Socialist Workers and Socialist Consumers

Abstract

Angolan and Mozambican worker-trainees’ lives in East Germany on the factory floor, in the company schools, and in the supermarkets form the basis of Chap. 4, which examines their roles as producers and consumers of East German goods. It is one of the many strengths of the oral histories, on which this chapter draws, to see historical actors as both producers and consumers, often simultaneously. Socialism, too, held the promise of uniting production and consumption. I argue that the socialist labor and training program formed and disciplined Angolans and Mozambicans into skilled socialist workers and offered them the opportunity to become socialist consumers. This chapter highlights how they negotiated their work and training environment and saw the East German consumer landscape through the lens of their experiences of scarcity in the conflict economies at home. They invested in necessities and luxury goods from East and West to maintain host and home networks, and they invested in their personal futures. This aspect of the dual experience of a socialist economy, and its contrast with economies of the global South both during and after the Cold War, is an insight into the East German experience rendered visible by a transnational history approach.

Introduction

For the Mozambican and Angolan worker-trainees who came to East Germany, their involvement in producing East German goods, and how they consumed what East Germany had to offer, was central to their experience and their understanding of their migration. Consumption and production are often discussed as two separate spheres, and consumption tends to be associated with consumer society, affluence, choice, and variety, all connected to market economies. However, if we look at the essential unity of people’s lives, we see that this distinction is an artificial one. It is one of the many strengths of the oral histories that make up this book that we can see historical actors as both producers and consumers, often simultaneously. Communism held the promise of uniting production and consumption.¹ Companies—in East Germany the VEBs, Volkseigene Betriebe, publicly owned enterprises—were to be places not only of work but also of entertainment and education, consumption and production. Through their experience of both, the worker-trainees transcended stereotypical Cold War simplifications of Western consumption and Eastern production. The specifics of their experiences as producers and consumers were bound up with the status as foreigners and Africans, and their memories of both are heavily influenced by their experience after returning to Africa. This aspect of the dual experience of a socialist economy, and its contrast with economies of the global South both during and after the Cold War, is an insight into the East German experience that can only be afforded by a transnational history approach.

The first part of this chapter is devoted to production. The design of the labor training program was intended to create model skilled socialist workers. During their stay in East Germany, worker-trainees formally became workers—that is, they passed from being unskilled workers to (ideally) being skilled workers. Regardless of their skills level, they also adopted an identity as workers that remained meaningful to them long after they ceased working in the industrial sector. Companies fashioned workers by integrating the new arrivals into their collectives and introducing them to training and work routines that bestowed soft skills such as language competence, punctuality, and reliability, as well as technical knowledge in various subject areas.² They were disciplined when their behavior ran counter to the demands and expectations of productive labor. The young worker-trainees, however, were not simply passive receptacles of knowledge; they also engaged with, and contributed to, their East German world. Oral histories reveal that far from being victims, many worker-trainees succeeded in negotiating the terms of their employment collectively and individually.

The second part of this chapter explores consumption.³ Angolan and Mozambican worker-trainees brought with them experiences of scarcity in their war-torn home countries. This informed the way in which they experienced the East German consumer landscape. While many others compared the goods on offer in East Germany to West Germany and found the consumer landscape wanting, Angolans and Mozambicans experienced it as a land of plenty.⁴ This is certainly how many of them remember it. The worker-trainees made use of their wages and worked overtime to buy necessities and luxuries intended to lay the foundations for their own future households in Africa. They were willing to work hard to earn extra income: Rudi Grandtke, a master tradesman who worked with Mozambican laborers, stated in 1982 in a conversation with East German author Landolf Scherzer that some of his Mozambican workers worked about 160 hours overtime a month, something which was legally prohibited but accepted under the pressure to fulfill the production quota. They would start working eight hours in the morning shift and then do another eight-hour shift in the evening.⁵ Other groups of foreign workers in East Germany were also industrious in supplementing their incomes to make the most of their consumption possibilities. Vietnamese workers tended to spend their time outside work hours invested in the East German parallel economy, in tailoring imitated Western clothes or smuggling.⁶ The decisions to use their time in East Germany for income maximation were made by the workers.

Not all the workers’ attention was on buying goods to consume back home. Angolan and Mozambican workers also bought things to help maintain social networks in East Germany. The worker-trainees’ consumption decisions were not only driven by their needs. They also focused on pleasure and status symbols. Consumption was an area of key importance to migrants’ contributions to both home and host communities. Their oral histories provide insights into its pleasures that state and company archives do not readily reveal.

Part I: Doing Work, Making Meaning—The Working Life of Socialism

Verse

Verse Film Factory, My Great Model Film factory, my great model Not selfish, from your ranks emerged Formed Mozambicans, in great models From your ranks emerged formed Cubans. From your ranks emerged formed Poles From your ranks emerged formed Vietnamese In great models You tempered us with the force of your ideas For the great model’s work You built chemistry into our minds Great model You constructed a great laundry In our hands You built Magneton, great model You made endless cassettes Recorded cassettes, film factory, my great model You were my great pride. Regina, February 27, 2007Footnote

In the poem, Regina is referring to her work at the film factory in Wolfen. Original in Portuguese. Translation by Pieter Cordwell.

We celebrate the first of May because we are a people who grasped our independence. We are a people that grasped liberty. And this liberty demands sacrifices. This freedom and independence demand from all of us, old, young, men and women, sacrifices. A small drop of sweat, a small drop of blood, which, together enable this grand victory. …We recaptured our dignity, we recaptured our personality, because the alliance between workers and peasants effectively governs our society.

During colonial times, I am sure we all remember very well, our workers were not considered human beings but simple pack animals. The class of workers was ignored and disdained. And not just disdained but also seduced into corruption, fought against, and destroyed, and therefore it was difficult for our worker and factory worker to become conscious of his own power. …We were a dominated, oppressed, and enslaved people.

Samora Machel, May 1, 1979⁸

As Regina’s poem demonstrates, work and training were matters of the heart for many young worker-trainees, who took pride in production. To some, Regina’s work for six months in the company laundry and for two years rolling cassettes and magnetic tapes might not appear desirable, but to her the work provided meaning.⁹ In the rhetoric of revolutionary Mozambique displayed in Samora Machel’s quotation above, work was a means to free the country from its colonial past and build a prosperous Mozambique that guaranteed a decent life, devoid of exploitation, to everyone. Young Mozambican worker-trainees were to learn the value and culture of socialist work in East Germany, while being prepared—through vocational training and learning the work rhythms—for future employment in the envisioned industrialized Mozambique.¹⁰ In the meantime, their temporary migration to East Germany got them out of the fragile labor and education market at home and gave them and their families access to remittances in the form of goods from Europe.¹¹

Aside from its pure economic value, work served a philosophical or moral and political function in socialist societies like Mozambique, Angola, and East Germany: every person was to derive meaning in life from being a productive worker. A policy of full employment was thus key. This was reflected in policy in most developed socialist countries, most famously the Soviet Union and East Germany. In Mozambique, policies like Operation Production, which targeted unemployed city dwellers, epitomized what could be a near-obsessive focus, sometimes verging on fetishization, of (not always) productive work.¹² The centrality of manual work to human dignity was symbolized by performances such as the national latrine-digging day. Samora Machel participated personally.¹³ In East German companies, many of the returned worker-trainees solidified their understanding of the “socialist work ethic.” The values taught in East Germany corresponded to the values Samora Machel strove to instill in his population. The worker-trainees’ attitudes to work were formed through an ideology of production and physical labor on the factory floor and in factory classrooms. They were also forged through interactions in the forced collective of the work brigades at the factories and with other colleagues, whether in the cafeteria or on company-sponsored field trips. These were often of a decidedly apolitical nature, such as having coffee and cake, going hiking or bowling, or enjoying a pub quiz.

