This article examines queer feminist knowledge production as thematized and performed in Kim de l'Horizon's debut novel Blutbuch (2022). I define "queer feminist knowledge" as an alternative (Halberstam), affective (Ahmed), ephemeral (Mu & ntilde;oz), nomadic (Braidotti), and metaphorical (Preciado) experimentation. This knowledge production revisits relationality as ever-changing and fluid, rendering it as an act of defiance against norms. Blutbuch tells the story of its non-binary character, also named Kim, through a fragmented narrative and delves into family history, witch figures, language construction, and different modes of writing. Offering a close reading of the novel, this paper analyzes representations of relationality, the body, and knowledge, and considers how these can be challenged and reimagined. After first outlining how queer feminist knowledge can transform the notion of lineage toward a more inclusive understanding of kinship, I then reflect on the narrator's self-expression to (re)create alternative forms of knowledge about family, language, and themself.
This article examines Judith Hermann's exploration of embodied vulnerability in Alice (2009) and Aller Liebe Anfang (2014), drawing on vulnerability studies, feminist care ethics, phenomenology, and narratology. Alice addresses vulnerability through the experience of witnessing loved ones dying, while Aller Liebe Anfang explores it through the embodied practices of maternal and professional care work. Across both novels, Hermann's modulation of focalization and her attention to bodily presence and absence reveal vulnerability in moments of crisis as well as in the temporal textures of daily care. In Alice, prolonged illness and sudden death articulate a phenomenology of loss, disclosing how bodily breakdown transforms perception for both the dying and those who attend to them. In Aller Liebe Anfang, the rhythms of caregiving expose vulnerability as a persistent condition, where protection-understood as the ongoing effort to safeguard those who depend on one's care-is inseparable from dependence and ambivalence. Read together, the two texts highlight Judith Hermann's thus-far-overlooked contribution to literary explorations of embodied vulnerability and the human interdependence at its core.
This article explores the community-building activism of the Heinrich-Heine-Klub, an organization devoted to promoting German cultural life among displaced artists and intellectuals in Mexico City in the 1940s. I consider the parallels between reflections on cultural identity in the work of Anna Seghers, a leading member of the Mexican exile community and president of the Heine-Klub, and Hannah Arendt's notion of civic friendship in her 1960 speech Von der Menschlichkeit in finsteren Zeiten. In the 1942 essay "Volk und Schriftsteller," Seghers argues that the process of cultural identification is based not on a connection to place or ethnicity but rather on social bonds that constantly produce and reproduce culture, wherever those bonds may form. Within her own community in Mexico, Seghers sought to put this call to action into practice; in effect, the Heinrich-Heine-Klub became an exercise in what Arendt identified as "friendship," a relationship founded in active "dispute and discourse" rather than defined by a shared diasporic identity. To illustrate this point, I discuss a collection of essays, entitled Heines Geist in Mexico, published in 1946 as a farewell to the club just before many of its members returned to Europe. With contributions from Seghers and other club members, including Egon Erwin Kisch, Paul Merker, Andr & eacute; Simone, and Alexander Abusch, the collection highlights the community's shared purpose of maintaining intellectual exchange across ideological and cultural differences.
In this article I examine notions of fugitivity and fungibility as they are depicted in Jagdpartie (Hunting Party, 1964). Filmed in the German Democratic Republic by Sudanese director Ibrahim Shaddad, the film depicts a white mob's hunt for a lone Black man in a setting rife with visual and nominal referents to the US American West. Shaddad builds a narrative of escape that I read, via Tiffany Lethabo King, as emblematic of the racializing schema of European modernity. Joe's movement in and out of the film's natural spaces makes him visually "porous," in contrast to the fixity of the white figures, who embody settler colonialism and white supremacy. I draw on King's metaphor of shoaling to address the ambivalence of the German-US setting, as well as the film's critique of the Marxist rubric of solidarity. Finally, I consider the absence of Indigeneity in the film and the demands it makes on present-day viewers.
In the convergence era, non-American-made, multilingual streaming shows such as Netflix's 1899 (2022) and the ZDF's The Swarm (2023) enjoy increased popularity among global audiences. This article explores how these two German-made productions create multilingual universes on set and on screen. It argues that the two shows conceptualize multilingual identities uncoupled from their cultural environments, which hinders the creation of a sense of cultural authenticity, a crucial factor in building indexically rich environments that increase audience engagement. Finally, the article proposes that the shows' over-reliance on state-of-the-art technology further prevented the generation of cinematic "authenticity feelings." In conclusion, the article suggests that both series' lack of clearly identifiable cultural indexicality mirrors the current moment, which is characterized by a political recalibration of German identity.
