Singing their emotions: Greek migrants in West Germany

The mobility of people from southern to northern Europe marked the post-war history of the continent for decades. Various countries, such as West Germany, Sweden and Switzerland, developed massive foreign labour recruitment programmes.Footnote ¹³ According to the agreements signed by the West German government with countries such as Italy (1955), Greece (1960), Spain (1960), and Turkey (1961), incoming migrant workers were only supposed to reside temporarily in West Germany, for as long as they worked for a German company.Footnote ¹⁴ Henceforth, the number of migrants moving to West Germany from southern Europe increased substantially. Between 1961 and 1973, when the oil crisis put an end to foreign labour recruitment, the number of Greek residents in Germany had risen from 42,000 to 408,000.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet, even after the Anwerbestopp of 1973, the moratorium on foreign labour recruitment, Greeks continued to move to Germany, albeit primarily as students.Footnote ¹⁶ At the same time, Greek ‘guest workers’ began to return to Greece, in response to the improving job market in Greece.Footnote ¹⁷

These first-generation Greek migrants continued to identify closely with their country of origin and, by extension, with their compatriots in West Germany. The community of Greek migrants thus formed in Germany can be conceptualised as an ‘emotional community’ which revolved mainly around a feeling of ‘suffering’ and its expression during the 1960s and early 1970s. Music played a key role in facilitating those affective bonds. For instance, Andreas Arnakis’ bilingual radio show entitled ‘Meeting in Germany’, which broadcast news about Greece as well as Greek music, apparently struck a chord among migrants.Footnote ¹⁸ According to Dimitris Katsantonis, who has lived in Munich, Mannheim and Heidelberg since the 1960s and has been involved in left-wing politics ever since, it was the ‘ear’ through which Greek migrants ‘heard’ their ‘motherland’.Footnote ¹⁹ They listened to such shows individually or together with a few friends in apartments or in their residential halls (Heime). It was the music of Stelios Kazantzidis in particular that marked the migrant experience of many Greeks in West Germany. Elpida Domokou-Tsakiri, who migrated from northern Greece to West Germany in the early 1960s in order to work, stressed that ‘we found those songs touching’.Footnote ²⁰ Similarly, ‘[Greek] migration [to West Germany]’, according to Katsantonis, ‘is emotionally linked to Kazantzidis. . . On Saturday, on Sunday you walked by the residence halls, where those workers lived, and that was the only music you could hear’.Footnote ²¹ The lyrics of those songs portrayed migration as a quintessentially miserable experience. Some of their common themes were mothers lamenting the departure of their offspring as well as the longing of migrants to return ‘home’. For instance, the lyrics of the song ‘To psomi tis xenitias’ (‘The Bread of Foreign Lands’) contained the following lines: ‘Please, Virgin Mary, make migration stop. No mother should cry again for being separated (from her offspring) and they should come back home again’. Notably, other emotions were also associated with this suffering and ‘pain’ (ponos), such as the ‘fear’ (fovos) migrants felt facing conditions that differed substantially from their everyday life up to that point.Footnote ²² Other oral testimonies stressed ‘anger’ (thymos) at what was depicted as the ‘unequal treatment’ that migrants believed they experienced in comparison to local inhabitants.Footnote ²³

Greek migrants not only listened to this music on the radio, but also sang such songs collectively, a practice that was arguably even more important for the formation of this emotional community. Two important locations where such performance took place were the Heime and the community halls. Greek residents of the former often met during their leisure time, as Katsantonis mentioned above, to ‘sing their pain’ together.Footnote ²⁴ The communities (Gemeinden) multiplied from the early 1960s onwards in cities where Greek migrants lived. Such communities were founded, for instance, in Cologne (in 1962), Frankfurt (1964), West Berlin (1964) and Munich (1964).Footnote ²⁵ They usually proclaimed in their charters that one of their main aims was to preserve Greek ‘customs’ and organise relevant cultural events.Footnote ²⁶ They also offered space where patrons could gather, talk, play cards and sing.

While ‘suffering’ featured prominently in the formation of the emotional community of Greek migrants, the image of a coherent national emotional community revolving solely around this feeling needs to be scrutinised. Other emotions and emotional conditions, kefi in particular, played an important role within this community as well. The latter term is difficult to translate. It is typically rendered into English as ‘fun’, ‘joy’ or ‘merriment’. Yet, as anthropologist Jane Cowan, who has studied kefi in the city of Sohos in northern Greece, remarks, ‘more than just a label for a kind of high spirits, kefi has philosophical dimensions, particularly concerning the relation between self and collectivity’.Footnote ²⁷ While it ‘represents the natural predisposition of the [individual] heart’, it is experienced more deeply within a group of people singing and dancing.Footnote ²⁸Kefi was a profoundly gendered emotion. Cowan and Papataxiarchis have asserted that heterosexual men were mostly involved in the performance of this emotional condition. Women were not excluded, at least in Sohos, but, in contrast to the men, they were not licensed to feel kefi as a result of having consumed alcohol. In addition, while men could experience it both individually and collectively, reaching the emotional condition of kefi individually was not a legitimate option for women. Kefi-centred performances by Greek migrants in West Germany usually included singing and dancing together to Greek folk music. Such performances served actually as a means of coping with the distance from ‘motherland’ and tackling the suffering ascribed to migration. Quite tellingly, Domokou-Tsakiri mentioned that such performances were among the occasions on which ‘we consoled one another’.Footnote ²⁹ Other narrators used family metaphors to describe their emotional experience during those events: statements such as ‘we felt like a family’ were not at all uncommon in the testimonies I have gathered.

