in progress - phD-thesis of Jan Behrendt

The public diplomacy of the GDR: self-portraits and manipulation in the Third World

Abstract (English translation)
of the doctoral thesis of Jan Behrendt »Bewusstseinsbildende Massenarbeit Über die kulturpolitische Selbstdarstellung der DDR in der Dritten Welt« (04/2006-04/2009)

The aim of this dissertation is to explore national self-portraits that were created through the public diplomacy of the former East German state in countries of the Third World.
The GDR presented itself abroad through various diplomatic, developmental, and cultural activies, which collectively can be seen as a series of national self-portraits with particular aims. Painting the image of a ‘young, peace-loving German state’, the GDR attempted to disassociate itself from Germany’s National Socialist past. As a member of the Soviet system of alliances, the GDR sought to appear as an ideologically reliable, anti-capitalist comrade-in-arms for those engaged in the international class-struggle, meanwhile distinguishing itself from the West German state culturally and politically in an attempt to forge its own national identity. Furthermore, to enrich this identity, under the new ”heritage and tradition” concept [Erbe-und-Tradition-Konzeption] of the 1970s, it integrated into state doctrine those German classics of music and literature, which had formerly been shunned.
Although such intentional political image-construction characterized the political communication of the government of the GDR and the citizens of other countries, the patterns and contents of the self-portraits that were presented are vague at most. The multitude of cultural activities of the GDR carried out overseas at different times and in different places makes it difficult to identify common principles of employment, underlying intentions, and tendencies of a general concept. This dissertation attempts to fill a gap in the research on the foreign policy of the GDR, which lacks an overall comparative study on the between-country/ between-region public diplomacy of the East German state in the Third World.
Through summarizing the concerted means of self-presentation occurring in one context as "self-portraits," it is possible to analyze the instruments of public diplomacy regarding their coherent effect.
Identified as image-phenomena, the reconstructed self-portraits can be made the subject of comparative questions on composition and symbolism as well as on specimen and deviations, as they are asked in studies of conventional picture-theory. The framework of this dissertation is structured according to standards of picture-analysis: After describing the basic conditions of the public diplomacy of the GDR, its activities are reconstructed in a way that its procedures and contents, or its patterns and icons, are carved out. Separate from such an iconographic interpretation, a contextual analysis is then carried out, in which reconstructed self-portraits are examined in correlation to developments in the countries’ foreign policy and cultural history. By these means, not only the self-presentation of the GDR abroad, but also specific reasons for different variants of self-portraits are outlined. As a contribution to studies on the history of German cultural and foreign politics, this dissertation attempts to add to the understanding of the diplomatic legacy of the GDR, interdependence of national and international cultural politics of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), manipulative possibilities, and limits of governmental control on cultural life.