The transnational character of the 1960s protest movements has long been evident, and historians have put forward a number of explanations for the simultaneous eruption of youth activism in so many countries. Jeremi Suri's book Power and Protest (2003) postulated a common link in opposition to the Cold-War stalemate in Europe—even though the protesters had virtually nothing to say about the Warsaw Pact. Martin Klimke's landmark study The Other Alliance (2010) focused on SDS ideology, presenting an intricate look at the shared German and American critiques of capitalism and racial oppression. For most historians of these years, “transnational” has meant, in effect, “transatlantic.”

Yet the signal event of the West German 1960s—the death of Benno Ohnesorg—took place at a rally against the shah of Iran. From that standpoint, it is astonishing that Quinn Slobodian is among the first to address the Third-World encounters at the heart of the protest movements. In six brief chapters, Slobodian sketches out a persuasive account of the catalytic impact of foreign students in Germany. During the first half of the 1960s, lawyers and dissident students wrested greater political demonstration rights from skeptical interior ministers, making possible the 1967 clashes between anti-shah protestors and their Iranian antagonists. Personal interaction with Latin American students in the mid-1960s persuaded Rudi Dutschke that a global network of revolutionaries could be mobilized. Meanwhile, Dutschke's collaboration with African students at anti-Tshombé protests in 1964 helped him grasp the utility of provocative extralegal behavior.

To Slobodian, the best German theorists of the 1960s were not merely casting an Orientalizing glance at the Third World; they were engaging substantively with the victims of foreign oppression. The author's sympathy for the “Marburger” wing of the SDS is evident; it is presented here as more thoughtful and analytical than the “antiauthoritarian” wing that wrested control of the SDS in fall 1966. Afterward, the anti-imperialist front swerved toward abstraction and romantic projection. In a strikingly original chapter on “corpse polemics,” Slobodian shows how impassioned radicals (including the publishers of Konkret) began to exploit shocking, anonymous images of violence—thereby contributing to a depersonalization of radical discourse. Responses to Mao's Cultural Revolution were especially problematic: “Self-identification as Chinese was an act of defiant solidarity . . . but it was also an act of arrogance that assumed other national or racial identities were open for West German appropriation” (p. 199). The most significant departure, he suggests, was the turn from human rights discourse toward more “structural” interpretations of Third-World violence—thereby helping to isolate the far left in the 1970s even as Amnesty International flourished among the mainstream German left.

Some of the freshest moments in Slobodian's book point beyond the student movements themselves, highlighting the dangers of distant strife for Germany's own civil peace. The author is fair enough, and thorough enough, to observe that the shah's partisans in 1967 were not all paid hacks from SAVAK, the Iranian secret service. West Berlin was home to two distinct Iranian communities: oppositional students and supporters of the shah's modernization program. What played out in June 1967 was, in a sense, an Iranian civil war on German soil. The more Germany opened to the world as a host to foreign workers, students, and assorted asylum seekers, the more exposed it was to the clash of rival factions. This is a theme that Slobodian has further emphasized in subsequent conference papers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the early 1970s.

How well does “Third-World politics” work as a unifying framework for understanding the dynamics of the protest era? One geographic anomaly stands out right away: Greece under the military junta was also a significant touchstone for radical agitation, yet it defies categorization as a Third-World country. Perhaps the encounter with America—its vigorous culture of protest as well as its war in Vietnam and support of hated dictatorships—remains the most comprehensive touchstone for “1968.” Yet Slobodian ably demonstrates the empirical value of bringing Third-World nationals into the narrative of German protest. The sheer geographic range of these students' origins helps to shatter the myth of a provincial West Germany: Neville Alexander of South Africa; Salomon Espinoza of Peru; Bernard Pierre-Louis of Haiti; Indian-German film student Harun Farocki; and Bahman Nirumand of Iran, a minor celebrity in the 1960s but seldom remembered in histories of the 1960s. (One exception is Simone Derix in Bebilderte Politik [2009], whose compelling account of the shah's state visit in 1967 is not referenced here.)

Thanks to the newly digitized search system at the Foreign Office archive in Berlin, it is easier than ever to locate files on foreign nationals in Germany from decades past. Slobodian's book represents a methodological field guide for how these stories can be used to situate West Germany better in a global context. This is exemplary transnational history and essential reading for today's graduate students.