Contrary to popular belief, the first multiracial, multicultural starship crew to be seen on film or television was not Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek (1966–69), but the science fiction feature Der schweigende Stern (Silent Star, 1960). A co-production between Film Polski and the German Democratic Republic's (GDR) film studios Deutsche Film Aktiensgesellschaft (DE FA) and directed by Kurt Maetzig, the film tells the story of a global astronaut mission to Venus that reveals the ruins of an extraterrestrial civilization annihilated by its own volatile nuclear technology. When the mission's presence accidentally reactivates some of that technology, three of the eight astronauts sacrifice themselves so that the remaining crew can return to Earth. Internationalist solidarity manifests itself in a crew comprised of Soviet captain Arsenyev (Russian actor Michael N. Postnikov), American nuclear physicist Professor Hawling (Czech actor Oldrich Lukes), Japanese physician Sumiko (French- Japanese cabaret singer Yoko Tani), East German pilot Brinkmann (GDR star Günther Simon), Indian mathematician Sikarna (GDR actor Kurt Rackelmann in brownface), Chinese biologist/linguist Chen-Yu (Shanghai stage actor Tang Hua-Ta), Polish engineer Soltyk (Czech actor Ignacy Machovski) and—the world's first black astronaut on film or television—African communications specialist Talua (Kenyan medical student Julius Ongewe). The film's opening credits even foreground each crew member's national heritage in turn—‘the Japanese doctor,’ ‘the African communications officer’—boasting that the film contains ‘many actors from many countries, and Omega the Robot.’

Even in its pacifist internationalism, Silent Star marks a moment of 1950s Eastern Bloc cultural hubris: Sputnik had proven the Soviets’ dominance in aerospace engineering, East Germans had recast themselves as ‘worker-scientists,’ and national liberation movements in the Global South projected a postcolonial world order. Despite white Eurocentric ideologies in circulation at the time, the casting of Silent Star posits that cosmonauts could be white or non-white, male or female. Yet this expensive production also showcases the East German Socialist Unity Party's (SED) ambivalent position on race, a position that proves an object lesson in what Dale Hudson calls multicultural whiteness in the media, which ‘negotiates contradictions between an overstated racially blind inclusiveness of multiculturalism and an understated racial exclusiveness of whiteness’ (Hudson 2008, 130).