When three former Algerian contract workers, Ali Seddiki, Hamdane Abboud, and Abdelkader Manaa, returned to Erfurt, Germany in August 2025, it was not a coincidence. Their visit marked fifty years since the racist riots they had survived in the city. In August 1975, groups of young locals violently attacked the newly arrived Algerians after weeks of racist rumours and stereotypes circulating in the city. They were chased and beaten in the series of assaults over several days.
Their return came as a result of the research carried out by Jan Daniel Schubert, a PhD researcher at the EUI Department of History. Jan’s efforts to locate the men and bring their testimonies back into public view eventually led to the organisation of the commemorative events. “Being present at those moments is overwhelming,” he said. “You realise how much has been left unresolved for decades.”
The two-day programme drew far more attention than Jan had anticipated. National media such as ZDF, MDR, Die Zeit, Deutschlandfunk, and taz, covered the story in depth, while DW Arabic and Algeria’s elwatania TV reported on it for Algerian audience. Jan emphasises that none of this would have happened without the interviews he began conducting years earlier. “The idea for the events came directly out of the research,” he notes. “Once I started talking to the men and understood what their memories carried, it became clear that their stories needed to be heard publicly.”
Jan’s doctoral research at the EUI situates the 1975 attacks within a broader and long-neglected history. His dissertation, ‘An Oral History of Algerian Labour Migration to the GDR (1974–1984) – How Labour Migrants’ Agencies deal with (Socialist) Coloniality and the Marginalization of their Masculinity,' examines the experiences of Algerian workers in the former GDR, also known as East Germany, and how they narrate those experiences today. “My thesis is about Algerian labour migrants in the GDR and their oral histories,” he explains. “I try to add their stories to what we know about the GDR’s migration society. The GDR is often still perceived as a white, exclusively German society, but this does not reflect the historical reality.”
Much of the existing scholarship, Jan notes, relies heavily on archival sources, especially Stasi (East Germany's state security service) files. These documents are extensive but reflect the ideological framing of a state that officially denied the existence of racism. “The perspectives of the workers themselves are almost completely absent from the traditional sources,” he says. “And of course their experiences differ from what appears in the official documents.”
Jan first encountered references to the racist riots while studying in Erfurt, where he participated in the local initiative Decolonize Erfurt, examining the city’s colonial past. “I was astonished that no historian had tried to speak to any of the Algerians affected,” he recalls. That surprise eventually led him, during his master’s studies, to begin searching for former workers. “It took me more than a year to find the first three men,” he says. “I eventually contacted them through Facebook.”
These early conversations quickly broadened the scope of the research. “They had so much more to tell than just the events of 1975,” he explains. “They spoke about relationships, about children they had lost contact with, and about the consequences of being forced to leave the GDR and leaving those families behind.” They also described work conflicts and strikes. “They organised one of the biggest strike movements in GDR history,” Jan says. “It is widely unknown.” Hearing these accounts convinced him that oral history would be essential. “Oral history allows me to look at things that written sources cannot provide,” he explains. “I want to understand their agency: how they acted, what mattered to them, how they shaped their lives in the GDR.”
To capture these broader perspectives, Jan conducts long biographical interviews rather than focusing only on the East German years. “Their memories of the GDR are influenced by everything else they lived through,” he says. They had lived through the Algerian War of Independence and, later, the civil war of the 1990s. “For many, the issue of being separated from their partners and children is more central than the commemoration of the racist violence they experienced.”
One case illustrates the personal dimension of his research. Through Jan, one former worker located his son in Germany and met him for the first time in 2024. “It was very intense,” Jan says. “You’re there when people meet after fifty years. And everything is not suddenly perfect — how could it be? But it is important, and it shows what these stories still carry.”
