Three places, three perspectives:
Erfurt, School of Education in the early evening: a 21-year-old Black student is already in the youth club – today we would call it a student bar – for a get-together with fellow students when the now historic press conference takes place. First, a television has to be set up in the bar to show what is actually happening. The atmosphere is palpable: excitement, disbelief, a uncertainty. The young black student thinks: ‘Maybe some things are possible now. Possible to find your family. Possible to travel to Nigeria. Possible to escape the confines of this small city in the GDR.’
Berlin, Heinrich-Heine-Straße, around 10 p.m.: a group of Black and PoC youths from the GDR learn that the border is suddenly open. Here too, disbelief, here too, a sense that something is amiss. 9 November stands for something else. It doesn’t feel right. Nevertheless, they decide to go to the Heinrich-Heine-Straße border crossing and see if it is possible to go to West Berlin. There, they meet a group of young Black members of the Initiative of Black People (ISD) and do some unlikely networking, which would later lead to a larger network within the ISD.
Berlin, Checkpoint Charlie, also around 10 p.m.: a young, black, queer activist who lives in West Berlin and often has to travel to West Germany for work. For the first time on her many returns from West Germany, there are no GDR border guards standing watch, demanding identity papers, and intimidating her. She spontaneously decides to travel to Alexanderplatz with her mother.
Break: Experience
Mid-December, Berlin-Kreuzberg: Nuran from the Turkish-Kurdish community is noticing that, more and more often, white Germans from West Berlin are coming into the shops of Turkish and Kurdish people and telling them to pack their bags, ‘now we are one people again, now the East Germans are coming’.
Also in mid-December, Erfurt, near the cathedral square, the young 21-year-old Black student: ‘At a demonstration against the destruction of evidence at the Stasi headquarters in Andreasstraße, I experienced the first upheaval in the movement. From “We are the people”, an offer of communication to the government, to “We are one people”, and finally, once again: “Germany for the Germans”. At that moment, I realised that it was no longer my movement. I was no longer meant to be there.’
Transformation knowledge – Laboratory 89
2018/2019: Germany remembers, and it feels good. It begins with ‘50 years of 1968’, an emancipation movement, an experience that did Germany good. And it continues with ‘30 years of the so-called Peaceful Revolution’. Perspectives such as those described here are not included; they are not only deliberately ignored, but they also leave an empty space. And yet we set out to capture these perspectives, to bring them into the dialogue, to dig them up, so to speak, and to dig them up from our own memories. Because when we start to design a project to commemorate ‘50 Years of ‘68’ from a BIPoC-feminist perspective, we realise above all that our older sisters don’t identify with the ‘68ers at all, because it was never open to them as such. When we began our next project, Laboratory 89: Intersectional Movement Histories from West and East, we realised that we had already taken many steps in 1989 to get to know each other, to form networks, and to get to know each other’s’ stories, including the stories of our movements. But we also realise that we have few spaces in which we can share them. Because I am now one of the older sisters. And it is important to pass on these transgenerational experiences, too. That is remembrance, intersectional remembrance. And not just today on 9 November, but throughout the year, always: we need these spaces to keep these experiences alive, to pass them on, and then to be able to transform them into something so that future generations will be able to do something very meaningful with them.
