Overcoming Static Inertia: Ilija Trojanow’s “Nach der Flucht”
Elise Volkmann, Ph.D. candidate of German Studies at Berkeley, reflects on our event with novelist Ilija Trojanow and his book Nach der Flucht (2017), examining how a person who has fled can turn the loss of language and the struggle with a new language into a source of multi-directional creativity. The event series “Archives of […]
CFP (edited volume): Charting Asian German Film History: Imagination, Collaboration, and Diasporic Representation (ed. Qinna Shen, Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick, Qingyang Freya Zhou)
Since the beginning of 2020, anti-Asian violence saw a sharp increase in Europe and North America, as frustrations about the COVID-19 pandemic were taken out on those marked as Asian or “asiatisch gelesen.” In response to the March 2021 shootings in Atlanta, the Berlin-based network for Asian German perspectives korientation posted the open letter “Atlanta – […]
A Tale of Three Cities: Part III – How to Politicize Public Health
In an exclusive three-part series for our blog, UC Berkeley undergraduate and MGP contributor Jezell Lee reflects on a personal experience of misinformation and polarization during the coronavirus pandemic, caught between the gravitational pull of Los Angeles, Berlin, and Taipei and heavily mediated through social media and the particularity of each locale. In the concluding […]
A Tale of Three Cities: Part II – Polarization and Conspiracy on Social Media
In a new three-part series for our blog, UC Berkeley undergraduate and MGP contributor Jezell Lee reflects on a personal experience of the pandemic and political polarization, caught between the gravitational pull of the United States, Germany, and Taiwan and heavily mediated through social media and the particularity of each locale. In the second installment, […]
A Tale of Three Cities: Part I – Instagram as Pandemic Archive
In a new three-part series for our blog, UC Berkeley undergraduate and MGP contributor Jezell Lee reflects on a personal experience of quarantine caught between the gravitational pull of the United States, Germany, and Taiwan, heavily mediated through social media and the particularity of each locale. In the first installment, Jezell thinks through the role […]
Reflections on Archival Resistance: Conversations with Sharon Dodua Otoo, Zafer Şenocak and Yoko Tawada
In spring 2021, we hosted a series of conversations with contemporary writers titled “Archives of Migration: The Power of Fiction in Times of Fake News.” Organized jointly by Professors Deniz Göktürk and Elisabeth Krimmer (UC Davis), this series was supported by the German Consulate General San Francisco, and co-sponsored by the German Historical Institute Pacific […]
Border Talk in Dresden: Imagining Cohesion through Difference with Zafer Şenocak
In this thoughtful commentary, UC Berkeley Class of 2021 alumna and MGP contributor Ardo Ali, who participated in our workshop with Turkish-German author Zafer Şenocak, grapples with the troubled legacy of German reunification as reflected in the rise of so-called right-wing populism in Germany, which has been disproportionately steep in the formerly socialist East. Ali […]
New Visions of Belonging in German Studies
The latest installment in our Mission Possible series of reflections on the future of German Studies comes courtesy of the MGP’s own Elizabeth Sun, who situates Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Ingeborg Bachmann Prize-winning short story “Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin” in the context of recent trends in German literature and film as well as tendencies in […]
Traveling in Pandemic Times: Yoko Tawada and Poetic Border-Crossing
Yoko Tawada’s guest appearance in the third installation of “Archives of Migration” sparked a lively and contemporarily relevant conversation on the potential of poetic border-crossing in pandemic times, where physical mobility has been intensely challenged by closed-off national borders and the anxiety over cross-person contamination. A native of Japan, Tawada writes and publishes prolifically in […]
Pandemic Palimpsest: Yoko Tawada’s “Paul Celan und der chinesische Engel”
MGP editor Qingyang Zhou and Jezell Lee, both participants in our series of Zoom workshops with authors, reflect on our event with poet, playwright, and novelist Yoko Tawada, examining the transnational homage and fragmentary intertextuality of her latest novel, 2020’s Paul Celan und der chinesische Engel. In the third installment of the Zoom conversation series […]