Volume 8.2: Foreword
Dear Readers, We are pleased to announce the publication of the second installment of texts in our 2012–13 volume, including a series of articles on “Participatory Media and Public Memory.” The impetus for this volume was our conviction that changing mediascapes and forms of communication are increasingly challenging traditional conceptions of the archive and the […]
“A Wall Victim from the West”: Migration, German Division, and Multidirectional Memory in Kreuzberg
Jeffrey Jurgens Download PDF Abstract: Focusing on the 1975 drowning death of Çetin Mert, the five-year-old son of a Turkish guest worker family, this essay explores the varied ways that non-German migrants and other minority groups have figured in public memories of the Berlin Wall. On the one hand, Mert’s shadowy presence in local and […]
Re-Imagining the Past in Transnational Online Communities
Kaarina Nikunen Download PDF Abstract: This essay examines transnational online communities as sites of identity, belonging and memory. It looks at the ways in which memories are circulated, shared and created within these virtual spaces. It explores, with the guidance of previous research on diasporic online sites, the ways in which notions of nostalgia, ordinariness […]
Countermemory and the (Turkish-)German Theatrical Archive: Reading the Documentary Remains of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Karagöz in Alamania (1986)
Lizzie Stewart Download PDF Editor’s Note: Due to copyright restrictions, images for this article are only available in the secure PDF. Abstract: Theatre history stands in a curious relation to the archive: created from physical, archival documents it then itself helps constitute or contest the ‘cultural archive’ which the ‘imagined community’ of a particular area, […]
Lost:
Black Briefcase Enis Batur Translated by Oya Erez Download PDF Acknowledgements: Translation of Enis Batur, “Siyah Bir Çanta Aranıyor (1982),” Babil Yazıları (Istanbul: AFA Yayınları, 1986), 79–81. A question that has long preoccupied the creative person: what degree of permanence is there in what I do? Will I, who am anyway impermanent, manage to be “a pleasant echo […]
Alwan’s Quest of Home: Re-Mapping Heimat and the Nation in Hussain Al-Mozany’s Der Marschländer: Bagdad–Beirut–Berlin
Yasemin Mohammad Download PDF Abstract: The German-Iraqi writer Hussain Al-Mozany’s novel Der Marschländer (1999) makes an important contribution to German transnational literature by its productive critical engagement with an ethno-cultural understanding of German nationhood. The novel is based on the travel experiences of the Iraqi male protagonist Alwan to Baghdad, Lebanon, East and West Germany in the […]
European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe, by Fatima El-Tayeb
Reviewed by Priscilla Layne Download PDF El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 253 pages. Paper, $25. The issue of race has stubbornly haunted postwar Europe, complicating Germany’s transition from fascist dictatorship to democratic nation, France’s legacy of brotherhood, and Holland and the UK’s alleged histories of […]
Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition, by Yasemin Yildiz
Reviewed by Christina Butler Download PDF Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. Cloth, $55.00. Yasemin Yildiz has provided a much-needed new look into the recent discourse on multilingualism and monolingualism. Rather than perpetuating a multilingual-monolingual dichotomy, Yildiz presents a new framework, in which co-existing multilingualisms and […]
Kiezdeutsch: Ein neuer Dialekt entsteht, by Heike Wiese
Reviewed by Lindsay Preseau Download PDF Heike Wiese, Kiezdeutsch: Ein neuer Dialekt entsteht. München: Beck, 2012. Pp. 280. Paper, 12,95 €. Linguist Heike Wiese has been researching the German urban youth dialect called Kiezdeutsch (literally translated as ‘neighborhood German,’ and reminiscent of English terms such as ‘hood talk’) with her colleagues at University of Potsdam […]