In recent years historians have argued that after the collapse of the Nazi regime in May 1945, the concept of race became a taboo topic in postwar Germany but that Germans nonetheless continued to perceive resident foreign populations in racialized terms.Footnote 1 Important studies of Jewish displaced persons, the black children of American occupation soldiers and German women, and Turkish guest workers have highlighted continuities and transformations in German racial thought from the Nazi era into the postwar world, particularly in West Germany.Footnote 2 In a programmatic essay, Rita Chin and Heide Fehrenbach argue that “the question of race remained at the very center of social policy and collective imagination during the occupation years, as the Western Allies worked to democratize Germany, and during the Bonn Republic,” and they call for a new historiography that is more attentive to the category of race and the process of racialization in Germany and Europe after 1945.Footnote 3 While this newfound emphasis on race in Germany's postwar history has been salutary, an approach that puts race and racialization at the center of German interactions with resident foreign populations runs the risk of sidelining the experiences of foreign groups that Germans did not view in primarily racial terms. Indeed, to a certain extent this has already occurred. By the mid-1980s, public and policy discourse on immigrants in West Germany came to focus overwhelmingly on Turks and the problems raised by their “alien” Islamic cultural practices. That West Germany's guest worker program had resulted in the permanent settlement of hundreds of thousands of Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Yugoslavs was largely forgotten.Footnote 4 When historians, anthropologists, and scholars in other disciplines began taking more interest in Germany's migration history in recent decades, they too focused overwhelmingly on Turks.Footnote 5 Only in recent years has the historiography of Germany's postwar migration history started to reflect the multinational character of Germany's immigrant population.Footnote 6
Without wanting to deny the importance of race in Germany's postwar history, an examination of German attitudes toward guest workers from Yugoslavia underlines the limits of the racialization paradigm. I argue that German perceptions of Yugoslav guest workers were shaped less by race and more by the shifting Cold War context and the political cultures it fostered in the Federal Republic. In the Federal Republic, nationalism had been largely discredited because of its association with Nazi crimes, but anticommunism had deep roots in German history and with the emergence of the Cold War in the late 1940s, it quickly became a cornerstone of West German identity.Footnote 7 Historians have shown that during the 1950s and early 1960s, many German officials were concerned that Italian immigrants, in particular, represented a communist threat.Footnote 8 But by the mid-1960s, as the early hot phase of the Cold War gave way to détente, Germans had for the most part ceased to perceive Italians as a potential security risk and increasingly came to associate them with their homeland, which many Germans viewed as a land of romance and beauty after it became a favorite holiday destination in the late 1950s.Footnote 9 German attitudes toward Yugoslavs were similar, in some respects, to their perceptions of Italians, but as the only group of guest workers to come from a communist state, the course of the Cold War and German attitudes toward communism exerted a more profound and long-lasting influence on the image of Yugoslav guest workers in the West German imagination.
Until at least the early 1960s, West German officials frequently viewed Yugoslav guest workers as a communist threat and therefore a security risk and an undesirable immigrant group. The belief that immigrants from Yugoslavia represented a threat led to efforts to limit their migration and to increased scrutiny once they arrived in West Germany. German experiences with Yugoslavs during the course of the 1960s did not, however, confirm authorities' fears. Yugoslavs were far less active in leftist or communist politics than every other sizable immigrant group on West German soil, and the image of Yugoslavs as a political threat, so prevalent in official circles, played a limited role in structuring German attitudes toward Yugoslavs. German employers, for instance, found Yugoslav guest workers to be skilled and reliable workers who accommodated to life in West Germany more easily than did other immigrant groups. The rapid growth of German tourism in Yugoslavia beginning in the early 1960s also suggests that for many Germans, Yugoslavia came to be seen more as land of sunny beaches than a menacing communist state. By the late 1960s, Germans had had frequent encounters, at the workplace and on vacation, with Yugoslavs. They had more encounters with Yugoslavs than with the citizens of any other communist state in Eastern Europe, and these experiences simply did not confirm the suspicions that Yugoslavs, because they came from a communist state, represented a security threat. This is not to suggest that Germans and Yugoslavs developed a special bond, or that their encounters were always pleasant, but rather that German exposure to Yugoslavs and Yugoslavia over a period of years led to a normalization of the Yugoslav presence in West Germany.
By the time that the Federal Republic and Yugoslavia signed a labor recruitment agreement in 1968, the fear that migration from Yugoslavia would allow a communist infiltration of West German society had almost completely disappeared. The association of Yugoslavs with communism, however, persisted, but it now took on a radically different meaning. Migration historians have convincingly argued that Willy Brandt pushed for the recruitment agreement because he saw it as a means of developing a positive relationship with Yugoslavia, and therefore as a modest but early step in his attempt to normalize the FRG's relationship with Eastern Europe.Footnote 10 Building on this research, I contend that by linking Yugoslav guest workers with his Ostpolitik, Brandt endowed them with a new significance. In the decade after the labor recruitment treaty, West German officials and the media developed a vision of what I call “interpersonal Ostpolitik,” in which friendly interactions between Germans and Yugoslavs at workplaces in West Germany and tourist resorts in Yugoslavia provided proof to the world that people from entirely different political and social systems—capitalist democracy and communism—could forge strong relationships and that the divisions of the Cold War could be overcome. In this vision, Yugoslav guest workers, earlier viewed as representing a communist threat, were reinterpreted as ambassadors of peace. In interpersonal Ostpolitik, German-Yugoslav interactions were portrayed in unrealistically sunny terms, and that leads to an obvious, if infrequently asked, question that will be provisionally addressed here: scholars accept that negative stereotypes of foreign groups often have detrimental effects for those foreigners, but what effect do positive stereotypes or discourses have on foreign populations?Footnote 11
This article focuses on the impact of the Cold War on the image of Yugoslav guest workers in West Germany, but it is also attentive to the ways in which the memory of World War II weighed upon relations between the two states and shaped the meanings that officials and the press assigned to German-Yugoslav encounters. Historians have increasingly emphasized the extent to which post-1945 Europe was shaped by the experience and memory of World War II.Footnote 12 Much of the research on the postwar character of European societies has focused on individual nation-states.Footnote 13 But by examining West German-Yugoslav encounters in the light of the legacy and memory of World War II, and more specifically, Germany's occupation of Yugoslavia, this article takes a modest step toward the project of writing what Frank Biess has called “an integrated and transnational history of the European aftermath.”Footnote 14
World War II and West German-Yugoslav Relations
In June 1948 Stalin expelled Yugoslavia from the Cominform, a move that decisively shaped socialist Yugoslavia's history. The Tito-Stalin split had many causes, but at the root it was a result of Tito's insistence that Yugoslavia be an independent Soviet ally, not a satellite state.Footnote 15 Cast out of the international communist movement, Tito turned to the West for support. Leaders in the West, and particularly the United States, were happy to oblige, as they viewed Yugoslavia's break with the Soviet Union as a challenge to the Soviet Union's domination of Eastern Europe. The United States and other Western states sent Yugoslavia billions of dollars of economic aid between the early 1950s and early 1960s, and Tito quickly became the West's favorite communist.Footnote 16 Tito's move toward the West also led to Yugoslavia and West Germany establishing diplomatic relations in 1951/1952, which made Yugoslavia the first communist state to recognize the FRG. This was followed by the conclusion of a series of economic and trade agreements between the two states.Footnote 17 But West German-Yugoslav relations were complicated in ways that the West's relations with Yugoslavia were not. First, in 1957 Yugoslavia became the first state outside of the Sino-Soviet bloc to recognize the German Democratic Republic, which led the FRG to immediately break off diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia.Footnote 18 Second, as will be detailed below, the experience of World War II and its aftermath in Yugoslavia cast a long shadow: it colored Germans' and Yugoslavs' attitudes toward each other and gave rise to a number of problems that strained West German-Yugoslav relations.
