Foreword by the Managing Editor
DEAR READERS,
With this foreword, I present to you the first issue of the fourteenth volume of TRANSIT on Borderlands. As a Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism in the German-speaking World, a volume on the theme of borderlands speaks to one of TRANSIT’s most enduring themes. Indeed, over the past few years, members of TRANSIT’s editorial board at the University of California, Berkeley have actively engaged in conversations on borders, nations, and mobility, through conferences on Borders and Crossings, New Perspectives on Turkish German Cinema, and Arrested Mobilities; the contemporary writer series on the Archives of Migration; and recent issues on Traveling Forms, Archival Engagement, and Heimat, which was recently republished by Literarische Diverse Verlag in print format. With this newest issue—which includes feature articles, a special cluster on German-Polish Borderlands in Contemporary Literature & Culture, book reviews, creative pieces, and translations—we bring geographically situated scholarship to our discussions of border-making practices. How might literary and artistic practices shed light on the complexity of local identities and the entangled histories of bordering nations? What kinds of ironies and contradictions persist within our current ordering of the world? This volume offers sustained reflections and critical inquiries into these questions.
The first article of this issue assesses these very ironies and contradictions of inhabitation, where the extremes of mobility and immobility occur in the same spaces. In “Displacement vs. Mobility; or, Who Owns the World?” Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky closely considers the space of Berlin’s Tempelhof Field and questions the possibility of collective ownership over “the world,” as well as the violence undergirding the concept of “infrastructure.” Through a close examination of Karim Aïnouz’s documentary Central Airport THF (2017), Deuber-Mankowsky highlights the aesthetic techniques that are used to expose the ironies, contradictions, and incongruences between Kant’s notion of an “original community of the land,” which is based on a shared possession of the earth, and the refugee housing situation at the former Tempelhof Airport.
In his study of “The Southern German Borderlands,” H. Glenn Penny traces a history that underscores the linguistic flexibility, mobilities, and polycentrism thriving in the area that connects contemporary Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Drawing on the curations of five museums in the region, Penny reengages established notions of belonging and adds to ongoing scholarship of imagined communities and cultural and linguistic interactions that are closely felt by local communities, rather than demarcated from the outside. This essay can be seen as a continuation of Penny’s latest book, German History Unbound, which retells a history of Germany that de-centers boundaries of the nation-state and emphasizes the plurality and interconnectedness of Germans with the rest of the world.
We are especially excited to include a section on German-Polish Borderlands in Contemporary Literature and Culture and invite you to read Karolina May-Chu and Paula Wojcik’s insightful Introduction to this cluster of articles. In this foreword, I give a simpler overview. In “Remapping Breslaff: German and Gay Culture in Current Polish Literature,” Alicja Kowalska closely reads two novels, Marek Krajewski’s Death in Breslau (1999) and Michał Witkowski’s Lovetown (2004), to foreground the politically repressed histories of Poland’s German and queer topographies. In “Reimagining German-Polish Borderlands in Nowa Amerika and Słubfurt,” Karolina May-Chu examines two art activist projects that remap and reimagine the border between Poland and Germany, playfully subverting established cultural and political demarcations. Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova analyzes “The Reconciliatory Potential of Objects in Stefan Chwin’s novel Death in Danzig” to show how “post-German” objects model an affective reconciliation between Polish and German identities after experiences of forced displacement circa WWII. In “Train Journeys in Postmemorial Narratives on ‘Heimatverlust’ in Contemporary German Writing,” Sabine Egger unpacks the “multidirectional” “post memory” encoded by the motif of the railway journey in two contemporary novels, interlinking the traumatic displacement of ethnic Germans and Poles at the end of WWII with the experience of Holocaust victims. Finally, in “Contested Memory and Narrative within GDR-Polish Intercultural Landscapes,” Jean. E. Conacher considers Poland as an alternative space upon which GDR scholarship can base its inquiries.
