After 1945, the German politics of peace – against war and among activists – was defined by the emerging and interpenetrating geopolitical regimes of the Cold War and decolonization. These unprecendented international conditions forced pacifists to rethink their existing agendas. Peace rhetoric that once had focused on the domestic roots of militarism was reoriented to emphasize human dignity as a positive leitmotif. Was this a sufficient response to the deployment of modern weapons in an ideologically-grounded and potentially global conflagration? What sort of position were pacifists to take on anticolonial wars like those fought in Algeria or Vietnam, which many activists perceived as being fought in the name of human dignity? These and similar questions vexed West German pacifists and led to a series of crises among them.

This dissertation explores the historically-contingent nature of pacifism as it was articulated and practiced in the Federal Republic of Germany on the shifting terrains of geopolitics, political economy, and activist networking. At its core, this is a history of peace organizations and their respective attempts to revive pacifism in Germany after World War II, adjust their priorities to the geopolitical and domestic political priorities of the Cold War, and accommodate themselves to a new era of social movement organizing and activism. I demonstrate a global turn in pacifist thought during the 1950s, and I argue that this shift encouraged pacifist identification with and support for national liberation movements around the world during the 1960s, leading some activists to seriously qualify their traditional opposition to the violence of war. Pacifists thus found themselves caught between affective expressions of solidarity and political movements that thematized exploitation in such a way as to elevate human dignity above the sanctity of human life.

Resisting the common characterization of protest as an expression of youthful, countercultural dissent, I identify the competing influences of broader cultural economies over peace activism. The historical trajectory that I map enables further analyses of pacifist relationships to local, regional, and transnational public cultures; of protest as a mode of remembrance; and of the influence of peace politics over West Germany's evolving political culture.