The companies and governmental representatives governed the official framework in which the worker-trainees moved. The East German companies that took on foreign worker-trainees were responsible for language training, technical training, work environment and housing, and official leisure time programing.¹⁴ The thinking behind the migration program, and indeed the thinking behind many of the ways in which socialist societies were organized, saw the company as an intersection of work, learning, and leisure. The more the worker-trainees’ lives were focused on the company, the easier they were to control. In East Germany, the VEBs were sites of material production, political socialization, and sociocultural reproduction for all workers.¹⁵ But while other workers could still spend their free time in private homes, the foreign workers lived in dormitories under surveillance.¹⁶

Worker-trainees were monitored as much in their (not very) private space in the dormitories as they were in their professional lives on the factory floor and in language and technical training schools. Their group leader, the dormitory janitor, their translator, and their brigade leaders and supervisors on the job were all responsible for supervising the worker-trainees, as was the Ministry of State Security—the infamous Stasi. Worker-trainees were conscious of the control structures, but (perhaps partly because of the short leashes they were on) they did not always take their work routine seriously. As Gaspar admits:

We were also under surveillance. If we didn’t go to school or work, our group leader knocked on our doors and asked what happened. We were very irresponsible, not least because we had money. …We had practically everything in Germany. We had food, lodging, work, clothes and we still had money for play.¹⁷

Control was in the interest of worker productivity and also to make sure that workers did not branch out too much on their own and potentially integrate too much, thereby jeopardizing their planned return.

The professional lives and experiences of foreign workers in East Germany depended on a variety of factors. A big factor shaping the experience migrants had was when they arrived. Those arriving in the late 1970s and early 1980s generally received better training because the numbers of worker-trainees were smaller.¹⁸ Furthermore, the East German economy was not yet struggling to the same extent as in the late 1980s.¹⁹ A second factor was where within Germany migrants lived. Those in urban centers had much better access to a social life and blended into a more cosmopolitan environment than those in more remote parts of the country. Thirdly, the company where a worker-trainee was placed mattered. On paper, all workers had the same rights and duties, though the agreements did not stipulate the specifics of the training.²⁰ In practice, however, experiences on the factory floor varied widely. Some received first-rate training and rose through the ranks, in rare cases even to the level of master craftsman while in Germany. Many others were exploited as unskilled laborers in hazardous and unattractive jobs.

Creating Socialist Workers: Language Classes, Vocational School, and the Factory Floor

At the same time that we had language lessons, we also had practical lessons in the company and after the language classes we had theory class related to our work in the company.²¹

The migration programs’ structure was oriented toward shaping worker-trainees into socialist workers. The training consisted of language classes, technical classes, and practical labor during shift work. One of the most fundamental steps in constructing the new worker was the acquisition of German. Contrary to regional labor migrations within southern Africa, all worker-trainees to East Germany received language training, however of varying quality. This illustrates the fundamental difference of the scheme compared to, for example, previous Mozambican worker migrations to South Africa. There was indubitably an intrinsic intention running throughout the scheme to train the workers and encourage their—however, strictly limited, temporary, and circumscribed—integration into East German professional life. Worker-trainees themselves understood the fundamental importance of learning to communicate in German. In Santana’s words:

You know very well that if you arrive some place and you don’t yet speak the language you are deaf and mute. I remember that was a real annoying headache…My boss spoke very fast and I thought I would return to Angola without ever learning German. But when I entered the school I saw that by studying you can learn anything.²²

When first arriving in Germany, new groups of migrants had a translator through whom they could communicate with their new environment, whether on the job, with doctors, or going shopping. While facilitating the arrival process, this state of things rendered individual workers dependent upon translators. Worker-trainees received between 100 and 400 hours of language training over three to six months in company schools.²³ The lessons emphasized vocational vocabulary rather than writing or grammar, which meant the language abilities with which workers left East Germany varied significantly. Some worker-trainees, like eighteen-year-old Ilíbio, were highly motivated to absorb the foreign language quickly to facilitate their integration:

We had six months of theoretical German language classes where I quickly distinguished myself. It was my objective to stay in Germany as long as I could so that I could return after the military conflict here [Angola] was over. That is why I had to adapt as quickly as possible and learn that language. I succeeded within the framework of our classes; I was teacher’s aide within two months.²⁴

Ilíbio was from Huambo in Angola and had been to school in Namibe and Lubango, where he attended the Instituto Médio Friedrich Engels until ninth grade. In 1988, he went to East Germany, straight out of school, with no work or military experience. The prior education he had had allowed him to make the most of his training. Ilíbio was unusual, as learning German was for many of his fellow migrants a major challenge. This was even more so because some Mozambicans arrived with the bare minimum of a fourth-grade education—not an easy feat to achieve in Mozambique at the time. It was particularly these formally less educated migrants who struggled at times with basic reading and writing skills for which the training in East Germany made no provisions.

The process of acquiring new linguistic skills was fraught with misunderstandings. Elvas, who worked for Angolan groups as a translator in different factories across East Germany, remembers:

In reality all races, when they go to a new place, they have two major preoccupations: they want to know the offensive words and how a person is discriminated. You can easily misunderstand the pronunciation of Schwarze [blacks] and Schweine [pigs] and often people felt offended because they thought of those words as the same. That created problems, and here the translator was needed.²⁵

His comment reveals the existence of everyday racism in the form of racist comments and tensions between East German and foreign workers that formed part of the worker-trainees’ factory universe from the start.²⁶

The training of foreign workers was not always a one-way street; while young Angolans and Mozambicans strove to learn German, some Germans working closely with them learned Portuguese and picked up a few words in African languages from across Angola and Mozambique. Pastor Almuth Berger, of Berlin’s Bartholomäus parish, started a Portuguese course in her mission house. She recalls: “We wanted to show them that we were also interested in learning their language. …on this basis we increased our understanding, that was a beautiful thing.”²⁷ Regina, who wrote the poem about the film factory, remembers that her manager “liked to learn our language, Changana. Every time when a cassette broke, she would say ‘That is broken, tchucumeta.’”²⁸ On a more formal level, some company brigades learned African revolutionary songs, or received Mozambican names, such as the “Kakomba” brigade at a motorcycle factory. This official engagement was often pretty shallow. It is not clear what “Kakomba” meant—it may have been a wrongly transcribed or spelled version of the name of Paulo Samuel Kankhomba, a Mozambican independence fighter—hardly a sign of deep engagement—and in any case, official events did not mean true meeting of minds.²⁹

Technical know-how played an important role in transforming worker-trainees into skilled socialist laborers. They were taught the theory required for their certificates as skilled laborers. Like the language lessons, the company provided this training, which varied by company and by job description. For instance, it took Juma, from northern Mozambique, nineteen months to receive his diploma as a skilled milling cutter with an overall grade of “good,” for which he had to pass theoretical and practical subjects (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). The theory behind technical training included manufacturing techniques, machine engineering, material science, technical design, and length checking practice. Practical lessons included milling and planning (levels 1 and 2) and training under production conditions.³⁰ From the moment Juma received his certificate as cutter he was considered a skilled worker.³¹ Throughout this endeavor it was clear who was learning from whom, a hierarchy juxtaposing North and South, uncomfortably mapping on colonial hierarchies. These asymmetries are also revealed in the paternalistic tone of Juma’s report (see Figs. 4.3 and 4.4).

Fig. 4.1

Juma Madeira’s certificate as skilled milling cutter, in Portuguese. Source: Juma Madeira

Fig. 4.2

The same certificate in German. Source: Juma Madeira

Fig. 4.3

Juma Madeira’s report in German I. Source: Juma Madeira

Fig. 4.4

Juma Madeira’s report in German II. Source: Juma Madeira

The text of the report in Fig. 4.4 reads:

J. Madeira worked in light metals production and was deployed on milling and drilling machines. He was interested in technical aspects and achieved good work results. Use of work time and thereby better meeting of expectations not always satisfactory. He fit in well in the work team.

