We Are Here
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| free admission |
| 12 years and older |
| German |
| Mechanical Arena in the Foyer |
| Part of: Talking About Ruptures |
| Belongs to: Transform! |
Contract workers from Vietnam, Mozambique and Angola helped the GDR to achieve prosperity. However, contract workers remained largely invisible in everyday life away from the factories. The situation was similar for guest workers in the West. They came from Turkey, Italy or Greece. Their labor was gladly used for the “economic miracle”. In both parts of Germany, their status and acceptance changed with the fall of communism. After 1989/90, many of the “guests” in the former GDR lost their source of income and had to leave the country. This still has consequences today, as the example of the “Madgermanes” in Mozambique shows. For those who remained in East Germany, a new era dawned after 1989: Exclusion, violence and hatred dominated the “baseball bat years”, which reached their sad climax with the attacks in Hoyerswerda and Solingen in both East and West.
Moderation
Insa Wilke
Participants in the discussion
Esther Dischereit, Angelika Nguyen and Julia Oelkers
Participants
Esther Dischereit, lives in Berlin, writes poetry, prose, essays and plays for radio and theater, multi-media. She is recognized as one of the most important literary voices of the second generation after the Shoah. Most recently published: Ein Haufen Dollarscheine, prose, 2024; Der Verdacht, theater, Hayat Habibi* Frankfurt am Main, 2024; Quando il mio golem mi aprì la porta. Ediz. italiana e tedesca, 2023; Flowers for Otello On the Crimes which Came Out of Jena, 2020 (English), book and audio play: Blumen für Otello. Über die Verbrechen von Jena, 2014, (nominated for the ARD Media Prize); Großgesichtiges Kind, 2014, and the poetry collection Sometimes a Single Leaf, 2019, the essays Mama darf ich das Deutschlandlied singen and (ed.) Hab keine Angst, erzähl alles! Das Attentat von Halle und die Stimmen der Überlebenden, 2021, from 2023 together with Deutsche Bahn: Exhibition: Wer war Fritz Kittel, Ein Reichsbahnarbeiter entscheidet sich. Esther Dischereit was a professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna from 2012 to 2017; 2019 DAAD Chair in Contemporary Poetics at NYU. In 2009 she received the Erich Fried Prize for her work, in 2024 she won the Alfred Gruber Prize in the Merano Poetry Competition.
Angelika Nguyen grew up in the GDR, studied film studies at the film academy in Potsdam and in 1991 made the documentary Bruderland ist abgebrannt about Vietnamese migrants in East Berlin. In 2011, she wrote her autobiographical essay Mother, how far is Vietnam?, in which she explores the tension between official GDR solidarity and the reality of everyday experience, while at the same time drawing a critical arc into the racist present of the Federal Republic of Germany. Angelika Nguyen works as an author, speaker and film journalist. She lives in Berlin.
Julia Oelkers is a journalist and documentary filmmaker. She has produced various TV documentaries on contemporary history. A second long-standing focus of her work is her preoccupation with the topics of racism, flight and migration. The cinema documentary Can’t Be Silent about refugee musicians was awarded the DGB Film Prize and screened at numerous festivals. With her latest works, she changed the medium. The web documentaries Eigensinn im Bruderland about migrants in the GDR (bruderland.de) and Gegen uns – Betroffene im Gespräch about right-wing and racist violence and the defense of a society based on solidarity (gegenuns.de) both won a Grimme Online Award. Her latest project is the online exhibition De-Zentralbild (dezentralbild.net), which shows private photos and memories of migrants in the GDR.
Insa Wilke is a literary critic. She writes for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and German radio, among others. She was a member of the lesenswert quartet on SWR television until 2024. At the beginning of the year, she attracted attention with her own literary platform Café lit. More information at: www.insawilke.de and www.cafelit.de.