visiting, but nothing happened, there was no fight or anything, we didn’t experience it as disturbance but as life.’ And then we had to go to the neighbors…to solicit for understanding and with the time, in the last years of 88’, 89’ there was some understanding. But it was a long way.” Adelino and the workers invited the neighbors to come visit them in the dormitory to create a better relationship. “But,” he says, “it was not

226 In Scherzer, Die Fremden, 19. 55 relaxed. It was to treat with caution. We wanted to invite them, but they didn’t dare to get to know us.” For East German citizens the sudden presence of black Africans in their neighborhood stirred up anxieties and hostility that were deeply grounded in racial prejudices. Often the noise and the perceived disorder around the dormitory were used as proxies for racist prejudices of local citizens.227 While comments that could potentially be accused of being racist were not voiced in public, cases of noise pollution could legitimately be reported. Controlling noise in the workplace and neighborhoods had become a key dimension of socialist welfare during the 1970s.228 At the time the noisy neighbor “emerged as a new ‘enemy of the people,’ as peace and quiet became popular yardsticks with which to measure residential harmony and socialist civilization.”229 The company dormitories that had become the home of Mozambican workers did not fit to meet this ideal model of private residential life. Hence, where the dormitory was located in a residential area, authorities and commissions were poured over with entries on noise pollution.230 The neighborhood in Suhl- Heinrichs still filed complaints in 1988, eight years after the first contract workers had moved in. It shows that they had yet not accepted their new neighbors. In most places the relationship of Mozambican workers with the neighborhood of the dormitories was rather shaped by conflict then by friendship. However, the Mozambican youth also listened to music outside of the four walls of the dormitory, in the bars and discos of East Germany, where the difficulties were of a different kind.

The dance floor

Paula and Luisa did not like the East German hits of the ‘80s very much. They preferred their own music to dance. In Frankfurt (Oder), the town in which both received their education as draughtswoman, they became locals in a pub that played “their” music. Berlin was just an hour train ride from Frankfurt, and the women regularly went to the airport to pick up the latest African records they had ordered others to bring with.231 They introduced

227 For further comments by neighbors, see Scherzer, Die Fremden. 228 Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press), 159-160. 229 Ibid., 160. 230 Also reported by the authorities in BArch DQ 3/638, “Bericht über den Einsatz im VEB Fotopapierwerk Dresden,” 21 June 1982; BArch DQ 3/637, “Kontrollbericht,” 27.3.1984. For a perspective from the neighborhood, see Scherzer, Die Fremden. “Many neighbors filed entries, apparently they are still being processed. There was another residents’ meeting about these problems. We can’t speak publicly about these things.” In Ibid., 20. 231 Paula and Luisa, interview by author, 24 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique. 56 new music into the pub scene of the city. had several pubs that welcomed Mozambicans and there was a disco Café Nord where they played Cuban music and the beer cost 50 pennies that was very popular among them.232 In the cities one simply had more choices. And that was not only about taste but also about having the chance to go out. Here, I seek to trace the nature of the larger space through which one could move and make place—from the dance floor to the city.

Regulating the dance floor

In smaller cities Mozambicans often faced restrictions on who and how many were allowed to go out. Suhl would qualify as a mid-size city. With around 50,000 inhabitants at the time, it was an aspiring industrial town.233 As a symbol of that it had built a restaurant and party complex with space for 250 people to dine and dance almost every day.234 It carried the name of the Russian town “Kaluga” in reference to the ‘international friendship’ between the countries.235 For Mozambicans however the international friendship was limited to a small number of workers. One company report of FAJAS Suhl from 1983 documents: “For the fulfilment of order and discipline the ticket sale for the pub ‘Kaluga’ has been restricted to 20 (…) per event for disciplined colleagues.”236 At that time around 141 Mozambican contract workers worked at FAJAS Suhl. Even after several years the agreement on restrictions between the Kaluga management and the company direction were maintained. By 1989 already 224 Mozambicans worked and lived in Suhl-Heinrichs.237 In the “cultural plan for Mozambican workers” from 1989 a similar formulation can be found, and it is added that every event will be accompanied by a person in charge for the control of order and security.238 Authorities did not document the reasons for those restrictions but listening to the voices of former contract workers, rivalry, among other things, caused conflicts between Mozambican and German men in bars and clubs.239 However, it is not my aim to further speculate about causes. To exclude Mozambicans from public spaces and control the

232 Alberto, Leben wie die Götter, 141. 233 Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, “Suhl,” accessed August 1, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/- w/index.php?title=Suhl&oldid=-908082798. 234 Werner Hertha, “Ein gastlicher Komplex und die Kaluga-Praline,” Freies Wort, Oct. 20, 2012. 235 Ibid. 236 BArch DQ 3/634, “Bericht über den Einsatz,” Suhl, 31.03.1983. 237 BArch DQ 3/2131, “Informationen zur Realisierung des Abkommens,” 30.04.1989. 238 “Kulturplan,” Suhl, 24.11.1988, 4-94-1221, Sign. 3351, Landesarchiv Thüringen, Meiningen, Germany. 239 Also documented by Saunders who adds to it that the jealousy for Mozambicans’ clothing further caused conflicts: “Contact with foreign workers in the GDR was thus often limited to brief encounters in public spaces such as shops, bars or discos, where jealousy towards foreigners who wore Western clothing and young males who flirted with East German girls often degenerated into abuse.” In Saunders, Honecker’s children, 85. 57 implementation of these rules represents a territorial strategy of segregation.240 By minimizing the number of workers in clubs and bars authorities sought to minimize conflicts without addressing racism. Further strategies of segregating Mozambicans in public spaces were sometimes implemented by the bars themselves.241 In the small neighborhood of Suhl- Heinrichs the one existing pub established an extra table designated “Reserved for Mozambican colleagues.”242 A German colleague of FAJAS commented on this practice towards Landorf Scherzer: “Mozambicans build a small island in the pub, just like in their daily lives.”243 The company’s restrictions on discos in Suhl were also thought as an incentive to do good work and behave well, but they were eventually dissolved. Adelino reports: “We realized that we exclude the youth. Where else shall they have gone?” Then he adds, “we all went to the disco, to Kaluga, Hotel Thüringen…we were allowed to, but not en masse (massenhaft).” After a while unwritten rules were formed to which the young migrants conformed. They had got to know their environment and weighed up the risks that were connected to going out. It meant to brake with the dormitory rule of having to be back by ten o’clock at night. Those rules however lost their strictness with time. But tensions between Mozambican and German men escalated in some places and brought about violent attacks. David, group leader in Hoyerswerda, tells me how going out had to be weighed up and planned to dodge struggles: “We were afraid to go by oneself to a pub, or a disco. But it was nice. We noticed it, already around 1980, we realized that there is a problem if you go alone. And we organized us, so two to four or six of us go together somewhere to a pub or to a disco. If we were ten or twenty men, that wasn’t a good idea, either.” “Not more than six”— that was the rule of thumb for going out. The growing violence that Mozambicans experienced in public spaces produced a space of segregation different to the regulated space of the dormitory. The presence of right-wing oriented skinheads that spawned in the capital and smaller towns and their attempts to intimidate also shaped space.244

240 As territorial strategy I understand, following Belina, exercise of control over a demarcated space by controlling who and what can enter and exit that space. Cf. Belina, Raum, 88. 241 Banning Mozambican contract workers from particular bars for a period of time is documented i.a. in BArch DQ 3/636, “Zusammenfassung der besonderen Vorkomnisse,” Dessau, 1982. In some places Mozambicans were dismissed by not being served. See, Mende, “(Arbeits-) Migration.” 242 Scherzer, Die Fremden, 92. 243 Ibid. 244 Gideon Botsch, “From Skinhead-Subculture to Radical Right Movement: The Development of a ‘National Opposition’ in East Germany,” Contemporary European History 21, no. 4 (2012): 553-73. 58

On risk aversion and small gains

How to move in public space and how to behave was a negotiation and required to be evaluated for each place Mozambicans visited. The struggle for physical integrity as well as for one’s presence and participation in the social life of cities and villages required different strategies and adaptations than the space of the dormitory. Eusébio lived in several places, in Meißen, Großschönau, and Kirchau. He tells me that he liked to go to a pub on his own or meet German friends. To my question whether he was ever afraid to go out he replies: “I never experienced these problems, but there were places where they had lots of problems.” In the places he lived, Eusébio could circumvent “the problem” of racist abuse. “I don’t go where I know, I can easily… or there are only asocial people—I simply don’t go. I go drink my beer, where I know I can, there is no problem.”245 However, also in his experience moving in public spaces was connected to precautions and considerations. But despite the constraints on integration into the society Mozambicans asserted their public presence in East German towns and villages. Circumventing particular places was part of this process just as claiming others for themselves. Interracial couples avoided spending much time in public spaces but in the privacy of one’s home or in the community of the dormitory they found places to dwell.246 Mozambicans often chose a nonconfrontational practice of making place. Living in villages and small towns had its particularities. There were less opportunities to do one’s own thing and to find places in which one didn’t stand out. Every activity of the migrants happened under the eyes of the company authorities and work colleagues. But the smaller size of the town and often the smaller size of the group that was connected to it created other opportunities. Maneca says in his East German village they didn’t have these “problems,” because “we were just a few” and the inhabitants got to know them. Many worked in the same company. One can assume that people got used to the Mozambicans’ presence in their hometowns, even if this did not correlate with integration. This holds also true for Suhl-Heinrichs, Adelino remembers:

In the meantime, we had a good reputation, because we went shopping there and sometimes when they had citrus fruits or bananas in the little corner shop, they thought of us, ‘We set something aside for you’ and we appreciated it, yes. There were sellers, particularly elder women, that viewed us as ‘their boys.’ But only in the last years.247

245 The term “asocial” (asozial) often featured in the GDR public and was used particularly by the state to persecute people whose lifestyle or behavior did not conform to socialist morals. 246 Alberto, Leben wie die Götter, 3; Eusébio, 24 April 2019. 247 Adelino, 20 February 2019. 59

When Zeca speaks of Zeulenroda his verbal appropriation, in speaking of ‘our’ places, transmits the close attachment he created: “We had our department store and our park.” Mozambicans made place in the act of being present in public space, and they built an attachment to the villages and cities that lied in front of their dormitories. But the grounds on which they moved were not stable and fix. Welcoming spaces had first to be found, negotiated on and sometimes struggled for.

