Kurdish Transnational Activism in Cold War East and WestBerlin, 1960s

Since the beginning of the Cold War, the GDR was one of the main centres of Kurdish transnational political activism, which intensified during the long decade of the 1960s. At the same time, the GDR was the preferred place of exile for communists from Turkey and Iran, one of the main centres of student activism (both German and Kurdish) and the transit point to West Berlin. West Berlin, the symbolic capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, was also the centre of Kurdish political activism in the 1960s: the majority of Kurdish students of the Kurdish Students' Society in Europe (KSSE) studied here, the first Kurdish-language literary publications appeared here, and the headquarters of Radio Berlin International, which broadcast Kurdish-language programmes at the time, was located here. In order to investigate transnational Kurdish political activism and pro-Kurdish solidarity networks in Berlin in the 1960s, this project addresses three interrelated themes, each of which is conceived as an independent area of research: (a.) Divided Berlin as a theatre and meeting place for revolutionaries and activists from both sides of the Iron Curtain and from the Third World. (b.) Berlin as a place of settlement for various Kurdish circles and as a hub of Kurdish and pro-Kurdish transnational activism and solidarity. (c.) Berlin as a place of crystallisation of ideological divisions and intra-Kurdish conflicts within the framework of the new Cold War order, while the city embodied the ideological struggle between the two blocs on an international level.