But the ‘emotional community’ of Greek migrants was not internally coherent, and actually fragmented along regional lines, among others. Initially, Greek migrants who came from from the Black Sea (Pontioi), but also from various areas in Greece, such as Epirus and Thessaly, gathered spontaneously in spaces such as the rooms of the buildings where communities (Gemeinden) were hosted, to sing and dance. Gradually, they founded regional associations. Quite often, those societies attracted musicians, who played local instruments, such as the stringed one kementse (also called a Pontiaki lyra) in the case of Pontioi.Footnote ³⁰ Greek popular music, such as Kazantzidis’ sorrowful songs, featured prominently at their gatherings. Texts published by those groups in the 1960s and the 1970s and the oral testimonies of participants in such events indicate that the emotional conditions of entertainment (diaskedasi) and kefi were central in these contexts.Footnote ³¹ In the gatherings of the Pontioi, melancholy and kefi were closely intertwined: according to Nikitas Apostolidis, who is a Pontios, they sang songs revolving around the frustration due to the fact that they lived away from the ‘motherland’ of Pontos as well as joyful ones; both emotions were amplified by the sound of the kementse.Footnote ³²

Another parameter that diversified the emotional communities in which Greek migrants in West Germany engaged themselves was age. Numerous university students and young workers came to appreciate cultural patterns that were core components of the youth cultures existing in West Germany and elsewhere in the ‘West’ at that point. Looking back, some of those students say they liked dancing to Anglo-American popular music in the 1970s, either in discotheques or at parties in private apartments. Young students of approximately the same age were able to socialise with their peers from different national backgrounds and flirt with local women. Grigoris Parakampos, who was a young worker residing in West Berlin in the 1970s, recounted that ‘at parties we listened to English songs’.Footnote ³³ For some of those migrants, especially those who originated from rural areas, this stood in stark contrast to their experience prior to migration. Apostolidis, who was a university student in West Berlin in the 1970s, referred to the limitations on the intermixing of boys and girls in his small, northern Greek village: ‘we did not live as young people until we were 18–19. . . for us who came here (in West Germany), life started’.Footnote ³⁴ Those young migrants, however, did not scorn Kazantzidis’ songs or Greek folk music and dances. They listened to various music genres in diverse spaces, sometimes mixing with older migrants. In those performances, they often developed conflicting understandings of ‘migration’: a negative one, while collectively singing Kazantzidis’ songs, and one that imbued their leisure time in West Germany with ‘joy’. These ambiguities were particularly illuminated in their oral testimonies, which, to borrow a term used by the historian Alessandro Portelli, showed the ‘horizon of shared possibilities, real or imagined’ that migrants entertained at that point.Footnote ³⁵

‘Everybody was so happy, so warm, so brotherly’: the formation of the emotional community of Greek left-wing migrants

Political affiliations also resulted in different emotional communities. Although their political activities have been neglected in relevant scholarship until recently, neither Greek nor other first-generation migrants to West Germany were apathetic.Footnote ³⁶ In the early to mid 1960s many Greek migrants were already members or sympathisers of Greek left-wing organisations. During those years, left-wingers in Greece fell victim to diverse types of exclusion and were treated by the state as ‘dangerous citizens’, as anthropologist Neni Panourgia has aptly remarked.Footnote ³⁷ From the end of the civil war in 1949 until the coup d’état on 21 April 1967, although elections took place regularly, Greece experienced a limited democracy.Footnote ³⁸ The Communist Party of Greece (Kommounistiko Komma Elladas, Communist Party of Greece, KKE) was outlawed in 1947. Still, most Greek left-wingers participated in the United Democratic Left EDA (Eniaia Dimokratiki Aristera, EDA), which operated legally from 1951 to 1967. Members of the clandestine KKE were for a period simultaneously affiliated with EDA. Branches of EDA and its youth groups were also established in West Germany, which were the most successful in recruiting Greek migrants in comparison to EDA branches elsewhere in Western Europe.Footnote ³⁹ Its youth organisations were the official Youth of EDA and the Democratic Youth Movement Grigoris Lambrakis (Dimokratiki Kinisi Neon Grigoris Lambrakis, DKNGL), a group affiliated with EDA, but not guided by it. They merged in 1964, to form the Democratic Youth Lambrakis (Dimokratiki Neolaia Lambraki, DNL).

Greek left-wingers in West Germany during the 1960s and 1970s shared with the right a positive reference to the nation and similarly performed kefi to overcome the suffering of migration. Yet, in the left-wing inflection of this emotional condition, it also became a prerequisite for gaining courage (kouragio) and hope (elpida), a means of forging dedicated militants, who subscribed to the cause of the socialist transformation of Greece.