The soccer pitch

This chapter studies the soccer pitch as an alternative space that Mozambicans created to live a self-determined life. Playing soccer belonged to everyday life in the dormitory. Finding a field to play on and creating teams were often the first activities that Mozambicans did for themselves—outside of the sphere of production. “We played every day, for those who wanted, with ten or fifteen of us,” says Lázaro. Mozambicans started to address the company management to support their activities, asked for a coach and jerseys.248 The preparation of the team followed matches against the company’s soccer team and others. Companies and group leaders organized tournaments with other Mozambican teams.249 The brown coal factory Borna organized an international championship with other teams of contract workers from Poland, Vietnam, the Soviet Union and the German workers.250 Playing soccer is part of how Madjermanes remember their youth in East Germany. As one former contract worker told a German television crew visiting the garden: “Parties on the weekends, and soccer, you drank beer, it was fun, many friendships—that was good.”251 The soccer pitch in many cases became an inclusive space where interracial and intercultural relations among men were possible and friendships began. Germans started to recruit Mozambican players for their teams. Those workers who found their closest friends among Germans found them among their team members.252 And then there were those Mozambicans for whom playing soccer became a second career. The East German state did

248 Lázaro, 9 April 2019; BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2, “Plan zur sinnvollen Freizeitgestaltung,” Suhl, 9.6.1981. 249 Some companies supported the contract workers’ initiatives in playing soccer, in other places the workers organized everything themselves, as described by Alberto, Leben wie die Götter, 134. 250 BArch DQ 3/636, Part 2, “Monatsbericht,” Borna, Oktober 1980; BArch DQ 3/638, Part 2, “Einschätzung über den Stand des Einsatzes,” Saalfeld, 26.09.1983. 251 Interview with Madjermanes in the garden, cited from Joana Jäschke, “Mosambik: Sehnsucht nach der DDR,” Das Erste, Oct. 5, 2014, https://www.daserste.de/information/politik- weltgeschehen/weltspiegel/sendung/br/mosambik-ddr-100.html. Also, in my own conversations with Madjermanes statements such as this were very common. 252 Zecca and Raimundo spent most of their free time playing soccer and after practice, they tell me, they hung out with their German friends and had some beers. 60 not admit non-citizens to join the DDR Oberliga (the high division of soccer) but Mozambicans were recruited by the best regional teams. Raimundo played in several teams, in that of his dormitory, in that of his company and in the district selection (Kreismannschaft). Proud of his achievements in the East German soccer world, he tells me how one day he played 210 minutes in a row. Until today he plays soccer with other older men of his neighborhood and oftentimes, he is not the only former contract worker on the pitch. For a contract worker such as Raimundo, who worked as a machine cleaner in East German factories for ten years without receiving training, soccer allowed him to feel recognized. His East German coach became his greatest supporter and they are friends until today. They still exchange opinions on Bundesliga games and stories of family life on WhatsApp and Facebook.253 In playing soccer Mozambican migrants and local citizens could create and negotiate a relationship that existed formally only in phrases of brotherhood and solidarity. The practice of playing soccer was also an expression of Mozambicans’ agency. It asserted their humanity and ‘sameness’ with the German colleagues. In the authorities’ minds, Mozambicans had to be educated in how to develop “useful leisure activities.”254 The paternalistic approach of East German authorities to control and educate Mozambican contract workers even in their free time was built, as Mende has shown, on a German feeling of superiority that was compatible to racialized colonial images of the alleged ‘inferior African’.255 The initiative and the successes of Mozambicans as soccer teams and individual athletes also countered the narrative that Mozambican contract workers are “unable” to participate in organized leisure activities of the companies because they do not “understand,” are “overstrained” by the diverse offers of the company and can’t “adhere to European discipline.”256 Beyond that soccer became “a critical means for claiming public space” for Mozambican contract workers.257 Faranak Miraftab sees in the activities of migrants around soccer “significant achievements in asserting immigrants’ rights” to their town.258 Following

253 Raimundo is Dortmund fan, since their jerseys have the same color as Dynamo Dresden used to have. He closely follows the German championship: “We have WLAN in the company where I work, when I am there, I can sit down and know everything about soccer. I was so happy that Dortmund was on the top, but it went down again, now its again.” 254 “Main concern in the political-ideological work with the Mozambican contract workers is the realization of the unity of learning and professional qualification in the sphere of the production and of meaningful leisure activities.” BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2, “Bericht über den Einsatz,” Suhl, 30.11.1981; Similarly formulated in BArch DQ 3/636, “Halbjahresmeldung,” Rietschen, 1980. 255 Mende, “(Arbeits-) Migration,” 112. 256 Quotes from interviews and archival sources cited in Mende, “(Arbeits-) Migration,” 113. 257 Miraftab describes how soccer transformed public space in Beardstown and frames it as a mean to claim space and a practice of placemaking. Miraftab, Global Heartland, 192. 258 Miraftab, Global Heartland, 194. 61

Miraftab, I see soccer and therewith the sheer presence of so called non-white bodies in public spaces as a political gain in the context of the isolation of Mozambican workers.259 Ibraimo Alberto joined the sports club “Tiefbau Berlin” and advanced to one of the best boxers in East Germany.260 In his biography, he describes how much it meant to him that Germans cheered for him. However, despite Alberto’s success in sports he could never resign from his work shift—it remained the legitimation for his life in Germany. The public transport that brought him from work to the sports club, to the soccer pitch, to his girlfriend and then back to the dormitory, was not available in many of the places in which company dormitories were located. The possibilities for individual paths always remained limited and they had to be accommodated in the strict schedule of one’s work shift.

The abstract space

Formal politics

This section shifts the perspective from the space that is created by people’s actions to the space that is created by writings, lips and ears—the space of discourse that unfolds its own effect in the realm “of prescriptions and inscriptions.”261 Educating the workers according to socialist morals and Marxist ideology was seen as part of the “cultural, athletic and political supervision” in the dormitory.262 This education was, however, not intended to mold their political opinions but to straighten the workers behavior according to the authorities will. Lefebvre describes how such discursive practices shape space. The state and political power tend to reduce social space to a mental space of ideology to veil over incipient conflicts.263 A “spatial shell” of a homogenized and hierarchical space can arise.264 Mozambican contract workers were incorporated into the ideological sphere of the GDR and educated in the Marxist-Leninist tenets of Frelimo and the SED. Former group leader Lázaro describes what making politics meant at the time:

I: Would you say that you did politics during that time? Did you ally with Frelimo and union members to raise critique towards the company director, for example?

259 From the perspective of the companies the sports activities of the workers had two sides. It often supported the workers’ independence and thereby weekend the company’s control but at the same time it supported the workers’ health and wellbeing with positive results for their productivity. That contract workers were practicing sports was in the company’s interest, so they often commented positive about it in company reports. However, I do not think that this aspect reduces the larger social and political gain through soccer for the workers. 260 Alberto, Leben wie die Götter, 112. 261 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 403. 262 BArch DQ “Halbjahresmeldung,” Rietschen, 04.03.1981. 263 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 106. 264 Ibid., 384. 62

L: (He laughs) A good question! A good question! Because at the time our country, or Mozambique, became socialist and GDR also went in this direction of socialism and we [the Mozambicans] in the GDR always ought to receive politics or palavras (words)…. In Lazaro’s description “politics” were what the contract workers received not what they were invited to participate in (even though membership in the youth wing of Frelimo (OJM) was compulsory). As a group leader he had to go to periodic Frelimo assemblies. To not have to give account of the party’s will and teachings in their “own” dormitories group leaders swapped among each other and lectured in other districts’ dormitories. Because, “we knew it was a lot of lies, we had to lie a lot,” Lázaro openly admits. Inside the dormitory Mozambican contract workers could not express their thoughts and opinions freely. The group leader was installed inside the dormitories to be the voice of the party. They had to give account of their colleagues if “he said something against Frelimo or he is pro capitalismo, he [the group leader] had to give all this information.”265 In the depiction of Eusébio, former group leader, one was reported “only when it had to do with being undisciplined then the group leader could write down that the person does not behave well politically.” Every group leader was different but to address the group leader with personal problems and hardships required to have trust in him—something difficult to build up in the environment of control and disciplining.266 Therefore, some contract workers turned rather to the German supervisors and dormitory managers for support.267 The group leader himself was under pressure from various sites and needed to be accepted by the group at the same time: “It was difficult to be group leader, that means you stand in the middle between your German colleagues, the company, and the Mozambicans, your fellow countrymen. You carry the responsibility for them and in a third place for the government.”268 Group leaders were usually identified with the dormitory management and nonetheless they were often part of the community the workers created. When a group leader spoke up against the company management and turned Marx’ condemnation of exploitation into a demand for just wages and better living conditions, chances were high that the company would find a way to replace him.

265 Zeca, 23 April 2019. 266 Expressed by Manuel A., in Viele habe ich erkannt. 267 Maneca, 12 April 2019; Zeca, 23 April 2019. 268 Eusébio, 24 April 2019. In South African mines the “indunas” were in a similar position. As Moodie writes, “The induna was caught in a bind imposed by management, since he was expected both to control the hostel and to represent the inmates to management.” The induna was seen to side with management and not care about the worker problems. Dunbar, Going for Gold, 82. A comparison of the regime of disciplining in East German and South African workers accommodations would be interesting to pursue in a further study. 63

“Politics,” in their formal frame passed through the space of the dormitory as a threat rather than as a terrain of emancipation.269 “Politics” always played a role when the discontent of the workers was sought to be “absorbed, canalized, and neutralized.”270 “Politics” also played a role when the workers did not adhere to the work discipline that was expected from them.271 And, “Politics” cropped up when forms of resistance had to be condemned as “political immaturity.”272

269 “Politics” in this context needs to be understood as a quote, referring to what Frelimo and SED understood as politics, which was often very explicitly formulated as “political-ideological education.” For example among the list of the group leader’s responsibilities, in BArch DQ DQ 3/2131, “Richtlinie zur Durchführung des Abkommens,” Anlage 2, Berlin, 31.10.1988. 270 Mende describes this in detail for the role of the group leader, in Mende, “(Arbeits-) Migration,” 64. 271 Eusébio described this practice to me in detail, also see the quote above from Eusébio, 24 April 2019. 272 The company management reports about a group leader that used several measures of protest to demand their full wages, a more respectful treatment and the release of dormitory control: “He forbade colleagues to work on Saturdays, (…) and called the entire group up to strike. We understand this as a political action that cannot be justified. He further accused the authorities of his company of the unlawful withdrawal of money, which speaks of his political immaturity.” In BArch DQ 3/638, “Antrag auf Ablösung des moçambiquanischen Gruppenleiter,” Merseburg, 13.10.1981. 64

The Party, the Party, the Party is always right, And, comrades, it will stay that way. For who fights for what’s right is always right, Against lies and exploitation.273

This SED slogan sums up the principle that also shaped the abstract space of the dormitory. SED and Frelimo were “the” parties of the working class and what theoretically meant that social life must be organized from the standpoint of the interest of the working class, its struggle for peace, and societal progress practically meant that all activities are subordinated to the directives of the party.274 Hence, while the actors of the “control- and disciplining regime”275 foremen, German teachers, representatives of Frelimo, OJM, OMM, SED, and FDJ taught contract workers in the emancipatory politics of socialism, they aimed to ensure that the party maintains its monopoly on power, human ideals and reality itself.276 This regulatory system aimed at the “fulfilment of the socialist work discipline”277 and the suppression of resistance. With “educating” the workers in “order” authorities’ endeavor was to confine conflicts on the company level and to avoid a politicization through higher ranks.278 The contradiction of ideology and reality (as experienced by the contract workers in their daily lives) tried to be explained away with “politics.” These were the contours of the state-produced ideological space which determined what could be said loudly, setting the parameters within which dormitory control and workers’ resistance have been exercised.

273 Louis Fürnberg, “Die Partei hat immer recht,” quoted in Nothnagle, Building East German Myth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 17. 274 Ibid. 275 The term goes back to Mende, “(Arbeits-) Migration.” 276 This description of the SED’s use of ideology and mythology goes back to Nothnagel, Building East German Myth, 18. 277 Listed as second point among the “Tasks of the Mozambican group leader” after the “political-ideological education” of the workers. In, BArch DQ DQ 3/2131, “Richtlinie zur Durchführung des Abkommens,” Anlage 2, Berlin, 31.10.1988. 278 A general practice of domination in GDR companies, see Vietzke, Konfrontation und Kooperation, 25. 65

Figure 5: Organizational structure that governed contract workers.

The graphic aims to give an overview about the various actors involved in the control- and disciplining regime around contract workers in East Germany. This intricate system of mutual control also posed a risk for those authorities, whether from Mozambique or from Germany, that undermined party directives and loosened dormitory rules.

The graphic was created on the basis of interviews and archival documents.

