Research

My current book project, East Berlin’s Red Youth: The Red Woodstock, International Solidarity, and Socialist Dissent, focuses on the making of an international youth culture in East Berlin during the 1970s and 1980s. It argues that despite living behind the Berlin Wall, East German youth participated in important internationalist exchanges–from youth festivals, to human rights campaigns, peace demonstrations, and solidarity events–that occurred at the intersection of Western leftist, global socialist, and radical Third World movements. While often at odds with one another, most of these movements were to some extent red–or socialist–in ways that made them more easily accessible to youth behind the Wall. In turn, East German youth appropriated ideas and expressions of activism, conformity, non-conformity, and even resistance—that originated not only in the West, but also in the socialist East and the global South. East Berlin’s Red Youth thus contends that East German youth both defined and were defined by the ebb and flow of international socialist youth culture, with East Berlin—red Berlin—serving as both the epicenter and the periphery of the Cold War in the 1970s-80s.

A work in progress, East Berlin’s Red Youth is a revised version of my dissertation manuscript with a reworked conceptual framework, a revised chapter breakdown, and additional archival materials. In total, the project incorporates materials collected from over ten libraries and archives, including the German Federal Archives in Berlin-Lichterfelde (das Bundesarchiv), the Berlin-state archives (das Landesarchiv), the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR (der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatsicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR or BStU), the Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste Ost), the Evangelical Central Archive (Evangelisches Zentralarchiv), the Evangelical State Church Archive, (Evangelisches Landeskirchliches Archiv) , the Robert Havemann Society, and the German Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) in Berlin. Additional materials were obtained from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and the DEFA Film Archive in Amherst, MA.