Indigeneity, German and Otherwise: The Society for Threatened Peoples in 1970s West Germany

The Society for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker, GfbV) became prominent in 1970s. Sparked by the Biafran war, it was sustained by groundbreaking research on the past, such as Roma and Sinti in the Holocaust, and on the 1970s present, such as the Ache of Paraguay and nationalities under communist rule in Eastern Europe. Together with Freimut Duve, an influential editor of publications about the Third World through his “rororo” series, GfbV founder Tilman Zülch and his organ Pogrom was second in influence among West Germans only to Amnesty International.  While the GfbV remains a leading human rights organization in Germany today, it has been dogged by controversy.  Zülch has been excoriated as a right-wing nationalist for privileging ethnic identity as a category of oppression and for relating his own Sudeten German expellee experience to that of the people he seeks to aid. 

This paper contextualizes Zülch and his organization in two ways.  First, as I demonstrate in my forthcoming book, all West German human rights activism was tensely arrayed among four distinct variants:  anti-Nazi political education; anticommunist activism; activism for redress for ethnic German refugees and expellees; and activism for distant non-Germans, such as Amnesty pursued. It was only in the 1970s that the fourth variant finally took hold in West Germany—itself signaling a major shift in West German political consciousness. The GfbV was a lightning rod for controversy because it refused to restrict itself to one of these variants. Second, all four variants of activism, and certainly the GfbV, participated in a transnational European debate in and beyond the Left about state legitimacy. This debate was one of the most important intellectual developments of the 1970s and is the essential backdrop for the history of human rights in that era.