It has often been said that the eyewitness is the enemy of the historian, or at least that living eyewitnesses destabilise the narratives that historians using archives attempt to stabilise. Ever since the ideas of living archives, of creating alternative archives, and of giving voice to the voiceless, emerged, the stabilisation of memory-fragments into history has been proceeding apace. With the proliferation of oral histories, eyewitness accounts became archives, leading to an inseparability of once-distinct forms. My contribution to this conference looks at the DDR from the point of view of eyewitnesses to the late Cold War, to the benevolent status of East German aid, culture, and support for newly ‘decolonised’ states, and examines the nature of anticolonialisms and antifascisms both official and unofficial. Using sources such as school textbooks, films, and public history-writing and telling, it uses shifting perspectives to examine the potential divergence between affect and affection for a regime or a state that one encounters among Third Worlders (as they were called before they became People from the Global South), and the really existing policies and practices that relied on hollowed-out versions of the two antis (to use a semi-Maoist turn of phrase). The paper requires us to touch upon the relationship, in Marxian thinking, between imperialism and fascism, and to trace the difficulties of using these categories in a meaningful sense as Third Worlders encountering the DDR.