When HIV infections first appeared behind the Berlin Wall in the mid-1980s, the response of the East German state was mixed: some health professionals hoped to dismiss the growing pandemic as a capitalist problem, while others saw an opportunity to showcase East German health care and scientific leadership on a global stage. In the final few years of the GDR, however, at least one clear trend emerged: even as new resources gradually became available to East Germans, HIV/AIDS prevention among East Germany’s African students and guest workers grew increasingly discriminatory and punitive. Scholars have attributed this to the supposed insularity of the East German state, implying that in the face of this emergent threat, the GDR simply receded into isolationism behind the “Iron Curtain.”

The growing racialization of the East German response to AIDS, however, actually emerged precisely as East German scientists and doctors were launching a massive effort to join the “global AIDS community” of researchers and health officials. By this time, hidden (and not-so-hidden) racial and geopolitical hierarchies were an inescapable feature of the Western-led global response to AIDS. I hope to show how these hierarchies proliferated across the Cold War divide via well-meaning scientific collaboration and exchange, with special emphasis on the complex landscape of "alternative knowledge" or "conspiracy theories" about HIV/AIDS as a site of conflict between states, health professionals, and activists. While at the GHI, I'll use materials from the National Archives and the National Library of Medicine to continue tracing the new global networks that emerged in the first decade of the HIV/AIDS crisis, which contributed, I argue, to the liberalization and globalization of East German medicine long before 1989.