Film presentation and talk with Gülriz Eğilmez, Angelika Nguyen, Nivedita Prasad

For migrants and migrantisized people 30 years of German-German unification rather means 30 years of exclusion. We take this anniversary as an opportunity to gather and make visible these marginalized perspectives on German history. We ask: Who lived under the shadow of the wall? and invite the protagonists and contemporary witnesses Gülriz Eğilmez, Angelika Nguyen and Nivedita Prasad to talk about their experiences and memories. They lived on both sides of the wall and belong to different generations.

Three closely related filmic works and contemporary documents extend their stories: Bruderland ist abgebrannt (1991) by Angelika Nguyen, is a pioneering work that has become part of the post-migrant canon. In it, Nguyen documented the stories of Vietnamese contract workers in the GDR, whose state contracts lost their validity with the fall of the Wall. The film also addresses the everyday racism of the time and structural exclusion.
In Die Mauer ist uns auf den Kopf gefallen (2018) by Diane Izabiliza, Women* of Color talk about the German reunification and its impact on their activist and political work, how it strengthened Black alliances between East and West German women* and how it led to the founding of many associations. In the interviews Mit offenem Blick | Açık bakışla – Migrantische Perspektiven zur Erinnerungskultur des Mauerfalls und der Wendezeit Gülriz Eğilmez and Alexandra Weltz-Rombach compile the experiences of migrants* who experienced reunification and the so-called fall of the wall in and around Dresdener Straße in Berlin.