Authors

George Bodie¹;  ¹ Goldsmiths, University of London,

Discussion

In the 1950s, the East German state carried out an unprecedented campaign of solidarity with North Korea. Although recent studies have emphasised the depth and importance of GDR solidarity campaigns, these have largely focused on later campaigns, particularly those bound up with the quest for international recognition in the 1960s. In contrast, solidarity with North Korea in early 1950s GDR was centered around a shared sense of victimhood: as a response to the shared experience of US bombing. 

Here then, solidarity served a less obvious instrumental purpose. Rather than being rooted in broader geopolitical goals, solidarity served as a means of processing trauma, on the German side at least. Korea became a means through which the experience of US bombing could be memorialized, explored, and processed. 

Using contemporary literature and archival documents from the campaign, this paper will explore how solidarity in this case served as a response to disruption - in this case, the trauma of the war, and the corresponding difficulties of forming a memorial culture thanks the complexities of the Cold War, and will ask whether it was successful in producing a sense of shared victimhood between East Germans and North Koreans.