66

“You always had to be careful, do I say it or not. Most of the time we didn’t say. Those who said things were regarded as undisciplined and most of them, well probably send back to Mozambique.”279 The fear to be send back to Mozambique posed a threat to resistance and non-compliance to the rules, but it did not render contract workers powerless. With Lefebvre we can see the “abstract space” surrounding contract workers constructed by political domination and economic relations, a space that becomes a “political ‘medium.’”280 But within this abstract space we know there is always “lived space” that is experienced, appropriated, imagined, and subjective because the user and inhabitant is a concurrent producer of space.281

Conclusions

This chapter aimed to achieve two ends. One was to depict the formal contours of the space in which contract workers lived, including its social organization and physical materiality. The second was to render visible how the workers inhabited and fine-tuned the places that became their homes despite the limitations of their social reality. The stories and memories of the everyday life of workers offer an insight that expose the cost of contract work for Mozambican women and men. The ways in which localities and dormitories posed barriers to making a place depended on multiple factors. Nonetheless, all workers were confronted with an inhospitable and controlled space whose function was to further the exploitation of the Mozambican workforce. The sphere of the production and the sphere of social reproduction were inextricably linked to each other. Further, company dormitories reflect the post-colonial legacy of the GDR’s governing of contract workers through ‘arresting’ them in segregated spaces. Mamphela Ramphele has coined the term “bedholds” for South African hostels, in which entire households were tied to the space of a bed. She observes that reducing human beings to the space of a bed has serious implications: “They have to either ‘shrink’ to fit this space or to expand the space to accommodate their needs.”282 For Mozambican contract workers expanding their space was grounded in what I call a community of care, resistance and imagination.

279 Eusébio, 24 April 2019. 280 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 377. 281 Ibid., 362. 282 Ramphele, Bed Called Home, 22.

67 Chapter 4: A Community of Care, Resistance and Imagination

The following chapter retraces activities of resistance and support as ways in which Mozambican contract workers expanded and appropriated the spaces of dormitories and beyond. Networks of support developed that expanded their spaces and constituted a strategy of placemaking among the inhabitants of the dormitories, among Mozambicans in East Germany, and among foreigners from different nations. This process can be seen as an “appropriation of space,” emphasizing the political dimension of changing the meaning or order of space.283 Chapter 3 depicted the constraints of contract workers’ spaces and showed the workers mundane strategies to cope. Chapter 4 shifts the perspective on constraints towards the possibilities that originated in the workers’ community and social networks, as well as in their conscious reflection of their situation. Apart from bearing the risks of circumventing dormitory rules, groups of contract workers challenged the legitimacy of their constraints by referring to their humanity and rights.

Making life more humane

They said: ‘No, the girls cannot go to the boys, cannot make love to the boys.’ But how could we live!284 Mozambican contract workers developed their own rules and strategies of collective action to challenge the control of their movement. Rooted in informal interactions among workers and a calculated “blind eye” of group leaders and supervisors, workers circumvented dormitory rules and established their own rules of what was a legitimate non-conformity—to “make life more humane.”285 The

283 Lefebvre contrasts appropriated space and dominated space. See Production of Space, 165-167. My understanding of “appropriation” of space derives particularly from David Harvey’s reading of Lefebvre. Appropriation here can be institutionalized and has the possibility to produce “territorially bounded forms of social solidarity.” It is a politically progressive mode of the production of space. Creating this positive relation to particular places goes in hand with an identification. In Harvey’s analysis of this process, “appropriation” is a prerequisite to resistance. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origin of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 222. 284 Lázaro, 9 April 2019. 285 Adelino, 20 February 2019. 68 sexuality of Mozambican men and women was disregarded and curtailed. The control of the dormitory rules (no guest is permitted inside the building after 22.00, and workers need special approval to stay over elsewhere) must be seen in the GDR’s attempt to restrain the sexual activity and romantic relationships of Mozambican workers. Racial and sexual stereotypes of “the lascivious African man and his counterpart, the promiscuous German woman, so prominent in imperial Germany, continued especially to shape perceptions of African-German interactions in the GDR.”286 In the official discourse the ambivalent attitude of authorities towards sex and race was camouflaged by affirming that the Africans’ sexual behavior and that of their German partners would not adhere to socialist morals. However, references to Walter Ulbricht’s invocation of “moral decency,” a conservative, family-centered morality, cannot explain the politics around Mozambican sexuality also described as “the sex problem” in one report.287 Mozambican contract workers debunked the myth that sexual abstinence would make them “good Marxist.” Dismissing dormitory rules on sleeping over as “inhumane,” they developed a sense of injustice that undergirded non-compliance to the rules.

The dormitory rules were inhumane, because we were already grown-ups. When you say, ‘You won’t go out after 22.00!’ Then I would be military, not worker. The dormitory rules were not good.288 David tells me that they didn’t accept these rules right from the beginning. “We had no choice,” he says, but also “it was a fight.” David’s words resonate how the workers’ actions were always a negotiation between adhering to the regulation and at the same time challenging and defying it. A similar ambivalence towards the rules comes up in my interview with Eusébio: “We behaved in a way that we always remained ‘disciplined.’ But not really, now and then there was something we did not do in a ‘disciplined’ way.”289 It underlines the way in which the workers accommodated to the rules but did not subject themselves to it. Not complying to the rules meant to take a risk. Hence, how to “behave” always had to be measured

286 Pugach makes visible how much the GDR’s attempted regulation of African sexuality is based on European assumptions of blackness from colonial times. Sara Pugach, “African students and the Politics of Race and Gender in the German Democratic Republic, in Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World, ed. Quinn Slobodian (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2015), 132. Seeing the relation to Mozambican men as the result of the “misconduct of women” also appears in the reports. BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2, “Jahresbericht 1984,” Suhl, 09.01.1985. 287 Pugach, “African students,” 136; BArch DQ/3/633 “Protokoll über das Ergebnis der Kontrolberatung am 19.02.1981,” Merseburg. 288 David, 11 April 2019. 289 Eusébio, 24 April 2019. 69 against local dormitory politics that directed who would receive a referral and for what kinds of actions. Yet authorities were aware that they cannot hinder the workers to have a sex life. It seems that overstepping the rules became in many places a reluctantly accepted normalcy for as long as it didn’t reduce the workers productivity.290 In a report from 1982 authorities depicted the development without the announcement of consequences: “The initially more disciplined order cannot be complied with. Overnight stays outside the dormitory take place, visitors are being smuggled in illegally and do not adhere to the visitor regulations, illegal overnight stays happen, and everyone comes in and goes how he likes.”291 Beginning in the early 1980s the majority of the periodic reports acknowledge the company’s “difficulties in enforcing the dormitory rules.”

Finding collective arrangements

And, yes, we had arrangements, if someone had a girlfriend, okay, the others had to give way to them…the dormitory manager and the group leader turned a blind eye and the girlfriends came to visit, spend the whole weekend with us. They were solidary among each other. The others went to an adjoining room, slept there, well, to give a friend the possibility to live, like a human being needs to.292 Arrangements like these, doing each other a favor, were part of everyday life in the dormitory just like disputes and conflicts were. When the workers organized themselves in solidary with others, it was to restore the personhood that was denied to them by the space constraints and forms of control. “Yes, we understood each other well. There was nothing like, I don’t have a girlfriend, you have to see yourself where you are going.”293 Workers confronted the dehumanizing conditions of hostel life by supporting each other. One popular strategy to circumvent control was climbing in and out through windows. Some seem to have deliberately confused supervisors by “loosing” one’s company ID or “having washed it with” to make it difficult to put down the names

290 Eusébio on the dormitory rules: “GDR leaders’ interest was that people produce, yes, you need to stay fit, so you can do a good work for your company. That was their interest.” 291 BArch DQ 3/637, “Kontrollbericht,” Erfurt, 02.09.1982. 292 Adelino, 20 February 2019; Also reported by Ibraimo Alberto: “We hold together when one of us wanted to smuggle his girlfriend in for a lovers’ tryst. Then everyone else made space and left the room.” In Alberto, Leben wie die Götter, 135. 293 Adelino, 20 February 2019. 70 of those who came late.294 In the stories of my interviewees there were often informal and unvoiced agreements with group leaders and supervisors. As Lázaro tells: “We had internal rules…sometimes also people stayed over…but I as group leader, I must not know. Sometimes I did like that (he holds his hands in front of his eyes) and they did it behind my back. But it was forbidden, completely forbidden.” In some places German supervisors acted in a similar way.295

Challenging the dormitory management’s hegemony296

German supervisors were positioned next to the front door to control people’s entry and exit. The “implicit contract” between supervisors and workers that delineated how vigorously contract workers had to hide their visiting friends and partners and whether and to what extent they reported rule violations depended on several factors. Irrespective of how much they contravened them in practice, one can assume that supervisors had to formally comply with their assignment and the state’s directive for not risking trouble with their superior. Nonetheless, in response to the workers’ resistance against dormitory rules it was more and more tolerated that guest slept over, and workers slept elsewhere. Dunbar Moodie described these negotiations defining legitimate and illegitimate forms of rule violation as “implicit contract.” The function of the “implicit contract” is to “constitute the unwritten, constantly renegotiated, tacitly agreed-upon norms or codes of conduct that governed compound dwellers’ daily interactions.”297 In the realm of East German company dormitories the “implicit contract” shaped the arrangements between the workers themselves and with the German management and supervisors. By retracing the tentative changes on the adherence to dormitory rules, I depict the strategies of workers and authorities to negotiate the informal codes of conduct.

294 See BArch, DQ 3/634, Part 1, “Bericht zur Kontrollberatung am 6.4.1984,” Rüdersdorf. 295 Zeca, 23 April 2019. 296 I speak of the dormitory management’s hegemony in reference to the power and authority of the company and state institutions over Mozambican contract workers. The hegemony derives from the workers dependence on their workplace, “structures of supervisory surveillance,” and incentives. For a definition of hegemony in such a context, see Moodie, Going for Gold, 46. 297 Moodie, Going for Gold, 20. The notion of “implicit contract” goes back to Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1978).

71

According to my interviewees, authorities’ lever lied mostly in threatening contract workers to be send back to Mozambique. As a group leader, Lázaro, used this strategy to ‘discipline’ the workers:

That is the rule and rule is rule. If you don’t want to be here, okay. You can go home. It’s not obligatory to be here, you can go home. They said, ‘No, boss, please, it won’t be necessary.’ I said, okay but then you have to stick to the rules. If not, I will put you in my report to our representative and you can go home tomorrow—with 20 kilos. Everything else will stay here. As a group leader, his work was judged on how well he could discipline the workers. After Lázaro described me his way of trying to enforce the dormitory rules, he says “I had to put pressure on them somehow.” The group leader was part of the disciplining regime, he himself could not risk confronting the rules. Group leaders’ activities were firmly monitored, having allowed overnight stays and having had overnight guests themselves were used as justification by company authorities to request their removal.298 Therefore, in most cases it was ‘the group’ of a dormitory that confronted the authorities with the inhuman character of the rules and rejected to accept them. Their most powerful lever was their workforce. Realizing this is a prerequisite for empowerment, as Ramphele describes:

After all, it is the workers in a factory who possess the ultimate discretion to move their muscles to perform tasks which perpetuate an exploitative relationship with the owner of a particular factory. Empowerment occurs at that level at which the workers make the connection between their possession of that ultimate discretion and their capacity to exercise it.299 Archival reports give the clear impression that after the first or second year of the contract, workers claimed to not accept dormitory rules anymore. I see the workers’ confrontation of German and Mozambican authorities as a process of empowerment. The workers realized how much East German companies are dependent on their workforce and that ‘sending them home’ did not lie in their interest. That Mozambicans were productive workers it seems, gave them a small