He was very interested in theoretical lessons. Sometimes he missed lessons, otherwise his achievement levels would have been even better. He still needs to work more precisely on written work. He tried hard to contribute to the collective. Appearance and behavior praiseworthy.

Shift work on the factory floor further molded worker-trainees. Adaptation to new work rhythms was a key part of their training as socialist workers. Much of the learning on the job took place through the practice of soft skills. Punctuality, striving to achieve quality work, and meeting production quotas are examples of the sort of things that were emphasized. Moreover, all worker-trainees had to learn about work and safety regulations; it was the company’s responsibility to furnish them with all necessary work equipment and knowledge. Some worker-trainees received certificates, honorable mentions in company newsletters, and promotions to brigade supervisors, and became model workers.

The training gave meaning to some worker-trainees, but not to others. Some struggled to adapt to the strict routine, the cold weather, and the difficult work. The system perceived them as troublemakers. There are several reasons why some worker-trainees expressed unhappiness with their training. Often, training began during the initial stages of their program, when many were still uncomfortable with the new language. Furthermore, schooling in their home countries did not always provide adequate preparation for the requirements of East German theory lessons, a problem with which the program organizers struggled repeatedly.³² In other cases, worker-trainees who had completed twelfth grade at home wanted to gain a university education in Germany and were not satisfied with the scope of the labor program. Other worker-trainees were not interested in theory and training but simply in an income. Lastly, the training on offer varied according to industry, company, and section. While some underwent an apprenticeship that saw them receive training across several sections in their industry, others received the bare minimum of safety instructions and learned to operate the machine they were to work.³³ The extent of exploitation of foreign labor in unpopular, unskilled positions also varied across industries and regions.

Some worker-trainees such as Regina, who worked in the film factory, remember enjoying learning both technical expertise and soft skills on the job. Regina recalls being eager to partake in the discussions at work where worker-trainees learned about “hygiene, respect, punctuality, and quality and effectiveness in the workplace.” During her two years at the factory in Wolfen, she was placed in different sectors. In addition to working in the laundry and as a roller of cassettes, she also worked with chemicals where she received additional training in “chemistry, which is the language of the Germans.” She learned “much about how work can be an exchange where you give and receive, how to join and transform products, and how to communicate with the language used at work.”³⁴ She also learned about German culture at work: Regina’s supervisor taught her “to value my birthday. Every time the 19th of August came around, I found a bunch of flowers and a present on top of my machine.”³⁵ During lunch break everybody went to the cafeteria to eat “Wurst, Schnitzel, Broiler—food of the gods!”³⁶ Regina sums up: “As luggage from Germany I brought back the German language, training in laundry, chemistry, and manufacturing of cassettes and magnetic tapes. This was my training, and I was a twenty-two-year-old, independent woman.”³⁷

Despite Regina’s positive relationship with her work, the eclectic variety of her areas of operation suggests a prioritization of the needs of the factory rather than a concern for the skills that Regina might need upon her reintegration back home. Regina had no choice regarding the selection of her specializations; her placement at a movie factory does not suggest the prioritization of the needs of Mozambican industry. Nevertheless, Regina brought back with her more than skills which she never got to employ and a language that hardly anyone else spoke. She brought with her a sense of the importance of migration for her own development and of wage labor for her independence. Just like for Regina, for many young Mozambican and Angolan women, going abroad and being able to earn their own income signified personal independence from family structures and the ability to independently provide for their children.³⁸

Not all worker-trainees were as enthusiastic as Regina. Some challenged the conditions they found in their respective placements in ways that have been described elsewhere as “weapons of the weak,” “everyday resistance,” or the Eigensinn—self-willed-ness—of the workers.³⁹ Their responses ranged from abandoning their places of work temporarily to leaving permanently. Former Angolan worker-trainees, in the first Angolan group to be sent to East Germany in 1985, remember some of their colleagues voting with their feet. Reportedly, about forty people out of about 250 worker-trainees, sent to IFA (Industrieverband Fahrzeugbau—Industrial Association for Vehicle Construction), Ludwigsfelde, and to Leipzig, decided to return. They refused to partake in the program because they had been under the impression that they were signing up for academic training.⁴⁰ One group member recalls: “Soon after our arrival a meltdown happened. When we learned about the actual activities we were to carry out, discontentment spread. Many became demoralized. Some workers ended up conforming and others renounced the contract.”⁴¹ The worker-trainees were expected to “integrate into the factories, to start working directly.”⁴² New worker-trainees had to decide for themselves whether they wanted to accept the conditions they found on offer in East Germany or return back home.

Unforeseen events, such as strikes, work stoppages, or accidents, played a special role in the workers’ formation. Strikes in East Germany were officially prohibited. Nevertheless, this law did not stop foreign workers from threatening or going out on strike or refusing to show up for work.⁴³ In their memories, worker-trainees had had a say on the factory floor, however difficult to voice. Jacinto, a skilled textile worker specializing as a spinner and stretcher, remembers a strike in his pithily named textile company VEB Vereinigte Baumwollspinnereien und Zwirnereien Baumwollspinnerei Zwickau, Werk II Meerane (Zwickau United Cotton Spinning and Twisting Cotton Mill, Meerane factory no. II) over wages received during the training period.⁴⁴ Jacinto remembers:

We had a director who was from the same textile industry and we had workers from other sectors who already worked there for a long time. …They told us we were being robbed and we needed to put on a strike. They had passed through the exact same situation, vindicated, and succeeded. …the next morning the 10 o’ clock shift did not go to work, my colleague went to strike with three pre-decided mottoes, ‘Pay us like workers,’ ‘We will return to Mozambique,’ and ‘We will work for another company!’ That day there was a lot of tension in the company and the evening shift also did not go to work. …In the presence of the Director General of the company we won our cause. …He came, we had an interpreter who communicated to him what happened. He immediately said we were right and ordered that our salary was readjusted for the months during which we had been exploited. But, on the basis of the agreements, we also had to make up for that lost day, which we did on a Saturday. From then onwards things went well.⁴⁵

In contrast, following a failed strike attempt in Mittweida, seven people were sent back, which Jacinto does not remember happening to his colleagues. “When we were threatened with being sent back to Mozambique, the others just said it didn’t matter to them, that what mattered was that we were paid what was ours by law,” explained Jacinto.⁴⁶ Whether the details of this strike occurred exactly as described to me on a hot afternoon in a café in Beira, more than a quarter century later, is of less importance than Jacinto’s recollection of his agency and success in having collectively applied pressure on the company to rectify worker-trainees’ grievances. Worker-trainees became workers conscious of their rights and knowledgeable about how to claim them. Not all East Germans behaved toward the migrants in accordance with the spirit of the program, but at least in some cases they were willing to correct exploitative tendencies.

Workplace accidents necessitated self-advocacy. In theory, worker-trainees were eligible for compensation and treatment but as the following example demonstrates, in practice it could be difficult to enforce these rights.⁴⁷

I was told that a member of my family had passed away and I went to tell my supervisor that I had to leave on the same day, but he refused to let me go. As a result, I paid little attention to my work and that was how the accident occurred. I became angry and no longer wanted to work for that company. Not that I hold resentment against the company, but I was upset with that person who refused me the leave of absence to return to Mozambique. …Afterwards my supervisor said I had no right to the indemnity payment because the accident was caused by my negligence. That left me outraged and with a lot of anger against him. When I returned for my second contract in February, I was left without work for a long time because I no longer wanted to work for that company.⁴⁸

Despite having experienced unfair and abusive workplace treatment, Jacinto was still able to negotiate the situation according to his wishes and switch companies. The East German labor shortage and the special political and economic relationship between East Germany, Angola, and Mozambique put the worker-trainees in a relatively good bargaining position. Furthermore, political embarrassment from the failures of the labor migration scheme gave German officials incentive to negotiate to make things work.