Greek left-wing groups in West Germany, such as EDA or the DNL, regularly organised celebrations. The events that mattered most for them were Christmas, New Year's Eve, and Easter, as well as the anniversaries of the War of Independence of 1821 (on March 25), the creation of the DNL, the rejection of the Italian ultimatum demanding the annexation of Greek territory in 1940 (on October 28) and the resistance against the occupation of Greece in 1941–4. Some branches of EDA and its youth groups also held frequent musical and dancing events, in Hanover, for example, once a month.Footnote ⁴⁰ Even at those celebrations where EDA youth branches featured prominently, older migrants were not excluded. Indeed, these events often took place in spaces such as the Gemeinde halls where people could mingle regardless of age. During such gatherings, identification with the Greek ‘motherland’ was celebrated. ‘Inside the room, on the right, a huge Greek flag hung on the wall,’ as a text by the DNL in Hanover about such a celebration stated, ‘. . . we had placed on almost all the walls very beautiful artefacts produced by women.’Footnote ⁴¹ Evidently, Greek left-wingers in West Germany were deeply concerned that what they construed as national traditions might fade out, unless they were promoted, especially in the context of migration. Throughout the 1960s, the Greek left was crystal clear in criticising migration per se, as a phenomenon that deprived Greece of the skills and the labour of those workers.Footnote ⁴² For instance, an announcement of the youth branch of EDA in Hanover referred to the ‘uprooted’ Greek youth residing in the city.Footnote ⁴³

Music and its emotional investment were prescribed in EDA rhetoric as a means of reinforcing Greek national identity among Greek migrants in West Germany. In those events, musicians quite often played instruments, such as the kementse and the bouzouki, a plucked string instrument, whose sound resembles to an extent that of the mandolin. The rest of the participants engaged themselves in singing Greek folk music from diverse regions as well as in group dance. Kefi figured prominently in this regard. A report in 1965 on the celebration of Easter by the DNL in Hanover mentioned: ‘Soon kefi became predominant. Everybody was so happy, so warm, so brotherly. Those living in foreign lands have their own way of celebrating their happiness, they become one, one man, one soul, one nostalgia for the motherland.’Footnote ⁴⁴ This link between kefi and the longing for return to their country of origin or their specific birthplace permeated many oral testimonies of former EDA members. Indeed, one narrator, Gortynos, a young worker who resided in Nuremberg and Munich from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s and was affiliated with EDA in the late 1960s, went further to argue that this emotional experience aroused many of his senses: ‘[When listening to this music], I could even imagine the smell [of my natal area]’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This nostalgic conceptualisation of kefi was supposed to unite all migrants regardless of ideological background, even though the above-mentioned ‘one man’ was not necessarily a left-winger. Similarly, its enactment followed the rules described by Cowan and Papataxiarchis, which were not peculiar to Greek left-wing migrants, but constituted common ground they shared with their compatriots.

Simultaneously, a narrower, left-wing understanding and enactment of kefi could also be observed in the same gatherings. Its distinguishing feature entailed listening to entehno laiko (artistic popular) music by Theodorakis, who was a leading figure of the Greek left at that point: he was the president of the DNL, the youth organisation of EDA, and was elected as an EDA member of parliament in 1964. He was the creator of that music genre, whose core component was setting poetry to ‘Greek popular music’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Theodorakis resorted to the work of renowned Greek poets, while extensively employing the sound of the bouzouki. Various sources indicate the preponderant role that Theodorakis’ compositions played in the events organised by EDA in West Germany.Footnote ⁴⁷ From the mid to late 1960s onwards, Theodorakis also inspired Greek migrant musicians, such as Kostas Papanastasiou, who at that point resided in West Berlin, was affiliated with EDA and studied architecture until 1970. He produced two albums in the 1960s and 1970s: Stavrosi 67 (Crucifixion 1967) and Parousia (Presence, 1972).Footnote ⁴⁸

In the inflection of kefi, which revolved around entehno laiko composed by Mikis Theodorakis, this emotional condition did not just connote nostalgia for the country of origin, but also the dedication to contribute to its radical transformation. Quite tellingly, Gortynos stated that those songs gave left-wing Greek migrants ‘power’ during those years.Footnote ⁴⁹ Their lyrics stimulated mobilisation – and for good reason: Theodorakis’ first entehno laiko work appeared in the early 1960s with the album Epitaphios, which was based on a poetic collection of the same name by Yiannis Ritsos, a communist. It was inspired by a mother's lament for her son, who was killed during a labour demonstration in Thessaloniki in 1936. Theodorakis went on to compose numerous other works, such as Axion Esti (1964, a ‘popular oratorio’ based on Odysseas Elytis’ poetry) and Romiossini (1966, Ritsos’ poetry set into music), whose content refers to resistance and popular uprising. Those migrants, similar to their comrades in Greece, did not appreciate only the lyrics, but also the sound of the bouzouki, extensively used in Theodorakis’ compositions, which they construed as profoundly moving.Footnote ⁵⁰ In spite of the fact that the lyrics did not directly address migration, performing Theodorakis’ music in that context stressed the very territorial underpinnings of left-wing patriotism, which designated that Greeks could not be happy as long as they stayed away from their ‘motherland’.Footnote ⁵¹ Theodorakis himself attended some of those events, assigning meaning to them not only through his music, but also through his speeches. On 21 May 1965, when he visited the branch of the youth organisation of EDA in Munich, he highlighted the ‘struggle to bring the migrants back to Greece’.Footnote ⁵² In contrast with the bonds forged by singing Kazantzidis’ songs, suffering was not an end in itself, but a prerequisite for militant action.