The German invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 unleashed a torrent of violence that persisted unabated until the very end of World War II in Europe. Germany quickly defeated the Yugoslav army and then carved up Yugoslavia: it annexed part of Slovenia; established a nominally independent Croatian state ruled by the fascist Ustasha movement; gave Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria control over various parts of the country; and created a rump Serbian state under a collaborationist ruler.Footnote 19 Under German occupation Yugoslavia almost immediately devolved into a murderous civil war in which there were more than two sides and alliances were ever shifting. The dizzying complexity of events need not be recounted here; suffice it to say that the war took on the character of an ethnic struggle in which powerful Croatian and Serbian forces aimed to secure and ethnically cleanse territories that they hoped would become the basis of ethnically pure nation-states in the postwar era.Footnote 20
Terrible as it was, the violence among the various Yugoslav national groups had less of an impact on West German-Yugoslav relations than the widespread destruction wrought by German forces and the brutal counterinsurgency tactics the Wehrmacht adopted in its attempt to crush the two resistance movements that emerged in Serbia: the Serb nationalist Chetnik movement and the communist Partisans, led by Tito. In September 1941, Hitler ordered that throughout German-occupied Europe, Nazi forces were to execute one hundred people for every German soldier or official killed by insurgents and fifty people for each wounded German. This order was only strictly enforced in Serbia, and it resulted in brutal massacres of thousands of civilians who generally had not been involved in resistance movements.Footnote 21 In two of the most notorious reprisal actions, in October 1941 German soldiers executed all of the adult males in the town of Kraljevo and about 2,300 men in Kragujevac, including an entire class of schoolboys who were marched to a field and shot.Footnote 22 The Kragujevac massacre became part of the collective memory of the war in Yugoslavia; it was commemorated with a museum, a monument, and in verse, and it served as a constant reminder to Yugoslavs of the cruelty of German occupation.Footnote 23 More generally, the partisans' defeat of Germany became socialist Yugoslavia's founding myth and a major source of its legitimacy.Footnote 24 In the frequent retelling and elaboration of this myth Germans appeared, for obvious reasons, as the hated enemy vanquished by the united Yugoslav people. Many of the Yugoslavs who migrated to the FRG as guest workers in the postwar era would have absorbed this history from their parents, in school, or during their time in the Pioneers, Yugoslavia's communist youth organization.Footnote 25
The war and its aftermath also left at least some Germans feeling embittered toward Yugoslavia. Prior to the war, approximately half a million ethnic Germans, so-called Donauschwaben, lived in Yugoslavia, but in the final year of the war perhaps as many as 300,000 of them were evacuated or fled in order to escape from the fast-approaching Red and Partisan armies.Footnote 26 The Donauschwaben who remained in Yugoslavia after the German retreat faced a terrible fate: internment in labor camps with high mortality rates; random executions; dispossession of property and loss of Yugoslav citizenship; and, for some, deportation to labor camps in the Soviet Union.Footnote 27 In 1948 Yugoslavia closed its internment and labor camps and began allowing Germans to buy their way out of Yugoslavia at a very steep price. By the 1950s approximately 200,000 Donauschwaben had settled in West Germany.Footnote 28 Donauschwaben had willingly collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation of Yugoslavia, but their suffering during and after the war led them to conceive of themselves as victims of communist terror, a memory of the war that would have resonated with many Germans.Footnote 29 This sense of victimhood, combined with the widespread anticommunism of the first postwar decades, led many Donauschwaben, and at least some other Germans, to be hostile toward Tito's Yugoslavia and its representatives.Footnote 30
The legacy of the war also caused problems between the states. Indeed, two of the most important issues in West German-Yugoslav relations during the 1950s and 1960s were directly linked to the war. First, Belgrade repeatedly insisted that Bonn pay war reparations, as international agreements in the postwar era required it to. After the break in diplomatic relations in 1957, however, West Germany refused to negotiate a reparations settlement.Footnote 31 Second, relations between the two states were strained by the presence in West Germany of about thirteen thousand Croatian émigrés, most of whom had fled Croatia in the final months of the war.Footnote 32 Many of the émigrés had been supporters of the fascist Ustasha regime that the Nazis had installed as the rulers of the Independent State of Croatia during the war, and the most important émigré organizations in the FRG remained broadly committed to Ustasha ideals and, above all, to the destruction of Yugoslavia and the re-creation of a Croatian state. In the early 1960s some Croatian groups adopted violent means in their struggle against Tito's Yugoslavia, including the bombing of a Yugoslav trade mission in Bonn in 1962, the assassination of a Yugoslav consul in Stuttgart in 1966, and countless other attacks on German soil.Footnote 33 The Yugoslav government reacted angrily to these attacks and launched a smear campaign against the West German government, claiming that it actively supported the Croatian émigrés and questioning the extent to which West Germany had rejected its own fascist past.Footnote 34 The turn to violence by Croatian émigrés received extensive coverage in the West German press, but it is not clear how that affected German attitudes toward the Yugoslav guest workers who migrated to the FRG beginning in the mid-1950s.
