'We Are Workers, Not Inmates!': the Politics of Space in Mozambican Workers' Company Dormitories in East Germany (1979-1990)
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‘We Are Workers, Not Inmates!’ The Politics of Space in Mozambican Workers’ Company Dormitories in East Germany (1979-1990) Lea Marie Nienhoff ‘We Are Workers, Not Inmates!’: The Politics of Space in Mozambican Workers’ Company Dormitories in East Germany (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 West Germany 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 “peaceful revolution” 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 German reunification 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