Six hours at the archive flew by today. I’m learning so many new and exciting German words like Todesschwadron (death squad) – insert sarcasm. The language barrier makes researching quite slow and there are tons of sources in the archive, which makes for long days, but they’re pretty fascinating at the same time.
The picture above is of a newsletter published by a German socialist group, whose name escapes me at the moment. The title of the newsletter is in Spanish, and translates as “Free Nicaragua” while the smaller text immediately below it is in German and translates as “for the new Nicaragua,” and also in German the red text with the exclamation point translates as “The Revolution continues!” I would really like to makes this headline my banner. I’m actually not even supposed to have it since I can’t digitize and documents myself and have to ask an assistant to make copies, but I couldn’t help myself with this one. It’s going to be really hard not stealing tons of pictures later this week when I look at the poster collection.
I found at least four newsletters like this one in the collections of Gabriele Gottwald, which were sent to her by solidarity groups. I was primarily interested in the newsletters because they mentioned a large rally protesting the Nicaraguan war being held in Bonn on November 3, 1984. The protest was largely organized by socialists, but the greens also participated. One of the newsletters mentioned that its organizers were formerly involved in protesting the Vietnam War. It is impressive to study these groups and understand that there scope was vast not only geographically but temporally as well. Many of these groups in North America and Western Europe influenced relations between their home countries and the “Third World” for decades.
Andrew W. Wilson 