“Between Solidarity and OSTracism: Asian-East German Entanglements”
Organizers: Qingyang Freya Zhou, Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick, Qinna Shen
Primarily remembered as a period of ideological bifurcation, the Cold War also generated unexpected forms of alliance. Among them was East Germany’s strategic solidarity with multiple Asian countries, including China, North Korea, Mongolia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, and India. The 2027 Summer Film Institute examines how the GDR’s cinematic engagements with Asia both articulated ideals of “socialist brotherhood” and exposed their limits through gendered and racialized forms of ostracism. It approaches DEFA–Asian film history through a central tension between abstract notions of ideologically motivated political kinship among nations on the one hand and the concrete bonds forged by border-crossers on the other, including international students, contract workers, and interracial families. Particular attention is given to migration “from East to East,” foregrounding Asian East German voices that complicate dominant post-reunification narratives that tend to emphasize minoritized experiences in the capitalist West.
Specific questions of inquiry include:
- How did official GDR rhetoric define solidarity with Asian “comrades of color” in the decolonizing world, and how did color film technology shape racialized representation? To what extent did portrayals of Asianness in DEFA films differ from other cinematic traditions?
- How did hypermasculine concepts of socialist fraternity shape the lived experiences of women, and how is this androcentric gaze manifested across various genres of visual representation?
- How did racialized practices of ostracism persist despite the GDR’s avowed antifascist commitments and “color-blind” discourse, as evidenced in linguistic practices of film translation, such as accent performance, dubbing, and subtitling?
- How have postmigrant filmmakers revisited the GDR’s contested legacy through personal and family archives, alongside experimental aesthetics of compilation?
Screenings will bring together DEFA films and coproductions (from the 1950s through the late socialist period) with contemporary works by Asian German filmmakers. The selection spans a wide range of genres, including newsreels, anthology films, ethnographic documentaries, fairy tales, animated shorts, and melodrama. Participants will examine how racial difference was negotiated within the socialist bloc and why these negotiations remain relevant today.
Morning sessions will be devoted to discussions of the films screened on the previous day, with short supplementary clips from other relevant titles. Live interviews with invited filmmakers on select days will offer insight into production contexts and contemporary Asian German media practice. Throughout the week, participants are encouraged to move across groups to reflect on questions of race, gender, kinship, labor, diplomacy, and belonging in East(ern) Germany and beyond. Screenings are presented in collaboration with local theaters as public events.
Qingyang Freya Zhou is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD in German, with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies, from UC Berkeley, in 2026. Her first monograph in progress, Divisive Kinship: The Long Cold War in Korean German Film and Literature, examines literary and cinematic representations of national division across East/West Germany and North/South Korea from 1900 to the present. Freya has published two award-winning articles on Asian German cinema in Seminar and German Studies Review and co-edited the anthology Charting Asian German Film History (Camden House, 2025).
Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick is Assistant Professor of German and Affiliate of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research and teaching interests encompass Asian German studies, film and media studies, queer studies, and, most recently, the Viet German diaspora. He earned his Ph.D. in Germanic Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he received the Mellon-CES (Council for European Studies) Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Along with Shen and Zhou, he is co-editor of the volume Charting Asian German Film History (Camden House, 2025).
Qinna Shen is professor of German and affiliate faculty in film studies and comparative literature at Bryn Mawr College. She received her Ph.D. in German from Yale and is a cultural studies scholar of twentieth-century Germany. She authored The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films (2015) and co-edited volumes on Asian German studies. She is on three editorial boards: German Studies Review, Visual Culture in German Contexts Series, and German Screen Studies. She has co-edited the special issue marking the German Studies Association’s 50th anniversary in 2026. She also serves on the GSA Executive Board (2026–2029).
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