Workers were faced with policies that invaded their personal domain. Despite socialist rhetoric about women’s importance in the workplace and as mothers, female worker-trainees had to make difficult decisions between production and reproduction. As Luzia, who worked in textiles in Gera from 1985 to 1989, remembers: “It was a strict rule and written in the contract that if a person became pregnant, they’d be sent away. They [men] had the possibility to father many children there without having to return.”⁴⁹ Consequently many pregnant female worker-trainees were sent back to an unknown future while their male counterparts left offspring in Germany.⁵⁰ The implications could be dire. Those who were sent back prematurely often did not have the chance to bring many goods with them. Additionally, they often had to fight for themselves and their children in the civil wars to which they returned. Yet, quite a few women I interviewed also highlighted their choice to receive help from their own families back home in raising children and therefore wanting to return. Yet, it was the absence of the choice to remain which made this ruling highly problematic. Furthermore, not all women were able to rely on the help of their families but could be shamed for their behavior. Women therefore faced challenges that arose partly from their precarious position in their home society, and partly from East German society failing to live up to its own ideals of combining production with reproduction.⁵¹

The worker-trainees’ East German and other international colleagues were expected to support their transformation into skilled socialist workers. Officially, workplaces were places of international cooperation and racism was illegal. Though many East German colleagues put on their best behavior while at work, this did not stop racists from making their intentions known outside of work. Pedro, who left for East Germany at the age of twenty in 1986, and worked at a textile company close to Dresden with about 500 other Mozambicans, remembers this schism: “One of my colleagues, a young man, who also came to be auxiliary mechanic like me, we treated each other well in the company, but as soon as we were outside, he was already my enemy. We never reached the point of a physical fight though.”⁵² However, others befriended their co-workers. A worker who was at VEB Glasseidenwerk Oschatz—Silk Glass Works Oschatz—from 1987 to 1991 remembered years later: “Even outside work we went on excursions together with our German colleagues, we even left our city and went to explore other cities, or we just played football. It was great.”⁵³ The integration experience within the workplace depended very much on the atmosphere of the company in which the trainee was placed. This atmosphere was in turn determined by the cities in which migrants were located, the attitudes of the local leadership, the size of the workplace, and whether there was any previous experience with foreign workers.

The labor and training program set out to create socialist skilled labor to support the East German economy in the short term and their home economies in the long term. It did so through knowledge transfer and soft skills training in the company classrooms and on the factory floor. The worker-trainees challenged those parts of the program that did not work for them; in return, the companies sought to discipline the worker-trainees into submission to the rules and regulations of the program.

Disciplining the Socialist Worker

Controlling the labor force is an important theme in the history of industrial production. It certainly has a long history in southern Africa.⁵⁴ For the worker-trainees, infractions could lead to disciplinary talks, warning letters, being punished with a curfew or fines, or even expulsion from the program. Chief among forms of indiscipline at the workplace was the inability or unwillingness to perform according to expectations. Infractions that brought punishment included pregnancy, disease, religious convictions, excessive drinking, and criminal behavior. Pregnancy, long-term diseases, and religious beliefs were effectively criminalized, presumably because they interfered with the workers’ productivity.

Worker-trainees who fell sick for an extended period were to be sent back.⁵⁵ However, my collected oral histories do not speak of such cases. Speculatively, this may be because workers who had to return early identify less with the madjerman cause, so I did not get the opportunity to speak with them. Another possibility is that most of those who were sent home early due to ill health are now dead. A happier explanation is that the threat to send the workers home in case of illness was rarely carried out. I did come across cases where workers were treated for serious illness in East Germany, sometimes over a period of months, and for various diseases ranging from tuberculosis to malaria.⁵⁶ Some worker-trainees became ill because of the shock of (not) adjusting to the sudden change in climate, cuisine, and work routine.⁵⁷ The medical eligibility of the worker-trainees was among the selection criteria and East German doctors were stationed in Mozambique.⁵⁸ Despite this, some worker-trainees arrived in ill health. This indicates the limitations of the in-country health screenings. One worker-trainee remembered: “Two days after we arrived, we underwent another medical inspection. Many of us left with diseases that we never even knew we had.”⁵⁹ The East German treatment options were often not available in Mozambique or Angola. Access to East German health care was therefore perceived as an advantage, and in some cases was even seen as the primary reason for migration.⁶⁰

Worker-trainees faced consequences, including deportation, if they followed their religious beliefs in a way that companies considered a threat to maintaining work discipline. Christian ties helped to integrate worker-trainees into East German society as they found church support networks or were adopted by host families.⁶¹ As throughout the Eastern Bloc, the parties in charge of Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany perceived religious networks as competition. A Mozambican migrant, a FRELIMO member, was also involved with the Cabana movement. Portuguese for ‘hut,’ this organization was originally started in 1988 in the Bartholomäus parish in Berlin by pastor Almuth Berger. It began as an informal meeting space for religious foreigners and East Germans and expanded to include students and workers from various nationalities. The Mozambican man was forced to choose between his involvement with the church and FRELIMO. When he chose the church, FRELIMO immediately sent him back to Mozambique.⁶² Another worker-trainee belonging to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, whose faith forbade him working on Fridays, could not arrange his schedule to have Fridays off. When it became clear that the company showed no interest in accommodating his needs, he decided to withdraw from the contract and flew back home.⁶³ Worker-trainees were exposed to the tensions between secular state socialism and religious expression from both host and home governments.

It is important to highlight that religious expression was not always repressed, and in fact also sometimes opened possibilities for intercultural learning. While Mozambican and Angolan worker-trainees learned from the East German Protestant and Catholic Churches, in turn German parishes learned about Christian diversity in Mozambique. Pastor Almuth Berger remembers that the Mozambicans “founded a real ecumenical congregation … this was an exciting development, interesting from a theological point of view, usually in East Germany something like this did not exist.” She recalls having been interested in the plethora of Christian churches, ranging from churches which originated in missions from various countries, to Pentecostal denominations.⁶⁴

Worker-trainees also faced disciplinary measures for their alcohol consumption when it interfered with performance at work or in vocational school. In Samora Machel’s Mozambique, drunkenness was one of the cardinal sins, interpreted as sabotage to the revolution.⁶⁵ By contrast, in East Germany, the young revolutionaries had ample access to alcohol. João, an Angolan worker-trainee, remembers:

I drank too much. I was very close to being sent back because of my drinking. During class, when the others drank juice, I drank alcohol. They caught me with a bottle of whisky, but I got away with it explaining that I drank to keep warm in the cold weather. To tell the truth, I really did drink because I could not deal with the low temperatures. I had a colleague with whom I used to drink but after they spoke to us, I quit drinking and he continued and when they discovered this he was sent back to Angola.⁶⁶

João’s story illustrates some reasons migrants had for drinking, such as mitigating emotional and physical adjustments to the work routine, to the different culture or the inhospitable weather, and to homesickness.

Substance abuse was one expression of Eigensinn, a way in which workers were able to alleviate the pressure, escape the control of the work routine, and maintain a sense of independence. Drinking during work breaks can also be read as a form of passive resistance.⁶⁷ Drinking was in fact so pervasive that those who did not consume alcohol experienced group pressure. For instance, Bernardo grew up in a family in Lunda Sul province in which all the children completed secondary school because the father, a nurse, and the mother, a primary school teacher, valued education. He decided not to drink: “I had many problems with colleagues because of that decision. My decision had to do with my family, nobody smokes or drinks in my family. …I am a Catholic and I don’t like alcohol and drugs.”⁶⁸ The pervasiveness of drinking was not only an annoyance to peers who were excluded, it was also a problem which regularly confronted team leaders and companies. Often this led to conversations between company personnel and worker-trainees with the goal of making them understand their “misbehavior” to bring about a behavioral change.⁶⁹ Such a warning, in João’s case, worked. In the case of his friend, it did not.

