New Research on Social Movements in Cold War Germany

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The last few years have seen a burst of new scholarship on social movements in 1970s and 1980s Germany, including gay and lesbian movements, new visions of conservatism, and antiracist activism that arose in East and West Germany. Drawing on a diversity of archives, oral histories, and printed sources, these new studies make a forceful case for the centrality of these social movements to understanding the social, political, and cultural histories of East and West Germany. At the same time, they help us rethink the contours of social movements, by integrating previously overlooked actors and perspectives and by questioning the totems of traditional political and activist historiography. This virtual roundtable discussion will feature four scholars who focus on the 1970s and 1980s in East and West Germany and whose work both constitutes and engages with this new historiography on social movements in this period. The discussion will offer a forum for these scholars not only to engage with the ways in which questions of race, class, sexuality, gender, and ideology shape our understanding of social and political movements, but also to think through how this new scholarship has recast the historiography of Cold War Germany.

Panelists

• Tiffany Florvil, Associate Professor, University of New Mexico, author of Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement, (University of Illinois Press, 2020)

• Samuel Clowes Huneke, Assistant Professor, George Mason University, author of States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (University of Toronto Press, 2022)

• Anna von der Goltz, Associate Professor, Georgetown University, author of The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany (Oxford University Press, 2021)

• Craig Griffiths, Senior Lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University, author of The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany (Oxford University Press, 2021)

Moderators

• Kerstin Brückweh, Berliner Hochschule für Technik, editor of Die lange Geschichte der Wende: Geschichtswissenschaft im Dialog (Ch. Links Verlag, 2020)

• Richard F. Wetzell, German Historical Institute, author of "Rosa von Praunheim, Martin Dannecker und das Verhältnis der westdeutschen Schwulenbewegung zur  homosexuellen Subkultur, 1971–1986",  Invertito – Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten, Jg. 23, 2021, pp. 95-135