Translated excerpt from Çetin Gültekin and Mutlu Koçak's bestselling book Geboren, aufgewachsen, und ermodert in Deutschland (2024)

This ethnography tells two related stories.Bettina Stoetzer is interested in exploring places in Berlin's ruderal, or unplanned and wild, spaces, where life happens unbeknownst to many of Berlin's officials and most of its residents.There are, in fact, a great variety of unregulated urban spaces, such as corners of public parks and forests, which people have been using to grow food, socialize, participate in unregulated commerce, and promote new businesses.Some resourceful people have, in short, found ways to live alternative lives on the edges of Berlin's regulated society, and through that process, they have transformed a variety of overlooked spaces into personal or social places.In part, as Stoetzer explains in her first chapter, those actions followed the precedents set by the so-called "rubble women," who rebuilt Berlin after World War II, and the many other individuals' reappropriations of its public spaces, necessitated by the succession of ruptures during and after the war.Most of what she engages, however, took place long after the city was rebuilt, divided, and then (re)unified and (re)ordered in the 1990s, and many of her descriptions of people's actions during the first decades of the twenty-first century conform to what Michel de Certeau identified as 'tactics' in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980).Since beginning her fieldwork in 2007, she not only encountered a great variety of people finding their own ways in and around the city, she also began engaging with their mental maps and varied interests, many of which aligned poorly with official regulations and common comportment.Instead, the centers of their worlds turned intriguingly around the city's margins and its peripheries-some of which were in the heart of the metropolis.Others, like those that appear in her delightful final chapter, were in Brandenburg's forests.This makes for fantastic reading.At the same time, Stoetzer devoted a lot of energy to reading and interacting with political activists, and she is keen to use her ruderal ethnographies to throw light on racism and race relations in twenty-first-century Germany."Colonial legacies and contemporary racial injustices," she wants us to understand, "materialize not only in bodies but also in relations to land" (xi).Consequently, most of the resourceful actors in her stories, those

Transnational diaspora groups make intensive use of community media when communicating and connecting in cyberspace. In particular, I argue that blogs constitute a new kind of (post)migrant archive that compiles shared histories and experiences of diaspora. The principal role of the digital archive has become defined, not so much by storage, as by circulation and transfer, in what media theorist Wolfgang Ernst (2002) calls the paradigm shift in the reconceptualization of the archive in the digital age.Indeed, circulation and transfer are also essential dimensions of the digital diaspora. Regarding the modes of interactions of diaspora communities on the web, I will analyse how (post)migrants’ online self-representation and their struggle to gain visibility shape new understandings of the digital archive of diaspora. My focus targets blogs as one of the most popular genres in cyberspace. The samples I analyse are written by (post)migrants and are often intended to decenter the German “Mehrheitsgesellschaft” [“mainstream society”] and diversify its artistic-intellectual scene.It has been shown that these new media settings also give rise to new forms of writing; for example, authorship is often collaborative. My thesis is that this very heterogeneous virtual collaboration often has the effect of transcending the contours of stable “Turkish”, “Arab” and/or “German” identities and of thus also contradicting dominant parameters of identity politics.This is the case with the collective blog “migrantenstadl” that is the subject of my analysis; “migriert, migriert, sonst sind wir verloren” [“migrate, migrate, otherwise we are lost”] is the motto of this often provocative project and an invitation to its readers. “Migration” is movement and mobility, whereas “Archive” is preservation, so how to construct an archive of migration on moving ground?While my primary interest is to explore and connect the concepts of digital diaspora and digital archive, I will try to give concrete form to my theoretical findings on this nexus by analysing the above-mentioned blog, which is a cultural and political initiative directed by Tunay Önder and Imad Mustafa that was founded in 2011.

