Internationale Solidarität: globales Engagement in der Bundesrepublik und der DDR

Extract

Until recently, many historians and former activists have interpreted 1960s ‘Third World’ solidarity in Europe as the mere abstract daydreaming of (largely white) students. Their stories are perhaps reminiscent of the images in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise of students waxing romantic over revolutionary upheavals in the Global South (without leaving their bedrooms and kitchens). Despite recent historiographical interventions that have emphasized the role of Global South actors in 1960s Europe, the present volume edited by Frank Bösch, Caroline Moine and Stefanie Senger takes this long-standing myth about the 1960s as a starting point. According to Bösch’s introduction, in the 1960s, ‘solidarity remained generally abstract, much like the solidarity with Maoist China’ (p. 15). The essays contained in the volume, however, focussing as they do on the decades after ‘1968’, make a crucial contribution to the ongoing revision of a historiography that has heretofore eclipsed ‘Third World’ actors. In contrast to the sixties, those later decades saw increased possibilities for contact, meaning that solidarity was no longer abstract but instead motivated by a number of practical encounters between East and West Germans and revolutionaries from Africa, Latin America and the United States.