Foreign Front

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 in the world beyond Europe and North America. Their activism served as a model for West German students' own activist organizing, catalyzing their movements, and influencing their mode of opposition to the Vietnam War. In turn, West German students offered solidarity with and safe spaces for international students' dissident engagements. The collaboration with foreign students offered West Germans a measure of empathy in understanding the Third World not as a place of suffering, poverty and futile violence, but a political entity containing individuals with the capacity and will to speak in their own name.