This particular enactment of kefi appeared in diverse cities in West Germany, where Greek migrants lived. It revolved around the onstage performance of these political songs by an artist, such as Petros Tsoupidis in Munich.Footnote ⁵³ Alternatively, choirs comprising DNL members sang these songs, for example at an event in Hamburg on 19 May 1965.Footnote ⁵⁴ When it came to entehno laiko, dancing was out of question. Still, the audience was not passive: the formation of the emotional community of Greek left-wing migrants involved collective singing, sometimes together with the artist performing Theodorakis’ music. The reactions of the left-wingers were not homogeneous, however, but depended on different gendered expectations about how to express emotions. In all oral testimonies I have collected, it appears that men, in contrast with women, tried to refrain from crying in public, including when listening or singing along to such music.Footnote ⁵⁵ They seem to have tried to avoid behaviour patterns that would make them appear ‘weak’. Despite such differentiations, left-wing men would seldom sing those entehno laiko songs individually, but, usually, jointly with other men and women, in order to reach kefi together. While anthropologist Catherine Lutz maintains that emotion is associated with femininity in the ‘West’, this does not apply in this case.Footnote ⁵⁶ One way or another, the performance of Theodorakis’ music helped stir strong emotional ties among Greek left-wingers residing in West Germany regardless of not only their age, but also their gender.

Shifting political conditions in West Germany and Greece ‘around 1968’

While the 1960s witnessed the inception of an emotional community of left-wing migrants in West Germany, a series of events in the late 1960s and the early 1970s would have a profound impact on it.

Even before the 1960s, becoming a member of the left was not an uncomplicated process for Greek migrants. According to the Ausländergesetz or aliens law that was passed in 1965, political activity on the part of migrants in general was not permitted if the activity was deemed incompatible with the principles of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ as conceived by the West German state.Footnote ⁵⁷ If the latter decided that migrants overstepped the boundaries of legality with their militancy, they could face sanctions and even deportation.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, the condition of the Greek left-wingers deteriorated significantly in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. After the establishment of the dictatorial regime in 1967, travelling to Greece became more difficult for the advocates of the left, since the military junta had banned the activity of all parties and was persecuting dissidents.Footnote ⁵⁹ On top of that, it stripped many left-wingers of their Greek citizenship by cancelling their passports, while pro-junta Greek elements in the Federal Republic of Germany, such as the members of the league of Greeks of West Berlin] (Syndesmos Ellinon Dytikou Verolinou), regularly intimidated foes of that regime.Footnote ⁶⁰ Conditions in West Germany also became increasingly unfavourable for left-wing militancy, especially on the part of ‘foreigners’ from the early 1970s on. As historian Quinn Slobodian notes, the government of West Germany ‘expanded the scope of executive power greatly in its fight against left-wing terrorism’ during this decade. As a result, whoever was regarded by the West German state as ‘extremist’ was bound to face legal sanctions. According to Slobodian, its reaction to the events of the ‘German Autumn’Footnote ⁶¹ in 1977 has so far been portrayed in relevant historiography as the culmination of this process. However, from the perspective of the rights of the ‘foreigners’ residing in West Germany, the peak of the expansion of ‘the scope of executive power’ coincided with the wave of deportations of ‘foreign’ radical militants in 1972.Footnote ⁶²

Meanwhile, as briefly mentioned in the introduction, protest erupted in several locations around the globe ‘around 1968’. Protests also swept West Germany at that point, in which the Socialist German Student League (Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund, SDS), featured prominently. The SDS was founded in 1946 and was initially affiliated with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), with which it severed ties in 1961. Protests escalated in 1967–8, when massive student demonstrations took place. However, the SDS soon experienced bitter infighting and divisions, before eventually disbanding in 1970. Collective action in West Germany was not limited to radical students at that point, however. From 1969 to 1972, the apprentices’ movement (Lehrlingsbewegung) mobilised around ten thousand protestors, according to historian Knud Andresen. Nevertheless, the radical apprentices largely avoided representing themselves as ‘1968ers’, since they equated the latter with students, whom they often viewed with scepticism.Footnote ⁶³ This tendency was not atypical among workers in West Germany during those years: for instance, functionaries of the union of metal workers (IG Metall) also treated radical students of the late 1960s with suspicion.Footnote ⁶⁴

Meanwhile, the protests that erupted in West Germany as in many other countries around the globe did not leave Greek migrants unaffected. The sites of their politicisation were multiple and not necessarily identical for workers and students. Greek left-wing students, such as Kostas Papanastasiou, joined teach-ins that the left-wing militants organised in 1968 against the Vietnam War.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the meantime, many migrant workers participated in strikes. In one notable case in the Pierburg factory in Neuss during the summer 1973, Greek and Turkish workers played a major role.Footnote ⁶⁶ While their politicisation often stemmed from different sites, Greek left-wing migrant workers and students often mingled, especially in the Gemeinde halls. In contrast to West German militant workers and students who were active in this period, they did not necessarily view each other with suspicion, since they usually joined forces in their opposition to the authoritarian regime in Greece.

