Multicultural Germany Course: Week 4 Summary (Sept. 21 & 23)
Who defines identity? Germany’s struggle with inclusivity. This last week in class, we discussed the limits of Germany’s capacity to take in immigrants and what it means to be German. Proponents of reducing the number of foreigners in Germany believe that the “boat” of Germany’s capacity for incorporation of foreigners is “full.” To these native-born […]
The End of Migration As We Knew It
On October 4, 2015, a panel on “Ethnography and the Study of Diversity in Germany” held in Washington, D.C., questioned paradigms of research on transnational migration and diversity, focusing on the impossibility of containing these categories within nation-based frameworks of analysis. As part of a series of five panels on “Ethnography and German Studies,” organized […]
True Stories of Being Black in Germany, Lakshmi Sarah
Lakshmi Sarah, one of the participants in the course Multicultural Germany, produced an article published in KQED entitled “True Stories of Being Black in Germany” in which she introduces a traveling exhibit from the Goethe Institut and its curator Victoria Toney-Robinson. Please click on this link to read the article in full: “True Stories of […]
Multicultural Germany Course: Summary of the First Two Weeks
To summarize the first two weeks of the seminar “Multicultural Germany” (fall 2015) it is best to start off with the participants: One third of the class is exchange students, mostly from Germany. Due to this the class can benefit from the insights and background information these students bring to the table. Another bonus is […]
Multicultural Germany Course, Fall Semester 2015
This course addresses questions of mobility and borders in our increasingly connected and disjointed world. We will approach the history of post-World War II Germany through the lens of migration, reading a variety of texts critically and relating them to broader questions of economic and cultural globalization: the long term consequences of “guest worker” recruitment; […]
A Path through the Woods: Remediating Affective Landscapes in Documentary Asylum Worlds
Bettina Stoetzer Download PDF Abstract In his book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues that an engagement with the legacies of German nationalism requires a track through the woods: throughout German history, forests have played a key role as origin myth to found a national identity (Schama 1995). In today’s forests, these entanglements between the […]
“On the Train”
by Emine Sevgi Özdamar Translated by Leslie A. Adelson Download PDF Translator’s Introduction Emine Sevgi Özdamar, born in 1946 and raised as what the author herself calls a ‘child of Istanbul’, first attracted widespread attention from German literary critics in 1991 when she was awarded the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for Literature for her first German […]
Multicultural Germany Class Final Paper: Staged Realities
At the end of the past semester, students in the Multicultural Germany class at UC Berkeley wrote final papers on topics of their choosing. To conclude our series of posts from this class, we are delighted to share several of their papers here. This paper is by Treasure Nguyen, who wrote about Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film, Angst […]
Film Rezension: “Gegen die Wand”
As part of their work in the Multicultural Germany undergraduate seminar at UC Berkeley, students in the course have reviewed recent German films relating in various ways to topics of migration, multiculturalism, and contemporary German identity. Julia Schroeder reviewed Fatih Akin’s 2004 film “Gegen die Wand” (Head-On): Der Film “Gegen die Wand” von Fatih Akin ist eine […]
“Gegen die Wand” Rezension von Julia Schroeder
Der Film “Gegen die Wand” von Fatih Akin ist eine dramatische und brutale Tragikomödie und gleichzeitig eine zärtliche Liebesgeschichte über zwei verzweifelte, leidenschaftliche Menschen, die sich nach ihrem Selbstmordversuch, (er fährt gegen die Wand und sie schneidet sich die Pulsadern auf) in der Psychiatrie einer Klinik in Hamburg begegnen. Doch das ist erst der Anfang […]