Ghetto Voices In Contemporary German Culture

Accounts of how Germany has changed since unification often portray the Berlin Republic as a new Germany that has left the Nazi past and Cold War division behind and entered the new millennium as a peaceful, worldly, and cautiously proud nation. Closer inspection, however, reveals tensions between such views and the realities of a country that continues to struggle with racism, provincialism, and fear of the perceived Other. Mainstream media foster such fears by describing violence in ghetto schools, failed integration, and the loss of society's core values. The city emerges as a key site not only of ethnic and political tension but of social change. Maria Stehle illuminates these tensions and transformations by following the metaphor of the ghetto in literary works from the 1990s by Feridun Zaimoglu, in German ghettocentric films from the late 1990s and the early twenty-first century, and in hip-hop and rap music of the same periods. In their representations of ghettos, authors, filmmakers, musicians, and performers redefine and challenge provincialism and nationalism and employ transcultural frameworks for their diverging political agendas. By contextualizing these discussions within social and political developments, this study illuminates the complexities that define Germany today for scholars and students across the disciplines of German, European, cultural, urban, and media studies. Maria Stehle is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Illuminates tensions and transformations in today's Germany by examining literary, filmic, and musical treatments of the ghetto metaphor. Accounts of how Germany has changed since unification often portray the Berlin Republic as a new Germany that has left the Nazi past and Cold War division behind and entered the new millennium as a peaceful, worldly, and cautiously proud nation. Closer inspection, however, reveals tensions between such views and the realities of a country that continues to struggle with racism, provincialism, and fear of the perceived Other. Mainstream media foster such fears by describing violence in ghetto schools, failed integration, and the loss of society's core values. The city emerges as a key site not only of ethnic and political tension but of social change. Maria Stehle illuminates these tensions and transformations by following the metaphor of the ghetto in literary works from the 1990s by Feridun Zaimoglu, in German ghettocentric films from the late 1990s and the early twenty-first century, and in hip-hop and rap music of the same periods. In their representations of ghettos, authors, filmmakers, musicians, and performers redefine and challenge provincialism and nationalism and employ transcultural frameworks for their diverging political agendas. By contextualizing these discussions within social and political developments, this study illuminates the complexities that define Germany today for scholars and students across the disciplines of German, European, cultural, urban, and media studies. Maria Stehle is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

For decades, Germany has been shaped and reshaped by the sounds of popular music—whether viewed as uniquely German or an ideological invader from abroad. This collected volume brings together leading figures in the field of German Studies, popular music studies, and cultural studies at large to survey the sociopolitical impact of music on conceptions of the German state and national identity, gender and sexuality, and transnational cultural production and consumption, expanding on the ways in which sounds, technologies, media practices, and exchanges of popular music provide a unique glimpse into the cultural dynamics of postwar Germany.

"Transnationalism" has become a key term in debates in the social sciences and humanities, reflecting concern with today's unprecedented flows of commodities, fashions, ideas, and people across national borders. Forced and unforced mobility, intensified cross-border economic activity due to globalization, and the rise of trans- and supranational organizations are just some of the ways in which we now live both within, across, and beyond national borders. Literature has always been a means of border crossing and transgression-whether by tracing physical movement, reflecting processes of cultural transfer, traveling through space and time, or mapping imaginary realms. It is also becoming more and more a "moving medium" that creates a transnational space by circulating around the world, both reflecting on the reality of transnationalism and participating in it. This volume refines our understanding of transnationalism both as a contemporary reality and as a concept and an analytical tool. Engaging with the work of such writers as Christian Kracht, Ilija Trojanow, Julya Rabinowich, Charlotte Roche, Helene Hegemann, Antje R vic Strubel, Juli Zeh, Friedrich D rrenmatt, and Wolfgang Herrndorf, it builds on the excellent work that has been done in recent years on "minority" writers; German-language literature, globalization, and "world literature"; and gender and sexuality in relation to the "nation." Contributors: Hester Baer, Anke S. Biendarra, Claudia Breger, Katharina Gerstenberger, Elisabeth Herrmann, Christina Kraenzle, Maria Mayr, Tanja Nusser, Lars Richter, Carrie Smith-Prei, Faye Stewart, Stuart Taberner. Elisabeth Herrmann is Associate Professor of German at Stockholm University. Carrie Smith-Prei is Associate Professor of German at the University of Alberta. Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture and Society at the University of Leeds and is a Research Associate in the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch; German and French at the University of the Free State, South Africa.

Highlights the spirituality and cosmopolitanism of four contemporary German Muslim writers, showing that they undermine the clash-of-civilizations narrative and open up space for new ways of coexisting.

Emotions, especially those of impoverished migrant families, have long been underrepresented in German social and cultural studies. That Sinking Feeling raises the visibility of the emotional dimensions of exclusion processes and locates students in current social transformations. Drawing from a year of ethnographic fieldwork with grade ten students, Stefan Wellgraf’s study on an array of both classic emotions and affectively charged phenomena reveals a culture of devaluation and self-assertion of the youthful, post-migrant urban underclass in neoliberal times.

This book examines the right to education for migrant children in Europe between 1949 and 1992. Using West Germany as a case study to explore European trends, the book analyzes how the Council of Europe and European Community’s ideological goals were implemented for specific national groups. The book starts with education for displaced persons and exiles in the 1950s, then compares schooling for Italian, Greek, and Turkish labor migrants, then circles back to asylum seekers and returning ethnic Germans. For each group, the state entries involved tried to balance equal education opportunities with the right to personhood, an effort which became particularly convoluted due to implicit biases. When the European Union was founded in 1993, children’s access to education depended on a complicated mix of legal status and perception of cultural compatibility. Despite claims that all children should have equal opportunities, children’s access was limited by citizenship and ethnic identity.

A collection of scholarly articles and essays by dancers and scholars of ethnochoreology, dance studies, drama studies, cultural studies, literature, and architecture, Dance and Modernism in Irish and German Literature and Culture: Connections in Motion explores Irish-German connections through dance in choreographic processes and on stage, in literary texts, dance documentation, film, and architecture from the 1920s to today. The contributors discuss modernism, with a specific focus on modern dance, and its impact on different art forms and discourses in Irish and German culture. Within this framework, dance is regarded both as a motif and a specific form of spatial movement, which allows for the transgression of medial and disciplinary boundaries as well as gender, social, or cultural differences. Part 1 of the collection focuses on Irish-German cultural connections made through dance, while part 2 studies the role of dance in Irish and German literature, visual art, and architecture.