A Conversation about Global Lives in Global History: South Korean overseas travelers and Angolan and Mozambican laborers in East Germany during the Cold War

In this contribution to global mobile lives and scales in global history, Korean cultural studies researcher Jiyoon Kim, University of Tokyo, and German historian Marcia C. Schenck, Princeton University, draw on their respective dissertation research. Experimenting with a conversation style, we discuss the issue of scale in global history and elaborate on what working with subjects who move transnationally through a Cold-War-influenced world means for our projects on, in Schenck’s case, Angolan and Mozambican labor and education migrants to East Germany in the late 1970s and 1980s. As for Kim, she studies South Korean youth travelers and tour participants who journeyed abroad before and after the full liberalization of overseas travel in 1989. Shedding light on two different sides of the iron curtain, the chronological overlap produced similar insights into the “hot cold war” and the importance of the state in relation to mobility. In explicitly discussing global mobile lives of non-elite actors as a methodological approach to the writing of global history, we engage with issues of scale, units, archives, collaboration and the relationship between history and the present for and in which the historian is writin