Committing violent or petty crimes led to disciplinary measures ranging from serving a prison sentence in East German prisons to being returned home prematurely. Foreign worker-trainees were involved in disco brawls, but not all were as unlucky as Anselmo, who was deported. Anselmo encouraged a group of Mozambicans to start a fight with East Germans to exact revenge for the beating of one of his Mozambican friends. “Our Mozambican superiors reported the incident to our delegation saying that we started the trouble, and they requested our expulsion and consequently our return to Mozambique,” remembers Anselmo.⁷⁰ His comments underscore the role that home country representatives and delegations played; disciplining the worker was a matter of bilateral cooperation between home and host country. The Angolan and Mozambican groups were stratified according to hierarchies. The interests of groups within the national groupings were often at odds.

Becoming New Men and Women

Creating the New Man, the Homem Novo, or the Neue Mensch in Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany was fundamental to socialist development.⁷¹ Samora Machel framed his understanding of the New Man for Mozambique: “Education is our principal instrument in forming the New Man; a man, liberated from old ideas, from a mentality that was contaminated by the colonial-capitalist mind-set; a man educated by the ideas and practices of socialism.”⁷² Meanwhile, Agostinho Neto declared during Angola’s proclamation of independence: “The objective is…the construction of a just society and a New Man. …The working masses shall exert complete power, the only guarantee to form the New Man and for the triumph of our revolution.”⁷³ The Angolan and Mozambican New Man was a top-down vision of the new modern, virtuous citizen who sacrificed private pleasure for political duty. The idea of the New Man also carried the tension between the promise of individual education and the chance for upward mobility in the name of the collective and the socialist revolution.

The creation of socialist workers who lived up to the standards of the New Men and Women was one of the key goals of the worker training migration program. Politically, the Angolan and Mozambican migrants were to help grow the nascent proletariat in Angola and Mozambique, thereby strengthening the base for the national socialist revolutions. Economically, they were to lend their labor power and expertise to their country’s development after their return. While the worker-trainees were conscious of this mission, few of them came to embody the socialist worker at home. Most returned home to a post-socialist order where everything they had learned about socialism and most of their technical knowledge was obsolete. In some ways, the emphasis on large-scale state programs that managed labor with the idea of creating a modern human was reminiscent of the late colonial period in Africa. The colonial civilizing mission became the socialist civilizing mission. Scientific socialism replaced religion and socialist notions of development replaced capitalist ones. A belief in the dignity of labor and linear modernization survived, however. Above all, the hierarchy of who was learning from whom was unchallenged in the shift from colonialism to socialism.⁷⁴

Worker-trainees went to Germany to become workers. That is, many adopted an identity as workers that remained meaningful to them long after they had ceased working in the industrial sector.⁷⁵ In the interviews, former worker-trainees create bridges between their past and present experiences that are important to understanding how a worker’s identity can be formed and how it is independent from the work that people are actually doing. In East Germany, workers formed expectations about what a socialist welfare state should provide its citizens. This included health care, retirement benefits, subsidized housing, transportation, basic goods, and employment. They also hold the post-socialist countries in which they now live to this standard and find them deeply wanting. They understood, and understand, “real work”’ as wage labor in the formal economy. Lufaquenda, who was recruited for East Germany when she was in the ninth grade and worked there from 1988 to 1991, remembers: “I liked the work I was doing.” She describes her work at the cotton mill in Zschopau as “dignified work.” She associated dignity with the reliable receipt of a salary: “During the week we worked at night, we earned more. …There never was a late payment, at the end of the month you had your salary, here in Angola there is a lot of delay.”⁷⁶ Salaries were central to the worker-trainees during their time in East Germany. Receiving equal pay as compared to other workers served as a measuring rod of exploitation. The secretive nature of the shifting deductions from their base salary led to rumors and the feeling of being exploited for political ends. Salaries varied according to industry and status (apprentice, skilled or unskilled worker) as well as individual output. Group leaders and translators had a higher income than worker-trainees. The link between work, dignity, and wages is a strong one in most former worker-trainees’ present-day understanding of labor. Most worker-trainees come from a background in which they and their families experienced irregular payment during colonialism as well as in the postcolonial states they are now inhabiting. Uncertainty about one’s compensation for work performed is thus a continuity that shapes workers’ ambiguous relationships to their work. The connection between work, wages, and dignity is felt especially strongly by the many who are suffering economically and psychologically from the precarious and informal work and pay systems which characterize their post-return lives and continue to fuel present-day madjerman activism.⁷⁷

Many worker-trainees remember their migrant labor experience more favorably than their post-return work experiences. Workers from Nacala, a port city in northern Mozambique where a small group of returnees found blue-collar wage labor, illustrate this: “In Germany work is organized and there is no exploitation of the worker. On the contrary, they are valued. Here there is a great devaluation of workers and the spirit of work is missing.”⁷⁸ Like these workers, many portray their migrant work experience as better—more efficient, safer, more dignified, more organized—than their post-return experiences. Gaspar, from Luanda, would even send his children to East Germany: “There people care more about the workers, there are constantly reunions. That is marked in my heart and if I had the possibility to send my children to partake in a similar experience, I would.”⁷⁹ As should be clear from the ground already covered in this chapter, work and training in East Germany was hardly a bed of roses. Enthusiasm for it nearly a quarter century later reflects even worse working conditions in contemporary and recent Mozambique and Angola, particularly as regards stability of income. Against this present, the past appears glowing by contrast.

Work and training reflected trade-offs between different imperatives. On a national level, the East German state wanted functional workers to satisfy its demand for labor power for its increasingly struggling economy. On a bilateral level it also increasingly wanted to see a return on the current account surplus with Mozambique which had developed in the barter trade system used in the socialist world. To that end voluntary “transfers” of a portion of the workers’ wages became mandatory. In reality, the transfers were fictional as the Germans simply paid a lower proportion of the wages and Mozambique and Angola were to make up the difference on the workers’ return. From the German perspective, the difference between what workers produced and what they were paid could create a surplus. This was a way of offsetting the imbalance of trade. As an overarching international policy goal, East Germany supported fledgling socialist states in advancing toward socialist world revolution.

Angola and Mozambique sought to get some of their excess workers employed and trained for future use in their planned industries. The individuals who constituted the scheme wanted to gain an education and work experience and make money. Some of these goals emphasized work. The future-oriented developmental ones emphasized both, but with a far greater weight on training. What the migrants themselves were most interested in depended on their own personalities, circumstances, and short- and long-term goals.

Part II: Consumption: The Material Life of Socialism

Looking through the returned workers’ photo collections, carefully saved in illustrated albums or simply scattered in boxes, it is hard to miss the centrality of materialism. A young man proudly posing with Pink Floyd’s vinyl Dark Side of the Moon, another in an Adidas sports jacket and jeans posing with a white baby doll. A group of young women in high heels, animal prints, and shiny jewelry. A man in a suit playfully combined with sneakers, another in fine leather shoes with striped overalls and sunglasses. A woman posing in her room between a TV, a sound system, and shelves displaying Fanta, Sprite, Pepsi, and Coke cans like trophies. Two women smoking on a bed underneath walls covered in posters of Michael Jackson and pin-up girls from West Germany; a group of men smiling at the camera, holding guitars. Again and again, social snapshots with beer bottles. Such is the colorful life captured in black and white—and occasionally in color—that worker-trainees kept as memories and sent home from the Eastern Bloc.⁸⁰

Ina Merkel points out that consumption in socialism has frequently been discussed in terms of a shortage of consumer goods and a lack of variety and aesthetics.⁸¹ These portrayals of a limited consumer life under communism have led to a homogenized depiction of “the socialist way of life” as being dichotomously different to capitalist (over-)consumption.⁸² Indeed, much of the traditional story of the Cold War is told through a dichotomous analysis which contrasts collectivism with individualism, homogenization with pluralism, norms with needs, and needs with wants. The memories of Angolan and Mozambican former worker-trainees pry open this schematic conceptualization and open up a space for another, more ambiguous—and because history is always ambiguous, more accurate—reading of East Germany. The migrants experienced East Germany as a place of riches and also as a means to access Western goods.⁸³ Moreover, the memory of those who stayed on until after the fall of the Berlin Wall is colored by their shopping sprees in the West before returning home.