Yugoslavia's Western orientation and gradual liberalization after the Tito-Stalin split undoubtedly led some West Germans to consider Yugoslavia a far less threatening state than the other communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and this likely carried over to German perceptions of Yugoslavs. But Yugoslavia's move toward the West could not by itself sweep away the shadow of the war that loomed over West German-Yugoslav relations or the widespread anticommunism that characterized the Federal Republic through the mid-1960s. Yugoslavia's liberalization after the Tito-Stalin split—one of the most important aspects of which was its open border policy—did, however, pave the way for a new chapter in the history of German-Yugoslav encounters, this time in German workplaces and on Yugoslavia's Adriatic coast.Footnote 35
On the Lookout for “Communism-infected Tito-Workers”Footnote 36
Labor migrants from Yugoslavia began trickling into the Federal Republic in the mid-1950s; their numbers increased steadily throughout the early and mid-1960s, and then took off after the FRG and Yugoslavia signed a labor recruitment treaty in October 1968. In 1960 there were 8,800 Yugoslav labor migrants in the FRG; in 1968 there were 119,100; and by 1973 they reached a peak of 535,000. When dependents are included, there were just over 700,000 Yugoslavs residing in the FRG in 1974, although this figure does not take into account the large number of illegal immigrants from Yugoslavia.Footnote 37 In 1970 more guest workers from Yugoslavia were employed in the FRG than from any other state. Their numbers were soon dwarfed by Turks, but immigrants from Yugoslavia remained the second largest guest worker group in the Federal Republic, and would remain so into the twenty-first century.Footnote 38 The majority of Yugoslav guest workers were young married men between the ages of twenty and forty, but women from Yugoslavia were also in high demand; in 1972 they represented nearly a third of all Yugoslav labor migrants.Footnote 39 Neither West Germany nor Yugoslavia kept statistics on the ethnic composition of Yugoslav migration, but we know that Yugoslavs in the FRG came from every corner of Yugoslavia, and in greatest numbers from the republics of Croatia (38.3 percent of Yugoslavs in the FRG in 1971), Serbia (23.9 percent), and Bosnia-Herzegovina (23.7 percent).Footnote 40 Yugoslavs settled most heavily in Baden-Württemberg, Nordrhein-Westfalen, and southern Bavaria, with Munich having by far the largest Yugoslav population of any German city.Footnote 41
When West Germany first began recruiting foreign workers in 1955, German officials and the press expressed the fear that guest workers would spread communism in the FRG, a development that could destabilize the young Federal Republic. This concern first appeared in discussions about Italian guest workers, who came from a state that had the largest and most powerful communist party in Western Europe. In 1955/1956 the Interior Ministry implemented a system of security checks for all Italians who registered to work in the FRG, with the goal of forestalling a communist infiltration.Footnote 42 These worries were quickly extended to guest workers from other states, and they persisted well into the 1960s.Footnote 43 In the early 1960s, for example, the press continued to publish articles with alarming titles such as “Warning! Trojan Horses!,” which warned of communist activity among guest workers.Footnote 44
As the only group of immigrants to come from a communist state, West German officials were especially wary of Yugoslavs. Their fears focused on the possibility that Yugoslav spies were entering the FRG disguised as labor migrants and asylum seekers. Croatian émigrés, disturbed by the arrival of loyal Yugoslav citizens, helped to solidify these fears, as they repeatedly informed German officials that the Yugoslav government was using the cover of labor migration to sneak agents into the country.Footnote 45 It must be noted that Yugoslavia did, in fact, have an active spy network in the FRG, as did other Eastern European communist regimes. But Yugoslavia's spy network focused almost exclusively on gathering information on and combating Croatian and Serbian nationalist groups that émigrés had established in West Germany after World War II and ensuring that labor migrants were insulated from the émigrés and their nationalist politics. There is no evidence to suggest that Yugoslav agents sought to spread communism among German and foreign workers or to otherwise destabilize the FRG, but that fear, rooted in the deep anticommunist anxieties of the early Cold War, cast Yugoslav migrants in an unfavorable light and had negative repercussions for them.Footnote 46 Nowhere was this more the case than in Bavaria.
The fear that Yugoslavs represented a communist threat began to be voiced in Bavaria in the mid-1950s, just as they started arriving as labor migrants and asylum seekers.Footnote 47 In 1954, for example, Leo Stahl, Nuremberg's police chief, wrote an alarming letter to the chairman of the Bavarian Landtag's security commission. The Valka camp for foreign asylum seekers, he reported, was being infiltrated by communist agents from Eastern Europe, and Yugoslav agents predominated. Stahl claimed that the Yugoslav Security Service (Uprava Državne Bezbednosti—UDBA) “summoned Yugoslavs before they began their trip [to Valka] and gave them specific orders to conduct spy operations in economic and military fields.”Footnote 48 He admitted, however, that he could provide no evidence for this espionage activity, claiming that UDBA forbade its agents from creating a written record of their work. In another case, two Yugoslavs in the camp, one a Serb and the other a Croat, said that they wanted to visit a common relative who was living in the Federal Republic. But for Stahl, the notion that they would have a common relative “was impossible because of the ‘refugees’ different nationalities and the hostility between the two nations.” This was enough for him to conclude that these two asylum seekers were, in reality, communist agents.Footnote 49
Suspicions that Yugoslavs were operating as communist agents gained wider currency beginning in the late 1950s. In early 1958 the Bavarian state police reported to the Bavarian Interior Ministry that there were indications that Yugoslav itinerant traders were traveling throughout the FRG not to sell carpets and other wares, but to gather intelligence to be sent back to Yugoslavia's intelligence services. An official in Bavaria's Interior Ministry agreed with the police's assessment of the Yugoslav traders and added that, “as a consequence of their constantly being on the move, it is extremely difficult to monitor these people, and they therefore represent a threat to public safety.” The same official, following the suggestion of Bavaria's Office for the Protection of the Constitution, immediately sought to determine if it was possible to deny Yugoslavs permission to practice itinerant trades.Footnote 50 In August 1958, officials in the Bavarian Interior Ministry informed the government of Upper Bavaria that many Yugoslavs were suspected of practicing itinerant trades as a means of covering and facilitating their activity as agents and that local officials should therefore be urged to bar Yugoslavs from practicing itinerant trades and to adopt stricter measures for granting Yugoslavs residency permits.Footnote 51
Just two weeks later, and apparently without any new evidence coming to light that linked Yugoslav immigrants to UDBA, the Bavarian Interior Ministry initiated a statewide investigation in which local authorities were ordered to report on their experiences with Yugoslav immigrants, and especially if there was any indication that their spy activity was being directed by a central organization.Footnote 52 Following this directive, local authorities and police conducted checks and inquiries, sometimes including secret surveillance, into the Yugoslavs residing in their districts and then reported back to the Bavarian Interior Ministry. Every one of these reports concluded that there was no evidence that Yugoslavs were secretly gathering intelligence for UDBA in the Federal Republic.Footnote 53
But even while affirming that no incriminating evidence had come to light, some of the reports still expressed suspicions. A report from Lower Bavaria noted, for instance, that a group of six itinerant traders from Yugoslavia in the district of Rottenburg possessed an expensive car and dressed in noticeably elegant clothes. While admitting that there was no concrete evidence that they were spies, the report nonetheless concluded that their “obviously high living standard warrants the assumption that these Yugoslavs, possibly disguised as peddlers, are conducting intelligence operations on German soil.”Footnote 54 Police in the Upper Palatinate reported that their inquiries produced no support for the notion that Yugoslavs were operating as spies on West German soil, but the head of the police nevertheless instructed local police to “devote special attention to the future conduct of Yugoslav citizens.”Footnote 55 In November 1958 an official in the Bavarian Interior Ministry read all of these reports and, lack of evidence for Yugoslavs' wrongdoing notwithstanding, responded by calling for the federal government to take a harder line against Yugoslav asylum seekers; for local and border police in Bavaria to carry out more intensive surveillance of Yugoslavs, particularly itinerant traders; and for local governments to revoke Yugoslavs' residency permits in appropriate cases.Footnote 56 This whole affair brought increased scrutiny and cast a pall of suspicion over the small Yugoslav communities scattered throughout Bavaria. At the same time it highlighted Bavarian officials' profound fear of a communist infiltration from Yugoslavia, even when their fears proved unsubstantiated.
