From the Archives in Cameroon to the Stasi-Archiv in Berlin, Germany?
Using Research Skills from African Archives to understand the German Cold War

Being trained as an International Relations scholar, my research has mainly been on and in Africa. I am socialized with researching colonial archives and have so far spent my academic life reflecting on power relations, post/decolonial theories, and their implications for conducting research in the ‘Global South’. My theoretical stance has often brought me into uncomfortable situations in the field. It has hardly been resolved, but I have always felt the need for profound and systematic reflections regarding my position as a white scholar from the Global North. I transparantly shared my ways of dealing with power binaries in all research articles and referred to them as my postcolonial dilemma (Ketzmerick 2019; Ketzmerick-Calandrino 2024) – doing the research while simultaneously knowing I cannot do it right in the current system of power. 

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This stance towards field research has changed slightly in my recent research for “Crafting Entanglements: Afro-Asian Pasts of the Global Cold War” (CRAFTE) project as there are less obvious postcolonial dilemmas for me in German archives. Even though I continue researching actors from the Global South and their perceptions of identity, the context of my research has changed entirely. Instead of flying hours and being away for months, having been vaccinated with all sorts of vaccinations, feeling side effects from Malarone, and sitting in dusty buses on bumpy roads, I now take the S-Bahn to the Bundesarchiv in Lichterfelde (Federal Archives), which is only 30 minutes away from my home in Kreuzberg. I have even met research interlocutors merely walking out of my house, located at a prominent critical juncture between the former east and the west. While reading materials from the former Politbüro in the Bundesarchiv, I could not help but wonder: has only the context changed, or is it my entire method of research? What would ‘postcolonial’ mean in my research on Africans in Cold War East-German Berlin? Is there a postsocialist dilemma to unpack in this case? 

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In the following contribution, I will reflect on my ongoing research within the CRAFTE project on African actors in the divided city of Berlin. I am mainly interested in the extent to which Africans used the Cold War divide for shaping their fate and whether they engaged in relations with other groups of Afro-Asian descent in the GDR. My overarching interest is also invested in understanding why, especially former eastern Germany, is portrayed today as being prone to racist ideologies despite the calls for global solidarity in the GDR. I also intend to explore the postsocialist space and its dilemmas more thoroughly in international situations. As a source-base, I am relying on my ongoing experiences in the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (Political Archive of the German Foreign Office), the Federal Archives, and the Stasi Records Archive (Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv), and the interviews I have conducted so far. Three takeaways from my past and current research form the crux of this contribution: a) Research as a collaborative process, whereby talking to people is essential; b) Usage of historical facts as sensitizing concepts, which may be helpful in approaching transitory processes of change, c) Creatively finding data to understand historical processes more holistically. 

 

a) Historical Research as a Collaborative Process 

Even if it seems obvious for most scholars, I can only reiterate that regardless of the feeling of utter loneliness, which one often has when conducting research in the archive, archival research is a collaborative process. First and foremost, ethically, I started becoming a great advocate for collaborative work while researching in Yaoundé and Buea's archives. To address the postcolonial dilemma of using colonial sources while applying a postcolonial framework in my research on Cameroon, I organized group discussions with students and encouraged them to develop research questions based on their own life experiences. However, how could this research approach be transferred and implemented with German archives? In addition, the research process in Germany was much less personal: you register online, wait to be registered, and then receive suggestions from the responsible consultant. You then search for and order files yourself. However, my previous experience of talking to all kinds of people and sharing my research topic gave me a different access also to German archives— not only to archival and historical knowledge, but also to institutional knowledge. By talking to people, I found out that the Bundesarchiv digitizes everything upon request, especially files I was not allowed to photograph because they contained personal information. I only found this out because every morning, I had a friendly chat with the person at the second reception desk about all kinds of matters and, above all, about my research and the various access points I was looking for. Talking about your research does not stop in the archive but also continues in everyday situations, while buying groceries, eating out, or taking a taxi to the Central train station. I found potential interlocutors for interviews in many such everyday situations, for instance while attending a different event and talking to someone randomly over a beer afterwards. 

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This hidden institutional knowledge is critical back in the archive because I do not have to go into every archive or am only there for a very short time. I have yet to go to the Stasi archive because my Referentin (Advisor) gives me excellent information and insight via email. She has digitized everything I have requested so far, and I wonder if I will ever enter the archive’s building. It is the same with the AA's Political Archive. After spending four days there and looking at two full boxes, I was able to view and download everything I wanted to see online. So, the research sites here in Germany are differently organized, more socially distant, and more home-office based, yet the necessity of talking to people is the same as that I experienced in Cameroonian archives. Conversations with archivists are crucial and sometimes provide leads which one cannot get through one’s own searching process in finding aids. 