The establishment of the dictatorship in 1967 and the eruption of protests in West Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s were factors that deeply affected the making of Greek left-wing migrants in the Federal Republic of Germany. Their political landscape altered fundamentally, witnessing a dialectic of convergence and division: the increased efforts to co-ordinate a broad range of anti-dictatorial forces were often weakened due to their increasing fragmentation. In particular, centrist and left-wing groups often collaborated within the framework of the same anti-dictatorial committees, which spread throughout West Germany from 1967 onwards.Footnote ⁶⁷ Similarly, the Federation of Greek Communities (Omospondia Ellinikon Koinotiton, OEK) in West Germany, which had been established in 1966, was yet another yet another hotbed of the anti-dictatorial struggle.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Greek left became increasingly divided, which affected its activities in West Germany as well. The KKE suffered a split in 1968 into the pro-Soviet KKE and the KKE Esoterikou (Interior). The latter gradually demanded greater autonomy from Moscow in terms of ideology. Numerous Greek migrants were members or sympathisers of those communist parties. According to a 1974 report from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz), a wide array of Greek associations in West Germany linked to ‘orthodox’ communist organisations, namely KKE and KKE Esoterikou, attracted a declining, but significant number of members: 19,000 in 1971, 14,000 in 1973 and 9,150 in 1974.Footnote ⁶⁹ Meanwhile, a Greek Maoist group – the Revolutionary Communist Party of Greece (Epanastatiko Kommounistiko Komma Elladas, EKKE) – was formed in West Berlin in 1970. EKKE was mainly influential among Greek students living in West Berlin.Footnote ⁷⁰ Other dissidents formed the Panhellenic Liberation Movement (Panellinio Apeleytherotiko Kinima, PAK), an organisation that attracted left-wingers and liberals and which was mainly inspired by liberation movements in Latin America.Footnote ⁷¹ PAK was active both in Greece and abroad, including several cities in West Germany. The Verfassungsschutz estimated the total membership of the Greek Maoist organisations and PAK in West Germany around 2200 and 1700 militants in 1973 and 1974, respectively.Footnote ⁷² These left-wing groups, both in Greece and in the Greek migrant communities in West Germany, often engaged in bitter debates, with each claiming to represent the genuine and most effective version of ‘anti-fascism’ and ‘anti-imperialism’.Footnote ⁷³ Greek centrist organisations were also active in West Germany at that point, such as the Centre Union-Greek Democratic of Youth (Enosi Kentrou-Elliniki Dimokratiki Neolaia, EK-EDIN), which established its own headquarters in Hanover.

Protests ‘around 1968’ in West Germany also provided numerous opportunities for these Greek left-wingers to collaborate with local activists.Footnote ⁷⁴ Such links were not a novelty of the late 1960s: for instance, young EDA members participated in the Easter marches for peace (Ostermärsche) in the early to mid 1960s alongside local comrades of theirs.Footnote ⁷⁵ Still, while Greek migrant left-wingers continued to be staunch advocates of Greek patriotism and viewed themselves as temporarily residing in West Germany, their contacts with local activists intensified at that point. Soon after the coup d’état was staged, Greek left-wing migrant workers and students, together with local comrades of theirs as well as other migrants, organised numerous demonstrations throughout West Germany. Among those who participated were the sympathisers and members of a wide array of West German organisations, such as the SDS (until its demise in 1970), the Maoists and the Jusos (the youth organisation of the SPD at that point). In this vein, the KKE collaborated with the pro-Soviet and pro-GDR German Communist Party (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei, DKP) which was formed in 1968. For instance, when dissident students occupied the Athens Polytechnic in November 1973, the Maoists participated in marches against the dictatorship in many cities, such as Frankfurt, Göttingen and Bremen.Footnote ⁷⁶ Multiplying forms of such co-operation emerged at that point. For instance, West German left-wingers who were not of migrant background and so were unknown to the Greek military junta, often travelled to Greece in order to collect material produced by clandestine left-wing groups and smuggle it back to their comrades in West Germany.Footnote ⁷⁷ Another development at that time were the joint initiatives formed by a diverse array of migrants against the authoritarian regimes in their countries of origin. Gortynos, who progressed from the EDA to the KKE Interior, emphasised the ‘militant relationships’ between left-wing Greeks and Spanish people in West Germany who opposed the Franco regime.Footnote ⁷⁸ In general, the perception that they were all ‘suffering’ brought left-wing militant migrants as well as local inhabitants closer, in their struggle to change political situation in their country of origin but also globally.

1967–74: ‘Going out in the rain’ and overcoming fear

As in the early to mid 1960s, left-wing militancy continued to be a bodily experience, one that was expressed in song and dance, among other activities, for Greek workers and students in West Germany after 1967. The developments ‘around 1968’ helped reshape the emotional community of Greek left-wing migrants, contributing to its expansion:Footnote ⁷⁹ Greek centrists and local left-wingers increasingly participated together in the performances around which this community revolved.

