You have full access to this open access chapter. It therefore focuses on human affective relationships ranging from romantic encounters and family formation to racist and xenophobic hate crimes, illustrating how the migrants carved out their own social spaces in an increasingly hostile environment. The second part examines how migrants experienced exclusion. The grounds were, variously, sexism, racism, xenophobia, and ethnic tensions.
Integration and exclusion reflect two contrasting ends on the scale of human affective relationships, but the central theme of this chapter is how love and hate, intimacy and exclusion, and friendship and racism are intricately tied up with one another.
New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, , You have full access to this open access chapter, Download chapter PDF. We feel at home because we are surrounded by warmth and friendship. We feel at home because East Germany has always closely accompanied our revolutionary process. This is a meeting between brothers in arms, an exchange of experienceβ¦The people of the GDR under the leadership of the SED are roses of solidarity, hope and the future. The friendship between peoples is indeed the big star, the sun that rises on the horizon and overcomes the shackles of hatred, of division and war, created by oppression and exploitation.
Footnote 2 Erich Honecker, during the same visit. However, many worker-trainees in Germany were subjected to racism, overt and covert. Footnote 3 They were confronted with racist attitudes, were exposed to racist slurs, and even had to defend themselves and their partners from physical attacks.
Footnote 4. The labor and training programs were intended to be circularβotherwise what was the point of training the workers to lead the African socialist industrial revolution? Footnote 5 Worker-trainees instead became intimate strangers while in East Germany. Footnote 6 On one hand, these international workers were welcomed for political and economic reasons. They were showcases for East German solidarity and vectors that would carry the socialist revolution to the Third World.