In the early 1960s the federal government also raised the alarm that migration from Yugoslavia represented a potential security threat. In late November 1961, the Yugoslav consul in Munich organized a folklore concert for Yugoslav labor migrants in Stuttgart in order to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of socialist Yugoslavia. Croatian émigrés crashed the event, unfurling banners that denigrated Tito and called for the destruction of Yugoslavia; a violent scuffle between the émigrés and labor migrants ensued.Footnote 57 A story about the conflict in Der Spiegel made it clear that officials from the Federal Ministry of Labor were troubled not by the Croatian émigrés who provoked the conflict, but by the presence of Yugoslav labor migrants who were loyal to the Yugoslav state. According to the report, Ministry of Labor officials had decided in 1955 that no Yugoslavs were to be allowed in, and that they therefore believed they had “prevented the infiltration of potential communism-infected Tito-workers.”Footnote 58 Officials in the Foreign Office were shocked to learn that approximately thirteen thousand Yugoslav citizens resided in the FRG and concluded that labor migration from Yugoslavia “gave the communist regime in Belgrade the possibility of infiltrating as many Vertrauensleute as it pleased into the Federal Republic.” Deeming that an intolerable situation, Foreign Office officials recommended that immigration from communist states be dramatically reduced.Footnote 59
In June 1962 these concerns were discussed at a policy meeting attended by representatives from all of the major federal ministries. The Federal Interior Ministry's expert on foreigners contended that all migration from Yugoslavia—labor migration and refugees—had to be seen from the perspective of state security. He argued that in order to forestall future conflicts the FRG had to decide between allowing either migration directly from Yugoslavia or the migration of Croatian refugees from camps in Italy. He favored allowing the migration of Croatian refugees at the expense of migration from Yugoslavia, and representatives from the foreign, labor, and economic ministries agreed. They decided that in the future only Croatian refugees and skilled workers from Yugoslavia would be permitted to enter the FRG, while local officials were to be urged to practice restraint in renewing the residency and work permits of unskilled Yugoslav workers already in the FRG.Footnote 60 If there were any doubts about the motivation for this policy change, Labor Minister Theodor Blank dispelled them when, upon questioning of the new policy, he explained to the Bundestag that the restriction of migration from Yugoslavia “makes possible the improved monitoring (Überwachung) of Yugoslavs in the Federal Republic of Germany and thus lessens the threat of a communist infiltration.”Footnote 61 Yugoslav migration to the FRG grew at an increasing rate after this policy change, and it therefore seems likely that the policy was not always implemented at the local level. But the policy almost certainly increased illegal migration from Yugoslavia, and it infuriated unskilled Yugoslav workers already resident in the FRG, who reported that they felt “‘persecuted’ and ‘discriminated’ against because of their identification with the communist regime in their homeland.”Footnote 62
Unfounded Fears: German-Yugoslav Experiences in the 1960s
West German authorities' fears that migration from Yugoslavia would allow a communist infiltration and that Yugoslavs already in the FRG were potentially communists or communist agents resulted in Yugoslav migrants facing increased scrutiny and regulation. But German experiences with Yugoslavs during the 1960s—at the workplace and during vacations in Yugoslavia—proved that authorities' fears were unfounded. These experiences also suggest that by the early to mid-1960s, before the spirit of détente had gained ground in Europe, and years before Brandt's Ostpolitik, West Germany's anticommunist consensus was beginning to show cracks at the popular level.
During the course of the 1960s, West German security services discovered that of the largest immigrant groups, Yugoslavs were the least likely to engage in communist or leftist politics. In 1964 and 1965 the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution produced reports on communist activity among guest workers, and while the largest guest worker populations—Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, and Turks—all purportedly displayed varying degrees of communist activity, including cooperation with the banned Communist Party of Germany, there was no evidence to suggest that Yugoslavs took part in any communist agitation.Footnote 63 In 1964 Bavaria's Office for the Protection of the Constitution detailed significant communist activity on the part of Italian, Spanish, and Greek guest workers, but concluded that, while there were “naturally” a great number of “ideologically convinced communists” among the Yugoslavs, there were no signs that they were politically active.Footnote 64 A list of communist publications for immigrants compiled in 1965 gives a clear indication of Yugoslav labor migrants' political quiescence, and particularly their distance from left-wing and communist politics. It listed sixteen Spanish, ten Italian, four Greek, and four Turkish communist publications that appeared in West Germany. There were zero publications for Yugoslavs.Footnote 65
Others who worked closely with Yugoslav guest workers also remarked on their apparent lack of interest in communist politics or, indeed, politics of any stripe. In 1963 the director of a large mining company in North Rhine-Westphalia that employed significant numbers of Yugoslavs noted that there was not the slightest indication that his Yugoslav workers engaged in communist politics. He concluded, moreover, that “those who have come directly from Yugoslavia only want to earn money and are politically indifferent.”Footnote 66 In 1966 Janez Zdešar, a Catholic priest and head of the Slovenian Catholic ministry in the FRG, reported to Bavarian Church officials that “the guest workers from Yugoslavia are not all communists, as is often claimed. On the contrary, the great majority doesn't want to hear anything about communism; they only want to earn a lot of money as fast as possible so that they can then return home.”Footnote 67
What accounted for Yugoslavs' lack of interest in communist politics in the FRG? There is little source material that addresses this question, but most Yugoslavs, like the vast majority of labor migrants in the FRG, migrated to earn good wages and then return home to a better life, not to engage in politics that might earn them a ticket out of the FRG. Even if some Yugoslavs were convinced communists, they likely did not engage in leftist politics because they had little to fight for. While Spanish, Italian, and Greek communists in the FRG may have dreamed of bringing communism to their homelands, in Yugoslavia that had already been accomplished, and by the early 1960s Tito's Yugoslavia was a well-established and generally stable state. Finally, in some cases Yugoslav officials suppressed even leftist political activity, such as participation in wildcat strikes, apparently fearing that emboldened workers would bring unwanted political activism back to Yugoslavia upon their return.Footnote 68 Yugoslavs in the FRG were not, to be sure, uniformly apolitical, but the political energy consistently resided on the nationalist right rather than on the left, and that worried Germans much less than did the vision of a surreptitious communist infiltration.Footnote 69
During the 1960s, Germans' positive experiences with Yugoslavs at the workplace likewise contributed to an easing of the fear that they represented a political threat. In the early 1960s, just as state and federal authorities were growing increasingly concerned about the potential political risks associated with migration from Yugoslavia, West German employers avowed that Yugoslavs were very good workers who they valued for their good education and workplace performance, particularly as skilled workers.Footnote 70 While employers repeatedly lauded Yugoslavs' quality as workers, many also came to see Yugoslavs as being less culturally different—less foreign—than immigrants from other states. A Catholic youth rehabilitation home in Bavaria, for example, preferred to employ “really hardworking Yugoslav women,” over Turkish women, who were “less pleasant” to deal with because of the language barrier and the difficulty of accommodating their dietary restrictions.Footnote 71 The same director of a large mining company who reported that the Yugoslavs he employed were politically indifferent also described them as reliable workers who adjusted to work in the mines faster than immigrants from any other state. Signaling a clear preference for immigrants who did not look foreign, he went on to note that “Croats adapt to the German lifestyle very quickly, and on the streets of mining communities they cannot be distinguished from Germans.”Footnote 72
The perception that Yugoslavs were excellent workers who, compared to other guest workers, were able to rapidly adapt to German norms was also shared by some government officials. In 1963, in the course of the debate over whether the FRG should conclude a labor recruitment agreement with Yugoslavia, an official in the Labor Ministry suggested that Yugoslavs would need much less support and mentoring than immigrants from southern Europe and Turkey, because “in terms of language and work readiness, Yugoslavs adapt well to the German rhythm of work and life.”Footnote 73 Four years later, when West German officials were debating reopening negotiations on a recruitment treaty with Yugoslavia, a Labor Ministry position paper stated that the economy would welcome increased migration from Yugoslavia “because Yugoslavs are good workers and their mentality is closer to ours than is the case with Mediterranean peoples.”Footnote 74 The view, held by at least some employers and government officials, that Yugoslavs were culturally more similar to Germans than were other immigrant groups may have been a result of the Central European heritage that many Yugoslavs shared with Germans; Croatia and Slovenia had been, after all, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for centuries. In any case, their reputation as good workers who fit well into West German society suggests that fears of a communist infiltration, so prevalent in the halls of government and the press, had only a limited influence on German attitudes toward Yugoslavs.