Angolan and Mozambican worker-trainees’ consumption habits are best thought of along two temporal axes and two relational axes. First, they consumed with an eye to their East German present and immediate future. They enjoyed fashionable clothes, music, alcohol, cigarettes, and much sought-after food items like bananas, rice, and garlic that were challenging to buy in East Germany. Moreover, they bought presents with which to maintain relationships with friends, colleagues, and partners in East Germany. Secondly, they invested in their return home.⁸⁴ They sent presents home to family and friends—we can see this as a way of cultivating their networks ahead of their return. Most importantly, they relished the autonomy their work abroad afforded them to buy goods to prepare for the establishment of their own households back home. These goods ranged from electronics to furniture and kitchen equipment. The migrants’ consumption enabled them to acquire the personhood they desired by sustaining both their host and home social networks and collecting the material basis for their future life back home.

Going East to Shop

From an ideological perspective it is ironic that young people, sent off to a socialist country to learn how to become New Men and Women and return as vanguard workers, remember material consumption as having played a central role in their migration experience. Material consumption remained an emotive issue for the migrants through all three stages of their migration. Before they left, they dreamed of the goods they would acquire and the lifestyle they would assume in East Germany; in East Germany, they focused on living and portraying a life they deemed worthwhile while also preparing for their return. After their return, they acquired social standing through the goods they brought to keep and to redistribute. Once marginalized, they parted with many goods in a struggle for survival. The Mozambican and Angolan governments, familiar with the concept of labor migration to industrial centers as a result of their history with South Africa, likely factored remittances in the form of material goods into their vision of this labor and training program. The Gayisa, Mozambican men who returned from mine labor in South Africa, brought with them all sorts of consumer goods to maintain their networks and build their futures.⁸⁵ From the perspective of the migrants themselves, production was intricately linked to consumption.

Socialist economies like that of East Germany strove to satisfy the basic needs of their population while securing general well-being for everybody. The relationship of socialist governments to consumption changed over time from advocating austerity to a greater awareness of the importance of satisfying consumer demands. When the worker-trainees arrived in East Germany at the end of the 1970s, the government had developed “consumer socialism.” Many East Germans who compared their choices with those of family and friends in West Germany perceived consumer socialism as lacking.⁸⁶ However, East Germany was the most advanced socialist society in terms of consumption possibilities. It was a far cry from the scarcity to which worker-trainees had been exposed at home in the war economies of recently independent nations mired in ongoing wars.

The basic tenet of consumption in communism remained that nobody should enrich themselves at the expense of others, and that each citizen should contribute according to their ability and consume according to their needs. This expectation required rational consumption on the part of socialist consumers and a mutual understanding of which needs were genuine or false and which demands were appropriate or excessive. In practice, this proved an impossible balance even just among East Germans. The continued existence of social stratification in a purportedly classless society remained a sensitive topic. The same can be said for the stickiness of race and racial thinking in an ostensibly anti-racist society.⁸⁷ Tensions rose when foreign worker-trainees, with different ways of gauging basic needs and appropriate or excessive demands, encountered the planned economy.

Foreign worker-trainees generally bought into the socialist logic of pride in production, yet, to them, this did not preclude a simultaneous pride in consumption. Merkel reminds us that in East Germany: “Consumption over and above…real needs was interpreted as compensation for an unsatisfying life. True satisfaction lay in being productive.”⁸⁸ For worker-trainees, consumption was the expression of a life they had desired back home. They did not see the contradiction between consumption and production that socialist ideology sought to establish. In any case, production and consumption were often linked. Some were involved in the production of the very things they came to consume whether indirectly or, sometimes, directly. For instance, Juma Madeira and Graciel Chumbe, whom we encountered in the prologue, worked in the production of the famous MZ motorbike brand. Many a worker was proud to export an MZ back home. While their labor aided the production of more goods, foreigners’ consumption put an additional burden on East Germany’s planned economy with its inflexible supply. Global redistribution of goods led to pressure on national supply. The politics of socialist consumption and the practices of consumption in socialist economies were not always compatible.

Among the things that the migrants sought in Germany for immediate and personal consumption were warm clothes, fashionable outfits, stereo equipment, music, food, alcohol, and train tickets. Worker-trainees often felt overwhelmed upon arrival in East Germany at the sheer quantity of available goods and food, and the affordability of rent and transport.

Our life was good in comparison to what we had before and what we had after. We did not have to pay much for housing, or water or electricity. Food did not cost very much so we had a lot of money to spend on drinking, partying, disco, and to buy things. We had 600,- marks every month. You could get a train ticket to Berlin for 20,- marks, so you see it was really a lot. We were young, that is the stupidity of youth.⁸⁹

The Angolan and Mozambican migrants, as with East German citizens, benefited from price subsidies but had to pay extra for non-essential goods. The East German government intended to save its socialist citizens from their own consumption desires through price mechanisms. Goods and services the government deemed necessary for a dignified life were subsidized. Housing, tram tickets, and basic food items such as bread and potatoes were cheap. Non-essential items such as cars and coffee remained expensive. The East German consumer landscape catered to different income levels through introducing special stores such as Exquisit for high fashion, Delikat for luxury food products, and Intershop, a chain selling Western goods and rare items for hard currency.⁹⁰ These enclaves of luxury aimed to satisfy consumers with more purchasing power, but foreign worker-trainees also occasionally frequented these stores in the hunt for Western goods or foodstuffs familiar from home.

Men and women generally bought similar items, but there were some differences. Some men bought food to prepare in the dormitory kitchens and some women invested in TVs and stereo equipment, but on the whole women report to have been drinking less frequently, investing less in going out to night clubs, and buying fewer motorbikes and cars. While men bought handbags, makeup, flowers, and chocolates for their partners, Mozambican women did not mention to me that they had bought gifts for their partners. Both men and women bought things for children left at home, but women talked more about this and it was often more central to their narrative. Women often made investment decisions that conformed to images of being responsible young women and mothers, but they were also young and enjoyed the freedom of spending their own wages. The female worker-trainees do not fit schematic depictions of female consumers focused on domesticity. Most importantly, they were directly involved in the production of goods; their domestic sphere was curtailed to life in a dormitory and the support of geographically distant family.⁹¹ Not only were both men and women involved in producing sometimes the very goods they consumed but both men and women invested in necessities and luxuries for their future households, and men and women shared an interest in fashion, music, and good food as well as in providing both for their home networks and for their own futures.

