“Not Even the Highest Wall Can Stop AIDS”: Expertise and Viral Politics at the German-German Border

Abstract

This article explores East German responses to HIV/AIDS and the emergence of sex as a site of border insecurity in the imagination of the East German state in the mid-1980s. Existing histories often dismiss the East German response to HIV/AIDS as ineffective or negligible on account of its illiberalism and insularity. These narratives, however, ignore the tense debates and wide variety of state and activist responses to the AIDS epidemic that developed within the GDR over the course of its final decade. I argue that as scientists and health officials sought to integrate East German institutions into the “global AIDS community,” the specter of African sexuality loomed larger in their characterizations of this epidemiological threat (notably, in ways that do not neatly correlate with rates of HIV prevalence in the GDR). Explanations of East German AIDS policy should therefore focus less on the GDR's illiberalism and more on its liberalization—that is, its entrance in the mid-1980s into a global moral economy of AIDS that elided and disincentivized socialist commitments to the Global South.