Recent transit items

“wer ihn zu verwenden weiß”. Pädagogik und Ästhetik der Isolation in Rudolf Arnheims Rundfunk als Hörkunst

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In seiner Monographie Rundfunk als Hörkunst (1936/1979) attestiert Rudolf Arnheim dem Rundfunk ein miteinander zusammenhängendes ästhetisches und pädagogisches Potential: Zwar stimmt es, wie die Forschung verschiedentlich unterstrichen hat, dass er damit parallel zu Bertolt Brecht die erzieherische Möglichkeit des Rundfunks betont, die Zuhörer:innen zu aktivieren und zur Selbsttätigkeit anzuregen. Allerdings blieb bislang unbeachtet, dass es Arnheim dabei in entscheidender Differenz zu Brecht nicht darum geht, Hörer:innen in Beziehung zueinander zu setzen. Stattdessen verfolgt Arnheim, so die These des vorliegenden Beitrags, im Gegenteil ein pädagogisch-ästhetisches Programm der Isolation. Darüber hinaus fallen bei Brecht Aktivierung und Aktion bereits in der Rezeption des Hörspiels zusammen, wie dies am Beispiel seines Stückes Der Lindberghflug darzulegen sein wird, während bei Arnheim jede Form der Aktion der Zuhörer:innen erst nach der Rezeption des Rundfunkbeitrags...

“The Book of the Future” and “Enrichment”

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translation of Rafik Schami's "The Book of the Future" and "Enrichment"

Book Review: Kate Zambon, Interrogating Integration

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Moving beyond familiar critiques of multiculturalism, Zambon shows how model minority figures—particularly racialized athletes, entertainment professionals, and public personalities—are instrumentalized to affirm a Judeo-Christian-coded version of a German Leitkultur, while displacing structural questions of race, belonging, and power. Integration here emerges as the central object of critique, a biopolitical regime of disciplinary sites that demand affective loyalty, individual productivity, and public visibility without extending full national recognition.

Translator’s Introduction to “The Inheritance”

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translator's Introduction to "The Inheritance" by Safae el Khannoussi

Foreword to 15.1: "Words and Lives in Transit"

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Foreword by Co-Managing Editor, Ambika S. Athreya

Baggage

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translation of Deniz Utlu, "Gepäck," in Das neue Deutschland. Von Migration und Vielfalt , ed. Özkan Ezli and Gisela Staupe (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2014).

Alexander von Humboldt’s Examen critique de l’histoire de la géographie du Nouveau Continent et des progrès de l’astronomie nautique aux quinzième et seizième siècles (1836-1839)

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translator's introduction to Alexander von Humboldt’s Examen critique de l’histoire de la géographie du Nouveau Continent et des progrès de l’astronomie nautique aux quinzième et seizième siècles (1836-1839)

Translating Surfaces: A Dual Critique of Modernity in Sabahattin Ali’s Kürk Mantolu Madonna

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction to David Gramling and Ilker Hepkaner's translation of "The Madonna in the Fur Coat."

Guest Faces

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translation of Emine Sevgi Özdamar, "Gastgesichter," in Das neue Deutschland. Von Migration und Vielfalt , ed. Özkan Ezli and Gisela Staupe (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2014).

Asylum

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translation of Heribert Prantl, "Asyl," in Das neue Deutschland. Von Migration und Vielfalt , ed. Özkan Ezli and Gisela Staupe (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2014).

Anna Seghers und das Elfte Reich

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dieser Essay folgt der wenig bekannten Erzählung „Die Reise ins Elfte Reich“ von Anna Seghers, den sie Anfang 1939 während ihres Pariser Exils in drei Teilen in der Zeitschrift Die Neue Weltbühne veröffentlichte. Darin übersetzt sie historische Tragödie von Flucht und der Angewiesenheit von Migrierenden auf Pässe und Visa in eine satirische Geschichte: die Einreise einer Gruppe von Emigrant*innen in ein utopisches weil passloses Land, das Elfte Reich. Die Erzählung entfaltet eine Mischung aus historischer Positionierung, politischer Kritik und phantastischer Erzählung, die einerseits dem Roman Transit gleichsam als Groteske historisch vorausgeht, andererseits in vielen Dimensionen in der von Migrationsbewegungen bestimmten Gegenwart widerhallt. Das Essay geht dem wohl unvollendet gebliebenen Text „Die Reise ins Elfte Reich“ selbst und seiner Geschichte nach, jedoch auch Konstellationen seiner Aktualisierung.

German in Transit

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Based on the author’s personal experience with physical migration across national boundaries, this paper explores the concept of migration as a metaphor for the crossing of other boundaries in the learning and using of German and other languages: linguistic, cultural, epistemic, disciplinary, literary, and communicative. Key concepts in this migration are: translanguaging, transknowledging, symbolic competence, and literariness. Developing a migrant mindset involves reinstating historicity and subjectivity to the foreign language educational enterprise.