While in capitalist systems migrants are often feared due to worries about competition for employment, they were feared in East Germany because they were seen to be competition for limited consumer goods.⁹² Shopping brought foreign workers in close contact with the East German population. Introducing people with culturally different consumption habits into a planned economy struggling to keep its consumers satisfied aggravated local anxieties. An example of this was food purchases. Some worker-trainees found German food inedible or experienced digestion problems and thus continued cooking their own meals rather than eating in canteens.⁹³ Mozambicans typically understood rice, chicken, and garlic as the ingredients of a good meal, while from the perspective of an East German citizen, these staples were sources of envy since they were hard to find in local shops. Eusébio remembers that bananas were often available only once a week—and indeed bananas became a symbol for scarcity in East Germany readable until today.⁹⁴ When he, as the group leader, took his group of worker-trainees out shopping, East Germans would make racially tinged comments such as: “Get out of the line, you have so many of these in Africa!”⁹⁵ Many East Germans saw the worker-trainees as competition for buying scarce luxury items. They saw the African consumption habits as reflecting privileged access to coveted goods. This attitude led to rumors, fueling jealousy and other tensions in East German supermarkets and beyond.⁹⁶

Worker-trainees do not only talk about racist encounters in supermarkets. They also speak about how scarcity brought about informal help networks. Shortages in the East German economy led to parallel informal economies including bartering, a black market, and networks of people exchanging goods and services.⁹⁷ For worker-trainees, participating in such networks could pay off in unexpected ways. An example is Bato, who, from 1988 to 1990 worked as a cutter producing diesel motors at IFA Motorenwerk in Nordhausen, and remembers having established close connections with his girlfriend’s family, and indeed having found love because of sharing:

After two months there, I had a German girlfriend and went to see her every weekend. …We got to know each other because her mother asked me for garlic, and I gave it to her. It was like this. Her mother cleaned in our dormitory and started talking to me. We talked and talked, and she had already shown me a photo of her girls. One day she asked me if I had garlic for her. I gave it to her, and she invited me to her house for that Saturday afternoon. When I got to the train station her daughter picked me up, and we went to her mother’s house. The whole family was there, the mother and the brothers and we ate a lot of cake and drank coffee. Later we danced and people drank and smoked. At that time, I did not yet do either, but I was soon to learn. Anyway, I had a whole German family, and I had a lot of contact with them.⁹⁸

Worker-trainees sometimes confronted hostilities and at other times were integrated into networks of exchange which could be an entry into East German social life.

Many worker-trainees saw East Germany as a country where they could not only satisfy their needs but also invest in their dreams of a good life. As the privileged sections of East German society experienced socialist consumption through pleasures derived from luxury goods, many Angolan and Mozambican worker-trainees also associated East Germany not with deprivation but with luxury. They bought records, TVs, stereo equipment, and fashionable clothes, items we could classify as wants rather than needs. Young men also spent lavishly on their partners. An impressed nineteen-year-old female factory worker recalled in 1982 what her Mozambican colleague from the assembly line for SR 52 mopeds had given his partner:

We went to her birthday party. …Well, what he gave her, we don’t receive on Easter, Christmas, and Whitsun together. If you’d have added it up it would have been around 300,- marks for sure. He shopped in the Exquisit store: stockings, a bra, lingerie, then he bought a leather bag in the leather shop—the red one that she always carries—a purse, and five boxes of Cabinet [cigarettes], a nightgown, chocolate, and more of that kind of stuff. I don’t think that you would spend this much money on a person whom you don’t love at least a little.⁹⁹

This list of gifts reveals that workers consumed luxury goods in significant quantities; 300 marks would be about half a month’s income.¹⁰⁰ This example, of course, has a gendered aspect to it and demonstrates the cultural expectations of many Mozambican men of a partnership between a man and a woman, where material gifts can play a large role in wooing.¹⁰¹

The worker-trainees’ positive memories of East German retail reveals that they construe luxury as the opposite of shortage. The more usual approach is to define luxury goods under socialism as those not addressing immediate needs. Worker-trainees go further in describing as luxury the relative availability of goods. Some of these goods might have seemed ordinary to the average East German, but their presence to the Africans denoted plenty.¹⁰² Long lines of consumers were a common feature across the socialist East as well as in Mozambique and Angola but the shops were emptier in southern Africa than in East Germany.¹⁰³ Worker-trainees remember their home as a true economy of shortage: “At that time we had neither food nor clothes. So, when you arrived in the dormitory where you found a modern kitchen with sophisticated machines…that was a miracle.”¹⁰⁴ Moreover, luxury included consumerist pleasure, which could include the satisfaction of long-unmet needs, or consumption which aspired to distinction and extravagance. Both of these aspects are visible in the workers’ choices of fashionable clothes, many of them Western in style.¹⁰⁵

Consumerism was an aspect of identity politics for the worker-trainees and East Germans alike. They lived in a world that sought to curtail individual autonomy, and one result was that consuming goods became an expression of individuality and self-determination.¹⁰⁶ Both worker-trainees and East Germans wore home-made clothes that mixed West and East.¹⁰⁷ Listening to Michael Jackson or Pink Floyd records allowed worker-trainees to become part of an international world that transcended the Iron Curtain. Katherine Verdey illustrates that people invested in goods to distinguish an independent self, vis-à-vis an unpopular regime.¹⁰⁸ For the worker-trainees, coming from a context of deprivation, consumption was not meant as criticism of socialism, but rather they understood socialism as an enabler for the possibility to migrate abroad to consume. Consumption remained central to their sense of personhood as it had been for the many labor migrants in southern Africa before them. This generation of worker-trainees expanded the product range they remitted back to their home countries by being able to tap into both the East and West German consumer markets.

The West held a certain fascination for some worker-trainees who displayed Madonna posters and Fanta, Sprite, and Coca Cola cans in their dormitory rooms. The Soviet Union and other socialist countries measured their own living standards against American suburbia, but for East Germany the more important comparison was on the other side of the inner German border.¹⁰⁹ Worker-trainees also looked toward Black America. They were primarily interested in the West insofar as they had an active interest in obtaining better-quality goods from West Germany at cheaper prices. They could obtain Western goods in the Intershop at inflated prices. But it was more advantageous to use personal networks. To that end, worker-trainees ordered goods from African students, who were in many cases able to transcend the wall, contrary to the workers who were not supposed to leave East Germany. A worker-trainee remembers: “Whenever we wanted something from the other side we talked to students because those were [the people] free to go there. I had a nephew who studied there at the time.”¹¹⁰ Other workers had family members in the West who were able to send goods. These networks then facilitated access to Western goods even when it was impossible for worker-trainees to go there themselves.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, West Germany became an important location for many workers to spend the welcome money that foreign workers and East Germans alike received.¹¹¹ In addition, many workers spent their indemnity pay after the premature cancellation of their labor contracts in 1990 in the former West. The vast majority of the 15,100 Mozambican and 1300 Angolan worker-trainees registered in 1989 went on a shopping pilgrimage to West Germany.¹¹² It seems safe to assume that these spending sprees subsequently colored the memory and perceptions of their entire stay in Germany.

Candido, who worked in East Germany from 1981 to 1990 at a textile company close to Dresden, remembers the fall of the Berlin Wall, like many worker-trainees, with mixed feelings:

When the wall came down, I was watching TV in the dormitory. There were many problems even before that day because the companies had ceased to work as they should have. Well, German unification was on the one hand beautiful because it allowed German families to reunite. But we were there without our families and we wanted to work. So, for us it was not such a good day. What was good though was that we could now buy Western products with West marks without having to change our money first. There were more goods now to take home and we could get them more easily.¹¹³

For those worker-trainees who had accepted returning, a final buying binge ensued. They were supposed to receive 3000,- marks indemnity payment and 70 percent of the monthly net wage for at least three months as makeup pay to compensate for the premature termination of their contracts.¹¹⁴ This was money to spend on goods to take home. Some worker-trainees even returned with cars (Mercedes Benz, not Trabant), motorbikes (MZs), and other large and expensive items like refrigerators and stoves.¹¹⁵ A colleague related to the Angolan ambassador to an Eastern European country remembers going to the West primarily for goods that were cheaper there: “Things were different over there, but it wasn’t a shock. We took advantage of the situation and bought lots of things there…clothes, electronics, sound systems, and more things.”¹¹⁶ Worker-trainees were guided by both rational decisions and emotional longings for luxury. Fernando, who worked in East Germany from 1985 to 1991 as a weaver, remembers having bought his first bottle of champagne in West Berlin.¹¹⁷

The worker-trainees’ consumption patterns knew no national borders—many of the workers who were sent to East Germany also consumed West German goods, many of which were ultimately destined for Mozambique and Angola. This transnational scope led to tensions; while the planned economy operated on a national level, based on the needs of the East German market, worker-trainees’ needs were not encompassed by this. The goods transfer from North to South on the one hand conformed to the East German foreign policy of helping a southern African communist state to mitigate its dire shortages of consumer goods. On the other hand, it led to a problem of internal policy as angry East Germans feared the competition of foreign workers in the supermarket.

