When we talk about the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, we rarely think of contract workers from Angola, Vietnam or Mozambique. Don Pablo Mulemba, author of Hundeheimat and co-host of the podcast Springerstiefel, draws on his own family’s history to explain why these migrant workers’ experiences are part of the history of reunification and how they challenge and reshape our understanding of Germany.
Mr Mulemba, in Hundeheimat you tell the story of your family and a little-known chapter of East German history. Your father came from Angola to the GDR hoping to study. What did he tell you about his arrival and first weeks there?The young men were taken to a kind of quarantine camp in the middle of nowhere in Brandenburg, where they had to stay for several weeks while the authorities checked they weren’t carrying any diseases. Nobody told them where they were going. My father ended up in a hostel for contract workers in Eberswalde. When they were sent to the factories, they realised it had nothing to do with the studies they’d been promised. Some of them, my father included, ended up at a slaughtering and meat-processing Kombinat. Others went to the crane manufacturing plant or a chemical factory. Whenever they asked about the studies they’d been promised, they got evasive answers.
“If there hadn’t been migration in the East for decades, I wouldn’t be sitting here either.”
Vertragsarbeiter, or contract workers, were essentially the East German equivalent of West German Gastarbeiter, or guest workers. At readings in western Germany, people are usually familiar with the term Gastarbeiter, but Vertragsarbeiter less often. Contract workers came from so-called socialist brother states. Some settled and started families in the GDR. If migration hadn’t been a part of East Germany’s history for decades, I wouldn’t be here today.
Your parents lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification together. Do you feel your East German mother’s story is seen as part of reunification, while your Angolan father’s is framed as one of migration, as though they were separate histories?
My parents were rarely asked how they experienced reunification. The questions were usually about my father’s life in East Germany and how he had suffered under far-right extremism. The focus was on him as a victim, not what reunification had meant for him.
So let’s ask exactly that: How did your parents experience the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification?
The post-unification period was a time of uncertainty for my parents. Like many East Germans, they suddenly found themselves living under an unfamiliar system. For us, it would be as if capitalism disappeared overnight. On top of that came everyday threats and lack of prospects. Would they still find work? The labour market was fiercely competitive, particularly in the east.
I don’t want this to become a success story, the kind where parents endure hardship and their children go on to build respectable careers. My parents simply had to keep going and get by. One reader called them courageous, but they say they had no other choice: they had children to bring up.
What is missing when stories like these remain untold?
Without these stories, we can’t tell the full German story. I find it astonishing that the history of contract workers isn’t taught in schools. It allows far-right narratives to persist – along the lines of: Everything here used to be idyllic. There were no migrants. They only appeared recently, and now we have to do something about it.
Your parents faced racism, far-right threats and financial hardship in Germany. Later, they moved to Angola, though you wanted to stay. What do you understand about their decision now that you didn’t understand then?
I can’t say for sure. Racism and far-right extremism clearly had a profound impact on my parents. As a child, I knew what was happening, but I didn’t connect it to their decision to move to Angola, even though I was affected by racism and far-right extremism myself. I had other things on my mind. I wanted to become a professional handball player, not move to a country that was completely alien to me. Today I see the connection much more clearly and understand their decision far better. But there was another factor I failed to recognise for a long time: my father’s political convictions and his pan-African vision, that one day we must return to our ancestral continent, because only there can we find happiness.
Reading your book, I kept noticing parallels between your life and your father’s. Which similarities did you discover yourself while writing it?
I knew it already, but it was only while writing the book that I fully realised that, in the aftermath of the Angolan Civil War, my father had grown up without his family. I grew up without my parents, too. That’s something we share. We probably went through similar experiences. The continuity of far-right violence and racism was less of a surprise, although things weren’t as extreme during my childhood as they were in the early 1990s, when neo-Nazis broke into my parents’ flat armed with baseball bats. People often say the fall of the Berlin Wall was followed by a sudden shift to the right in eastern Germany. I always think the Nazis didn’t just appear out of nowhere, like in a computer game. That ideology never disappeared from Germany as a whole.
You speak openly today about the racism you’ve experienced. Why was it hard to talk about in the past?
For a long time I was reluctant to talk about it, because it carries a sense of shame. It’s deeply uncomfortable. Today I can say that I’m not the one who should be ashamed. It’s the people who make others’ lives hell who should feel shame.
As an author and in your podcast “Springerstiefel“
, you bring alternative perspectives on eastern Germany into public debate. How do you feel about always being expected to explain the east to others?
Obviously, you eventually get tired of the subject. My next book won’t be about eastern Germany.
Media coverage would benefit from a wider range of voices, and I don’t just migrants. How much do people in the east know about queer life? Virtually nothing. Of course it exists, even if the media doesn’t portray it that way. And there are plenty of people here who are actively involved in civil society. What frustrates me is when journalists come here with an agenda and aren’t actually interested in finding anything out.
When you think about your father’s experiences, what concerns you most about people coming to Germany today?
One of the biggest mistakes is leaving newcomers to fend for themselves. What does “welcome” really mean? “You can come here, but we don’t want anything to do with you”? That’s a strange definition of welcome.
How can we make it as easy as possible for newcomers to take part in society? That’s the question that interests me.
You grew up in the east. How would you feel about raising your own children there?
I wouldn’t start a family in the east if I knew my children would look like me. I’d be confronting them with problems they shouldn’t have to face.
“Even though I no longer live in the East, that doesn’t mean I’m giving it up. On the contrary.”
I think it’s about more than the economy. What’s happening there culturally? What do these places have to offer?
I could play in Berlin, but I prefer going to Brandenburg to stay in touch with people there. I think the social value of belonging to a club is underestimated. When I imagine my youth in Eberswalde without sports clubs, my God, that would have been so sad!
To anyone thinking of moving to eastern Germany, I’d say: If you want to do something cool there, go for it. That’s exactly what these places need.
Just because I no longer live in eastern Germany doesn’t mean I’m giving up on it. Quite the opposite.
November 2026