This article reconceptualizes the fragmentary status of the archive of migration by focusing on Turkish German literary magazines Ezgi, Parantez, Şiir-lik and Allıturna. In the first part, I argue that literary magazines as intrinsically diasporic, mobile and spatially dispersed media provide us with a model that unsettles our understanding of archival engagement as well as Foucault’s theory of the archive. The fragmented status of this literay archive calls for anecdotal readings which exemplify the element of chance and randomness that characterizes archival research in general and calls into question the medial and institutional conditions of our access to the archival fragments. In the second part, I contrast these mobile and fragmented archives to the national archive, which imagines itself to be an archive of plenitude and completeness. While the latter valorizes preservation of a uniform past , the former prioritizes radical accessibility and dispersion, resists the “house arrest” of archivization and demands to be always in motion at the risk of dissemination with no return.

The present Covid-19 pandemic has brought the contradictions of our global existence into sharp relief. While the spread of the virus across national and continental borders has raised the awareness of global entanglements, the resultant closure of national borders even within the European Schengen Area locked people down in place and brought transnational movement to a halt. With most academic conversations having moved online, the 29th Annual Berkeley Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference, held February 19-20, 2021, gathered a group of scholars from across the globe to address the state of our discipline in times of uncertainty and transformation. The breadth of approaches contained under the disciplinary heading “German Studies/Germanistik'' can be at times dizzying, but we believe this ultimately to be a strength of what we call German Studies. Ours, perhaps more than many others, has been a discipline seeking to redefine itself by deconstructing its originary conception – in the sense both of its initially nationalistic orientation as well as its theoretical foundations and antecedents.

Drawing on Genette’s theory of transtextuality, this paper investigates how intertextuality is used in Lion Feuchtwanger’s Exil (1940) and Abbas Khider’s Der falsche Inder (2008) to design the figure of the exiled writer, who is marked in a threefold manner: by his ability to channel his potencies and potential into artistic productivity; by his capability of achieving self-determination through his writing; and by his willingness to use language as a tool of hope and resistance against oppression and discrimination. The shared intertexts are Rilke’s early writings Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (1904) and Das Stunden-Buch (1905), Benn’s connected poems ‘Der späte Mensch’ (1922) and ‘Nur zwei Dinge’ (1953), as well as similar mythological texts, predominantly Homer’s Odyssey.Although Feuchtwanger’s and Khider’s novels are usually classified as examples of two different genres—‘exile literature’ in the case of Exil and ‘migrant literature’ in the case of Der falsche Inder—the shared intertextuality of these ‘touching tales’ (Adelson 2000) offers the possibility of overcoming the division between two allegedly different literary genres and foregrounds the transhistorical and transcultural dimension inherent to any writing on the topic of exile.

Dieser Beitrag setzt sich mit der Behandlung des deutschen Kolonialerbes in der Jugendkolonialliteratur der DDR und der BRD auseinander. Da die untersuchten Werke – genauso wie die Mehrheit der bis zur deutschen Teilung veröffentlichten Jugendkolonialbücher – an historische Ereignisse und Staatsideologien anknüpfen, wird im ersten Teil des Beitrags der gesamtdeutsche kulturgeschichtliche Kontext und der gesellschaftliche Status des Schwarzseins dargestellt. Das Hauptaugenmerk des zweiten Teils liegt auf der staatsideologischen Prägung dieser Werke. Dabei wird der Fokus vor allem darauf gelegt, wie diese Prägung sowohl bei der Darstellung der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte als auch bei Race- und Genderkonstruktionen verschiedener Figuren festzustellen ist. Auf den ersten Blick zeichnen sich die westdeutschen Jugendkolonialwerke durch kolonialrevisionistische Aspekte und thematische Vielfalt aus, während bei der ostdeutschen Jugendkolonialliteratur eine kolonialkritische Haltung und die Behandlung des zurzeit wieder vielbesprochenen deutschen Völkermords an den OvaHerero und Nama dominant sind. Danach werden deren Gemeinsamkeiten thematisiert, die auf die gemeinsame Geschichte und ein gesamtdeutsches Kulturerbe zurückzuführen sind. Dabei wird auf den dargestellten Kolonialrassismus und auf das Potenzial der Jugendliteratur bei der Dekolonisierung der Germanistik hingewiesen.