Transit

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translation of Deniz Göktürk, "Transit," in Das neue Deutschland. Von Migration und Vielfalt , ed. Özkan Ezli and Gisela Staupe (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2014).

Diversity as Social Utopia

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translation of Özkan Ezli and Gisela Staupe, "Vielfalt als Soziale Utopie," in Das neue Deutschland. Von Migration und Vielfalt , ed. Özkan Ezli and Gisela Staupe (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2014).

Critical Examination of the History of the Geography of the New Continent and of the Progess of Nautical Astronomy in the 15th and 16th Centuries

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translation of excerpt from Alexander von Humboldt's Examen critique

“The Inheritance”

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translation of "The Inheritance" by Safae el Khannoussi

Translator’s Introduction to Rafik Schami’s “The Book of the Future” and “Enrichment”

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A brief introduction to the English translation of Rafik Schami's "The Book of the Future" and "Enrichment"

The Future of Migration

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translation of Jochen Oltmer, "Zukunft der Migration," in Das neue Deutschland. Von Migration und Vielfalt , ed. Özkan Ezli and Gisela Staupe (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2014).

Translator's Introduction to "Journey to the Eleventh Reich"

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translator's Introduction to "Journey to the Eleventh Reich"

Journey to the Eleventh Reich

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translation of Anna Seghers' "Reise ins Elfte Reich" by Ambika S. Athreya

The Madonna in the Fur Coat

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

With the consent of the original rights-holders Onk Ajans Instanbul and the author’s daughter Filiz Ali; translation rights for the novel in its entirety remain with Onk Ajans Istanbul.

Mobility

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translation of Gisela Welz, "Mobilität," in Das neue Deutschland. Von Migration und Vielfalt , ed. Özkan Ezli and Gisela Staupe (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2014).

DaZ—Deutsch als Zweitsprache and the Politics of Silence

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Language is never neutral. In Germany, placement in DaZ classes (Deutsch als Zweitsprache) signals who belongs in mainstream education and who is marked as an outsider. I was exempted from DaZ, a privilege that shaped my schooling yet came at the cost of my family languages remaining largely inaccessible. Drawing on personal experiences and my work on the oral history project Dersim 1937/38, this essay examines how translation mediates memory, trauma, and power. The movement of testimonies across Zazakî/Kurdish, Turkish and German reveals that linguistic practice is inseparable from histories of displacement, repression and survival. Language, whether in the classroom or the archive, is never innocent; It is a marker of inclusion and a field where power operates both in visible and subtle ways.

Nation

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translation of Wolfgang Kaschuba, "Nation," in Das neue Deutschland. Von Migration und Vielfalt , ed. Özkan Ezli and Gisela Staupe (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2014).

BOOK REVIEW: Nicholas A. Germana, The Orient of Europe

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Nicholas A. Germana, The Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of India and Competing Images of German National Identity. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. 272 pages. Paper, £39.99.

A Wanderer of the World—Lost and Rediscovered

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article presents the life of Iranian screenwriter and director Sohrab Shahid Saless (1944-1998) and his transnational film work, which was created as a result of multiple exiles, i.e., in Iran, the Federal Republic of Germany and the former Czechoslovakia. Saless is an important auteur filmmaker, who was part of and a driving force behind the Iranian New Wave in the first half of the 1970s. After his exile to West Berlin in 1974, he, who spoke Persian, German, English, French, and later Slovak, became part of the New German Cinema and was able to make a total of 13 feature films and documentaries between 1975 and 1991. Despite numerous national and international awards and his admission to the Academy of Arts in West Berlin, Saless retained his position as an outsider in the West German film and television landscape.

This article is based on the three-part monograph Die langen Ferien des Sohrab Shahid Saless. Annäherungen an ein Leben und Werk (The Long Vacation...

Der Körper als experimenteller Ort der Extreme in Terézia Moras Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Drawing on New Materialism this paper explores the materiality of bodies in Terézia Moras Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (2009) and the question of agency. As New Materialists emphasize, the construction of material bodies is related to the interaction between the material and discursive. This paper suggests that the body functions as an experimental space in the Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent where the extremes of reality and virtuality, acceleration and stagnation within modern capitalism, as well as between the inner and real world, come into play. Taking into account the new developments in the global market and technology, the novel shows how material and discursive interactions contribute to the social and communicative constraints faced by individuals in a neoliberal society.

