Foreign Front: Third World Politics In Sixties West Germany (radical Perspective [Paperback]

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.

Foreign Front describes the activism that took place in West Germany in the 1960s when more than 10,000 students from Asia, Latin America, and Africa were enrolled in universities there. They served as a spark for local West German students to mobilize and protest the injustices that were occurring wordwide.

"The topic is fascinating; the core thesis is provocative; the research is stellar; and the writing is wonderful. This is a bold, exciting book that will get a lot of attention."—Jeremy Varon, author ofBringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies

"This carefully researched and well written book convincingly brings the foreign students and international influence back into the stol£¼