298 BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2, “Antrag auf Ablösung des Kollegen X als Gruppenleiter,” Plauen, 24.06.1985; BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2, “Der Fall des Gruppenleiters X,” Suhl, 07.09.1983. 299 In Ramphele, Bed Called Home, 11, drawing on Barry Barnes, The Nature of Power (Chicago, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 50. 72 degree of leverage.300 When they appeared to work on time the next day, workers had less to fear.301 Authorities tried to adhere to the dormitory rules but had difficulties enforcing them. “The group does not follow the instructions of supervisors on duty and does not recognize the dormitory management as authorized to give orders,”302 is reported in a tone of outrage but it seems that the power of authorities in increasing the pressure was limited. In a case in which the Mozambican girlfriend of a contract worker had received a three-month dormitory ban it was “detected” that the girlfriend did nonetheless reside in the dormitory. She was requested to leave the dormitory to which the boyfriend responded, “it would be his apartment and that the supervisors have no say there and nothing whatsoever to do.”303 The group leader refused to intervene, and the girlfriend stayed. Considering how many contract workers were accommodated in a single building, German supervisors had not a very strong position among ‘the group’ of contract workers. Despite their function as workers in a situation of labor shortage, within the dormitory they gained power through being a collective that German supervisors and group leaders could set little against. Occasional accounts are scattered through the company archives in which contract workers used force against German supervisors.304 In some cases it is reported that supervisors felt threatened.305 For German employees in the dormitories it was a strategic choice how to react towards rule violation; letting things happen, eased their interaction with the workers. At the same time, it should not be left unnoticed that several of my interviewees remember individual supervisors as supporters and friends. Taking into account that dormitory rules did not change until the official end of Mozambican contract work, practices of having girlfriends over and neglecting the night curfew were based on an “implicit contract” that had been struggled over and constituted part of the politics of space. Such informal negotiations among

300 Several reports highlight the good productivity of workers, next to notices on violations of dormitory rules. For example, in BArch DQ 3/637, “Bericht,” Halle, May 1982. 301 Lázaro, 9 April 2019. 302 BArch DQ 3/633, “Bericht über den Einsatz,” Dresden, 21.6.1982. 303 Reported in BArch DQ 3/635, Part 2, “Vorkommnisse im Arbeiterwohnheim und im Betrieb,” 30.08.1982. 304 At the dormitory Schimmersburg were contract workers faced particularly degrading living conditions, contract workers slapped a supervisor. BArch DQ 3/638, Part 2, “Brief des Generaldirektors an Genossin Popp,” Saalfeld, 26.10.1982. 305 “Supervisors were threatened when they wanted to enforce the night’s rest,” reported in BArch DQ 3/634, Part 1, “Bericht,” Bautzen, 27.07.1984; That a dormitory manager felt threatened by several Mozambican workers is reported in, in BArch DQ 3/636, “Zusammenfassung der besonderen Vorkommnisse,” Dessau. 73 workers themselves and with the dormitory management defined the “moral economy” that encompassed “mutually acceptable rules for resistance within systems of domination and appropriation.”306 However, the workers negotiations and resistance happened on an unstable terrain of power. The tolerance of authorities towards skirting the dormitory rules could not be taken for granted and overstepping certain implicit rules could have severe consequences. The files of Suhl-Heinrichs contain a “notice on a special incident” that reports in detail how a male and a female German citizen were found sleeping in the beds of Mozambican colleagues after they had not appeared at work on schedule. In consequence, the police was informed that walked the two Germans off for an interrogation.307 The female received a dormitory ban and her parents were informed about the incident. The Mozambican colleagues received a referral. German women engaging with Mozambican man were conceived as “questionable women” and “asocial” by the authorities, categories that could lead to their social and legal discrimination in the GDR.308 Looking at the incident as a whole the authorities’ reaction on this day seems exceptionally harsh. Whatever drove the decision to call the police, we can assume that the fear to be detected or the fear of arbitrary exercise of power could not really be done away with.

The subversion of love

Those workers with a German girlfriend often stayed at their girlfriend’s place. It was tolerated in most places, but not allowed, and the worker would always maintain “his” bed in “his” dormitory. They were called Außenschläfer (those sleeping outside) and some dormitory manager did not tire of counting the days on which they exceeded the exit time, to report them.309 Since they would always remain part of their group—the group with which they arrived at their workplace and company dormitory—Außenschläfer had to keep doing their shift on cleaning the dormitory kitchen.310 Formally, things changed very little. Only in 1989 the

306 Dunbar Moodie, Going for Gold, 20. 307 BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2, “Meldung über ein besonderes Vorkommnis im Ausländerwohnheim,” Suhl, 24.03.1982. 308 Pugach, “African students,” 134; Mende, “(Arbeits-) Migration,” 107; Eusébio, 24 April 2019. 309 Workers are filed by name with the exact amount of nights they stayed away. Further it is summarized that “96 colleagues exceeded the exit time 294 times” within the report period. In BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2, “Bericht,” Suhl, 30.11.1981. 310 Maneca tells me: “After all, he belonged to the dormitory! That is something—private. But he belongs to the dormitory. They [those sleeping outside] slept somewhere else, they came to the dormitory only to clean the kitchen, that was obligatory.” Also, to receive general information or 74 possibility of marriage and gaining permanent residence was discussed among Mozambican and German representatives.311 Therefore, Mozambican migrants had to “formally” feign to adhere to the dormitory rules and to not inhabit space outside of it. The “subversion of love” carries two meanings that are linked to each other. On the one hand contract workers’ relationships to German partners were tried to be disrupted not only by dormitory rules and parents, but also by the MfS (German national security). On the other hand, interracial couples were themselves seen as a threat, as subverting the order the SED was so eager to maintain and control. The control of foreigners was an important subject of the MfS. In several company dormitories “unofficial forces” were installed, probably as well in the role of supervisors. 312 Of particular interest were “intimate contacts and relations of Mozambican workers to females.”313 A young couple that wanted to marry and move to Mozambique never got an answer to their request to emigrate and were monitored by “unofficial forces” since. After the end of his contract the young Mozambican worker had to go back to Mozambique where he received a notice that in the case of entering East Germany anew, he would immediately be arrested and sent back. “Order, Discipline, Safety and Cleanliness” were among the most frequently used categories that appeared in the archival sources on the company dormitories. The dormitory rules that I have cited on several accounts represented these “values.” Saving the youth from the West’s “abasement of morality” was a core myth of SED propaganda.314 ‘Order and Safety’ were usually conjured up in relation to morale and virtue. Hence, one’s relationships, one’s sex life, generally one’s private life should represent ‘cleanliness and decency.’315 Contradicting state claims that race did not matter, Mozambicans’ romantic relationships were more vigorously controlled and hampered than that of GDR

letters from Mozambique they always had to return to the dormitory, since they could not officially move to another place. 311 BArch DQ 3/2131, “Schreiben den Ministers für Arbeit der VRM,” 09.06.1989. 312 Peter Boeger, Elise Catrain (Hg.), “Stasi in Sachsen-Anhalt: Die DDR-Geheimpolizei in den Bezirken Halle und Magdeburg,” in Stasi in der Region, (Berlin: BStU, 2016), 59. 313 Ibid., citing archival sources from BStU, MfS, BV Halle, AKG, Nr. 1862, Bl. 25.

314 Wolle, Die heile Welt, 228. 315 The ninth command of Walter Ulbricht’s “Ten commands of socialist morale” claims: “You must live clean and decent and hold your family in respect.” In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, “Zehn Gebote der sozialitischen Moral und Ethik,” accessed August 9, 2019, https://de.wikipedia.org/- w/index.php?title=Zehn_Gebote_der_sozialistischen_Moral_und_ Ethik&oldid = 180218966. 75 citizens.316 The compulsory placement in dormitories and the patronizing dormitory rules minimized the space for love and desire. Workers’ arrangements to make place for love relationships in the limited space of the dormitory and their “fight” against the night curfew can be seen as collective strategies of expanding space and resisting against the racialized politics of “sexual conditioning.”317 The young Mozambican men tracked by MfS fled from Mozambique to the Federal Republic of Germany and in the following years the couple planed her escape to be able to live together in West Germany. Mozambican contract workers were not helpless in the structures the GDR imposed on them. They were active agents that engaged in the production of the space they inhabited as “informed, calculative beings.”318 The solidarity against the “inhumane” conditions strengthened the bond between the workers and created a “moral economy” that challenged the SED morale. I suggest that their effective undermining of dormitory rules (to some extent) bestowed them with a sense of power and confidence in relation to the dormitory management. We must therefore also recognize the emancipatory possibilities in East German company dormitories.

316 Cf. Mende “(Arbeits-) Migration,” 112. 317 African students and Angolan contract workers experienced similar constraints and politics around their private lives and sexualities. See Pugach, “African students,” 136. 318 Ramphele drawing on Barnes (1988) and Giddens (1984), in Bed Called Home, 11. 76

2. 1.

4.

3.

Figure 6: Memories of the workers’ free time and friends in East Germany, collected by Lázaro and David (various years).

1. Celebrating. 2. A worker’s personal photo album with the picture of a street in Schwerin. 3. Friendships are made. 4. A soccer match on the weekend.

77 Expanding space through networks

They like to travel. They like to go for walks. Once we were sitting in the neighbor’s garden when one of them passed by. “Where are you coming from him,” I asked him. “I went for a walk,” he answered. “But where?” “In Berlin.”319 A neighbor of the Mozambican migrants in Suhl-Heinrichs recounts the conversation to say how very different the migrants act. “As a simple citizen,” he says, one would not do such odd thing. This day the Mozambican worker travelled 700 kilometers. Getting on the train at four o’clock in the morning and coming back in the evening.320 The workers were bound to workplaces and dormitories but on weekends they were “free” as they say, and many went to visit friends and family members in other company dormitories and went to explore other parts of East Germany.321 The subtle protests that were performed through overstepping rules and spatial confines as described above were also related to Mozambican workers’ practices of travelling and visiting each other. Workers’ collective strategies in rejecting certain rules were driven not only by ‘the group’ of a dormitory but sustained and advanced by the network among Mozambican workers that spanned the entire country. By visiting each other on the weekends and spending vacation in each other’s dormitory, workers did not only contest dormitory rules but could also exchange on local dormitory practices. In visiting each other they created a wider network of support and awareness that shaped the workers’ experience of place. Also company authorities observed migrants “constantly growing travel activity.”322 In Halle authorities were concerned about losing control over Mozambican workers on the weekends and tried without success, under “constant protest,” to maintain the monitoring of entry and exit.323 Visiting fellows in other company dormitories also allowed a short time-out from the tight control in their

319 Quote from an interview with a neighbor of the company dormitory in Suhl-Heinrichs conducted by Scherzer. See Scherzer, Die Fremden, 18. 320 Ibid. 321 Lázaro says: “On the weekends I sometimes went to visit someone, in Schwerin, Erfurt or Magdeburg. We were free.” 322 BArch DQ 3/637, “Bericht,” Halle, May 1982. 323 Ibid.

