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.

This historical study “persuasively links the reception of Yugoslav migrants to West Germany’s shifting relationship to the Nazi past . . . essential reading” (Tara Zahra, author of The Great Departure). During Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis, more than a hundred thousand asylum seekers from the western Balkans sought refuge in Germany. This was nothing new, however. Immigrants from the Balkans have streamed into West Germany in massive numbers since the end of the Second World War. In fact, Yugoslavs became the country’s second largest immigrant group. Yet their impact has received little critical attention until now. Memory, Politics, and Yugoslav Migrations to Postwar Germany tells the story of how Germans received the many thousands of Yugoslavs who migrated to Germany as political emigres, labor migrants, asylum seekers, and war refugees from 1945 to the mid-1990s. With a particular focus on German policies and attitudes toward immigrants, Christopher Molnar argues that considerations of race played only a marginal role in German attitudes and policies towards Yugoslavs. Rather, the history of Yugoslavs in postwar Germany was most profoundly shaped by the memory of World War II and the shifting Cold War context. Molnar shows how immigration was a central aspect of how Germany negotiated the meaning and legacy of the war.

This book examines the right to education for migrant children in Europe between 1949 and 1992. Using West Germany as a case study to explore European trends, the book analyzes how the Council of Europe and European Community’s ideological goals were implemented for specific national groups. The book starts with education for displaced persons and exiles in the 1950s, then compares schooling for Italian, Greek, and Turkish labor migrants, then circles back to asylum seekers and returning ethnic Germans. For each group, the state entries involved tried to balance equal education opportunities with the right to personhood, an effort which became particularly convoluted due to implicit biases. When the European Union was founded in 1993, children’s access to education depended on a complicated mix of legal status and perception of cultural compatibility. Despite claims that all children should have equal opportunities, children’s access was limited by citizenship and ethnic identity.

Fear of the Family offers a comprensive postwar history of guest worker migration to the Federal Republic of Germany, particularly from Greece, Turkey, and Italy. It analyzes the West German government's policies formulated to get migrants to work in the country during the prime of their productive years but to try to block them from bringing their families or becoming an expense for the state.

Excerpt from Memories of the Fatherland Before the horror of the Present entirely obliterates the happier memories of bygone times, out of the wreck and welter of dissolving friendships and shattered illusions, one puts forth a timid hand, striving to save some broken fragment, to preserve from complete obliteration in the turbid flood of events some shadowy recollection of a saner, happier time, when Germany was at peace and all seemed well with the world. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Yugoslavia and Political Assassinations is the first book in English to analyse how and why the Yugoslav State Security Service carried out multiple targeted assassinations, over the country's forty-six years of existence, under the pretext of protecting the Yugoslav communist party-state. Offering a detailed history of the programme, from the inception of the State Security Service to the recent trials of individuals involved, it draws on Christian Axboe Nielsen's unique wealth of experience and research as an academic and as an expert witness in numerous criminal trials. The result is a ground-breaking contribution to the history of targeted assassinations, communist history, state security services and related criminal trials.

As the largest national group of guest workers in Germany, the Turks became a visible presence in local neighbourhoods and schools and had diverse social, cultural, and religious needs. Focussing on West Berlin, Sarah Thomsen Vierra explores the history of Turkish immigrants and their children from the early days of their participation in the post-war guest worker program to the formation of multi-generational communities. Both German and Turkish sources help to uncover how the first and second generations created spaces of belonging for themselves within and alongside West German society, while also highlighting the factors that influenced that process, from individual agency and community dynamics to larger institutional factors such as educational policy and city renovation projects. By examining the significance of daily interactions at the workplace, in the home, in the neighbourhood, and in places of worship, we see that spatial belonging was profoundly linked to local-level daily life and experiences.

A compelling account of how race and politics have affected Iranian immigrants in the United States and Germany Iranians have a complex and contradictory relationship with race. Though categorized as “white” by the US census, many Iranian Americans remain marginalized, and experience racial and political stigma daily. On the other hand, Iranian Germans who have been in Germany for decades, and are typically regarded as 'good foreigners,' continue to experience marginality and discrimination illustrating the limitations of integration and citizenship. Conditional Belonging explores these apparent contradictions through a comparative analysis of the Iranian diasporic experience in the United States and Germany, focusing particularly on the different processes of racialization of the immigrants. Drawing from eighty-eight interviews with first- and second-generation Iranians living in California and Hamburg, Sahar Sadeghi illuminates how international events, global political policy, and national social climates influence the extent to which Iranians define themselves as members of their adopted nations. All these factors lead to radically different experiences of belonging, or more specifically “conditional belonging,” for Iranians living in Western nations—while those in America might have situational access to whiteness, this is not always available to Iranians in Germany. The combination of these experiences results in perceptions, narrations, and experiences of what the author calls “being but not belonging.” Conditional Belonging is an important and timely book that broadens our understanding of how unpredictable and fluid a sense of belonging to a country can be.

Anticommunism in French Society and Politics, 1945-1953 evaluates the prevalence of anticommunism among the French population in 1945 to 1953, and examines its causes, character, and consequences through a series of case studies on different segments of French society. These include the scouting movement; family organisations; agricultural associations; middle-class groups; and trade unions and other working-class organisations. Aaron Clift contends that anticommunism was more widespread and deeply rooted than previously believed, and had a substantial impact on national politics and on these social groups and organisations. Furthermore, he argues that the study of anticommunism allows us a deeper understanding of the values they regarded as the most important to defend. Although anticommunism was a diverse phenomenon, this work identifies common discourses, including portrayals of communism as a threat to the nation; the colonial empire; the traditional family; private property; religion; the rural world; and Western civilisation. It also highlights common aims (such as the rehabilitation of wartime collaborators) and tactics (such as the invocation of apoliticism). While acknowledging the importance of the Cold War, it rejects the assumption that anticommunism was an American import or foreign to French society and demonstrates links between anticommunism and anti-Americanism. It concludes that anticommunism drew its strength from the connection or even conflation of communism with perceived negative social changes that were seen to threaten traditional French civilisation, interacting with the postwar international and domestic environment and the personal experiences of individual anticommunists.