[World Revolution in the GDR. Students from the Global South at the FDJ Wilhelm Pieck Youth College]

From 1958, the FDJ invited communist, socialist, and other friendly youth organizations to send officials to its “Wilhelm Pieck Youth College” (JHS) on Lake Bogensee near Berlin to train them in Marxism-Leninism through year-long courses. Communism, it was claimed, ws not content with piecemeal solutions but strove for liberation from all forms of oppression. This encompassed race, class, and gender in equal measure — issues that had lost none of their relevance in the 1960s through to the 1980s. Here, the GDR saw itself as providing an alternative perspective: while Western countries supported or downplayed fascist dictatorships, it granted exile to the persecuted. While those who supported the United States as the dominant power of the Western world, its wars, and the coups it launched against left-wing regimes, the GDR provided state funds and solidarity donations to liberation movements and lent a helping hand to the nation-states they established. While conservative and liberal politicians in the West were courted by the apartheid regime, the GDR supported the African National Congress. There was no longer a coordinating office for the world revolution — the kind one might have dreamed of in the days of the former Communist International — but there were people all over the world who were committed to socialism and were meant to work together. This was the basic premise of the International Course at the JHS. Just how limited these commonalities actually were, and how divergent the political visions and cultural ideals were, began to become apparent during the course year at Bogensee, but their full diversity only emerges in historical retrospect. The lecture reconstructs the theory and practice of the “imagined community” of the world revolution at the JHS, particularly the role of delegations from the Global South, the aporias of internationalism between postulate and practice, and the tension between everyday solidarity and racist continuities.