Kostas Papanastasiou began to run the restaurant Terzo Mondo (Third World) in West Berlin in 1972. Dominating its interior decoration was a large poster of Ho Chi Minh, the first President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Terzo Mondo would attract various activists, Greek migrants, other migrants and Germans, who would discuss political developments in Greece and elsewhere in the world (Papadogiannis, 2014). The vibrant interaction in Terzo Mondo just a snapshot of the various protest cultures in which Greek migrants were involved in West Germany.
This exhibition offers glimpses of the protests involving Greek migrants in West Germany. It covers the era between the 1960s and the reunification of Germany. In the 1960s, not only the number of Greeks in West Germany increased substantially, but incoming migrants began to get involved in protests in the receiving society. What changed around the reunification of Germany was the growing visibility of Greek lesbian migrants became in Feminist initiatives in West Germany. Overall, the exhibition aims to show that Greek migrants, including those protesting, were heterogeneous. Their demands varied and related to their diverse and changing social backgrounds and the shifting restrictions that the West German state imposed on migrants. Moreover, especially from the 1967-1974 period, Greek migrant protestors increasingly co-operated with other migrants and non-foreign-born German militants.
The exhibition covers four periods:
- the ‘first stirrings’ of Greek migrant protest in the early-to-mid-1960s
- the escalation of their mass mobilisation in the 1967-1974 period
- the subsequent change in the demands they posed from the early 1970s until the late 1980s
- and the visibility of Greek lesbian activists around the moment of the reunification of Germany