Co-published with the Waterloo Centre for German Studies For centuries, large numbers of German-speaking people have emigrated from settlements in Europe to other countries and continents. In German Diasporic Experiences: Identity, Migration, and Loss, more than forty international contributors describe and discuss aspects of the history, language, and culture of these migrant groups, individuals, and their descendants. Part I focuses on identity, with essays exploring the connections among language, politics, and the construction of histories—national, familial, and personal—in German-speaking diasporic communities around the world. Part II deals with migration, examining such issues as German migrants in postwar Britain, German refugees and forced migration, and the immigrant as a fictional character, among others. Part III examines the idea of loss in diasporic experience with essays on nationalization, language change or loss, and the reshaping of cultural identity. Essays are revised versions of papers presented at an international conference held at the University of Waterloo in August 2006, organized by the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, and reflect the multidisciplinarity and the global perspective of this field of study.

This book takes on a global perspective to unravel the complex relationship between Imperial Germany and its diaspora. Around 1900, German-speakers living abroad were tied into global power-political aspirations. They were represented as outposts of a "Greater German Empire" whose ethnic links had to be preserved for their own and the fatherland’s benefits. Did these ideas fall on fertile ground abroad? In the light of extreme social, political, and religious heterogeneity, diaspora construction did not redeem the all-encompassing fantasies of its engineers. But it certainly was at work, as nationalism "went global" in many German ethnic communities. Three thematic areas are taken as examples to illustrate the emergence of globally operating organizations and communication flows: Politics and the navy issue, Protestantism, and German schools abroad as "bulwarks of language preservation." The public negotiation of these issues is explored for localities as diverse as Shanghai, Cape Town, Blumenau in Brazil, Melbourne, Glasgow, the Upper Midwest in the United States, and the Volga Basin in Russia. The mobilisation of ethno-national diasporas is also a feature of modern-day globalization. The theoretical ramifications analysed in the book are as poignant today as they were for the nineteenth century.

Around the world, a new kind of diasporic citizenship is appearing, especially among diasporic people such as German-born Berliners of Turkish origin. Drawing on interviews conducted over a fifteen-year period, Forging Diasporic Citizenship explores the dynamics of everyday life for these Ausländer (or “outsiders”). These people are obliged to define themselves by their Otherness, but it is their relatedness to German society that transgresses traditional concepts of both German and Turkish identity. In this work of narrative research, Gül Çalışkan explores the tensions between the experience of displacement and the politics of accommodation as the Ausländer make claims to citizenship, articulate the ways they are rooted, and seek to achieve recognition. Through examining the social encounters, life events, and everyday practices of these German-born Ausländer, Forging Diasporic Citizenship constructs a theoretically sophisticated, transnationally applicable hypothesis regarding the nature of modern citizenship and multiculturalism.

The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans' perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany's protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.

A groundbreaking account of the development of Germany's first African community, which offers fascinating perspectives on transnational German history.

This edited volume discusses the discourse, experience and representation of Diaspora from a variety of cultural and disciplinary perspectives and offers new and original insight into contemporary notions of Diaspora.

Contemporary television fictions allow the audience to experience the reality of everyday life in audio-visual spaces. Thus, controversial issues discussed in German society such as homosexuality, racism or ‘clashes of cultures’ are revisited in the social drama films produced for German television through a mixture of generic conventions such as tragedy, thriller and melodrama. Consequently, the audio-visual representations of the people, who are the focus of these discussions, represent an interesting area of research. The book deals with the audio-visual spatiality of the Turkish diaspora in Berlin in three contemporary TV films in this format; namely Wut (Range, dir. Zuli Aladağ, 2006), Die Neue (The Newcomer, dir. Buket Alakuş, 2015) and Nachspielzeit (Extra-Time, dir. Andreas Pieper, 2015). Therewith, it brings a spatial approach to the issue of ‘polemical belonging of the Turkish Diaspora to the German national space’ within the audio-visual context. The proposed spatial approach presents an alternative argument to the assumptions of German politicians, who celebrate ‘a common German history that bases on Christian-Jewish identity, democracy and enlightenment’.