Page - 87 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 6 2020, 87–90 Extended Abstract Open Access: content is licensed under CC BY 3.0 The Left Looks at Portugal Travel pictures from and for the Carnation Revolution Extended Abstract Ana de Almeida, Jan-Hendrik Müller, Christian Wimplinger In the span of one week, “Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Victor Serge, Ernest Mandel [and] Louis Althusser” (Gomes & Castanheira 2006: 54) visited Portugal. From a revolutionary theoretical perspective, it was not neces- sarily to be expected that a military coup inspired by socialist ideas would kick off a non-violent revolutionary process in a Western European country. Between 1974 and 1975, many others joined to see the Portuguese Carnation Revolution with their own eyes. Traveling writers, journalists and filmmakers, understood as practically ori- ented theorists, are the dramatis personae of this text, on the basis of which we discuss the political, social, economic and media conditions under which such trips to the Portuguese Revolution took place. We read their individual trips in a broader context of mobility in which questions of national representation and traditional touristic motives play a role alongside political action. Coming mostly from France (Pereira 2010: 100) but also from other Western European countries, the Eastern Bloc, South America, the USA and sporadically from other geographies, a significant flux of people followed. On the one hand, they took part in a broad practice of international solidarity (Slobodian 2012: 13f.); on the other hand, they shaped a new travel paradigm (Pereira 2010: 100). In the case of Germany, many citizens from both the FRG and the GDR committed themselves to socialist reform projects and to the support of liberation movements abroad. In contrast to the GDR, where this support was carried out with official state involvement and under precisely defined guidelines of proletarian interna- tional solidarity (cf. Bösch 2018: 7), in the FRG solidarity actions were carried out by heterogeneous political and religious groups. Their goals and fields of action were diverse; they positioned themselves against authoritarian regimes and human rights violations, for example in Chile, Argentina and Nicaragua. The fact that the social upheavals abroad were accompanied by systemic conflicts between capitalist