As part of the special section on German Polish Borderlands, we have the privilege of presenting new and republished works by Inga Iwasiów, Dagmara Kraus, and Karolina Kuszyk, three authors who creatively address themes of migration, memory, and identity in their poetry and novels. We begin with a reprint of Kraus’ poem “liedvoll, deutschyzno moja,” annotated by Karolina May-Chu and Paula Wojcik, followed by Kraus’ auto fictional essay “Goethetak! Selbstporträt mit Wörtern” written especially for the German Polish section of this issue. Karolina Hicke and Karolina May-Chu present their translation of the first two chapters of Iwasiow’s first novel, Bambino, in conjunction with Karolina May-Chu’s “Introduction to the Translation.” Finally, we are grateful for the opportunity to republish chapters of Karolina Kuzyk’s book, Poniemieckie (Engl. “post-German,” published in German as In den Häusern der anderen in 2022). For the complete introduction to these works, please refer to Karolina May-Chu and Paula Wojcik’s “Introduction to German-Polish Borderlands in Contemporary Literature.”
This volume marks new territory for TRANSIT, as we work to include the work of more queer authors in translation. We are excited to include a translation of Irina Nekrasov/a’s essay, “What Gender is Your Hair Color,” by Nat Modlin. In their introduction to the translation, Modlin reflects closely on the gendered nature of the German-language and the enduring incompatibilities and destabilizations at work between language and identity. Be Schierenberg writes a reflection on their experience of translating Yael Inokai’s recent book, Ein Simpler Eingriff [A simple procedure], recently longlisted for the German Book Prize. As Germany’s far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) continues to perceive queerness and the deconstruction of the gender binary as a central threat to German identity, alongside immigrants and refugees, it is ever the more important to keep in mind the intersectional experiences of those who are multiply minoritized.
This volume concludes with two book reviews. Christiane Steckenbiller (Colorado College) reviews Tales that Touch, edited by Yasemin Yildiz and Bettina Brandt, an impressive and exciting essay anthology that builds on the work of Leslie Adelson and explores 20th and 21st century texts dealing with multilingualism, transculturality, migration, and memory practices. H. Glenn Penny (UCLA) reviews Bettina Stoetzer’s new book on Ruderal Ecologies: Rethinking Nature, Migration, and the Urban Landscape in Berlin an important ethnographic undertaking that explores the interrelationships between migration and the environment. Examining the unruly and wild spaces of parks and forests, Stoetzer tells new stories of Berlin’s migrant communities.
This year, we are especially excited to announce the website merge of TRANSIT Journal, and TRANSIT Blog, formerly known as Multicultural Germany Project (MGP). Founded in 2001 by the German Department at UC Berkeley, MGP served as a research collaborative and continuously updated archive of migration, supported by the tireless energy and willpower of our very own Deniz Göktürk and UC Berkeley’s graduate students. We invite you to browse through TRANSIT Blog’s posts, which include ongoing reflections and analyses of critical works in the fields of migration studies. We hope that TRANSIT Blog continues to serve as a resource and forum for both aspiring and continuing professionals in German Studies and its adjacent fields; we welcome contributions of short thought-pieces of ca. 1000 words year-round. We at TRANSIT would like to extend our utmost thanks and appreciation to our new Web & Creative Designer, Kayla van Kooten for her unwavering dedication to facilitating this merger.
Finally, I would like to take this moment to thank TRANSIT’s numerous contributors, editors, and authors, and my co-managing editor Sean Lambert who helped this issue to come into fruition. My gratitude also goes to Kristin Kopp (U Missouri) and Xan Holt (Northwestern) for their support and insights this year on the Special Cluster on German-Polish Borderlands. Finally, this issue was made possible through the generous support of the UC Berkeley Department of German and the guidance of Deniz Göktürk. We continue to accept submissions for our current volume on Borderlands, and look forward to continuing our mission of publishing peer-reviewed, open-source digital research and translations.
Warmly,
Elizabeth Sun
Managing Editor