78 own dormitory. Who would write them down if they came home late? Most dormitories had one guest room that visitors could register for. But to sneak in and stay illegally was the more common practice.324 For Dunbar Moodie in South Africa, networks on the mines had taken up the role of sustaining home networks: “Migrants were not confined to the [compound] outside of working hours, and on weekends mine workers traveled all over the Witwatersrand on foot and by train, visiting, eating, and sleeping with friends from home at other compounds. Migrants were thus able to sustain home networks across mines as well as within them.”325 The sources on migrants’ networks in East Germany do not suggest the same importance of home networks that has been described for South Africa, where the continuity of rural practices and regional identities was rooted in migrants’ networks.326 But home networks were maintained and used to support each other. Maneca’s cousin lived in a neighboring town, Raimundo’s family friend in another city and they often invited each other. I would suggest that the network among Mozambican workers in East Germany was above that also a means to expand their space. Almost each bigger city had a dormitory for Mozambicans and some colleague always knew someone else—being able to travel expanded one’s possibilities and gave the workers a sense of freedom.327 It allowed one to get out of the isolated environment of the dormitories and make new friends. This mobility creating network was observed with distress by some dormitory managers as one report illustrates:

Illegal overnight stay of external guests: Particularly on birthdays external Mozambicans are being invited that cannot stay over in the dormitory. They are informed immediately, with the result that they are brought in illegally. As a matter of fact, workers have claimed that 20 further beds should be provided for the colleagues. Colleagues who are on their regular vacation are not taken into consideration. Their beds are being occupied.328

324 Eusébio, 24 April 2019. The dormitory bans that were regularly issued in these occasions weren’t taken too seriously. Eusébio laughs about them today and says he probably still has some of these documents today. 325 Moodie, Going for Gold, 23. 326 Ibid., 24. 327 Many workers saved money to buy a motorbike. The sense of freedom that came with owning a motorbike was described to me by Zeca, who liked to go concerts in other cities, visit car races or the many friends he made all over Germany. In Saalfeld the company’s direction to only buy motorbikes in the last year of one’s stay and store it until one’s departure was not complied with. The company report suggests that Mozambican workers could drive without license without legal consequences. See BArch DQ 3/638, “Einschätzung,” Saalfeld, 26.09.1983. 328 BArch DQ 3/637, “Kontrollbericht,” Erfurt, 27.03.1984. 79

Mozambicans did not let themselves be intimidated by such complaints of German authorities. Going out in East Germany for a young Mozambican was not without challenge. In dormitories Mozambicans could celebrate birthdays and organize parties, without having to justify one’s presence and move with caution.329 Hosting ‘illegal’ guests was a collective activity of ‘the group’ living in a dormitory.330 Even though it might have sometimes caused trouble among workers as the company report suggests, all my interview partners have foregrounded how they made space for each other and found arrangements.

Claiming one’s youth

The collective challenge to circumvent dormitory rules and deal with neighbors’ complaints on their music can be seen as another form of claiming the space of the dormitory and at the same time it embodies the claiming of their youthfulness. While being expected to be complying workers their youthfulness was neglected in the formal design of contract work and dormitory rules. The network’s activities were thus also a way of defending and extending the possibility of “being young” that stands for experimentation, adventurism, and a search for greater autonomy and mobility.331 The community bonds that Mozambicans in East Germany thereby created, and the possibilities to celebrate and love, gave them strength in dealing with the constraints and the missing of one’s home.332 There was not only one existing network, but many networks that connected places and people. The network also had a transnational dimension, bringing together young aspiring students and workers from various countries. Some dormitories for Mozambicans had neighbors from Angola, Botswana, Zambia, Madagaskar, South Africa, Poland, Cuba or Vietnam. Some made friends among

329 Lázaro preferred staying in the dormitories rather than going out because “there were problems with racism, struggles with young German men and I didn’t want that.” David describes this very similarly and adds: “I cannot say that only they provoked us, we were young, we wanted to have someone’s girlfriend, we also provoked. In the dormitory it was nice, too. We had this relation, the friendship among us.” 330 The expressions of my interviewees such as “on the weekend they came to us or we went to others,” by Maneca or “we had guests over the weekend,” by Eusébio illustrate the collectivity in speaking of the “we,” the group of workers at a dormitory. 331 On the role of youthfulness as a form of collective dissent in authoritarian societies, see Bayat, Life as Politics, 118. 332 The close ties that Mozambicans created among each other in East Germany often came up in the interviews. It suggests the community’s importance for Mozambicans’ experiences in Germany. Ramphele describes the building of strong networks and a sense of community as an important communal survival strategy. Being hindered by several means to integrate into the German society, contract workers’ sense of community certainly made their lives more liveable. 80 themselves and again visited each other. Hence, the network kept moving and expanding. The “real” experience of a somewhat “proletarian internationalism,” as it was advertised by the party’s propaganda, fills some with a sense of pride to this day.333 Whether student or worker, the social and spatial constraints foreigners faced were similar.334 Hence, workers and students could become friends, Polish and Mozambican workers could fall in love. The networks among foreigners shaped their experience of space. It opened doors to new people and new places while many other doors to the German society kept being closed. Mozambican migrants managed to transcend some of the barriers set in the path of their wellbeing and youthfulness. Turning on the music until late, having overnight guests, all these activities violated dormitory rules.

A form of arriving

The network activities of the workers illustrate their agency in making place. A place is not necessarily a delimited territory. It is formed through networks of social interaction.335 Mozambican contract workers could not only form bonds and identify with the place that was offered to them by allocation to a dormitory— placemaking in their context meant to expand their space through forming relations with other places and people. The place that Mozambican workers thereby had created was grounded in their network. The sense of support and community that they experienced in their networks assisted in the development of a circular migration other than authorities expected. Back in Mozambique after the four-year contract many workers decided to run for contract work in East Germany for a second time, pretending not being able to speak German and to have never before touched East German ground.336 Workers exchanged strategies on how they would

333 Raimundo, Zeca, and Lázaro express their pride when they speak of their many friends from other African countries, or how they ‘illegally’ visited some friends in Poland. José is proud of his Spanish that he learned “because of the Cubans.” They went dancing together, played music, had similarities not only in the language, he tells me. José, conversation in Jardim 28 de Maio, Fieldnotes by author, 1 April 2018, Maputo, Mozambique. 334 Quinn Slobodian, ed., Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2015). 335 See Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 4. 336 Maneca foregrounds that there have been no computers at the time and little communication between different government institutions. Hence, he could even apply for a second time with his exact same name. A practice many others followed too as Maneca and Lázaro report. Having arrived in East Germany for the second time, Maneca kept pretending not to speak German for the first months of his stay. 81 be able to come back.337 The individual motivations to prolong one’s stay in Germany were certainly diverse but we can suspect that being allocated anew was a less frightening vision through the personal relations and networks of Mozambicans in East Germany one could build on.338 Mozambican contract workers’ space of arriving was maybe as much grounded in the network as it was grounded in the very localities. The practices inside the network allow us to see how Mozambicans found loopholes to pursue personal objectives even in the bureaucratized and controlled migration through contract work.

‘The dormitory is ours!’—On political consciousness

Human beings attribute values to the physical space they inhabit.339 And, they grapple with the multitude of trajectories and the multitude of stories that encompass space.340 In the depiction of the places that workers inhabited that are accessible through archival documents and oral history two narratives are prevalent: The interpretation of company dormitories as quasi colonial spaces and the presentation of dormitories as the workers’ property. By analyzing the contract workers’ perceptions of company dormitories, I depict their relevance in appropriating company dormitories and empowering the workers.

Labelling company dormitories

The similarities between East German company dormitories and South African hostels that led me to use Mamphela Ramphele’s writing as a starting point for my own research is something that has also been invoked by the workers themselves.341 Tomas, interviewed by Landorf Scherzer, expresses his thoughts when he first arrived at the dormitory. Having seen beautiful images of the GDR and its big cities

337 It became a well-known practice. Also, when a worker was sent home for being “undisciplined,” some managed clandestinely to come back to Germany by running for a new contract. Lázaro, 9 April 2019. 338 On the importance of networks among migrants in the process of arriving, and in gaining a feeling of security and dignity in the new environment, see Doug Saunders, Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011). 339 Belina, Raum, 45. 340 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 24. 341 The similarities have also been noted by Schenck who maps out the structural similarities that African contract work in East Germany shared with labor migration to South African, Rhodesian and Zambian mines as being present in recruitment, labor conditions, housing, level of integration, surveillance, pay and economic remittances. In Schenck, “From Luanda and Maputo to Berlin,” 212.

82 before his departure, he was shocked when he arrived in front of the dormitory in Suhl-Heinrichs, his new home: “these were the kinds of buildings in which they had put the mineworkers in South Africa. If someone would have asked us that day, who would like to return straight away, I would have gone back.”342 In his biography, Ibraimo Alberto draws a connection between the company dormitories and ghettos. Ibraimo was working for a meat factory in Berlin and lived in one of many prefabricated buildings built to house contract workers from Vietnam, Cuba, Hungary, and Poland in a designated and fenced area between the districts of Hohenschönhausen and Marzahn.343 When he describes this space, he speaks of it as “secluded from the public,” as foreigners being “locked up in a prison.”344 The control of workers’ movements and leisure time was experienced also by Manuel “like we would be inmates, in this barrack with gatekeepers that controlled us.”345 Mozambican contract workers that came to East Germany in their youth had lived through colonial rule. Independence had just been accomplished in 1975. In the so-called “colonial state” directed from Lisbon, African men were constantly pushed into its “extractive machinery” through forced labor and the control of labor migration to South Africa. 346 These work relationships were analogous to slavery in many ways, since colonizers treated Africans not as citizens but continued to treat workers as slaves.347 The motivation to migrate to East Germany followed a tradition of migration to the Transvaal mines or the Natal sugar plantations of South Africa to where many of the fathers, uncles and cousins of contract workers had gone to earn money.348 However, among young Mozambicans going to Germany was considered a better choice.349 But in East Germany they also got to know exploitative relationships in which they were not treated as equal citizens. A worker remembers:

342 Scherzer, Die Fremden, 63. 343 Alberto, Leben wie die Götter, 137. 344 Ibid., 137; 157. 345 Manuel, in Viele habe ich erkannt. 346 Hernandez, “Migration and Forced Labor,” 132. 347 Ibid., 135. 348 Schenck, “From Luanda and Maputo to Berlin,” 212. 349 My interviewees Lázaro and Maneca drew this conclusion from comparing the possibility of going to East Germany or South Africa. However, today they see their migration to Germany also as a fault as the stigmatization resulting from it made their lives so difficult since their return. In Lázaro, 9 April 2019; Maneca, 12 April 2019. 83

“People at work, I must say, perceived us as slaves (…), the company manager always said ‘solidarity’ and such things, but we can tell how they treated us. Their reactions indicated that they took us for slaves.”350 Unlike their fathers, the post-independence generation of contract workers placed their migration not primarily in the context of a necessary economic choice but at the same time in the context of a young nation’s hope for more equality and justice—of the socialist revolution spearheaded by Samora Machel.351 When Mozambican migrants realized that a majority would not receive the training they had hoped for and that they did not find much better conditions than their forefathers, drawing a comparison to slavery was close at hand. One can imagine that experiencing a quasi-colonial space in the midst of socialist Germany emptied the high-minded phrases of GDR officials on international solidarity and their fight against neo-colonialism. Being able to compare conditions for Mozambican workers in East Germany with that of colonial times might have given the workers a confidence in naming the injustices they faced. A Mozambican group leader stood up against the conditions of the workers at VEB Frottana Großschönau and wrote a letter, here quoted by the company itself: “…that the dormitory resembles a ruin and that the Mozambican workers are treated without any rights as slaves.”352 The group leader followed an effective strategy by addressing the East German ministry of work directly—who could not leave such accusation untreated. As a consequence of his letter, ministry representatives scheduled a control visit at the dormitory and documented that the conditions are so severe that they “question a further usage.”353 The ministry demanded the company to rapidly renovate the dormitory. Contract workers and group leaders in particular were well aware of Article 5 of the government-to-government contract that proclaimed: “the workers have the same rights and duties as workers from the GDR.”354 The awareness of their formal

350 Manuel, in Viele habe ich erkannt. A similar experience is described in a letter by a Mozambican group leader that narrates how a German foreman said to his workers that Mozambicans are “slaves, simple-minded, and that if they would speak to me as if they would be white, they can go home to Mozambique.” In BArch DQ 3/638, Part 1, “Brief des Gruppenleiters X an den Werkleiter,” 26.09.1981. 351 In the memory of former contract workers Samora Machel plays an important role as the only politician that acted on their behalf. They understand themselves as having been send by Machel to become part of the international proletariat and to acquire skills for building up the young nation. See Maneca, 12 April 2019; Schenck, “From Luanda and Maputo to Berlin,” 208. 352 BArch DQ 3/2131, “Protokoll über eine Beratung im VEB Frottana Großschönau,” 22.03.1988. 353 Ibid. 354 The contradictions in the nature of contract work are also apparent in the government agreement. The second part of the sentence continues with “as long as these [rights] do not arise from the citizenship and nothing else is agreed on in the present agreement.” See official government 84 rights as workers in East Germany together with their experience of the anti- colonial struggle and their education as socialists, I suggest, endowed Mozambican contract workers with a perception to condemn dormitory rules and other constraints. They formed a picture of their situation, out of their own experience and with the political education they had received. Mozambican contract workers saw their own lives as part of a general history of colonial exploitation and continued the struggle against it in their own ways. The articulate consciousness of the statements quoted above is above all an expression of their political consciousness.

