Campaigning against Apartheid in East and West Germany

The essay addresses the visual strategies of East and West German antiapartheid campaigns of the 1970s and the 1980s. By investigating the ways in which posters visualized the system of and the struggle against apartheid and examining the images they used to call for solidarity, it sheds light on the protagonists of antiapartheid solidarity in the German Democratic Republic and Federal Republic of Germany and examines their objectives, their strategies, and their perception of themselves and of others. The essay places East and West German solidarity posters in the broader context of the divided but entangled history of postfascist Germany, the Cold War, the era of decolonization, and the formation of the transnational antiapartheid movement.