Re-Enacting the Holocaust in Maryan’s Ecce Homo (1975)

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores Maryan S. Maryan’s experimental film Ecce Homo (1975), as both a site of Holocaust remembrance and a radical intervention into the aesthetics and ethics of witnessing. Positioned against the backdrop of canonical Holocaust representations—from early documentaries to Shoah—Maryan’s film emerges as a self-initiated, transnational memory work that anticipates key features of the memory film. Through re-enactment, fragmented narrative, and visual collage, Ecce Homo aligns with Stella Bruzzi’s concept of approximation, presenting history not as fixed truth but as open to rupture and reinvestigation. At the same time, the film functions as an activist document that extends its testimonial impulse beyond the Holocaust, forging links with global histories of violence and oppression. The article situates Maryan’s translingual voice and diasporic biography within broader debates about trauma, documentary form, and the politics of visibility.

The Fourth Memory

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

So-called “artificial intelligence” (AI) brings forth a new category of memory which recursively generates texts, speeches, images and sounds that can resemble “authentic” documents. In the automation of expression and representation using the massive data accumulated on the Web, the question of the arts, far from being anecdotal, has become consubstantial with the effects of current statistical models. What emerges is a new realism that destabilizes both past archives and future perspectives. The counterfactual nature of this alien realism unsettles the foundation upon which we previously established our relation to truth. The political consequences of this evolution have been successfully exploited by fascists forces. Progressive movements need a better understanding of counterfactual realism in order to stop losing battles.

Integration

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translation of Albrecht Koschorke, "Integration," in Das neue Deutschland. Von Migration und Vielfalt , ed. Özkan Ezli and Gisela Staupe (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2014).

At Home, Together: KUNSTASYL at the Museum of European Cultures

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The provocative exhibition daHEIM – Einsichten in flüchtige Leben (daHEIM – Glances into Fugitive Lives) ran from 2016 to 2017 at the Museum of European Cultures in Dahlem, Berlin.[1] Conceptualized and curated by the artist collective KUNSTASYL, the exhibition reframes discourses around representations of migration in Germany, particularly but not exclusively those in museums, and asks: what is the difference between being at home and being accommodated? This article follows this question to demonstrate how key tropes—arrival, foreignness, violence, tokenization—that were endemic to earlier exhibitions about migration in Germany become dislodged through more complex depictions of community, collectivity, and authorship in temporary exhibitions on migration in the mid-2000s to late 2010s. Specifically, by analyzing the exhibition daHEIM – Einsichten in flüchtige Leben, I argue KUNSTASYL centers a practice of translocal activism which retranslates and satirizes contemporary...

Multiculturalism (Multiculturality)

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translation of Claus Leggewie, "Multikulturalität," in Das neue Deutschland. Von Migration und Vielfalt , ed. Özkan Ezli and Gisela Staupe (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2014).

The Cousin

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Kelsi Morefield's Translation of Nava Ebrahimi's Bachmann-winning short story "Der Cousin"

Litterae ex Machina: AI Going Down the Rabbit Hole

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Translator's Introduction to " I was received by the city as I stepped into the world again" by Bajohr

"I was received by the city as I stepped into the world again"

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

"I was received by the city as I stepped into the world again" by Hannes Bajohr, translated by Kayla Rose van Kooten

Critical Reflection On The English Translation of Nava Ebrahimi’s The Cousi

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Critical Reflection On The English Translation of Nava Ebrahimi’s The Cousin

“A Second Attack”

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Translated excerpt from Çetin Gültekin and Mutlu Koçak's bestselling book Geboren, aufgewachsen, und ermodert in Deutschland (2024)

“With whose blood were my eyes crafted?” Critical Concepts of Seeing, Knowing, and Remembering in Philip Scheffner’s and Merle Kröger’s Havarie (2016)

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Philip Scheffner’s Havarie activates our mnemonic faculty and thus prompts us to put different temporal planes in relation to each other, so as to compare different histories of migration which, despite their specifics, share colonialism and neo-colonialism as framing conditions, and flight and genocide as consequences of those conditions. The site of this activation of viewers’ mnemonic faculty is a particular segment of Havarie that, while frequently noted, has yet to attract sustained analysis—the mid-film pan, during which the camera temporarily relinquishes its gaze onto the migrants and turns towards the cruise ship from where the filming proceeds.

The present essay centrally concerns itself with a discussion of this pan and how it subverts the Eurocentric looking relations in which the film partakes. My methodological approach is informed by two of postcolonial theory’s ongoing anti-Eurocentric projects. The first is to break down politically fraught categories...