Claiming ownership: We are workers, not inmates!

Contract workers were excluded from several spaces and possibilities in East Germany. However, all the more they claimed company dormitories as ‘their’ place. When former contract workers speak of company dormitories, they address it as their Zuhause (home), as the place in which they felt at home. The dormitory was also a safe place to which the workers “retreated” in battles between groups of German and Mozambican youth.355 In some places a third dimension of appropriation took place—workers claimed dormitories as rightful property. Workers in Dessau confidently asserted: “We pay our rent and thus it is our house and we can do with it whatever we like.”356 The workers turned down “advices” of supervisors regarding order and security as “paternalistic.” The cleaning staff was expelled with the words: “We need no one to spy, we clean ourselves!”357 In fact, contract workers had to pay a rent of 30 Mark. In proportion to the general level of rent, the sum was insolent for a bed and some malfunctioning basic facilities. A small apartment could be rented for around 30 to 40 Mark at the time.358 Understanding themselves as tenants and ‘right owning’ workers the Mozambicans in Dessau claimed what Article 5 stated—the same rights as GDR citizens.

agreement, in Heyden et al., Mosambikanische Vertragsarbeiter, 337. Lázaro, David and Zeca referred to this article and questioned whether they had the same rights or not. 355 Lázaro, 9 April 2019; BArch DQ 3/636, “Information zu besonderem Vorkommnis,” Rietschen. 356 A report quotes the contract workers’ response to the dormitory management’s attempt to further educate them in issues of order and safety. In, BArch DQ 3/636, “Kontrollbericht,” Dessau, March 1982. 357 Ibid. 358 Wolle, Die heile Welt, 255. 85

In a report from Dessau a few months later it surfaces that the dormitory had become the terrain on which company management and Mozambican workers negotiated their relation and strategically wielded power. Mozambican workers requested a third television, which was responded to that it would lie above the norm. They further asked for additional bedlinen and cleaner and substantiated their request by declaring: “We made so much money for the company through our work that it got rich and can pay everything.”359 The report let one suspect that the authorities’ way of responding to the claims was to leave workers without light. The company neglected the malfunctioning of the power supply in several dormitory rooms for months.360 The case can tell much about the tensions between company authorities and contract workers that developed over time. Mozambicans gained self-confidence through their performance as workers and felt more secure to make claims. But it is very difficult to ascertain in how many cases workers publicly denounced authorities, as it happened in Dessau, and to retrace the effect of their claims. Workers also questioned the legitimacy of having to pay rent for a place in which they were commanded. Eusébio’s perception on who ‘owns’ the dormitory and its furniture is linked to an anger of having had to face racist and unjust treatment:

In 1990 we wanted to take some things to Mozambique, the beds and the mattresses. We weren’t allowed to. Two days after we left, I heard, the beds and mattresses were burned. That is inhumane. We would have taken it to Mozambique, the country was poor, well, we didn’t have a bed to sleep. Those were old beds. Why? Such things I understand as racist and unfair. The things we had used, were our things. We payed rent for the accommodation—these were things we examined closer. What did they do with the rent? ‘Paying rent’, was that written on our government contracts—hardly ever. In retrospect Eusébio finds very clear words to describe the injustices he and his colleagues experienced. When I asked him if they had addressed the question of rent towards German authorities, he denied and said, “we were afraid.” That German authorities were openly confronted with such issues as the payment of rent did probably not occur frequently. The decision to resist or to acquiesce was always

359 Quoted by company authorities in, BArch DQ 3/636, “Ergänzung des Kontrollberichtes,” Dessau, 19.10.1982. 360 Some rooms were left without power supply and it was argued that this could only be repaired after the complete “clearing” of the building. A notice listed next to the workers’ ‘illegitimate claims.’ In, Ibid. 86 related to the price one expected to pay for it, which differed in each dormitory.361 However, the workers’ critical perception of the dormitories show that they denounced unfair treatment and the curtailment of their rights among themselves. Workers’ appropriation of the meaning and value of ‘their’ dormitory can be seen as a form of quietly appropriating the dormitory space. Asef Bayat writes on the urban marginal that they “continue to pursue autonomy in any possible space available within the integrating structures and processes.”362 When the risk for openly resisting could not be afforded and social and spatial constraints continued, there was always a space left that regulations could not limit—imagined space.

Hopes and imaginations make place

The Mozambican youth of the early 1980s was projected to act as political agent and driver of the nation’s transformation and at the same time they were drafted into a system of contract work that expected an obedient workforce. Workers had to negotiate their lives and perspectives in East Germany within these ambivalent coordinates. Up until today former contract workers, among them those who could not find work since their return, keep alive their memories and distinct identities as “workers” of a vanished socialist world. Zeca, speaking of the continuous struggle for recognition and compensation for Madjermanes asks:

Okay! What am I? A worker or a state slave? Who took my money?” Was I no more than a slave? ‘You, young people shall go to the GDR to make our country better, the Portuguese are gone, you are receiving education’…we are back for thirty years and no one gave an answer!363 The promises and aspirations that framed contract workers’ migration to the GDR shapes their struggle until today. Those who march to the Ministry of Work every Wednesday for thirty years do not accept having been exploited like slaves. Zeca’s above comment can also be read as saying, ‘We were workers and we want the full rewards of our efforts!’ The promise of becoming a trained worker who will return to Mozambique as the New Man, “liberated from old ideas, from a mentality that was contaminated by

361 On this tension in oneself, having to make a decision to resist or to acquiesce, see Ramphele, Bed Called Home, 12. 362 Bayat, “The Quiet Encroachment of the Ordinary.” 363 Zeca, 23 April 2019. 87 the colonial-capitalist mindset; a man educated by the ideas and practices of socialism”—had shaped contract workers’ perspective.364 These slogans were perpetuated by Frelimo officials in East Germany. Whether one “believed” in the myths or not, they were inescapable, they built the symbolic framework that legitimized contract work. Above that imagining their future as New Man with money in their pockets and experiences as workers in the GDR gave migrants the hope for a better future that made it easier to cope with the constraints they faced as contract workers. Raimundo showed me the photo albums from his time in East Germany when I said, “You look very happy on the pictures,” and he responded by saying:

I was very happy. I always wanted to be happy. I dreamed a lot, I dreamed that I will have a good house, a good work, and these things. (…) We thought socialism is the right path, that’s what we thought. But now we look back and we see that it was not real…it was not concrete; it was like a dream. The actualization of the socialist revolution in Mozambique and the money from the transfers contract workers expected to receive provided the hope for a future that sustained them. “The imagination of an ‘elsewhere’ where they can be rewarded with respect and dignity,” writes Faranak Miraftab is part of migrants’ social reproduction.365 Workers’ dreams, as Raimundo describes them, had the potential to provide them with a sense of self and humanity in the degrading environment of company dormitories. Hopes and imaginations can become a resource for immigrants’ placemaking.366 These “dreams” that contract workers had in common might have allowed workers to “imagine space where there is none”—to find room for maneuver and to cope within the spatial constraints of dormitories.367

364 Colecção estudos e orientações 14, Departamento do Trabalho Ideológico da FRELIMO ed. (Maputo: 1982), translated and cited by Marcia C. Schenck, in “From Luanda and Maputo to Berlin,” 230. 365 Miraftab, Global Heartland, 14. 366 Ibid., 19. 367 Ramphele, Bed Called Home, 23. 88

The Network Travelled—Concluding Remarks

After the workers’ large-scale return to Mozambique in 1990 hopes were frustrated by the absence of work and the Mozambican leaders’ silencing of their claim for the transferred percentages of their wages. Over time, dreams of the transformation of Mozambique and the migrants’ future reversed into a “reflective dreaming” of the idealized time in East Germany.368 In the context of the difficult reintegration of former contract workers, shared experiences of their youth in East Germany wielded Madjermanes together again. The network they had created in East Germany travelled to Mozambique. This network of support and resistance gained a new shape in the fight for recognition in their own society. From 1991 onwards contract workers organized and publicly protested against the Mozambican government and the denial of their rights.369 Having watched the fall of the wall after months of peaceful protest in 1989, returning Mozambicans had the audacity to accuse their government when it was still totalitarian. Eusébio frames their struggle in Mozambique as a continuation of the East German protests:

We had seen the fall of the wall, how it changed everything. And when we came back, we also started with the demonstrations, we carried on, we carried on from Berlin. Just carried on. The youth thought, only those who came from Germany start to make manifestations here, Mozambicans don’t dare to. We woke them up, yes. In a time when the government of Mozambique “airbrushed socialism out of official Mozambican history” and turned towards a neo-liberal agenda, former contract workers reminded the ruling Frelimo party of its former ideological orientation and the unrealized obligations of the state towards the workers.370 Right in the center of Maputo, one block away from the Ministry of Labor, former Mozambican contract workers occupied a public park—the Jardim 28 de Maio. They also call it their headquarter, the “base” of former contract workers. The police avoids to enter the park, Maneca reports, because they are “afraid” it

368 The notion was developed by Schenck in an analysis of former contract workers’ nostalgia for the past. See Schenck, “A chronology of nostalgia,” 366. 369 David and Zeca described how they started to gather and protest with many hundreds of former contract workers shortly after their return. 370 See M. Anne Pitcher, “Forgetting from Above and Memory from Below: Strategies of Legitimation and Struggle in Postsocialist Mozambique,” Journal of the International African Institute 76, no.1 (2006): 95.

