Fragmented fatherland : immigration and Cold War conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1980 / Alexander Clarkson.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

1945 to 1980 marks an extensive period of mass migration of students, refugees, ex-soldiers, and workers from an extraordinarily wide range of countries to West Germany. Turkish, Kurdish, and Italian groups have been studied extensively, and while this book uses these groups as points of comparison, it focuses on ethnic communities of varying social structures--from Spain, Iran, Ukraine, Greece, Croatia, and Algeria--and examines the interaction between immigrant networks and West German state institutions as well as the ways in which patterns of cooperation and conflict differ. This study demonstrates how the social consequences of mass immigration became intertwined with the ideological battles of Cold War Germany and how the political life and popular movements within these immigrant communities played a crucial role in shaping West German society.

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CHOICE Review

Adding to the growing number of critical works on pre-1990 West German history, Clarkson (King's College, London) addresses the Bonn government's treatment of immigrant groups between 1945 and 1980 from Ukraine, Croatia, Algeria, Spain, Greece, and Iran. Although their numbers were smaller than the more studied Italian and Turkish guest workers, these highly diverse groups included political activists who posed a major challenge to the federal and state governments, linked as they were not only to Germany's Nazi past but, even more importantly, to the FRG's domestic and international Cold War politics. Drawing on a vast number of government records, including the national and local intelligence services as well as extensive press and secondary sources, Clarkson deftly and cogently analyzes the evolution of the FRG's policies, from the conservative front line Cold War state of the 1950s that strongly supported anticommunist immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Balkans to a detente-seeking government in the late 1960s and 1970s that balanced the anticolonial and anti-authoritarian movements within its borders with its core political and economic interests. Paradoxically, these foreign political activists, many of whom defied the FRG's expectation of their return to their homelands, would also contribute to a decisive change in Germany's immigration policies. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. C. Fink emeritus, Ohio State University