In particular, the very conditions which Greek left-wing migrants in West Germany had to grapple with at this point further complicated their emotional experiences. Facing a repressive dictatorship at home and growing limitations abroad, they had to deal with additional dimensions of fear in comparison to the pre-1967 period: fear of not being able to return to their country of origin for a long time, or even worse, of being deported to Greece and subsequently imprisoned and tortured there. The very impossibility of remigration during those years exacerbated the ‘suffering’ they associated with their migrant status. The emotional condition of Greek migrants aligned with other anti-junta organisations was similar. Fear seems to have prevented some Greek migrants from joining such groups, be they left-wing or centrist, as described by a text published by the left-leaning Greek community in Hamburg: ‘Dictatorship beats up everyone who does not submit to its power. . . However, not everybody is willing to be beaten up. If one's offspring [and/or] parents are in Greece. . .’.Footnote ⁸⁰

However, as in the early to mid 1960s, Theodorakis continued to inspire left wingers. Arrested by the regime, Theodorakis embodied resistance to it.Footnote ⁸¹ His messages, such as the one conveyed by Greek left-wingers in Dusseldorf, aimed at helping them show courage: ‘The History of our Land is great and glorious. We have often struggled against well-armed enemies and we have defeated them. . . in the land where democracy was born tyrants die.’Footnote ⁸² Theodorakis’ music was also touching for Greek left-wing migrants, as is manifest in numerous oral testimonies. For example, Theodosia Karamanopoulou-Thielmann, a member of the Communist Youth of Greece (Kommounistiki Neolaia Elladas, KNE), the youth organisation of the pro-Soviet KKE, who lived near Leverkusen in the late 1960s, stated: ‘I cannot forget this, every Sunday my father listened to Radio Budapest, and suddenly he started shedding tears, he heard “be patient, the bells will soon ring”, an extract from Romiossini, written by Ritsos and set to music by Theodorakis’.Footnote ⁸³ Karamanopoulou-Thielmann recalled that this incident, which occurred during the dictatorship years, affected her deeply, contributing to her getting actively involved in politics – albeit not with PAK, which her father supported, but with the KNE. Her testimony suggests that politicisation in the so-called ‘old left’Footnote ⁸⁴ was not emotionally ‘dull’, confined to ‘occasional demos, [and] sending small cheques to good causes’, as historian and author David Caute has argued, but emotionally moving.Footnote ⁸⁵

However, a fundamental novelty of the junta period was that Theodorakis and his music took on meaning for all those who were opposed to the regime, not only for left-wingers. What constituted the basis of an emotional community of Greek left-wing migrants was transformed into one for all Greek migrants who despised the dictatorship. Even several centrists mentioned that they started listening to Theodorakis’ music from 1967 onwards. Myrodis Athanassiou, a high-ranking cadre of the EK-EDIN in Munich in 1968–9 and in North Germany in 1971–4, stated that ‘I started singing Theodorakis after 1967, often together with centrist, but sometimes also with left-wing, friends of mine. . . We sang those songs very frequently, wherever we could’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Gortynos also recounted that ‘I sang Theodorakis’ music alongside all Greeks who opposed the regime, not just the left-wing ones.’Footnote ⁸⁷ This emotional community embraced left-wingers and centrists of all stripes, despite the growing tensions within these groups at that point. For these migrants, the performance of music served as a means of overcoming – or ‘denigrating’, to borrow Rosenwein's term, – the fear of expressing opposition to the dictatorial regime.

During these years, Theodorakis’ work, which was banned in Greece, helped form what Benedict Anderson would call an ‘imagined community’ made up of Greek activists, living in Greece or abroad, who struggled against the military junta. These individuals did not necessarily know one another, but they repeated the same performances.Footnote ⁸⁸ The testimony of various militants, such as Athanassiou, is telling: ‘Those songs made us feel strong, continuously, that we are not alone; we knew that all Greeks, a lot of Greeks sang those songs.’Footnote ⁸⁹ However, the feeling of common belonging to this emotional community was also enacted by activists being in physical proximity with each other. Theodorakis’ music played a key role in the performance of kefi within Greek communities where anti-dictatorship forces featured prominently, such as the cultural community in Munich, Ekpolitistiki Koinotita, as well as the one in Cologne. This involved activists gathering to sing collectively, in order to reach this emotional condition, which they linked with the desire to ‘struggle’. That was evident, for instance, in an announcement from the Greek community in Cologne for an ‘artistic event’ featuring Theodorakis’ music and theatrical plays with explicitly anti-dictatorial content. The organisers hoped that ‘deep emotions, kefi and enthusiasm’ would prevail.Footnote ⁹⁰

Taverns provided another context where Greek migrants who opposed the dictatorship gathered and sang collectively, choosing mainly entehno laiko composed by Theodorakis, and rizitika, Cretan folk songs which were re-discovered by the composer Yannis Markopoulos. Such activity had become widespread among dissident students in Greece at the time. According to historian Kostis Kornetis, ‘the act of singing in the tavernas was the first testing ground in defying the authorities and a way of non-conformist socialisation’, which amounted to nothing less than the ‘cathartic energy of the taverna ritual’.Footnote ⁹¹ These practices spread among Greek left-wing and centrist migrants in West Germany as well. According to historian Maren Möhring, Greek restaurants, which had first appeared in West Germany in the 1960s, acquired a broader clientele, including many local people, in the 1970s and the 1980s.Footnote ⁹² One tavern that explicitly addressed politically active customers was Terzo Mondo (Third World), a West Berlin restaurant bought by the left-winger Kostas Papanastasiou in 1972.Footnote ⁹³ In a sense, Terzo Mondo epitomised the (trans)national orientation of the Greek left-wing migrants in the city. Dominating its interior decoration was a large poster of Ho Chi Minh that created a politicised context in which patrons engaged in discussions about the situation in Greece as well.Footnote ⁹⁴ Simultaneously, Theodorakis’ music featured prominently in the tavern. In his oral testimony, Papanastasiou mentioned that he was not reluctant to sing these songs there: ‘I had already gone out in the rain, I was not afraid of rain. . . I was already convicted in Greece; I could not return’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Normally, after having consumed copious quantities of red wine, the patrons also started singing. These were typically large groups sitting at the same table(s). Asimatos stated that kefi was ‘always an aspect’ of those gatherings, adding that ‘we needed it, especially since we experienced the echo of the persecution [of dissidents] by the dictatorship. . . [kefi] was a breath, our life, what preserved [our identity] during those years when we could not [return to Greece]’.Footnote ⁹⁶