Translator’s Preface to “A Second Attack“

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Elizabeth Sun's Translator’s Preface to “A Second Attack“ by Çetin Gültekin and Mutlu Koçak

“Liebe zum Wort ist immer Unbescheidenheit” Translating Irmgard Keun’s Exile Poetry Songs of the Refugees

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Translating Irmgard Keun’s Exile Poetry Songs of the Refugees

Cohesion Without Coherence: Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Form

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Commentary on “I was received by the city as I stepped into the

world again”

Songs of the Refugees

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Songs of the Refugees /Lieder der Flüchtlinge by Irmgard Keun

Translated by Anna Lynn Dolman

Narratives and Counternarratives of German Borderscapes in Olivia Wenzel's 1000 Serpentinen Angst

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Through a close reading of Wenzel’s literary de but, I reflect on the multifaceted images the novel creates of contemporary Germany and its contribution to the current reassessment of the role of borders in socio-cultural spheres. Applying the concepts of borderity and borderscape, I reveal the significance of Wenzel’s vivid illustration of the function of borders in the public sphere. I also illustrate Hanna Meretoja’s study of “metanarrative autofiction,” interpreting Wenzel’s novel as an example of this literary subgenre, which sharpens and extends the reader’s awareness of the role of narrative in society.

Reimagining the German-Polish Borderlands in Nowa Amerika and Slubfurt1

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Nowa Amerika and Słubfurt are two related activist art projects that are set in the German-Polish borderland. Nowa Amerika is an imagined country, and Słubfurt its capital. This contribution introduces these projects and examines their underlying cosmopolitan principles and their strategies of reality construction and performance. The analysis highlights how Nowa Amerika intervenes in the borderland’s spatial and temporal reality and creates new narratives that challenge established political, cultural, and social boundaries. On the one hand, the projects engage critically with existing borders and produce a cosmopolitan vision for the borderland by playfully subverting the borders of the nation state: They remap the borderland as a shared space, for example, through the creation of new cartographies or by bringing people together to form cross-border networks within the local community. On the other hand, their decided focus on the present and future means that historical context...

Yael Inokai's Ein Simpler Begriff: Reflections on a Translation

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Reflections on translating Yael Inokai's Ein Simpler Begriff

Introduction: German-Polish Borderlands in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is the introduction to TRANSIT 14.1's special section on the representation of borders and borderlands in the literary and cultural landscapes of Germany and Poland. We have brought together scholarship, excerpts from an essayistic historical study, a creative essay, a poem, and two translated chapters from a Polish novel that explore past and present German and Polish borderlands through the lensof their entangled history. Focusing on works from different time periods, ranging from the end of the Second World War until today, the contributions examine past and present German-Polish borderlands from diverse angles, situating them historically while also underlining their significance within a global future.

Introduction to the Translation

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Translator's Introduction to Inga Iwasiów's Bambino

Goethetak!

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Goethetak!

(Mäandras Nachlied

oder

post-Maulfall

vom Stürzchen aufs Frätzchen

und das Kennerfleisch der Literatur

so kopflos)

Inga Iwasiów: Bambino (2008)

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Translation excerpts of Inga Iwasiów's Bambino (2008)

Remembering and Remapping Breslaff: Resurfacing German and Queer Topographies in Contemporary Polish Literature

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This article focuses on the role of contemporary Polish literature in bringing back that which has been repressed under communism: the Germanness of the so-called “regained territories”, i.e. territories that became Polish due to the changes of national borders after the Second World War, as well as the marginalized queer life. I discuss two novels that feature the city of Wrocław, formerly German Breslau: Marek Krajewski’s Death in Breslau (1999) and Michał Witkowski’s Lovetown (2004). My analysis draws parallels between bringing back the German past of the city and remembering queer life during communism in fiction. Marek Krajewski situates the plot of his highly popular crime novel in Breslau in the 1930s. By doing so, he fictionally recreates the former German city which allows the reader to rediscover its past and foreign layer. Michał Witkowski’s prose performs a similar task by describing parts of the city that were central to queer culture but hidden from the experience...

Train Journeys in Postmemorial Narratives of Heimatverlust: Reinhard Jirgl’s Die Unvollendeten and Sabrina Janesch’s Katzenberge

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the last two decades, flight and expulsion have emerged as critical topics in contemporary German literature and culture, with authors exploring narrative modes in literary texts that open transnational perspectives. Reinhard Jirgl’s Die Unvollendeten (2003) and Sabrina Janesch’s Katzenberge (2010) are examples of such texts, dealing with traumatic experiences of displacement in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Second World War, while challenging exclusionary narratives. Both novels employ the railway journey, including places and objects associated with it such as the platform and the station, tracks and railcars, as a central motif. In the following, I will show the degree to which this motif allows for “multidirectional” (Rothberg) modes of “postmemory” (Hirsch) that transcend national borders and memory discourses. The railway provides a link between generations in both of the texts discussed. However, it also interlinks the traumatic displacement of ethnic Germans and...

