TRANSIT BLOG

TRANSIT Blog was formerly part of the Multicultural Germany Project (MGP), which we are now merging with Transit Journal. 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. Our blog includes reactions to current events and news, research materials, and teaching resources. Maintained mainly by students at Berkeley, the blog provides a window into our activities and campus discussions. 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. 1000-1500 words year-round. If you would like to contribute your own blog post or other materials (in English or German), please contact us at transitjournal@berkeley.edu.

  • Sounding the Archive: Sonic Strategies in Panorama Ephemera (2004) and The Natural History of Destruction (2022)

    Students taking the course Global Media (Film 145) in Spring 2025, taught by Deniz Göktürk and Kayla Rose van Kooten, learned about everyday practices of documentary film production in works from around the world. A key question arising in discussions of documentary cinema is the relationship of the audiovisual medium to real events. In the following blog post, Yansu Tan…

  • A Satirical Promotion: Sergei Loznitsa Goes to the Opera

    In January/February 2025, the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive welcomed renowned Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa for a ten-day residency. Loznitsa’s Mosse Lecture on February 5, 2025, was the opening event of this spring’s Documentary Voices series, co-curated by Kate MacKay and Professor Deniz Göktürk. Raiden Shields, a student in Professor Göktürk’s UC Berkeley course…

  • Authenticity Sucks! A Biased Manifesto from Future Documentarists

      Image generated by Open AI DALL-E2 Students taking the course on Documentary Forms (Film 125 / German 184) in Fall 2022, taught by Deniz Göktürk and Qingyang Freya Zhou, discovered possibilities of engagement with the world through documentary cinema, old and new. The class conversations culminated in a manifesto in which future documentarists contest all obsessions…

  • Work in Single Takes, Vol. 2

    Students taking the course on Documentary Forms (Film 125 / German 184) in Fall 2022, taught by Deniz Göktürk and Qingyang Freya Zhou, learned about everyday practices of documentary production: filmmakers observing, participating, and reflecting, as they record how human and non-human actors work, live, and play. To gain hands-on experience, the young documentarists made two-minute single…

  • “Auf den Trümmern das Paradies”? Ilija Trojanow’s Utopian Prerogative

    wie eine meuterei bricht das glück, wie ein löwe aus. ——Hans Magnus Enzensberger: utopia In this blog post, Berkeley Ph.D. student Anna Lynn Dolman reflects on Ilija Trojanow’s Mosse Lecture on “The Utopian Prerogative,” specifically how literature can sketch a topography of the future and indeed affect the world we live in – not by…

  • “Nation of Assimilation”

    What does it mean to make an investigative documentary on one’s family history? How could the filmmaker and her interviewees represent the joyful and eventful, as well as the painful and awkward episodes of their most intimate past? In this blog post, Berkeley Senior and L.A. native Veronica Jacques reflects on the process of making…

  • Behind the Apron: An Investigatory Dive into the Lives of Overlooked “Essential Workers”

    Scan products. Put items in bags. Collect payments. The repetitive and monotonous movements of supermarket cashiers often went unnoticed by the average customer — until the pandemic introduced the practice of self-checkout, which reminds us of the indispensable labor of these once “invisible” essential workers, who, it turns out, also live colorful lives outside of…

  • Work in Single Takes

    Picture source: Harun Farocki GbR Students taking the course on Documentary Forms (Film 125 / German 184) in spring 2022, taught by Deniz Göktürk and Alina Predescu, discovered possibilities of engagement with the world through documentary cinema old and new. Weekly screenings in the film series Documentary Voices, co-curated in collaboration with Kathy Geritz at…

  • Polyphone Auseinandersetzungen mit kulturellen Bildern, Vorurteilen und Rassismus im Hörspiel “Bitmemiş – not finished yet” (2019) von Ralf Haarmann und Tuğsal Moğul

    Picture Source: Westdeutscher Rundfunk Guest contributor Monika Preuß (Technische Universität Dortmund), author of the MGP blog post series on German radio plays, analyzes the portrayal of lived experiences of Turkish German immigrants across generations in Ralf Haarmann’s recent radio play, Bitmemiş – not finished yet (2019). Das Hörspiel Bitmemiş – not finished yet des Komponisten…

  • Writing as an (Im)migrant: Calls to Action in Fatma Aydemir’s “Work”

    In the latest blog post inspired by Berkeley’s “Archives of Migration” conversation series and Prof. Deniz Göktürk’s German and American Studies seminar on “Cultures of Migration,” Kavina Peters (Berkeley Freshman, Environmental Economics and Policy major) analyzes Fatma Aydemir’s short essay from that volume, focusing on how Aydemir challenges her readers to reflect on their own…