The rapid growth of West German tourism to Yugoslavia during the 1960s also makes evident that, despite anticommunism long having been a cornerstone of West German identity, millions of Germans had no ideological qualms about spending their Deutschmarks in a communist state, and they clearly felt threatened by neither Yugoslavs nor Yugoslavia. During the 1950s and 1960s, tourism in West Germany and Yugoslavia developed in a complementary fashion. Propelled by the economic miracle and the growing number of paid vacation days for German workers, tourism became a mass phenomenon in West Germany during the 1950s, and during the 1960s Germans increasingly vacationed outside of Germany, particularly on the beaches of southern Europe.Footnote 75 In the late 1940s to early 1950s Yugoslavia opened its borders to tourists from the West, in part to help the ailing economy, but also as a self-conscious signal that it was moving toward the West after the Tito-Stalin split in 1948.Footnote 76 Only in the 1960s, however, did Yugoslavia's leadership begin to invest heavily in tourism, and this contributed to the massive growth of foreign tourism.Footnote 77 Whereas in 1950 only forty-one thousand foreigners visited Yugoslavia, in 1963 that number had reached more than 1.7 million and would grow to more than six million just a decade later.Footnote 78
West Germans were at the forefront of the tourism boom in Yugoslavia. In 1961 West Germans vacationed in Yugoslavia more than the citizens of any other state, save Austria, and represented just over 20 percent of all foreign tourism in Yugoslavia.Footnote 79 By 1965, West Germans, with over 500,000 visits in that year alone, were the largest group of foreign tourists in Yugoslavia, a position they would long hold.Footnote 80 The number of West Germans vacationing in Yugoslavia continued to grow at a rapid clip: 652,000 in 1966, 740,000 in 1967, and over 1.2 million by 1970.Footnote 81 While Yugoslavia could not match the drawing power of Italy, Austria, and France, it still became a favorite destination for West Germans, and was, by a very wide margin, the country in Eastern Europe that they visited most frequently.Footnote 82
Commentators in the 1960s suggested that foreign travel played an important role in reeducating West Germans, contributing to their turning away from the nationalism and xenophobia of the Nazi era in favor of more cosmopolitan outlooks, and historians have recently explored the possibility that tourism in Europe since 1945 has increased mutual understanding among Europeans and brought them closer together.Footnote 83 While Germans would have undoubtedly had frequent interactions with Yugoslavs while vacationing on the “red Adriatic,” those encounters have left few traces in the historical record, and the nature of German-Yugoslav interactions in Yugoslavia is thus difficult to judge. Nonetheless, the view of tourism as a form of cosmopolitan reeducation ignores the reality that West German tourism was often freighted with memories of the Nazi past.Footnote 84 Some German men who had fought in Yugoslavia during World War II returned as tourists in the 1950s and 1960s, in part to remember the “good old days of the Third Reich,” and they were more likely to confirm their prejudices toward Yugoslavs and Yugoslavia and to affirm their sense of German superiority than to express atonement for their wartime actions or increase understanding between Germans and Yugoslavs.Footnote 85 Some Yugoslavs must have also been apprehensive about welcoming as guests people who came from a state that had, within recent memory, inflicted massive violence on the Yugoslav state and its people.
Wolfgang Staudte, one of West Germany's most celebrated filmmakers, explored this theme in his controversial 1963/1964 film Herrenpartie.Footnote 86 In the film a group of middle-aged German men, members of a men's choir, spend a long vacation in Yugoslavia, but their Volkswagen bus runs out of gas as they are trying to leave the country.Footnote 87 In their quest to obtain fuel, the men stumble upon a village with only women, mourning widows whose husbands had all been murdered by Germans in reprisal actions during the war, an unmistakable reference to German massacres such as the one carried out in Kragujevac. The widows are fearful and hostile toward the German tourists, who respond to the women's hostility by becoming increasingly aggressive, until the two sides are engaged in a fierce battle, with the Germans, growing ever more militaristic, “requisitioning” supplies and the Yugoslav women pushing the men's bus into a ravine and then bursting into old partisan songs. Staudte's satirical film clearly exaggerates the conflict potential in German tourism to Yugoslavia, but it points to both the incongruity of Germans vacationing in lands they had so recently ravaged and the apprehension and fear that German tourists could elicit among locals.
Many West Germans did, however, view travel as an opportunity to build positive relationships with foreign peoples, and there is reason to believe that German tourists and Yugoslavs often had friendly relations.Footnote 88 Anecdotal evidence from the early 1960s suggests that discussions with West German tourists led some Yugoslavs to migrate to the FRG, and, according to Rüdiger Rossig, Yugoslav guest workers and their German coworkers sometimes vacationed together in Yugoslavia.Footnote 89 In 1965 the Eastern European bureau chief for the American magazine Newsweek wrote a moralizing piece complaining about the swarms of promiscuous West German women on Croatia's Dalmatian coast “who seek fun and games rather than husbands and whose Serbo-Croatian vocabulary generally consists of just one word: ‘da’ (yes).”Footnote 90 These snippets of evidence suggest that German-Yugoslav interactions in Yugoslavia were often amicable and had the potential to contribute in some small way to Völkerverständigung. While tourism can undoubtedly lead to friction and conflict between visitors and locals, it is also true that tourists generally want to perceive their vacation destination in a positive light.Footnote 91 Just as the German discovery of Italy as a favorite holiday destination in the 1950s gradually contributed to improving perceptions of Italian guest workers, it seems likely that tourist trips to Yugoslavia during the 1960s modified West German attitudes toward Yugoslavs for the better.Footnote 92 At minimum, the enormous scale of West German tourism in Yugoslavia during the 1960s indicates that many Germans did not view Yugoslavia or Yugoslavs as a communist threat. Rather, German-Yugoslav interactions on vacation and at the workplace led to the normalization of the Yugoslav presence in West Germany by the mid- to late 1960s.