Displacement vs. Mobility; or, Who Owns the World: An Aesthetic Inquiry into Infrastructure, Common Possession, and Violence in Karim Aïnouz’s Documentary Film Central Airport THF (2017)

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“Central Airport THF” is a documentary film about the temporary housing of refugees in the halls of the former Tempelhof Airport, located at the edge of Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld. As if by accident, the director contrasts the arrested life in the adapted shelter to the mobility of life in the politically contested Tempelhof Park adjacent to it. Beginning with the specific locality of Central Airport Tempelhof, its architecture, history, and current use as refugee housing, the film employs aesthetic means to render an affectively knowable violence that extends to the very ground of what we call ‘infrastructure.’ The analysis of these aesthetic moments leads to questions that are only rarely addressed in the context of displacement and asylum, but are no less central to the relationship between displacement and mobility: What is common possession? Who owns the world? Does the world fall—can it even fall—under the categories of property or ownership?

In den Häusern der anderen: Spüren deutscher Vergangenheit in Westpolen

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Erschienen beim Ch. Links Verlag, 2022

Lessons from the Southern German Borderlands

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This essay engages the borderlands region joining contemporary Austria, Germany, and Switzerland as a ‘central periphery’ in the heart of Europe. As a region in which multiple and varied notions of belonging have long stretched across the borders that animate our modern political maps, the most important borders shaping the inhabitants’ sense of belonging were often in their heads. By drawing on five eclectic museums in the region, where these notions of belonging are being articulated and produced, this essay underscores some of the region’s key characteristics that historians of nation-states have frequently overlooked, but ethnologists generally have not. It argues that directly engaging those characteristics offers us productive ways of globalizing European and German histories that scholars regularly ignore when considering the implications of provincializing or decolonizing them. It also argues that this process has the potential to upend the historiography centered on European...

“What Gender is Your Hair Color”

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“What Gender is Your Hair Color” by Irina Nekrasov/a; Translated by Nat Modlin and with a Translator's Introduction

Contested Memory and Narrative within GDR-Polish Intercultural Landscapes: Ursula Höntsch’s Wir Flüchtlingskinder (1985) and Wir sind keine Kinder mehr (1990)

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This article demonstrates how literary studies can contribute to a deeper understanding of the cultural significance of borders, not least by exploring Mark Salter’s concept of the “performativity of the border, the ways that borders are given meaning through practices” in two interlinked works set within these cultural borderlands. In her semi-autobiographical novels Wir Flüchtlingskinder (1985) and Wir sind keine Kinder mehr (1990), the East German writer Ursula Höntsch, unknowingly writing in the final years of the country’s existence, challenges traditional GDR depictions of the German-Polish relationship and offers a dynamic exploration of personal, cultural and political “bordering and de-bordering” (Parker and Vaughan-Williams). Unusually for GDR literature, Höntsch presents Poland as an alternative political reality from which the GDR, still seeking to embody “socialism on German soil,” might learn. Taking as a starting-point the migrant experience of Höntsch’s protagonist...

Tales That Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First- Century German Literature and Culture eds. Bettina Brandt and Yasemin Yildiz

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Book Review: Tales That Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First- Century German Literature and Culture eds. Bettina Brandt and Yasemin Yildiz

The Reconciliatory Potential of Objects in Stefan Chwin’s novel Death in Danzig

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines the artistic rendering of post-German objects in Stefan Chwin’s 1995 novel Hanemann [Death in Danzig] through the lens of new materialism theories. In his depiction of the historical transformation of Danzig/Gdansk from a German to a Polish city Chwin applies two strategies: he centers portions of the narrative on objects and human-object entanglements and employs an imaginative child’s perspective which tends to view reality in animistic terms. In utilizing these narrative strategies, Chwin’s novel resonates with the works of the key representatives of the field of new materialism (e.g., Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo and Donna Haraway). More specifically, their similarity lies in the employment of anthropomorphism to open human perception to a whole world of unnoticed activities and processes of the nonhuman that resemble those of the human. In the concrete context of post-World War II forced migrations, the writer presents both the displaced Germans and Poles—as...

Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin by Bettina Stoetzer

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Book Review: Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin by Bettina Stoetzer

liedvoll, deutschyzno moja

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Poem by Dagmara Kraus with annotations by Paula Wojcik and Karolina May-Chu

Foreword: Archival Engagement

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

While the term “archive” conventionally evokes the storage of physical materials and documents, scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Ann Laura Stoler have called attention to the archive’s subjective qualities. Contrary to a definition that encompasses institutional collections and preservation, the “archive” may be better understood as a production of knowledge, meaning, and memory that exposes processes of transcultural negotiations, epistemic violence, and political engagement. Rethinking the archives of migration, then, involves asking questions that take us beyond “objectivity” or even materiality. TRANSIT 13.2 offers new frameworks for asking questions about archival practices: Who archives, and what merits archivization? How have such forms of archival engagement taken place in literary, artistic, digital, and geographical spaces? What are the stakes of archival misuse and misappropriation,...