The performance of kefi by migrants who opposed the Greek military junta transcended diverse barriers related to gender and age. It was a collective experience for men and women. In contrast to what Cowan describes about the enactment of this emotional condition in Sohos, left-wing Greek women in West Germany also consumed alcohol, while expressing their dedication to left-wing struggle through entehno laiko songs. In addition, Greek left-wing migrant students and workers, who might have been politicised in diverse settings in West Germany at that point, also took part in these performances of Theodorakis’ entehno laiko music. As in the early to mid 1960s, those songs functioned as the bedrock of a transgenerational experience, which kept militants of differing age together.

The enactment of an emotional community centering on ‘dedication to struggle’ against the dictatorship in Greece also helped moderate political fragmentation and infighting among groups that opposed the dictatorship. Theodorakis's entehno laiko music stimulated all these dissidents, who often gathered in the same venues and were involved in the same performances described above. Although Papanastasiou was leaning towards the KKE Interior group at that point, his tavern attracted pro-Soviet Communists and Maoists as well. Quite tellingly, Aspasia Frangou, a student affiliated with EKKE in the early 1970s, stated: ‘Kostas sang and gave us hope’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Similarly, Apostolidis, a university student and KNE member in the 1970s, mentioned that ‘Terzo Mondo attracted all progressive people. It was a concept (Begriff)’.Footnote ⁹⁸ The anti-dictatorship emotional community and its enactment through music were not split along party-political lines.

The performance of this emotional community of anti-dictatorship forces went hand in hand with the disruption of cultural events organised by pro-junta forces in West Germany by centrists and left-wingers. Indeed, culture functioned as a battleground between those forces: although the regime did not develop a coherent ideology, it embraced the slogan ‘Fatherland, Religion, Family’.Footnote ⁹⁹ It claimed to represent the genuine expression of the Greek nation and thus sought to discredit the patriotic credentials of its opponents. Promoting cultural patterns, such as folk songs, which the dictators viewed as demonstrating the continuity of the Greek nation, featured prominently in the cultural events they organised both in Greece and in Greek consulates abroad. Such celebrations were held, for instance, on the anniversary of the War of Independence of 1821. In a somewhat contradictory fashion, the authoritarian regime also promoted or, at least, tolerated Greek popular music artists, who were influenced by musical trends that emanated from western Europe. Greek left-wing workers and students who resided in West Germany often stormed celebrations at the consulates and concerts by touring bands they viewed as sympathetic to the dictatorship. For instance, when the dictatorship sent an envoy to organise Easter celebrations in Hamburg in the late 1960s for the Greek migrants living there, the response of the dissident Greek migrants was prompt: during the event, many of the latter chanted slogans against the dictatorship and sang Theodorakis’ music.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This was not an isolated case: Such incidents occurred in other West German cities and towns as well, such as Sandbach.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Opponents of the dictatorship viewed such disruption in emotional terms: As Papanastasiou put it, ‘we spoiled their kefi’.Footnote ¹⁰² The foes of the military junta not only wished to reach this emotional condition, but also to prevent their rivals from doing so.

International solidarity and its complexities

The growing ‘international solidarity’ among local and migrant left-wingers touched on above was not just expressed in statements and slogans, but was also enacted through music in many contexts. Singing was a core component of demonstrations and other gatherings against the dictatorship in Greece that were organised jointly by Greek migrants and their local comrades. Such an event, for instance, took place on 22 March 1968 at the Max Emanuel Brauerei in West Berlin. Entitled ‘Freedom for Greece’, it featured Friedrich Hitzer, a translator of Russian literature into German, and Papanastasiou, who performed his own songs as well as music Theodorakis had composed.Footnote ¹⁰³

During these years, Theodorakis’ music witnessed growing popularity in West Germany. Local left-wingers were becoming increasingly acquainted with it: The DKP-leaning record label Pläne produced a record with his music in 1968, having translated the lyrics into German.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ His life and work was also presented in mainstream media, such as the magazine Der Spiegel and the main public television station ARD.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The artist himself performed onstage on numerous occasions in West Germany shortly after his release and throughout the following decades.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Those concerts attracted a mixed audience, comprising not only Greeks but also local peope.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

In the case of local and migrant activists, Theodorakis’ music was an integral component in the mix of events organised by militants of the same ideological orientation, such as demonstrations held by the Maoists in Dortmund, West Berlin and other cities. Yet entehno laiko was not necessarily their sole feature. In the case of Dortmund, local and migrant protestors appear to have repeatedly sung the Internationale together, rendering their bonds palpable.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ However, such demarcation was not impenetrable: the intermingling of local and migrant militants of different ideological affiliations was not uncommon. The events surrounding May Day facilitated such interaction, for example. After the demonstrations finished, migrants and local people gathered at the Heime where Greek workers stayed, as well as in student halls of residence, such as those in West Berlin and Munich. Apostolidis and Katsantonis stated that the occasion was a ‘feast’ (‘glenti’). Greek activists cooked and sold souvlaki. During these gatherings, and in a manner similar to the pre-1967 period, those migrants were involved in an interplay between two enactments of kefi: a broader one, which included listening and dancing to folk songs, as well as a narrower, politicised one that revolved around collective singing of Theodorakis’ entehno laiko music.