Brandt's Ostpolitik and the Labor Recruitment Agreement
In December 1966 the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Christian Democratic Union / Christian Socialist Union (CDU/CSU) came together to form a “Grand Coalition,” with Kurt Kiesinger (CDU/CSU) as chancellor and Willy Brandt (SPD) as foreign minister. The Grand Coalition embraced détente and immediately attempted to improve the FRG's relations with Eastern Europe. The first breakthrough came when the FRG and Romania exchanged ambassadors in January 1967, but the Warsaw Pact responded to this development by blocking the FRG's agenda among its member states.Footnote 93 Faced with this obstacle, Brandt sought to improve relations with Yugoslavia, which he understood as a small but critical step toward bettering the FRG's relations with Eastern Europe more generally.Footnote 94 Not yet willing to discuss the war reparations issue, but looking for an opening, in 1967 Brandt identified the conclusion of a labor recruitment treaty as a policy area where the states had a common interest; he hoped to use the treaty negotiations as an instrument for improving West German-Yugoslav relations. His plan met with stiff resistance from the Minister of Labor, who argued that it was economically and politically unwise to sign another labor recruitment agreement while the FRG was in the midst of its first recession since the onset of the economic miracle in the late 1940s and unemployment rates were spiking sharply.Footnote 95 Brandt responded that, despite the poor labor market conditions, the negotiations should go forward, because improving relations with Yugoslavia was part of his Ostpolitik, and “foreign policy concerns should take priority.”Footnote 96
Brandt's position eventually prevailed, but negotiations dragged on for months. The push to improve relations with Yugoslavia bore fruit, however, even before the terms of the recruitment treaty had been agreed upon. The two states reestablished diplomatic relations in January 1968.Footnote 97 That was followed by Brandt making a highly publicized state visit to Yugoslavia in June 1968, the first trip to Belgrade by a West German foreign minister.Footnote 98 One of the key aspects of Brandt's Ostpolitik was that he fully accepted German responsibility for the crimes and devastation of World War II and was willing to address and show remorse for Nazi crimes.Footnote 99 Anticipating his iconic genuflection in Warsaw by more than two years, in preparations for his trip to Belgrade Brandt shocked West German and Yugoslav diplomats by suggesting that he visit Kragujevac, the site of one of the worst Nazi massacres in Yugoslavia. Tito turned down the offer, considering it too soon for such a symbolic visit, but the offer itself highlights Brandt's commitment to recognizing and addressing the violent past as a step toward ushering in a more peaceful future in Europe.Footnote 100
In October 1968, months after the reestablishment of diplomatic relations and Brandt's trip to Belgrade, Yugoslavia and West Germany finally came to terms on a labor recruitment agreement.Footnote 101 By that time the recession in the FRG had ended and the demand for foreign labor picked up, making the Labor Ministry more amenable to the agreement. The treaty benefited both states. It secured a supply of labor for the FRG and gave Yugoslavia more influence over the migration process. It also benefited Yugoslav guest workers in a variety of ways, as it guaranteed them the same pay, work conditions, and protections as Germans and other foreign workers, and provided Kindergeld for their children who remained in Yugoslavia.Footnote 102 Although it has received scant attention in the historiography on West German foreign policy, migration historians have convincingly argued that the labor recruitment treaty that West Germany concluded with Yugoslavia in October 1968 was one of the first successes of Brandt's new Ostpolitik.
Interpersonal Ostpolitik: Envisioning a New Europe
West Germany and Yugoslavia's conclusion of a labor recruitment treaty in October 1968, so critical to Brandt's Ostpolitik, found little echo in the West German and international press, primarily because it had been overshadowed by the states' resumption of diplomatic relations in January 1968 and Brandt's historic visit to Yugoslavia in June 1968, both of which clearly signaled the opening of a new era in West German-Yugoslav relations.Footnote 103 But by insisting throughout 1967 and 1968 that the labor recruitment treaty should be pursued because of its importance to the FRG's foreign policy, Brandt had linked Yugoslav guest workers to his Ostpolitik, and thus to the wider defusing of tensions in Europe that accompanied the era of détente. In March 1968, well before the treaty was concluded, Brandt suggested that one of the treaty's chief benefits was that it would increase contacts between Germans and Yugoslavs and would allow the two societies to grow closer together.Footnote 104 If the treaty itself received little attention from the press, this vision of two societies brought together through personal interactions would be developed and elaborated upon for more than a decade. By the early 1970s, West German officials and the media developed a vision of interpersonal Ostpolitik that imagined Yugoslav guest workers and German tourists playing a major role not only in improving West German-Yugoslav relations, but in overcoming both the painful memory of the war and the division of Europe.
Years before the emergence of this vision of interpersonal Ostpolitik, some German officials had emphasized the benefits of West-German Yugoslav interactions, but they assigned these encounters a completely different meaning. In 1965 Wilhelm von Klewitz, the West German consul general in Zagreb, argued that Yugoslav migration to the FRG should be encouraged because of the benefits of increased interaction between Germans and Yugoslavs. He suggested that because Yugoslav migrants only stayed in the FRG for about two or three years at a time, a huge number of Yugoslavs could work in the FRG and then return home to spread their impressions of West Germany to their friends and family. He noted that, “apart from the material results of, for example, a two year stay (the dreamed of car!), guest workers learn the German language, whether willingly or not they are convinced of the superiority of the Western economic system, and as a general rule represent, depending on their future career, a valuable connecting link to Germany for the rest of their lives.”Footnote 105 Von Klewitz clearly assumed that Yugoslavs would broadcast favorable impressions of West Germany upon their return to Yugoslavia. Locked in the logic of the Cold War, for him, West German-Yugoslav interactions would inevitably prove to Yugoslavs the superiority of capitalism over communism and, more generally, the West's preeminence over the East, thereby weakening Yugoslavia. In early 1966 an official in the Foreign Ministry came to the same conclusion, although in this case labor migration was much more clearly conceived of as a weapon that could be wielded against communist Eastern Europe. In an internal memo, the official argued that “in general the West has an interest in making a stay in the free world possible for as many members of communist states as possible. In most cases this stay will awaken or strengthen doubts about the economic and social order under communism, and will thus initiate a slow process of erosion of the communist system.”Footnote 106 Having tasted the freedom and material prosperity of the West, returning labor migrants, if their numbers were large enough, would undermine and perhaps fatally weaken the communist regimes in their homelands.
This view of labor migration and West German-Yugoslav interaction as a Cold War weapon never gained much traction, but it helps us appreciate the novelty of the vision of interpersonal Ostpolitik that emerged in the 1970s. In April 1973 Brandt made a state visit to Yugoslavia, the first such trip by a West German chancellor, and his speech to the assembled press upon arriving in Belgrade provides an early example of his conception of interpersonal Ostpolitik. He began by stating that the FRG and Yugoslavia had made enormous progress together on a whole range of issues since reestablishing diplomatic relations in 1968 and then launched into what would become the core message of interpersonal Ostpolitik:
Today no states with more different social orders have opened their borders more widely to each other than have our two countries. I believe that the most important result of our efforts is that, through the activity of half a million Yugoslavs in the Federal Republic of Germany and the travels of an enormous number of German tourists in Yugoslavia, our people have come closer together. In the process of getting to know each other the key requirements for successful cooperation—mutual respect and understanding—have developed.Footnote 107
Brandt then stated that the FRG's new Ostpolitik had made significant strides toward cooling down the temperature of the Cold War in Europe and that West German-Yugoslav cooperation was of vital importance for securing peace on the continent.Footnote 108 In this way he linked Yugoslav guest workers and German tourists to his Ostpolitik and his goal of overcoming the Cold War division of Europe. While still in Yugoslavia, Brandt reinforced this message by giving a speech in which he imagined the creation of a new Europe that would feature “the extensive and largely unrestricted exchange of people, goods, and ideas between all European states.” He noted once again that, “despite their different social systems,” Yugoslavia and the FRG had “opened their borders widely to each other,” a clear reference to Yugoslav migration to the FRG and German tourism in Yugoslavia. That cooperation between the two states, he affirmed, could serve as an example for the rest of Europe, and could thus help usher in a new Europe based on peaceful exchange.Footnote 109
From the mid-1950s until the mid-1960s, West German officials frequently expressed reservations about allowing Yugoslavs to migrate to the FRG because they came from a communist-ruled country, but in his interpersonal Ostpolitik, Brandt endowed Yugoslav guest workers with a special significance for precisely the same reason. He made Yugoslav migration to the FRG a parable for a new era in the Cold War: coming from the communist East to live and work in the democratic West, Yugoslavs' experiences in the FRG suggested that the Cold War division of Europe could be overcome through increased personal interactions between Eastern and Western Europeans. Earlier stigmatized as communists and communist agents, Brandt reimagined Yugoslav labor migrants as ambassadors of peace heralding the creation of a more peaceful Europe.
