Radical empathy: The Third World and the New Left in 1960s West Germany

Scholars and former activists have dismissed the West German New Left's relationship to the Third World in the 1960s as misguided identification and a projection of their own revolutionary fantasies. This dissertation provides an alternative narrative, making three primary interventions in the historiography. I begin by exploring how concrete collaboration with African, Asian and Latin American students on West German university campuses helped catalyze and organize the activism of West German students. I direct attention to the centrality of decolonization struggles and challenge the emerging scholarly consensus that places the origins of the transnational 1960s in the United States. Secondly, I place the visual tactics of New Left activism in the broader media context of 1960s West German society, demonstrating how New Left attempts to mobilize the West German population against state violence overseas created dilemmas around the ethics of representing Third World suffering unacknowledged in the existing historiography. Thirdly, I argue that it was not guerrilla militancy but the concept of cultural revolution that had the broadest and most enduring influence for West German leftist politics. While only a small number of radicals sought to adapt Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara's "propaganda of the bullet" to First World struggles, the reception of the Chinese Cultural Revolution played an important part in the New Left turn toward culture, a fact ignored by scholars and former activists determined not to acknowledge any productive outcome from the engagement with what became seen as an indefensible humanitarian catastrophe by the 1970s. This dissertation contends that the realities of the postcolonial world were not only remote sites of misconstrued projection for the West German New Left, but also elements of daily political discussion and the search for new political self-understanding in an era in which the Old Left seemed neither able nor willing to deal creatively with the challenges and possibilities of a decolonized world.