DisOrientations by Kristin Dickinson

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Book Review for DisOrientations by Kristin Dickinson

The Digital Archive of Diaspora: Blogging (Post)Migration

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Transnational diaspora groups make intensive use of community media when communicating and connecting in cyberspace. In particular, I argue that blogs constitute a new kind of (post)migrant archive that compiles shared histories and experiences of diaspora. The principal role of the digital archive has become defined, not so much by storage, as by circulation and transfer, in what media theorist Wolfgang Ernst (2002) calls the paradigm shift in the reconceptualization of the archive in the digital age.

Indeed, circulation and transfer are also essential dimensions of the digital diaspora. Regarding the modes of interactions of diaspora communities on the web, I will analyse how (post)migrants’ online self-representation and their struggle to gain visibility shape new understandings of the digital archive of diaspora. My focus targets blogs as one of the most popular genres in cyberspace. The samples I analyse are written by (post)migrants and are often intended to decenter...

Memory Meetings: Semra Ertan’s Ausländer and the Practice of the Migrant Archive

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Turkish migration to Germany has long been debated as not having been sufficiently documented and given an adequate place in German national archives. But these debates have often reified a static and nationally organized logic of the archive. This essay instead traces the literary figure of the Ausländer as poetically claimed by the writer Semra Ertan and visually staged by media artist Cana Bilir-Meier in order to give an account of the unspeakable experience of racialization as ongoing foreignization in a Germany shaped by labor migration. Based on the discussion of Ertan’s select poems and the textual, visual, and audible material compiled by Bilir-Meier, this article demonstrates how the figure of the Ausländer animates “memory meetings.” Ertan’s words and personal experience are co-produced by Bilir-Meier’s interventions and given out to meet with contemporary intersectional anti-racist activists, who are enabled to make a claim about their own present in which the figure...

Asian Fusion by Caroline Rupprecht

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Book Review for Asian Fusion by Caroline Rupprecht

Fears

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

"Fears" by Lena Gorelik

English translation by Nathan Modlin

Paranoia als Migrationsdelirium und Vermittlungswahn um 1900: Zu den Aufzeichnungen von Anton Wenzel Grosz

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Anhand eines konkreten Beispiels verdeutlicht mein Aufsatz die Bedeutung und Notwendigkeit einer Archivarbeit, die historisch verdrängte und marginalisierte Artefakte und Dokumente ins Licht rückt: Gegenstand der Analyse sind die handschriftlichen Aufzeichnungen und Skizzen eines Paranoikers aus den Jahren 1913/14, die mehr oder weniger zufällig in einem Berliner Literaturarchiv gelandet sind. Ich argumentiere, dass die Aufzeichnungen von Anton Wenzel Grosz für eine Geschichte der Migration im deutschsprachigen Raum von größter Bedeutung sind, weil sie – auch und gerade in ihrer paranoischen Verzerrung – ein Schlaglicht auf nur wenig erforschte vermittlungstechnische Bedingungen transatlantischer Migration zwischen Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten um 1900 werfen. Dabei betone ich mit Deleuze und Guattari, und in Abgrenzung von psychoanalytischen Lesarten, die historische und politische Dimension des paranoischen Wahns und mache seine Welthaltigkeit zur Prämisse meiner Analyse....

Introduction: Reexamining Turkish German Archive(s)

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This cluster emerged from a GSA (German Studies Association) conference panel series that aimed to (re)examine the Turkish German archive by specifically taking into consideration developments since 2013. In line with this issue’s focus on “investigations into critical and artistic attempts to challenge conceptions of the archive as a static, objective site of knowledge,” contributions that follow engage with a variety of positions of archival engagement in the Turkish German context. The ensuing questions have guided our inquiry: How have recent (forced) migrations from Turkey impacted and transformed Germany’s cultural, institutional, political, and academic landscape? How do relocation, immigration, and exile figure thematically and conceptually? What kinds of exchanges with long-standing Turkish and Kurdish diasporic communities have occurred? Which collaborative efforts and interventions have emerged that promote “radical diversity” (Max Czollek) and highlight alliances across...

Escaping the Hamster Wheel: Creative Remembrance in Traveling Archives

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

How can one find meaning in the scattered fragments that remain from a life? For me, this question arose full force when I was asked to contribute a short piece of writing on my mother Angela Göktürk to a volume honoring her life and work, initiated and published in Turkey by her former colleagues at Trakya University in Edirne. Leafing through handwritten notebooks, loose pages, letters, photographs—some arranged in albums, many more jumbled in boxes of various sizes at multiple locations—I felt overwhelmed by the task of integrating these disparate pieces into a coherent text. The sense of fragmentation and dispersal painfully highlighted the limits of full comprehension, even with respect to a person whom I had known closely for my entire life. At the same time, going through old papers can also be a creative pursuit that holds a captivating thrill: reviving memories, illuminating connections, and enabling new discoveries. As long as words written on...

