The Westernization of the political thought of the West German labor movement

Julia S. Angster

pp. 76-98

in: German ideologies since 1945, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Abstract

During the 1950s, a transformation of the West German labor movement took place that indicated an approximation to Western political thought. The central argument here is that this transformation of West German labor, which became manifest in the new programs of the Social Democratic Party and the German Trade Union Federation, in the Godesberg program of 1959 and the Düsseldorf program of 1963 respectively, and which also had a profound impact on the whole of West German society, was not just evolving by itself in an entirely internal process, but rather was very strongly influenced by external factors. To put it more provocatively still, it was the result of a cultural transfer from the Anglo-Saxon Western world, involving German laborites as well as American trade unionists. There were two main contributory factors to this cultural transfer: on the one hand the experience of German socialists and unionists during their years in exile, especially of those who spent the war years in Great Britain or the United States; and, on the other, the active role played by the American trade union federations in Western Europe between 1945 and the mid-1960s.