Throughout the 1970s West German officials and the media imparted to Yugoslav guest workers and West German tourists in Yugoslavia a similar significance, even if they did not always spell out the wider geopolitical import that Brandt had assigned to them. Even before Brandt's 1973 trip to Yugoslavia, for example, Bavaria's Center for Political Education published and distributed a “wall newspaper,” a large poster meant to be hung in public places, on the theme “relations with Yugoslavia.” It described in great detail the huge flow of Yugoslav guest workers to the FRG and of German tourists to Yugoslavia, and painted Yugoslavia's communist regime in a generally rosy light. It featured large pictures of a smiling Yugoslav guest worker and German sunbathers on the Adriatic coast, and in large text it informed readers that “there is no communist state with which the Federal Republic of Germany has forged better bonds than Yugoslavia.”Footnote 110 While this wall newspaper made a subtle but clear connection between the free flow of people between Yugoslavia and the FRG and the development of better relations with communist Eastern Europe, the message was more explicit during Tito's 1974 visit to the FRG.
In June 1974 Tito made his long-awaited first state visit to the Federal Republic. He had important business in Bonn, namely, securing a massive economic aid package that Brandt had promised in 1973, but West German officials and the press emphasized the symbolic character of the trip. It served as a public display, or, as one German reporter put it, a “demonstration—as proof that thoroughly positive relations could develop between a capitalist and a socialist state.”Footnote 111 The trip therefore represented a staging of Brandt's Ostpolitik, even though he had stepped down as chancellor earlier in the year.Footnote 112 Throughout the visit, Tito and West German leaders asserted that personal interactions between Yugoslavs and Germans, whether at the workplace or in holiday resorts, were the most important and productive aspect of West German-Yugoslav relations. In a speech in Tito's honor, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt reiterated that one of the most important results of Yugoslav-West German cooperation was that “the human connections between our peoples have grown much deeper.” “Our country,” he continued, “has greater and wider areas of human interaction with Yugoslavia than with any other socialist state.” Schmidt informed Tito that Germans very much appreciated Yugoslav guest workers, that they had developed especially good relationships with their German work colleagues, and that these good relationships contributed to the boom in West German tourism to Yugoslavia.Footnote 113
In the vision of interpersonal Ostpolitik that developed in the 1970s, personal interactions between Yugoslavs and West Germans were also conceived of as making an important contribution to the process of overcoming the lingering distrust and animosity between the peoples that was a legacy of World War II. Tito's trip to the FRG called attention to this aspect of interpersonal Ostpolitik. In anticipation of his visit, an article in the Münchner Merkur reported that “Tito's appearance on the Rhine represents the highpoint of the Federal Republic's long-standing efforts to establish relations between Yugoslavia and the free part of Germany—so long burdened by history and other developments—on a new foundation.” The article noted that the huge number of Yugoslav guest workers in the FRG and German tourists in Yugoslavia provided Yugoslavia a much-needed economic boost, but then immediately asserted that their activity should not be seen from a purely economic standpoint. “The human aspect,” the author wrote, “the mutual getting to know each other and the consequent dismantling of prejudices may, at least in the long view, be just as valuable.”Footnote 114 This perspective was implicit in West German leaders' statements regarding the transformational power of Yugoslav-West German personal interactions, but Tito made it explicit in a speech on the evening of his arrival in Bonn. He stated that the contact between millions of Yugoslavs and Germans “played an especially important role in the creation of mutual understanding and trust.” Taking a page straight from Brandt's interpersonal Ostpolitik, he noted that the close personal contacts between the two peoples “are important links that contribute to overcoming the shadows of the past and bring a new spirit and new content into our changed relations.”Footnote 115 The West German press provided extensive coverage of Tito's visit, and so the vision of interpersonal Ostpolitik would have reached many Germans.Footnote 116
This vision of interpersonal Ostpolitik continued to find expression in the FRG long after Tito's visit, although in less concentrated form. In April 1975, for instance, a Foreign Ministry official gave a speech entitled “The German-Yugoslav Contribution to Securing Peace in Europe,” in which he repeated the by-now familiar theme that through labor migration and tourism Germans and Yugoslavs had developed close personal relationships that provided an example for the rest of the world to follow and supported West Germany's goal of ending the Cold War and the division of Europe.Footnote 117 At the opening of a folklore celebration for Germans and Yugoslavs organized by Yugoslav immigrant clubs in Northern Bavaria in 1978, a local conservative German politician thanked Yugoslav guest workers for helping, through personal interactions with Germans, to put the dark chapters of both people's shared history behind them. He called the event “evidence of a real engagement for the reconciliation of peoples and for understanding,” and claimed that such events contributed to the “maintenance of world peace.”Footnote 118
A listeners' contest held in 1978 by Deutsche Welle, West Germany's international broadcaster, gave perhaps the most interesting expression of the vision of interpersonal Ostpolitik. The editors of the Yugoslav section of Deutsche Welle asked Yugoslavs, both in Yugoslavia and in West Germany, to describe in writing their experiences with Germans. The winners would have their stories broadcast and would win a radio. Four hundred and seventy-seven Yugoslavs sent in stories, and collectively they dealt with the three primary vectors of German-Yugoslav interaction since the 1940s: the German domination of Yugoslavia during World War II, West German tourism in Yugoslavia, and Yugoslav labor migration to the FRG. The editors at Deutsche Welle selected and broadcast twenty-five winning submissions; they had twelve of the winners and a large number of excerpts translated into German and published as a pamphlet in 1978 and as a book in 1988. According to the editors, submissions would be judged on the quality of the story and its recounting, not on whether they depicted positive experiences with Germans.Footnote 119 In reality, the selected winners were all almost embarrassingly positive, with a majority of the winning entries describing, bizarrely, just how nicely Germans had treated them during World War II.Footnote 120 Stories about interactions with German tourists were also overwhelmingly positive.Footnote 121 In these stories, friendly interactions during the war and on vacation frequently led to long-lasting emotional bonds between Yugoslavs and Germans.
While the winning entries were purportedly based on the writers' experiences, it quickly becomes apparent that the editors selected as winners those stories that featured the theme they were looking for: the healing of old wounds and the construction of a brighter present and future through therapeutic personal encounters. Mara Gajek-Borojević's story, entitled “Her Blood was Red,” perfectly renders this theme, and is worth examining in some detail, both because it provides a compelling vision of interpersonal Ostpolitik, and because it brings together the three main types of German-Yugoslav encounters since the 1940s: wartime encounters, German tourism to Yugoslavia, and Yugoslav migration to West Germany.Footnote 122
Mara recalls that as a young woman her brother invited her to spend her holiday at his house in Pula, a city on Croatia's Adriatic coast that was popular with foreign tourists. She could stay with her brother as long as she agreed to prepare breakfast and maintain the guest room that he rented out to tourists. On her very first day of work, her brother informed her that two German tourists would be arriving any minute. According to Mara:
These words somehow startled me, and my stomach began to churn. Like in a film, visions of the past were awoken inside of me, and for the first time the history of the 1940s was pushed to the front of my mind. The very term “German” awoke in me a certain anxiety and intolerance (Unverträglichkeit). I felt like a great disturbance was brewing inside of me, and with uneasiness I awaited my first encounter with Germans.Footnote 123
Upon meeting the German couple, Margit and Emmerich, Mara discovered, much to her relief, that they were not so menacing after all. They were normal people. Even though Mara did not speak a word of German, she developed a close relationship with Margit. One evening, while helping Mara prepare dinner, Margit cut herself with a knife. Mara instantly noticed that Margit's blood was red (hence the title), and not—as Nazi propaganda had claimed of Aryan blood—blue. Recognizing their common humanity, Mara quickly came to her aid. Margit and Emmerich's vacation soon came to an end, and Mara and Margit parted as friends, hoping to see each other again.