Archival Dispersals: Literary Magazines as Mobile and Fragmentary Archives

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This article reconceptualizes the fragmentary status of the archive of migration by focusing on Turkish German literary magazines Ezgi , Parantez, Şiir-lik and Allıturna . In the first part, I argue that literary magazines as intrinsically diasporic, mobile and spatially dispersed media provide us with a model that unsettles our understanding of archival engagement as well as Foucault’s theory of the archive. The fragmented status of this literay archive calls for anecdotal readings which exemplify the element of chance and randomness that characterizes archival research in general and calls into question the medial and institutional conditions of our access to the archival fragments. In the second part, I contrast these mobile and fragmented archives to the national archive, which imagines itself to be an archive of plenitude and completeness. While the latter valorizes preservation of a uniform past , the former prioritizes...

Counterarchives, Appropriation and the Disobedient Gaze: Archival Structures in Ursula Biemann’s Contained Mobility and Charles Heller’s & Lorenzo Pezzani’s Death by Rescue

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In the past twenty years, an abundance of video works has emerged that engages with the global crisis of forced migration, many of which employ a critical documentary approach in their negotiation and exploration of these issues. Two such works, which are the primary objects of analysis in this article, are Ursula Biemann’s Contained Mobility (2004) and Charles Heller’s and Lorenzo Pezzani’s Death by Rescue: The Lethal Effects of the EU’s Policies of Non-Assistance (2016).

The venture point from which both works are analyzed is the concept of the archive – a concept that on the one hand is of crucial importance to the production of knowledge and that, on the other, has coined contemporary art practices to a significant extent. After establishing a working definition of the term archive (in reference to seminal texts by e.g. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Marlene Manoff) as a.) a discursive...

After Flight

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

"After Flight" by Ilija Trojanow

English translation by Ambika Athreya

"Almanya: A [Different] Future is Possible” Defying Narratives of Return in Fatma Aydemir's Ellbogen

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This paper investigates the theme of returning ‘home’ in Fatma Aydemir’s 2017 novel, Ellbogen , arguing that the novel’s protagonist utilizes her physical journey to Turkey to formulate a new, fluid positionality between apparently conflicting expressions of Otherness and belonging. Through the lens of decolonial anthropology, including the works of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Stuart Hall, I examine the ways in which imaginaries of inheritance and ascription both inform and deconstruct components of Turkish German archival memory. My reading proposes a conceptual framework in which encounter and return are not conclusive, but continual. The character Hazal’s engagement with multiple elements of her family’s diasporic memory meld with her lived experience of violence and disenfranchisement in Berlin—as well as her difficulties accessing and acknowledging the communities with which she consistently finds herself associated in Germany. Hazal’s ‘return’ to her...

Privileges

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

"Priviliges" by Olga Grjasnowa

English translation by Allison García

Foreword to the Collection

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Foreword by editors of the German-language collection, Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah.

English translation by Jon Cho-Polizzi

Visible

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

"Visible" by Sasha Marianna Salzmann

English translation by Lou Silhol-Macher

Dangerous

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

"Dangerous" by Nadia Shehadeh

English translation by Elizabeth Sun

Home

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

"Home" by Mithu Sanyal

English translation by Didem Uca

Overcoming the Present

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

"Overcoming the Present" [ Gegenwartsbewältigung ] by Max Czollek

English translation by Jon Cho-Polizzi

Foreword to the Translations

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Editor's Foreword to the translation of the 2019 collection, Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (Ullstein fünf, 2019).

Trust

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

"Trust" by Deniz Utlu

English translation by Jon Cho-Polizzi

Sex

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

"Sex" by Reyhan Şahin

English translation by Didem Uca

Together

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

"Together" by Simone Dede Ayivi

English translation by Michael Sandberg

Insult

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

"Insult" by Enrico Ippolito

English translation by Michael Sandberg

Love

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

"Love" by Sharon Dodua Otoo

English translation by Adrienne Merritt

Work

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

"Work" by Fatma Aydemir

English translation by Be Schierenberg

Looks

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

"Looks" by Hengameh Yaghoobifarah

English translation by Jonas Teupert

Translators' Introduction

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Translators' Introduction with information concerning the language, context, and content of the translations, with input from the collective translators.