Reconstructing the atmosphere leading up to the attacks has been possible only by combining archival material with oral testimonies. “There were widespread racist discourses about Algerian migrants already circulating: rumours, sexualised stereotypes, all kinds of things,” Jan explains. Stasi files and other documents refer repeatedly to stories that portrayed Algerian men as a threat. “They were presented as rapists and murderers, though no rape or murder has been documented” he says, “and there were rumours that they were interested in very young girls.” According to him, these narratives spread rapidly in Erfurt during the summer of 1975, and “the official communications from the state or the companies failed completely in trying to counter this.”
He emphasises that this climate existed in several cities in East Germany, but the violent escalation in Erfurt was exceptional. On 10 August, during a city fair, tensions erupted. “The situation developed into a mass brawl and then a hunt across the whole inner city,” he says. Several Algerian workers were beaten; some required hospital treatment. One detail stands out to him. “The first reaction of the police was to set dogs on the Algerians,” he notes. “Three of them were bitten and needed medical treatment.” Only later, after the violence intensified, did the police intervene against the attackers.
Inside the Socialist Unity Party (SED), a different explanation was presented. Jan notes that shortly after the attacks, more than 800 local SED officials attended a meeting in which the events were explained by “an infiltration from the West.” As he explains, racism was incompatible with the state’s ideology. Publicly, the riots appeared only in a brief newspaper report describing a fast trial of five young men. “It referred to disturbances of public order,” he says. “It did not mention racism or the Algerians at all.”
For Jan, the story further disappeared after reunification. “Most Algerian workers had to return to Algeria by the mid-1980s,” he says. Many faced new and urgent concerns once they were back home, including political instability and the need to rebuild their lives. “And for many people in Germany, it was easy not to engage with the story once the workers were gone.”
When the 50th anniversary approached, Jan proposed organising commemorations while working at the Oral History Research Centre in Erfurt. He collaborated with civic groups, researchers, and memory institutions, and applied for funding from seven different sources. Coordinating the logistics and visa applications proved difficult. “Much of it I did in my free time,” he says, “but it felt important.”
Each day of the commemoration drew more than a hundred attendees. Reactions were varied. “Some people came to share their memories; others wanted to correct certain details,” Jan says. “Many were grateful that Algerian perspectives were finally being heard.”
As his project developed, Jan also found that working at the EUI shaped how he approached this history. Being in a programme with researchers from very different backgrounds encouraged him to rethink some of the academic habits he had encountered in Germany. “It’s very interesting to be here,” he says. “You exchange with people who look at similar periods but from completely different places. It makes you realise how provincial some of my perspectives are.” He describes the EUI History Department as a space where supervisors and colleagues “really took the topic seriously” and pushed him to think comparatively. “Many people here work on socialism or post-socialism in Eastern Europe or beyond, and those conversations are extremely enriching,” he adds. “You understand that the GDR story does not stand alone.”
Jan has also reflected on what this project has shown him about the role of historical research. “I was always sceptical of research that does not reflect on its own position in society,” he says. “This idea that I am objective or that I stand outside of what is going on, I don’t think this is true.” Over time, his academic work and earlier activism have converged. “Now I’m not seeing myself anymore really as an activist, because my research has become the activism I was doing before,” he explains. For him, this connection is practical. “The most useful thing I can do is to work on the issues where I really have an impact.”
He hopes the renewed visibility of the 1975 events will encourage further research and engagement. “There is still so much missing from this history,” Jan says. “But if we listen to the workers themselves, we can understand it in a way that would never be possible through the written sources alone.”
Jan Daniel Schubert is a PhD researcher at the EUI Department of History. His PhD thesis ‘An Oral History of Algerian Labour Migration to the GDR 1974-1984 – How Labour Migrants' Agencies deal with (Socialist) Coloniality and the Marginalization of their Masculinity’ is supervised by History Professors Benno Bastian Gammerl and M'hamed Oualdi.
Photo: Algerian contract workers in East Germany in the 1970s. Image archived as part of Jan Daniel Schubert’s oral history research (with permission from the family of Mohamed Kecheroud).