89 leads to fights. The park has become a territory for Madjermanes and a place to be and meet old friends. Moreover, it has become their assembly hall. When I visited the park in April 2019, almost every day meetings were hold on how to proceed after the conference in Magdeburg. The latest news from the memorandum spread beyond the park. Through their personal networks and old friendships former contract workers keep each other informed.371 It is also through this network that children of former contract workers were able to find their parent in Mozambique.372 This dissertation is about Mozambicans’ spatial practices in East Germany, but I have told the story of how former contract workers organized after their return to underline the degree of agency and self-confidence with which they returned. We must thus appreciate the ambiguities of contract workers’ experiences in East Germany and recognize that within the limiting nature of contract workers’ spaces existed emancipatory possibilities. While contract workers took their protest to the streets in Mozambique, their struggle in East Germany unfolded in acts of nonconformity and collective practices of placemaking. Mozambican contract workers’ dependency on their East German employer and the worry to be drawn into the civil war in Mozambique made resistance and collective demand making risky. While their appointment to contract work in Germany was cloaked in the emancipatory language of liberation and advancement through work and education, contract workers had to act and survive in the confined space that the economic cooperation between two authoritarian states produced. Chapter 3 foregrounds the mundane practices through which workers made place by small interventions in the dormitories’ design, by finding collective arrangements, and by acts of presence in the public spaces of East Germany. It discussed the ways in which space was strategically produced to exploit and segregate contract workers in East Germany and how Mozambican workers responded to it. Workers’ spatial and communal arrangements were not primarily directed to settle in the localities to which they were allocated but represent strategies to cope with the lack of space and privacy. The continuous regime of

371 Those interview partners I had found neither through the park nor the organization ATMA had also knowledge of the conference and all of them had a copy of the Portuguese translation of the memorandum. 372 Zeca, who is part of the German Mozambican Network Reencontro familiar supports German children in their search and told me about the process. He says, “I know so many, I know all the family names from the South of the country to the North of the country” and if he doesn’t know, he says, he knows whom to ask for the contact of that person. 90 disciplining and controlling inside dormitories required workers to invent strategies to circumvent control without risking to be expelled. Workers’ practices of making place created a reality on the ground that German authorities had to come to terms. Playing music, rearranging rooms and sleeping over elsewhere were strategies of expanding one’s space that had to be asserted but were more and more tolerated. In former contract workers’ positive memories of ‘their’ dormitory, one can see how their spatial practices transformed the dormitories poor and degrading environment into a home—and sometimes even into a place of dignity, safety and youthfulness. However, this should not distract the readers’ perspective from the violence that lied in detaining contract workers in company dormitories and curtailing individual ways to making place. As I describe in Chapter 4, Mozambican migrants’ spatial practices challenged the limiting and isolating space of the dormitory and opened it up for different values and desires. Thereby, they challenged the meaning and order of the state- governed space of company dormitories, which is an expression of their agency. It foregrounds how contract workers strategically used the space of the dormitory to confront authorities with the “inhumane” character of the space and how their spatial practices articulated their resistance against this treatment. Through their achievements as workers and the sense of community they created among Mozambicans in East Germany, workers managed to empower themselves and to raise their self-esteem. Empowerment, writes Ramphele “is aimed at expanding the capacity for ‘risk-taking’ in those defined as powerless.”373 The forms of ‘risk-taking’ that contract workers pursued in East Germany had the potential to empower. By no means were all of their actions “hidden” or “quiet” as archival records of Mozambican workers’ strikes and accusations of authorities show. Their claim to be recognized as workers and not treated as inmates shaped Mozambican contract workers activities in East Germany. However, the social and legal marginalization that contract workers faced strongly limited their possibilities to resist. After their return, Madjermanes were the first to organize demonstrations against the Frelimo led government. In former contract workers’ forms of protests and demands surface their self-understanding as Workers. A question I could not deal with in the limited scope of this thesis is the extent to which Mozambican workers proletarianized through their experiences in East Germany and how this

373 Ramphele, Bed Called Home, 12. 91 process had shaped their lives since their return.374 Of further interest would be to study Mozambican migrants’ struggles to make place and claim their rights over several generations. This would further allow one to study the differences and similarities between spatial practices in South African compounds and East German company dormitories. During the process of writing the question lingered in my mind: If and to what extent contract workers’ strategies of resisting and building networks were shaped by the stories and advices of relatives who had lived as migrant workers in Southern Africa? Further research should also take into account the experiences of other nations’ contract workers in East Germany. How did Vietnamese, Cuban, or Angolan contract workers experience space and how did they respond to the regulation and control in company dormitories? Whether in the form of crumbling old castles, barracks, or prefabricated buildings—company dormitories were often located in remote areas and we can assume that GDR authorities wanted to exclude these places from public consciousness. Today, almost thirty years later, Germany needs to acknowledge that Mozambican contract workers belong to the legacy of East Germany and take responsibility.

374 It would be important to further study this phenomenon in the general context of Mozambicans’ proletarianization at the time through the politics of Frelimo and migrant workers’ experiences in South Africa. And, to further follow the question why it were particularly those who returned from East Germany that were the first to make large-scale demonstrations in post-independent Mozambique. This would require to study in detail the work relations of Mozambican contract workers in East Germany and to study to what extent they experienced the actual social betterment of workers that was at the core of the East German constitution and politics or, as I would suggest, to what extent contract workers’ experienced a suspended proletarianization. Having observed the legal conditions of work for East German citizens might have engendered expectations for their employment in Mozambique. This question emerged in an interview with Maneca when he speculated about why it is so difficult to find work for former contract workers in Mozambique saying: “I can imagine they think that when they employ one of us, we will start to organize and protest, and say things should be different….” 92

1. 2.

3. 4. Figure 7: Activities of Madjermanes in Maputo (various years).

1. Protest march to the Ministry of Work. One former contract worker is dressed in a linen bag, accusing Frelimo officials to have sold their citizens like slaves (early 2000s). 2. Madjermanes are helping each other to fill out forms requesting their German pension. However, Mozambicans only have access to the pension from the months they worked after the official end of contract work in 1989 (2018). 3. David Macou speaking in front of former contract workers in a large gathering in the garden (1999). 4. Madjermanes spending time together in the garden (2018). 93

Appendix

An Epilog or about interpretation

Here is today not better than yesterday and a tomorrow doesn’t exist. Here I offended my last friends, dancing hard hearts to butter. Here I sworn in the young pioneers and planted Christmas trees.

Gerhard Gunderman ‘Here I was born’

To study the workers’ dormitories and their environments in their physicality and aesthetic, I went on a journey to what used to be the German Democratic Republic. The addresses of former dormitories I had found in the archive lead my way through Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia. My motif was that of an archeologist. Hunting down whereabouts on streets that in many cases have been renamed. Searching for spaces of the workers daily life in the GDR where no official memory exists. The traces often ended in vacant spaces or industrial ruins. The landscape of the GDR was sprinkled with factories and industrial plants even in the most remote villages. I couldn’t prevent the impression of travelling back in time. My imagination of the ‘socialist everyday’ in the past was suddenly framed by my perception of the East German landscape today. It is in the streets that are too wide for a small town, in the ruins of industrial plants or the vacant prefabricated high-rise buildings that the socialist past emerges. The journey helped me to wonder about things and to speculate about “What was it like.” What I saw triggered my imagination, but it was my interviewees that reminded me to be critical of what I perceived and interpreted. From 1980 to 1990 Eusébio lived and worked in six different places, being transferred from the government from one place to another. When I asked him whether there has been one particular place in which he felt at home during all these

94 years, he said: “In Meißen, in Meißen I felt at home.” He lived in a dormitory in a small forest close to the city center at the banks of the river Triebisch. He remembers the place with great affection and tells me of the days in autumn when they were collecting mushrooms around the house and asks me about the old castle of the city, and the famous porcelain factory. I had visited the dormitory in Meißen only a few weeks before. I was surprised to see that the dormitory had been transformed into a three-star hotel. It was very calm around the house, no car had parked in front of it, and the pink color of the wall was fading down. I walked up the crumbling stairs and rang the doorbell. The owner of the hotel opened the door and let me in. When I asked whether she knows if this house had been used as a dormitory for workers from Mozambique in the 1980s, her answer was short: “Yes, that was a dormitory for workers. I can’t say anything more about it. I don’t possess any documents about it.” And with that she accompanied me back to the entrance. Eusébio was curious to see a picture of his former dormitory from today. After I had sent it to him, he wrote me a message saying: “The pictures from Meißen are very beautiful, but that is all newly renovated, in those days well it was all almost trash [Schrott].”375 To Eusébio Meißen is his German home, because he has good memories of his time there. There, he had a German girlfriend and often they were spending time together at her place. Nonetheless, he remembered the dormitory with affect, describing me in detail where his room was located in the house. In that time, being in the dormitory was a choice for him. The hotel seemed to be rather simple and in need of restoration, it retained the character of a hostel. Therefore, I saw it as an element of continuity against the background of transformation that is overly present in the area of the former GDR. Eusébio, however, pointed to the change that the house went through after they had left. Since 1996 the house is being run as a hotel. I read in Eusébio’s message also the wish to say: We did not live in this colorful, renovated hotel, we lived in a place that was falling apart! His comment gave me a subtle hint not to mistake buildings that remained for an illustration of how the dormitories were like back in the days. The physical traces that I encountered are fragments of histories left over by coincidence and bereft of the people whose memories might lend them coherence.

375 Eusébio, email to the author, 27 May 2019. 95

From Eusébio’s depiction of his positive experiences in Meißen, I deduced that his personal judgement of the dormitory was positive, too. The words of appreciation for his home in Meißen, however, need to be read along his relationships, the friends and colleagues that made him feel at home. His feelings towards the dormitory were far more ambiguous. Memories are anchored in the places in which we experienced them. But the place itself does not reflect the memories of people.

96

Company Dormitories from Once

No space ever vanishes utterly, leaving no trace.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 164.

The following pages present sequences of my observations at former sites of company dormitories. Together with snippets from archival documents, the presented sequences and images aim to create an archive in itself. This is an attempt to recreate traces of Mozambican contract workers’ space on paper.

Figure 8: Locations of dormitories visited

97

1. 2.

3. 4. Figure 9

98 1. VEB Zementwerk Rüdersdorf 3. VEB Metallurgieofenbau Meißen Company Profile: Cement factory; Company Profile: Building industrial workplace for around 30 Mozambican furnaces; workplace for around 70 workers Mozambican workers378 Location of dormitory: Hennickendorf, Location of dormitory: Meißen, Berliner Str. 32 Goldgrund Dormitory on the factory premises. The The dormitory was located 2 km from vacant building at the entrance of the the factory, in a forest near the city. The factory is likely to be the former house has been transformed into a dormitory. The factory is at the edge of three-star hotel. the limestone quarry. Note from the archive: “In every 4. VEB Kombinat Kraftverkehr Leipzig consultation with the Mozambican workers they deprecate the location of Company Profile: Maintenance of the accommodation.”376 vehicles Location of dormitory: Leipzig, Barclayweg 12/14 2. VEB Braunkohlewerk Borna The dormitory was located in a Company Profile: Extraction of brown residential area at the outskirts of the coal city. It was part of a larger residential Location of dormitory: Espenhain building. There were distinct entrances (today part of the city Rötha), Otto- to the different parts of the house, of Heinig-Str. 29 which two were occupied by Dormitory for Mozambican workers Mozambicans. Dormitory dwellers was part of workers’ apartment worked in different companies in the buildings, housing people from several city of Leipzig. The house stands at a nations, as well as German workers. The freeway. housing estate is located at a freeway. Note from the archive: “A club- and Note from the archive: “Inspections of sport-collective will be built as part of the rooms on a regular basis evaluate the home committee that can manage order and cleanliness. Particularly good directly the specific problems adjusted and negative appearances are assessed to the needs of the Mozambican publicly.”377 contract workers in mental, cultural and athletic activities.”379

376 BArch DQ 3/634, Part 1. 378 Ibid. 377 BArch DQ 3/636, Part 2. 379 BArch DQ 3/637.

99

5. 6.

