Fragmented Fatherland: Immigration and Cold War Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1980 by Alexander Clarkson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fragmented Fatherland: Immigration and Cold War Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1980 by Alexander Clarkson Patrice Poutrus Fragmented Fatherland: Immigration and Cold War Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1980. By Alexander Clarkson. New York: Berghahn, 2013. Pp. xiv + 231. Cloth $95.00. ISBN 978-0857459589. In Fragmented Fatherland, Alexander Clarkson analyzes the ways in which West Germany’s political institutions and intelligence agencies dealt with the political activities of ethnic groups in the Cold War. He divides the book into five studies that highlight West Germany’s varying approaches to immigrant groups: Ukrainian, Croatian, Algerian, Spanish/Greek, and Iranian exiles. By not focusing exclusively on members of a single nation-state, Clarkson moves beyond traditional scholarship on immigration research. Furthermore, he extends the concept of immigrant to refer to a wide variety of groups whose residency status in West Germany differed considerably, including displaced persons, political refugees, guest workers, and foreign students. In all cases, the political activities of these diverse groups brought conflicts from within their home countries to the attention of the affluent West German postwar society. Clarkson offers intriguing examples of the complex interactions between institutions and immigrant groups. Ukrainian émigré organizations, for instance, successfully reactivated their wartime contacts with influential West German elites. These networks helped secure West German institutional and financial resources for Ukrainian activist groups as allies in their fight against communism. This anticommunist coalition broke down with Konrad Adenauer’s decision to establish diplomatic relationships with the Soviet Union. With the sociopolitical changes in the Federal Republic, including the new SPD/FDP coalition government of 1969, Ukrainian emigrants lost West Germany’s political backing. In contrast, Croatian exile organizations [End Page 224] were unable to reestablish meaningful collaboration with their Nazi-era contacts. In the 1950s, the alliance with the radical nationalists opposing Tito had already turned into a political and moral burden, and their—sometimes violent—activities could not be sanctioned by the Federal Republic. Clarkson’s overview of the conflict surrounding Algerian refugees in West Germany demonstrates the increasingly supportive position of the Social Democrats, then in the opposition, to immigrant organizations during the 1960s. Because the majority of Croatian and particularly Spanish and Greek immigrants were skilled or semiskilled laborers, the Social Democrats saw a domestic and foreign policy opportunity to distinguish their party from the CDU-led government. Contact to Spanish and Greek laborers was part of party chair Willy Brandt’s foreign policy platform in order to consolidate the Socialist International and strengthen the southern European democratic Left while also hindering a shift toward Soviet-style communism. When the SPD finally took over the leadership of the new government in 1969, they had established strong contacts to fledgling leftwing democratic movements in Spain and Greece. Yet this support of leftist activism among Southern European groups in West Germany did nothing to improve the Social Democratic leadership’s understanding of the larger plight of migrant workers in the Federal Republic. Even under the Brandt and Schmidt governments, it became evident that domestic policy, state institutions, and the public were either unprepared or unwilling to confront the political, social, and cultural challenges posed by foreign workers. Here, Clarkson’s work implicitly reiterates the conclusions of established scholarly literature on the subject without explicitly framing it within that historiography. Similarly, it is unclear why Clarkson placed the case of Iranian activist groups as the final chapter and thereby broke the chronological flow of the book. The public protests against the Shah regime at the end of the 1960s served as both a forerunner and a beacon of hope for the Extraparliamentary Opposition (Außerparlamentarische Opposition, APO). In contrast to the other exile groups, the Federal Republic openly opposed the Iranian activist community, viewing the Shah regime as an indispensable ally against the Soviet Union. Moreover, West German intelligence agencies suspected that the Iranian relationship with the APO was a cover for informal connections to East Germany’s Ministry for State Security (MfS or the Stasi). Clarkson concentrates almost exclusively on the state’s actions, particularly those of the intelligence agencies that monitored the activities of the various migrant communities. In his conclusion, Clarkson...