We see, therefore, that the Mozambican and Angolan experience of socialist consumption was at odds with the usual view. The challenges facing the development of a socialist Angola and Mozambique were enormous. The development of the national economies was severely hindered by the triple challenge of a Portuguese brain drain after independence, the lack of skilled technical personnel due to the legacy of colonial politics, and an ongoing destabilization war that commanded resources and manpower and repeatedly targeted the economies through damaging transport and production hubs. Angolans and Mozambicans came from societies in which socialism was under construction and had relocated to a place with already-existing socialism. Their memories illustrate how different socialist spaces could look from different vantage points. Moreover, the worker-trainees came to East Germany and experienced internal German division and unification firsthand. Their memories show that they found ways around the restrictions on West German goods, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall. After the fall of the Wall, they took part in the sudden exposure to Western consumerism that happened to everyone in East Germany. For workers who lived through the changes in 1989–1990, the availability of cheaper Western goods, together with the welcome money from the West German government, and their indemnity payments, allowed for an unparalleled shopping spree. But even those workers who returned before also speak of East Germany as a consumer paradise when compared with their home. Overall, the feeling prevailed that the migration was worth it, in terms of the immediate material economic gains it brought with it: “When we left, we had nothing but the shoes on our feet and the clothes on our bodies, when we came back, we had everything and more than we could have dreamed of.”¹¹⁸

Consumption and Becoming: Seeking Personhood Abroad and Staying in Contact with Home

Worker-trainees migrated to become people who were taken seriously in their communities of origin as much as in the communities of their temporary diaspora. They believed one of the most important ways to achieve full personhood was through the acquisition of goods. This is why many former worker-trainees, like other labor migrants in the region, remember consumption as a crucial aspect of their migratory experience.¹¹⁹

Worker-trainees’ consumerism was to an important extent motivated by investment in the life they wanted to set up after their return. They sent home parcels filled with goods, some of which were intended for resale, and sometimes hard currency exchanged on the black market. They also brought back suitcases of goods destined to support their dependent networks at home during home vacations. Like Lino, many migrants were excited to lay the foundations for their own home: “The majority of things I bought, were to prepare for my own house.”¹²⁰ Like Lufaquenda, they were also aware of supporting the wider family: “My salary was for me to buy clothes and things I brought back for my family. …I brought dishes, and electrical appliances. I was one of the first girls who brought back a sound system. I brought it back when I returned to Angola on holidays.”¹²¹

Every single worker-trainee perceived as an individual and as part of socialist collectives in East Germany was also a node in a system of relationships back home. These relationships had to be maintained through mutual assistance, often asymmetric in nature. Some still lived with their birth parents when they signed up, but many lived with relatives—uncles and aunts, older siblings, or cousins—in provincial capitals where they pursued further education or work opportunities. Through these experiences, worker-trainees grew up in systems of family relationships beyond the nuclear family. These extended family networks made demands on the fruits of the worker-trainees’ labor.

The personhood of the worker-trainee developed to a large extent in tension between personal dreams and obligations to wider social networks.¹²² Anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff speak of “being-as-becoming,” explaining personhood as a process gradually occurring over time and in relations to others.¹²³ The migration to East Germany was for many migrants a far-reaching moment of personal growth.¹²⁴ Many Mozambicans lived outside of family support structures for the first time. Even those Angolans who had served in the military prior to their migration still needed to adjust to a very different climate, cuisine, and work routine. They often for the first time had a regular income at their disposal that allowed them to buy goods to which they previously had no access. To a certain extent the young migrants became autonomous, while still firmly located in a socialist collective. Men and women used access to goods to solidify their standing in East Germany as well as their future standing after their return home; they at once enjoyed and felt constrained in the role of provider. A gendered dimension to this role becomes visible in the interviews. While many of the women who made the decision to return in the early 1990s justify their return with wanting to be closer to family, or returning to mother children they had left behind, quite a few men told their migration history from the point of view of an individual making choices best for himself. While men were traditionally perceived as providing access to goods and money through labor migration, for example, to the mines in South Africa, in this case women also became providers for their families through labor migration.¹²⁵ The relationships between migrants and home networks were thus ambivalent.

In a time before the internet and mostly before telephone access, migrants stayed in contact with those at home through postcards, letters, pictures, and reading the news about Mozambique and Angola. The postal service was also key for sending remittances: “I always sent something from Germany and with that I showed that even though I was far away I did not forget them [family in Mozambique]. …It wasn’t easy to send money because that money from there [GDR] was useless here [Mozambique]. So, I bought goods to send to them for their consumption and to sell to get a little bit of money.”¹²⁶ Worker-trainees sent parcels to Mozambique and Angola filled with clothes, shoes, and non-perishable food items. Some of this was intended for personal consumption, some for resale. This activity put the sender in a powerful position vis-à-vis the expectant recipient at home. Yet, this power was relative as worker-trainees needed to appease those same relatives to ensure a successful stay abroad. While most gift-giving refers to East and West German goods making their way to Angola and Mozambique, it is important to remember that material gifts went both ways. Among the more commonly exchanged items were professional photos and family snapshots that fit into a letter. This practice was often the only way in which absent fathers or mothers could relate to the offspring they had left behind.

Conclusion

For Angolan and Mozambican worker-trainees, production and consumption were two sides of the same coin. By participating in the labor and training migration they became workers and consumers. The worker-trainees’ experiences thus transcended stereotypical Cold War simplifications of Western consumption and Eastern production. Following in the footsteps of generations of southern African labor migrants, they used the work opportunity to invest in building a future life and sustain home networks. Unlike the generations before them, they were fashioned into skilled or semi-skilled laborers, meant to return with the skills and work experience to support production in their home economies. They operated in socialist environments where workers were heralded as the class that would advance socialism and build a new, prosperous society free from exploitation.¹²⁷

Material acquisitions were important in giving meaning to the worker-trainees’ migration. Worker-trainees did not make their consumer choices according to socialism’s belief in rationality and abstinence. Their consumption patterns were complex: they consumed goods from East and West Germany; bought goods for their life in East Germany and back home; and spent money on items both for pleasure and for the satisfaction of basic needs. Through these practices of consumption, they not only transcended the Cold War divide but also merged the home country with the host country context. Viewing consumption in East Germany through the eyes of Angolan and Mozambican worker-trainees brings a new facet to our usual conception of the victory of Western department store soft power. East Germany emerges as a developed country with a selection of desirable goods compared to the war-torn home context from which worker-trainees came.

Alongside containers of goods from East and West, filled with everything from cars to food, worker-trainees brought home with them an appreciation for the organization of work, and the prominent role of the worker experienced during their time in East Germany. As we will see in Chap. 6, the workers made use of their goods back home, albeit differently to how they might have foreseen. Upon returning home, they also drew on their ideas about dignified work, governmental responsibilities, and their experiences of agency through protest. They thus utilized their experiences with East German real socialism and its end to fashion their new lives in an Angolan and Mozambican post-socialist society.

The worker-trainees’ memories of their East German experience remain colored by what they lived through before coming to East Germany and what they encountered after their return. Acknowledging these various temporal influences on the retold experiences indicates how ideas about life in a socialist society overlapped or clashed with the experiences of worker-trainees. In the following chapter we will turn away from the migrants’ material and professional lives toward the social life of socialism. We will examine the worker-trainees’ experiences of inclusion and exclusion as intimate strangers in East German society.