Food

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

"Food" by Vina Yun

English translation by Thomas B. Fuhr and Wojtek Gornicki

Language

Sun, 5 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

"Language" by Margarete Stokowski

English translation by Jon Cho-Polizzi

TRANSIT Vol. 13.2 Archival Engagement

Tue, 13 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

TRANSIT Vol. 13.2 Call for Papers: Archival Engagement

Introduction: Traveling Forms (Global German Studies)

Sat, 29 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The present Covid-19 pandemic has brought the contradictions of our global existence into sharp relief. While the spread of the virus across national and continental borders has raised the awareness of global entanglements, the resultant closure of national borders even within the European Schengen Area locked people down in place and brought transnational movement to a halt. With most academic conversations having moved online, the 29th Annual Berkeley Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference, held February 19-20, 2021, gathered a group of scholars from across the globe to address the state of our discipline in times of uncertainty and transformation. The breadth of approaches contained under the disciplinary heading “German Studies/Germanistik'' can be at times dizzying, but we believe this ultimately to be a strength of what we call German Studies. Ours, perhaps more than many others, has been a discipline seeking to redefine itself by deconstructing its originary conception...

"Meine eigene Geschichte": Identity Construction Through Reading in Abbas Khider's Der falsche Inder

Sat, 29 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines issues of authorship, identity, and narrative form in Abbas Khider’s 2008 novel Der falsche Inder as developed through its thematization of reading. The novel presents a narrative of twenty-first century forced migration that challenges general assumptions about the identity formation of migrants by staging interventions in established discourses on literary authority and authenticity. While tropes of writing and authorship tend to dominate such discourses, the novel’s focus on reading, largely overlooked in the scholarship on the novel to date, repositions the debate. By undercutting romanticized notions of authorship and originality with the physical, material, and economic realities of migration, the novel exposes the bourgeois preconditions of such romanticized notions. This article argues that the novel’s depiction of identity construction revolving around reading instead of writing foregrounds the power of readers...

Empty Archives - Lost Letters

Sat, 29 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a translation of an excerpt from Zafer Şenocak's Das Fremde, das in jedem wohnt: Wie Unterschiede unsere Gesellschaft zusammenhalten.

Translator Introduction

Sat, 29 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

An introduction by Carpenter and Cho-Polizzi to their translation of Yoko Tawada's "Bioskoop der Nacht / Night Bioscope"

"Biohaus": The Bauhaus and the Biopolitics of Global Space

Sat, 29 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, art historians and urban studies scholars have been pleading for a more nuanced analysis of the Bauhaus in order to divorce from the one-sided affirmative reading of the iconic German art school. Yet, within the prevailing heroic narrative that still dominates contemporary public discourse after the 100-year anniversary of the school, the Bauhaus is praised for its affordable as well as working class-oriented design and it is thus depicted as intrinsically antithetical to today’s neoliberal housing market and bourgeois planning practices. To complicate this somewhat lopsided account, this paper draws on Henri Lefebvre’s critique of functionalist architecture and Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower to examine the late Bauhaus through a biopolitical lens. It first presents the Törten working-class housing estate in Dessau, Germany to scrutinize how biopolitical socio-spatial practices crystalize in Bauhaus urban planning and architecture. The...

Translations from the Poetic Archives of Migration

Sat, 29 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This piece serves as an introduction to a TRANSIT 13.1 subsection--a collection of poetry that investigates forms of archives and archival knowledge. In addition to introducing the subsection's contributions, it also details projects and collaborations carried out inter- and intradepartmentally at University of California, Berkeley.

Church Bells in Istanbul

Sat, 29 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a translation of an excerpt from Zafer Şenocak's Das Fremde, das in jedem wohnt: Wie Unterschiede unsere Gesellschaft zusammenhalten (2018).

The Hour of Assembly

Sat, 29 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is an unpublished German original and English translation of Zafer Şenocak's "Die Stunde des Zusammenfügens / The Hour of Assembly."

Das deutsche Kolonialerbe in der Jugendkolonialliteratur der BRD und der DDR

Sat, 29 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Dieser Beitrag setzt sich mit der Behandlung des deutschen Kolonialerbes in der Jugendkolonialliteratur der DDR und der BRD auseinander. Da die untersuchten Werke – genauso wie die Mehrheit der bis zur deutschen Teilung veröffentlichten Jugendkolonialbücher – an historische Ereignisse und Staatsideologien anknüpfen, wird im ersten Teil des Beitrags der gesamtdeutsche kulturgeschichtliche Kontext und der gesellschaftliche Status des Schwarzseins dargestellt. Das Hauptaugenmerk des zweiten Teils liegt auf der staatsideologischen Prägung dieser Werke. Dabei wird der Fokus vor allem darauf gelegt, wie diese Prägung sowohl bei der Darstellung der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte als auch bei Race - und Gender konstruktionen verschiedener Figuren festzustellen ist. Auf den ersten Blick zeichnen sich die westdeutschen Jugendkolonialwerke durch kolonialrevisionistische Aspekte und thematische Vielfalt aus, während bei der ostdeutschen Jugendkolonialliteratur...