Legacies of Socialist Solidarity: East Germany in Mozambique by Tanja R. Müller, and: Mosambikanische Vertragsarbeiter in der DDR-Wirtschaft: Hintergründe–Verlauf–Folgen ed. by Ulrich Van der Heyden, Wolfgang Semmler, Ralf Straßburg (review)

While doing field research in 2007, Tanja Müller was surprised to hear a Mozambican woman reminisce about her “memories of paradise” as a pupil in the School of Friendship (Schule der Freundschaft, or SdF) in Straßfurt in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Her sentiment contradicted the prevailing view of recent German scholars that the school had essentially indoctrinated rather than educated its students. Curious, Müller went on to investigate the experience of Mozambican children at the SdF, their lives after returning home, and the legacy of socialist values in present-day Mozambique.

Müller’s insightful study, Legacies of Socialist Solidarity: East Germany in Mozambique, is the first to examine the reintegration of nearly a thousand Mozambican adolescents, students at the SdF between 1982 and 1988. Their lives confronted an anachronism: at the behest of President Samora Machel, the children were immersed in values of socialism and solidarity in hopes of their becoming the vanguard of a postcolonial nation of workers. But when they returned home, Mozambique had moved on politically and economically. These youth were drafted into the military, their school diplomas were not acknowledged, and the returnees were left to fend for themselves.

This case study is of interest on several counts. First, this state-sponsored education project, aimed at creating the New Man (Homen Novo) to contribute to the development of a young independent Mozambique, is a story of transnational cooperation between two socialist nations. Zooming out further, the book can be read in the context of literature decentering the Cold War, highlighting the pervasiveness of the political in everyday life and the challenges posed by transitions to and from socialism. Zooming back in, it explores how an elite, state-led education program—an expression of “socialist cosmopolitanism” (4)—played out in individual lives in quite unforeseen ways. Second, this case study reveals how socialist legacies persist in shaping the identity of former SdF students in postsocialist Mozambique. Müller interprets continued attachment to values identified as “German” and “socialist” not as a sign of outdated nostalgia but as a reasonable response to negotiating the present reality in Mozambique. And third, this book offers an alternative reading from below of Mozambique’s postindependence history.

Müller introduces her project in terms of socialist legacies, discussing the scope of her sources, delineating her treatment of oral history, and stating the work’s two constitutive theories: Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of education and Nira Yuval-Davis’s theory of belonging. Chapter 1 provides a general background, embedding the history of the SdF within an analysis of socialist internationalism, GDR foreign politics, and solidarity toward the Third World. Chapters 2–4 depict the lives of the cohort before leaving for the GDR, while at the SdF, and after returning to Mozambique. We learn who these children were, where they came from, how they were selected, what their expectations were before leaving Mozambique, and what changed during their upbringing in Germany. At the SdF they learned such secondary values as discipline, patriotism, respect, courtesy, and comradeship in addition to receiving their academic and vocational training, and they grew together to form a family collective despite ethnic, linguistic, and class differences. The penultimate chapter traces education in the GDR based on five life stories, exploring how socialist values and emotional attachment were sustained years later. After a brief conclusion, five appendixes offer a glimpse into daily life at the SdF.

The book draws upon thirty-five in-depth interviews with former...