Annelotte Janse

Dissertation

The Pursuit of ‘White Security’. Transnational Entanglements between West German and American Right-Wing Extremists, 1961-1980

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. B.A. de Graaf & Prof. Dr. T. Bjørgo
Co-supervisors: Dr. E. de Lange & Dr. G.D. Macklin
Nomination: Utrecht University, Faculty of Humanities

When Europeans are asked about Germany in the years immediately following the Second World War, the first thing that often comes to mind is das Wirtschaftswunder. Barely had the rubble been cleared when Germany embarked on a period of unprecedented prosperity. Furniture and electronics, cars and holidays: Germans seemed almost gripped by a fever of consumption. The Neckermann catalogue may well have been the most widely read publication of the era. Not so long ago, the journalist Harald Jähner published a lively, if somewhat ironic, book about this period; a period which, as the back cover tells us, is ‘ripe for rediscovery’.

Never before had so many children been born, Jähner writes in Wunderland, but never before had so many overtime hours been worked, so many double shifts undertaken, or so much alcohol consumed in the pursuit of relaxation. It was, in other words, an age of profound paradoxes. One of the paradoxes to which Jähner paid little attention, and about which he could have learned a great deal from your outstanding dissertation, The Pursuit of ‘White Security’, is the rise of far-right extremist networks during a period of extraordinary economic growth.

You examined no fewer than nineteen archives in your search for traces of cooperation between West German and American far-right extremist groups during the period 1961–1980. You therefore went considerably further than opening a random Neckermann catalogue. The jury was deeply impressed by the meticulous way in which you demonstrate how the German far right adopted methods of violence and terrorism from the far left – for that too forms part of your analysis – while simultaneously receiving support from extremists in the United States whose principles and beliefs often differed substantially from their own. The phases of radicalisation you reconstruct show how terrorist violence increasingly came to be seen as a viable option.

You describe this progressive radicalisation in crystal-clear prose that steadily, almost imperceptibly, draws the reader ever deeper into the narrative. Then, as the 1980s begin to come into view, the reader suddenly looks up in surprise and thinks: surely we cannot stop now, we have only just begun? In short, as one member of the jury put it in their reading report: what a marvellous dissertation!

A period ripe for rediscovery – that was also the jury’s conclusion after reading The Pursuit of ‘White Security’. This book deserves a wide readership precisely because its study of that period also speaks to developments currently taking place on both sides of the Atlantic. It is no coincidence that several members of the jury were left with an uneasy feeling: are the things that happened during those twenty years not still happening today? The jury sincerely hopes that you will continue to expand this research to encompass networks in other countries, perhaps in other periods as well, and certainly in the present day.

The Pursuit of ‘White Security’ is an impressive dissertation: lucid, seminal, remarkable and historically extremely important. It therefore gives me great pleasure, on behalf of the entire jury, to offer you our warmest congratulations on receiving this Erasmus Dissertation Prize.