7. 8. Figure 10

100

5. VEB Sachsenbräu Leipzig and VEB have been put up after the Exportbrauerei Sternburg demolishment of the houses in the 1990’s.381 The village sits in the midst of Company Profile: Breweries; workplaces a steep valley of the Thuringian Forest. for around 35 Mozambican workers in The city of Suhl with shopping facilities each brewery with almost 50% female and places to go out is around 4,5km workers.380 away from the village. Location of dormitory: Lützschens Note from the archive: “The (today part of the city of Leipzig), insufficient material-technical Elsteraue 39 prerequisites for the overall The area in which the house was located performance in the dormitory need to was a mixed residential and industrial be secured.”382 area outside of Leipzig. The house has been teared down, leaving a vacant space. 7. VEB Möbelwerke Eisenberg Company Profile: Furniture production Location of dormitory: Eisenberg, 6. VEB Fahrzeug- und Jenaer Str. Jagdwaffenwerk Ernst Thälmann Suhl The house was originally built as (Fajas Suhl) dormitory for apprentices and was later Company Profile: Production and used as well as dormitory for contract montage of mostly two-wheeled workers. At the back the house is vehicles and hunting weapons; connected to the production site. Today workplace for up to 200 Mozambicans the buildings of “Möbelwerke Location of dormitory: Heinrichs (Suhl), Eisenberg” are dilapidated remnants of Am Rasen 9 a large production that was core to the Two dormitories, constructed for the identity of the city. The former train purpose to house contract workers, station from where the furniture used to were located adjacent to the company’s be shipped has been squatted and production site in the village Heinrichs welcomes refugees. that is characterized by traditional Note from the archive: The exact single-family homes. The houses have register on square meters shows that the been teared down and the space left workers have indeed only 5m2 per vacant for a long time. Today a small person, 4 beds in a 20m2 room are the workshop uses the land that is still rule rather than an exception.383 surrounded by a fence, which is likely to

380 BArch DQ 3/636, Part 1. nothingness.” A “nothingness” bordered by a 381 Landolf Scherzer has visited Heinrichs in the fence. Scherzer, Die Fremden, 9-10. early 2000’s describing the place that bears “no 382 BArch DQ 3/634, Part 2. debris, no single relict of the dormitories” as a 383 BArch DQ 3/633. leftover space to which “asphalted ways from newly constructed large-window mansions and old small-eyed half-timbered houses lead into 101 8. VEB Berliner Akkumulatoren und Friedrichsfelde, a district of Elementefabrik Lichtenberg. Here, several prefabricated multistory buildings were constructed Company Profile: Battery production; from the 1960’s onwards. It was the workplace for around 50 Mozambican first new housing estate of East Berlin workers384 built after the war and was a popular Location of dormitory: Berlin, Tierpark residential area in the GDR. Since the II, Hans-Loch-Str. 341, Aufgang D house numbers have been rearranged (Heute Sewanstraße) parallel to the renaming of the street, it The dormitory was accommodated in a is uncertain in which of the buildings large residential area in Berlin- the workers were accommodated.

384 BArch DQ 3/635, Part 2. 102 Allocation of Mozambican Workers in Industries, Cities, and Companies385

Companies with high concentration of Assignment of Mozambican workers CompaniesMozambican with workers high concentration of Assignmentaccording to of ministries Mozambican workers Mozambican workers according to ministries

Number of Number of Numberworkers: of Numberworkers: of workers: workers: Synthetic Fibers Plant Premnitz 361 Coal/Energy 1650 Synthetic Fibers Plant Premnitz 361 Coal/Energy 1650 Synthetic Fibers Plant Guben 291 Ore Mining, Metallurgy Synthetic Fibers Plant Guben 291 Rayon Plant Pirna 242 Oreand Mining,Potash Metallurgy 570 Rayon Plant Pirna 242 and Potash 570 Film Factory Wolfen 273 Chemical Industry 2400 Film Factory Wolfen 273 Chemical Industry 2400 KWO Berlin Electrical Engineering/ KWO(Electrical Berlin Cable and Wire) 252 ElectricalElectronics Engineering/ 860 (Electrical Cable and Wire) 252 Electronics 860 Wagon Construction 232 Heavy Machinery and Wagon Construction 232 HeavyGeneral Machinery Plant Construction and 720 Upper Lusatia Textile General Plant Construction 720 UpperCompany Lusatia Neugersdorf Textile 518 Tools and Processing Company Neugersdorf 518 ToolsMachine and Construction Processing 320 Frottana Großschönau Machine Construction 320 Frottana(Production Großschönau of Terry) 258 Light industry 2190 (Production of Terry) 258 Light industry 2190 VBSZ Flöha (Cotton Spinning General Machine Construction, VBSZMill and Flöha Doubling) (Cotton Spinning 670 GeneralAgricultural Machine Machines Construction, and Mill and Doubling) 670 AgriculturalAutomobile MachinesIndustry and 3110 Automotive Plant Ludwigsfelde 270 Automobile Industry 3110 Automotive Plant Ludwigsfelde 270 District Run Industry and Automotive Plant Eisenach 472 DistrictFood Industry Run Industry and 510 Automotive Plant Eisenach 472 Food Industry 510 Faja Suhl (Vehicle Production Glass Industry and FajaPlant Suhl and (Vehicle Hunting Production Weapons) 224 GlassCeramics Industry and 1135 Plant and Hunting Weapons) 224 Ceramics 1135 -Werk (Agricultural Building Trade 700 Weimar-WerkEngineering) (Agricultural 383 Building Trade 700 Engineering) 383 Transport 585 Harvesters Neustadt 196 Transport 585 Harvesters Neustadt 196 Agriculture, Forestry, Production of Roller Bearings Agriculture,Food Production Forestry, 1035 ProductionLuckenwalde of Roller Bearings 232 Food Production 1035 Luckenwalde 232 Meat Factory Berlin 265 Meat Factory Berlin 265 Meat Factory Dresden 203 Meat Factory Dresden 203

Territorial Distribution of the Territorial Distribution of the assignments of Mozambican assignments of Mozambican workers workers

Number of Cottbus 1310 Gera 550 Number of Cottbus 1310 Gera 550 workers: Leipzig 1170 Suhl 250 workers: Leipzig 1170 Suhl 250 Berlin 1300 Potsdam 1155 Dresden 3070 Berlin 1300 Potsdam 1155 Dresden 3070 Rostock 280 Halle 2050 Karl-Marx-Stadt 1705 Rostock 280 Halle 2050 Karl-Marx-Stadt 1705 Schwerin 355 Magdeburg 455 Schwerin 355 Magdeburg 455 Frankfurt/O. 175 Erfurt 1810 Frankfurt/O. 175 Erfurt 1810

385 Data retrieved from BArch DQ 3/2131, “Report on the realization of the government contract,” 1989.

103 Bibliography

Conducted Interviews Adelino Massuvira João. Interview by author, 20 February 2019, Suhl, Germany. David Macou and Lázaro M. A. Escoua. Group interview by author, 11 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique. David Macou. Interview by author, 11 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique. Eusébio João Demba. Interview by author, 24 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique. João Colarinho Maneca (called by the name Maneca). Interview by author, 12 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique. Lázaro Magalhães António Escoua. Interview by author, 9 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique. Paula Chambale and Luisa Chitara. Group interview by author, 24 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique. Raimundo da Costa Bernardo. Interview by author, 25 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique. Zeca Cossa José Alfredo. Interview by author, 23 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique.

Conversations Albert. Conversation in Jardim 28 de Maio. Fieldnotes by author, 1 April 2018, Maputo, Mozambique. João Colarinho Maneca. Conversation in Jardim 28 de Maio. Fieldnotes by author, 30 May 2018, Maputo, Mozambique. João Colarinho Maneca. Conversation in Jardim 28 de Maio. Fieldnotes by author, 10 April, Maputo, Mozambique. José. Conversation in Jardim 28 de Maio. Fieldnotes by author, 1 April 2018, Maputo, Mozambique. Mario. Conversation at the office of ATMA. Fieldnotes by author, 9 April 2019, Maputo, Mozambique.

Written Correspondence Dr. Franz Nagel. E-mail to the author, 16 April 2019. Eusébio João Demba. E-mail to the author, 27 May 2019.

104 State Archive Berlin-Lichterfelde (BArch)

Holding: DQ 3/ LV1 (1979-1990) Staatssekretariat für Arbeit und Löhne/ Abteilung für Ausländische Arbeitskräfte Company files Sign.: DQ 3/633, DQ 3/634, DQ 3/635, DQ 3/636, DQ 3/637, DQ 3/638 Government-to-government contracts and amendments Sign.: DQ 3/1813, DQ 3/3946 Guidelines and reports on the contract’s realization Sign.: DQ 3/2131, DQ 3/2133, DQ 3/857

Federal State Archive Thüringen

Holding: 4-95-1201 (1981) Protocols of SED district management Suhl Sign.: IV D 2/3/173 Holding: 4-99-031 (undated) Pictures from Mozambican workers and company dormitory Sign.: 170, 304, 317, 750 Holding: 4-94-1221 (1986-1988) Written correspondence partly on Mozambican workers Sign.: 3346, 3347, 3348, 3349, 3350, 3351

105 Printed Sources Alberto, Ibraimo with Daniel Bachmann. Ich wollte leben wie die Götter: Was in Deutschland aus meinen afrikanischen Träumen wurde. Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2014. Scherzer, Landorf. Die Fremden. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2002. Wandel, Malte. Einheit, Arbeit, Wachsamkeit: Die DDR in Mosambik. Heidelberg, Berlin: Kehrer, 2012. Weyhe, Birgit. Madgermanes. Berlin: Avant Verlag, 2016. Abkommen zwischen der Regierung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik und der Regierung der Volksrepublik Mocambique über die zeitweilige Beschäftigung mocambiquanischer Werktätiger in sozialistischen Betrieben der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1979. In Ulrich van der Heyden et al., Mosambikanische Vertragsarbeiter: 335-345.

Online Sources Autofocus Videowerkstatt e.V. Online documentation. Hoyerswerda-1991.de. Accessed June 23, 2019. https://www.hoyerswerda-1991.de/start.html. Jäschke, Joana. “Mosambik: Sehnsucht nach der DDR.” Das Erste, October 5, 2014. https://www.daserste.de/information/politikweltgeschehen/weltspiegel/hoyersw/br /mosambik-ddr-100.html. “Magdeburger Memorandum der Tagung ‘Respekt und Anerkennung’.” Magdeburg 2019. http://www.oekumenezentrumekm.de/attachment/97805e02a6bf11de99800bf9f2db da49da49/0d06803dacd74eb985db-586bb8297025/memorandum-deutsch1.pdf. “Viele habe ich erkannt: Gedächtnisprotokoll eines Kontraktarbeiters aus Hoyerswerda.” Video file. Hoyerswerda-1991.de. Directed by Helmut Dietrich, Lars Maibaum, Julia Oelkers. 1992. https://www.hoyerswerda-1991.de/1991/betroffene.html.

Documents from ATMA Mthembu, Victor. “Internationale Konferenz für Respekt und Anerkennung.” Written speech. February 2019, Magdeburg. ATMA. “Petição e Pedido de Intervenção.” Letter. August 2018, Maputo. ATMA. “Bittschrift und Antrag auf Intervention.” Letter. Translated by ATMA. August 2018, Maputo.

106 List of Figures

Figure 1: Photograph from the door of former dormitory, by author. 3

Figure 2: A map of Adelino's stations in East Germany, by author. 34

Figure 3: Photographs of the group and the company dormitory at VEB Fajas, Archive Thüringen, 4-99-031. 46

Figure 4: Photographs of daily life at VEB Fajas, Archive Thüringen, 4-99-031. 47

Figure 5: Graphic depicting organizational structure, by author. 66

Figure 6: Workers' personal photographs and memories, photographs with handwritten notes were given to me from David, others from Lázaro. 77

Figure 7: Photographs depicting the activities of Madjermanes in Maputo, photographs from 2018 were made by the author, other shared with me by ATMA. 93

Figure 8: Map of locations visited, by author. 97

Figure 9: Photographs of former dormitories, by author. 98

Figure 10: Photographs of former dormitories, by author. 100

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Philosophisch-Historische Studiendekanat Bernoullistr. 28 Tel.: 061 267 30 50 Fakultät CH-4056 Basel [email protected] www.philhist.unibas.ch

Erklärung betr. „Regeln zur Sicherung wissenschaftlicher Redlichkeit“

Hiermit bestätige ich, dass ich vertraut bin mit den von der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät der Universität Basel herausgegebenen „Regeln zur Sicherung wissenschaftlicher Redlichkeit“ und diese gewissenhaft befolgt habe.

Lea Marie Nienhoff Vorname & Name:

Titel der schriftlichen Arbeit: 'We Are Workers, Not Inmates!': The Politics of Space in Mozambican Workers' Company Dormitories in East Germany (1979-1990)

24. August 2019 Datum:

Unterschrift:

114

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