After a passage of time Mara ended up marrying a Yugoslav guest worker and moving to West Germany, a decision made much easier by her positive experiences with Margit and Emmerich. Once in the FRG she was amazed by how helpful Germans were, even to a foreigner who did not speak German, and she began to love her adopted homeland. One day Mara became lost while shopping and no one was able to help her. Worried, she prayed to God for help. Out of the blue, her old German friend Margit appeared. It turns out that Margit lived in the same city as Mara, and the two became fast friends. Growing up fearful of Germans because of stories about World War II, Mara overcame her fear and came to respect and admire Germans and West Germany because of her experiences with German tourists and as an immigrant in the FRG. Like the rest of the winning submissions, this fanciful but conceivably true story fleshes out the vision of interpersonal Ostpolitik that was voiced by Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, the West German press, and even Tito.
Evaluating Interpersonal Ostpolitik
In the space of a decade, the image of Yugoslav immigrants in the Federal Republic was dramatically transformed. Government officials and the press perceived Yugoslavs as a threat from the 1950s through the mid-1960s because of their association with a communist regime, but German experiences with Yugoslavs during the 1960s did not confirm these fears. On the contrary, West German employers and some government officials came to regard Yugoslavs as an especially desirable group of immigrants, both because of their relatively high skill level and the perception that they could rapidly accommodate to the German rhythm of life. These positive experiences, together with the German tourism boom in Yugoslavia, gradually led to a normalization of the Yugoslav presence in the FRG, so much so that when the FRG and Yugoslavia concluded a labor recruitment treaty in 1968, the concern that Yugoslavs might represent a political threat had almost entirely disappeared. By the mid-1970s, German politicians and the media took the generally positive attitudes toward Yugoslavs a step further by linking them to the new Ostpolitik and regarding them as mediators between West Germany and Yugoslavia and as a symbol of the reconciliation that was possible between old enemies and societies with different politics and modes of social organization.
But what do we make of this vision of interpersonal Ostpolitik? Did it reflect a real improvement in Yugoslav-West German personal interactions, or was it simply a discourse without a referent in reality? On one hand, this vision was firmly rooted in reality. Yugoslav migration to the FRG steadily increased throughout the 1960s, but it grew rapidly after Yugoslavia and the FRG reestablished diplomatic relations and signed a labor recruitment agreement in 1968. By 1974 there were more than seven-hundred thousand Yugoslavs in the FRG.Footnote 124 German tourism in Yugoslavia experienced similarly rapid growth: in 1967, 740,000 West German tourists visited Yugoslavia, while in 1974 that number had increased to 1.7 million.Footnote 125 The scale of these circulating population movements created extensive opportunities for social intercourse between Yugoslavs and West Germans. Not all of these encounters were during vacations or on the shop floor. The concomitant growth of migration and tourism fostered the creation of even more spaces for German-Yugoslav interactions, particularly in Yugoslav restaurants, which became so popular and ubiquitous in West Germany during the 1970s that one reporter observed that, “from a gastronomic standpoint, Munich is already a part of the Balkans.”Footnote 126 During the 1970s Yugoslav children also began attending West German schools in larger numbers, making schools another potential locus of German-Yugoslav encounters.Footnote 127 As Brandt, Tito, and others repeatedly noted, in the context of Cold War Europe, the extensive contact between Yugoslavs and West Germans was a novelty. Indeed, throughout the 1970s, Yugoslav-West German interactions represented the most frequent and sustained contact between Eastern and Western Europeans anywhere on the continent.
On the other hand, while interpersonal Ostpolitik was rooted in a material reality, its claims must be treated with skepticism. Yugoslavs and Germans did prove that the memory of World War II and the Cold War battle of the systems did not preclude generally peaceable interactions and even the formation of friendships between Eastern and Western Europeans, but one suspects that Yugoslav-West German encounters contributed little to the defusing of Cold War tensions. We must also be skeptical of the implication that Yugoslav-West German personal relations were of an invariably positive character. Tourists often cause disruptions and arouse the resentment of locals. Germans in Yugoslavia were no exception.Footnote 128 Moreover, tourists who vacation in less developed countries frequently adopt an attitude of superiority toward the lands they visit.Footnote 129 Guest workers in West Germany have also encountered a great deal of hostility and discrimination. Even if, as some evidence suggests, Yugoslavs were a favored immigrant group, that did not spare them the structural and legal discrimination and disadvantages—poor housing, short-term contracts, and restrictive family reunification and citizenship policies, for example—that affected virtually all immigrants in the FRG. Yugoslav guest workers submitted a greater percentage of negative accounts of their experiences with Germans than did other respondents to the Deutsche Welle listeners' contest discussed above—even more than those who wrote about the war—and that points to a disconnect between Brandt's poetic interpersonal Ostpolitik and the prosaic reality of toiling as an immigrant laborer in the Federal Republic.Footnote 130
But did the positive image of Yugoslavs propagated by the vision of interpersonal Ostpolitik have any impact on Yugoslav guest workers' experiences in the FRG? Interpersonal Ostpolitik was developed and elaborated upon during the 1970s, in the midst of an economic downturn and at a time when Germans were becoming increasingly uneasy about the presence of so many foreigners.Footnote 131 It developed just years before the emergence of a new cultural racism that conceived of Islam, and thus Turkish immigrants, as being incompatible with German culture and Western civilization more generally.Footnote 132 Scholars have long regarded Yugoslavs as one of the better integrated immigrant groups in Germany.Footnote 133 There are many reasons for this, but it is worth considering the possibility that the existence of a discourse that portrayed them in a positive light at the precise moment when more German voices were beginning to describe other immigrants, and particularly Turks, as an unwanted burden, eased their path of integration.
Historians have increasingly sought to write German history from the margins, a history that is sensitive to the experiences of minority groups that were often neglected in the older historiography that centered on the nation-state.Footnote 134 Given the terrible history of the Third Reich, considerations of race and racism rightly occupy a central position in this project. But even historians of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, areas in which race and racism are of obvious importance, have begun to recognize that the singular focus on race has distorted our understanding of the Holocaust and the allure of Nazism.Footnote 135 The new emphasis on race and the process of racialization in postwar Germany has yielded fresh perspectives and new avenues for research, but here too, it carries with it the risk of distorting Germany's postwar history, particularly by making some foreign populations virtually invisible. While the emerging racialization paradigm works well for Turks and black occupation soldiers and their children, will it work as well, for example, for an analysis of Spanish immigrants or immigrant children? By examining German perceptions of Yugoslav immigrants in postwar West Germany, this article has sought to show that race was not the only frame through which Germans viewed the foreigners in their midst. Historians must pay attention to race, but also to other frames of perception—in this case Cold War politics—if they are to capture the untidy diversity of Germany's postwar history.