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b) Historical Ideas as Sensitizing Concepts

Secondly, I want to stress using historical ideas as sensitizing concepts (Blumer, 1954). I emphasize Blumer's approach here to using concepts by drawing attention to the open, not clearly defined character of many sociological and historical terms. According to Blumer, "security," "person," "transition," and many other ‘core’ terms which are regularly used in academic contexts as descriptive of people and their practices, are not final, clearly defined concepts with unambiguous referents but only convey -not very precise- ideas about what should be taken into account in the research process. They stimulate questions and research problems (i.e., sensitize people to them and their usage in everyday contexts) rather than provide clear solutions. The concept, or rather, the framework of sensitizing concepts is seen today as a definable starting point for qualitative social research. However, Blumer believed that all social scientists work with sensitization concepts simply because this is how things are. So, although Blumer was thinking about qualitative and quantitative research, in the sense that there are no measurable realities but always approximations, I have used his idea for a different approach to archival research. Expanding on Blumer’s framework, I apply sensitizing concepts as an approach to archival research.

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It is not the objective of my research to develop an exact and stable narrative or a positivist account of ‘the past’, rather I aim to capture the polyphony of the memory of experiences people made during transitions. In doing so, I strive to accept the inherently sensitizing nature of sociological and historical concepts and to capture the diversity of empirical phenomena through conversations with interlocutors. This implies recognizing that there is no unambiguous and unequivocal past in actors’ memories and ‘the Archive’. Thus, my goal is to exchange and have conversations with several actors regarding their memories, to embed these narratives of the past in their transitioning contexts, and to bring them into dialogue with data from the archives. This approach has also enabled me to better understand the bureaucratic knowledge I was confronted with in the German archives, and the everyday bureaucracy in the GDR, its operationalization, as well as how it was confined to the geographical, political and economic specificity of the context and how the same often could lead to misunderstandings. I also used my own memories in trying to picture the workings of the bureaucracy, for example, I can refer to my memory of the voice and dialect of my former geography teacher, Mr. Staske, in my childhood memory the prototype of a GDR bureaucrat and whom I immediately remembered when I read a packing list for Vietnamese contract workers in the Bundesarchiv. Next to one item on the list, in the chronic state of scarcity in the late GDR, it was written in pencil next to mosquito nets: “Mosquitos??? Dit ham wa hier nich” [Mosquitos?? We do not have that here]. The cultural difference and bureaucratic surprise immediately reminded me of Mr. Staske, especially when imagining his dialect.

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However, this little moment of confusion is something I would consider to be something Stoler describes as “common sense” (2010) in trying to picture how former GDR bureaucrats tried to organize the unimaginable, namely to provide a pleasant stay for people who were about to experience something they (themselves) potentially never would—i.e. being abroad and foreign to a society. So, it was instructive to change my perspective and wonder— what were their ideas? What did they imagine the contract workers (Vertragsarbeiter) would need in order to be able to work here? Moreover, to what extent is there a chronic misunderstanding, solidarity, and racism at play? To sort all of these different structural explanations, using historical data as sensitizing concepts helps me to make sense of them. 

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Also, this acknowledges the different perceptions of the concept I am researching. For a long time, I researched what security meant for people in the case of Cameroonian decolonization. ‘Security’ is an open concept, which can be a mode of communication, a performative practice, or even a feeling. What is clear, though, is that security is not objective and can mean completely different things for differently situated-persons. The classic example is the SUV car, which is safe for people who drive it, but appears hazardous for children and pedestrians. In summation, I always attempt to approach research as open and to acknowledge different positions actors may have and their changing character. This approach towards sources in the archives has helped me navigate and comprehend power relations in the Cameroonian archives as well as in German ones. Lastly, and well-connected to the aforementioned experiences: 

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c) Using Creative Means of Data to Address the Power of the Archive

Of course, the obvious choice for research on internationalized decolonization and the global Cold War would be archival sources. However, as I learned, I was often able to grasp a more complete picture by triangulating such sources with other forms of information memoirs, interviews and testimonies, art exhibitions which helped capture rumors, the unsaid, and snippets hidden from the archives or those episodes which never made it to them in the first place. One illustrative example of the same would be a letter written by our interlocutor Iseewanga Indongo-Imbanda from today's Democratic Republic of Congo, who came to West-Germany in the mid 1960s, to his grandchild, which serves as a vibrant information source that places agency in the words of the actor rather than his Stasi-Akte which is a surveillance source that provides a completely different narrative of his life in divided Berlin/Germany. Working with data from secret services, such as the Stasi definitely creates a dilemma, I aim at further exploring. What does it mean to take the knowledge created in these reports as granted and what kind of knowledge is it then?

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Furthermore, I have attended several exhibitions, events, and talks organized in the context of the current memory politics in Berlin by foundations and museums. Here, the Stiftung Berliner Mauer, with their interview series online, and the Queer History month, with walking tours in Berlin, are worthy of mention. All such platforms acknowledge that there were several African and Asian voices in the former East, who actively crafted the historical process and experiences of the Cold War in the divided cities. I am optimistic of my approach that combines knowledge of postcolonial archival research with the realities of the post-socialist everyday in eastern Berlin, especially in the context of actors from African and Asian contexts, who come with their own invaluable experiences of decolonization and postcolonial realities.