Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Radical Perspectives)

Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Radical Perspectives)

Quinn Slobodian

Language: English

Pages: 320

ISBN: 0822351846

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


It is often asserted that West German New Leftists "discovered the Third World" in the pivotal decade of the 1960s. Quinn Slobodian upsets that storyline by beginning with individuals from the Third World themselves: students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America who arrived on West German campuses in large numbers in the early 1960s. They were the first to mobilize German youth in protest against acts of state violence and injustice perpetrated beyond Europe and North America. The activism of the foreign students served as a model for West German students, catalyzing social movements and influencing modes of opposition to the Vietnam War. In turn, the West Germans offered the international students solidarity and safe spaces for their dissident engagements. This collaboration helped the West German students to develop a more nuanced, empathetic understanding of the Third World, not just as a site of suffering, poverty, and violence, but also as the home of politicized individuals with the capacity and will to speak in their own names.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

conflicts. He wrote that solidarity with “the actual ‘wretched of the earth’ in theory and practice is always the struggle against one’s one ruling class.”17 He felt that the goal was to transcend the appeal to “pure humanity” or humanitarian principle and see the mutual necessity of socialist revolution for the liberation of the First World and the Third World. Such an approach seemed to dignify Third World political actors and recognize them as interdependent partners. Concretely, though,

nongovernmental landscape. The 1970s also saw the expansion of Medico International, Terre des Hommes, and the Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (Society for Threatened Peoples), three humanitarian organizations formed between 1967 and 1970 by West German leftists originally mobilized against the Vietnam War.32 The Humanist Union, which, as described in chapter 3, first turned its attention from domestic civic matters to global political issues in the context of the Vietnam War, continued to focus

treatment” of Ifeobu was further evidence that the Federal Republic was “the foster-child of the Kaiser-Hitler’s Nazi Germany.”209 The German ambassador in Nigeria dismissed the articles as “communist propaganda” and did not feel compelled to take further action to make Ifeobu’s return to West Germany possible.210 When a delegate from Hamburg asked during a parliamentary session whether the case of Ifeobu should be the grounds for revising the Foreigner Law to ensure a court hearing before

helped divert critical attention from the realities of his aggressive policies of anticommunist containment in the Third World, which were no secret in West Germany.15 The left-liberal newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported on what it called the “secret U.S. war” in South Vietnam from spring 1962 onward. The magazine conveyed graphic details, such as the response of the White House military adviser General Maxwell D. Taylor after hearing the number of communist partisans operating in South Vietnam:

the woman at the desk tears a page from the book of quotations, folds it into darted ends, and fixes wooden matchsticks and a pin to the end with string, turning it into a makeshift arrow (see figures 22 and 23). We see the arrow flying, followed by a shot of two people wearing masks of the Shah of Iran and his wife Farah Diba eating soup. The voiceover continues with “ . . . that, with surprise, strike the enemy,” as the arrow lands in the shah’s soup. He reels back with marks on his paper-bag

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