These enactments were both transnational and national. During events that were dedicated to the major concern of Greek left-wing and centrist migrants at that point, the toppling of the Greek junta, they tackled fear and felt hope by listening to music composed by Theodorakis together with local comrades and other migrant comrades; on some occasions, as shown below in more detail, they also jointly sang those songs. Meanwhile, his music functioned for local left-wingers, at least those aligned to the SDAJ, as a (trans)national symbol that stirred emotions. While they labelled Theodorakis’ music as ‘Greek’, they simultaneously construed it as an element of a transnational ‘democratic’ culture and, more importantly, as a genre, which would spread ‘courage’ to militants across national borders to confront an ‘international alliance’ of (extreme) right-wingers.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ However, the effort to establish transnational affective bonds through those songs did not always unfold smoothly. At least from the perspective of Greek left-wing and centrist migrants, listening to Theodorakis’ music in the context under study reinforced national boundaries, since their local, German, allies either did not manage or did not even try to emulate the ways in which the Greek militants performed. Asimatos stated that while their allies were also ‘emotionally moved’ by Theodorakis’ music and ‘even tried to sing it’, they did so ‘clumsily’, something that set them apart from the emotional performance of their Greek comrades.Footnote ¹¹⁰ By contrast, Katsantonis claimed that ‘we, Greeks, we sing our emotions’, adding that his ‘German comrades’ just listened to Theodorakis’ music without really reacting, not even reciting the verses they were familiar with.Footnote ¹¹¹ The opposition between emotionally expressive Greeks and more restrained Germans is a recurring theme in several oral testimonies I have gathered, regardless of whether the workers or students in question have since re-emigrated to Greece or not. Some interviewees went further and described such differing emotional expressions in music performances as timeless characteristics of (national) cultures. Kostas Papadopoulos, a KNE member who studied in Bonn in the early 1980s before returning to Athens, maintained that ‘we (the Greeks) speak loudly, laugh loudly; our relationship to our motherland is intense’.Footnote ¹¹² He stated that a similar situation could be observed in the early 1980s. The intensification of the arms race between the Cold War blocs triggered protests across the globe from the late 1970s onwards, which reached their apogee in the early to mid 1980s.Footnote ¹¹³ Protest was widespread in West Germany as well. When some 300,000 people marched in Bonn in October 1981 against the deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles, Greek left-wing migrants also participated and thus expressed international solidarity practically. At the same time, however, Papadopoulos experienced music as a means of national demarcation: ‘I remember a huge demonstration in Bonn. . . we were singing and dancing to slogans for six hours. . . the Greeks are loud, they want to make their presence felt’.Footnote ¹¹⁴

At least some Greek militant migrants, as these examples suggest, tended to reproduce a north–south distinction, according to which people from the south are more ‘authentic’ and ‘direct’ when expressing their feelings.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Such purported ‘authenticity’ not only demarcated national boundaries in common performances, but also inverted a north-south hierarchy by valorising the features that were associated with the latter. Still, such discrepancies in emotional expression did not prevent common action: even if they were seen as more reserved, the local activists were described by their Greek comrades as feeling a genuine sense of solidarity with them and were thus deemed reliable allies.

While such ambiguities in the contact between left-wing Greek migrant and local activists continued from the mid 1970s to the 1980s, the period was also marked by significant transformations both in West Germany and Greece. At around that point, the second generation of Greek migrants began to emerge, a segment of whom would later also get involved in politics.Footnote ¹¹⁶ According to anthropologist Regina Römhild, who borrows an idea put forth by her colleague Sven Sauter, this second generation of Greek migrants established ‘new connections apart from both their parents’ culture and German culture’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Moreover, according to Rita Chin, from the late 1970s onwards, the West German state began to seriously consider the ‘integration’ of migrants.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Meanwhile, a particularly important change for left-wingers occurred in Greece in 1974 with the collapse of the dictatorship: At that point, the foundations for a stable democracy were laid down in Greece, where anti-communism no longer served as the official ideology; as a result, the communist groups were legalised that year.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Communist and socialist groups became very strong, especially in student societies. Similarly, left-wing organisations dominated the Greek communities and student societies in West Germany in the mid to late 1970s.Footnote ¹²⁰ The political situation in Greece posed a challenge for many Greek left-wing migrants in Germany: for some, such as Gortynos, it signalled the opportunity to return to Greece without the prospect of state persecution.Footnote ¹²¹ Still, the decision of left-wing Greek migrants in West Germany to remigrate was not merely linked with their perceptions of political conditions in Greece. In numerous oral testimonies, getting married and having children in West Germany was experienced by many, male and female, as a turning point which impeded their remigration.Footnote ¹²² Some, who remained, such as Karamanopoulou-Thielmann, began to distinguish between ‘home’ and ‘motherland’, associating Germany with the former and Greece with the latter.Footnote ¹²³ The impact of this confluence of factors in the making of Greek left-wing migrant identities in West Germany as well as the emotional investment of their everyday life, mark a rupture which requires further examination.