For the very first time, the Zafraan Ensemble is curating a concert on the subject of composers from the "brother countries" of the GDR at the HKW - come along on March 1, 2024 at 9 p.m.!
https://www.hkw.de/programme/echos-der-bruderlaender/exhibition#main
The Zafraan Ensemble curates a special program that shows an exciting range of composers from the so-called brother countries who wrote music either in the GDR or in their own “brother country”. It will also be about composers who came from the GDR and showed solidarity with their sister countries and publicly stood up for it. The concert is on March 1st, 2024 at 9 p.m., the opening starts at 6 p.m. Free admission !
Anyone who only looks at Germany’s historical and current global relationships through the prism of the Federal Republic of Germany and thus the West does not grasp the whole picture and leads a discourse that inevitably results in an exclusionary and one-sided view of history. When the German post-war and post-reunification history is told – a history that can also be viewed and criticized as that of the “accession of the GDR to the Federal Republic of Germany” – then a legacy of the German Democratic Republic is often ignored: the migration movements and transnational political and economic , educational and artistic interweaving and exchange processes that came about through alliances and agreements between the GDR and other socialist-oriented states, the so-called “brother countries”. In a broader sense, the term refers to the entirety of the ideological, political and legal framework that enabled cultural and educational exchange as well as economic or political support between the GDR and its allies – which also included the employment of contract workers. Between 1949 and 1990, hundreds of thousands of people migrated to the GDR, including around 500,000 workers and trainees from countries such as Algeria, Angola, Mozambique and Vietnam and up to 70,000 students from Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, Syria, among others. Tanzania and Vietnam. There were also thousands of political migrants from socialist countries like Chile or non-socialist countries like Turkey, where communists were persecuted. In 1989, 190,000 foreign nationals lived in the GDR.