This article uses the example of the Starz television series Counterpart to suggest some preliminary hypotheses about the enduring appeal and important implications of telling "Cold War" stories through contemporary television. It draws on and contributes to historiographies of the postwar world, Cold War Germany, media history, historical memory, and recent work in critical media industries studies to explore a number of interrelated questions about the history, legacy, and representation of the Cold War, as well as the industrial conditions of contemporary television production and distribution. Counterpart, as I show, is a particularly keen example of television as both product and servant of neoliberal ideas, naturalizing the principles and also practices of neoliberalism for a transnational audience. It also exemplifies a new generation of television spy thrillers that is reimagining Cold War conflict and projecting a post-triumphalist version of the Cold War onto the problems of the post-9/11 world.
In this article, we provide a reading of Sam: Ein Sachse (Sam: A Saxon, directed by Soleen Yusef and Sarah Bla ss kiewitz) in terms of the media politics it presents as a Disney+ branded series. The miniseries, which is based on Black German public figure Samuel Meffire's biography, is a 2023 transnational co-production made with an international market in mind. Meffire's biography was narrativized once before as a documentary; this fictionalized version exhibits close ties between its Disney+ and Hulu branding and its storytelling and aesthetics. The show recounts Meffire's story as a narrative of resilience and a search for belonging in a white normative Germany of the 1980s and 1990s. We suggest that the streaming format and brand of Disney+ inevitably shape what is possible for visualizing such a story. We argue that the miniseries struggles between depicting racism as a structural problem in both East and West Germany and suggesting that how a victim responds to racism is primarily an individual problem.
This article examines Netflix's third original German series, How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) (2019-), in order to situate German (streaming) television in the broader media developments of the convergence era. Transnationally conceived from the outset, the series combines transnational genre narratives with German cultural history in order to address broad audiences across the globe. Focusing on narrative complexity, intertextuality, and genre hybridity, the article first analyzes the series' references to both national and international nerd narratives such as Baran bo Odar's Who am I: Kein System ist sicher (2014) and David Fincher's The Social Network (2010). Then it contextualizes How to Sell Drugs within twenty-first-century societal debates in Germany and canonical works from nineteenth-century German literary tradition-especially Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) and Faust (1808), as well as Frank Wedekind's Fr & uuml;hlings Erwachen (1891). In doing so, this article demonstrates that the series creates ambiguous images simultaneously inspired by both German and Anglo-American cultural history to appeal to audiences around the globe.
This article examines Klaus Mann's utopian visions, particularly those emerging in narratives written after 1933 during his exile. It highlights how "die Forderung des Tages," Mann's anti-fascist "cause of the day," plays a crucial role in his vision for a better future, marking a transition from an abstract dream to a concrete, collective goal. Mann's later utopian visions thus resonate with Ernst Bloch's "concrete utopia," as outlined in Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1954). Driven by political awakening, this transition is central to Mann's evolution as a writer and activist during his exile. His essays, journals, and autofictional works, such as Flucht in den Norden and Der Vulkan, reveal how his personal experiences shaped his portrayal of exile and resistance to the Nazi regime, demonstrating resilience and a commitment to antifascist ideals. Mann experienced growing disillusionment with Europe's catastrophic situation, which continued to impact him on his path as an & eacute;migr & eacute; to the United States. Serving as both a place of refuge and an ally, the United States becomes a beacon of hope for Mann's vision of a Pan-Europe and a post-fascist world where democratic and humanist ideals prevail. As this article highlights, Mann's legacy as an anti-fascist author and political activist demonstrates that his message of hope and utopian vision were intended to inspire future generations to envision and actively engage in creating a better world.
This article argues that writers and critics frequently deploy the mythological story of Perseus's slaying of Medusa to address the literary representation of the Holocaust and other traumatic events surrounding the Second World War, because the story is a complex of images relating concepts of experience, understanding, representation, and trauma. It examines how three writers, Siegfried Kracauer, Peter Weiss, and W. G. Sebald, use the story to articulate distinct answers to a key question for literature that addresses these events: How can literary representation contribute to our understanding of traumatic events when there are aspects of that understanding which experience cannot serve to confirm or deny? The article thus illuminates changing ideas about art and literature's response to the Holocaust and other traumatic events, including how these ideas continue to evolve in the twenty-first century.
This article investigates Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1972 television series Acht Stunden sind kein Tag and its relationship to the bourgeois genre of the "family series" through the theoretical lens of Bertolt Brecht's Messingkauf. Rather than tracing the general influence that Brecht had on Fassbinder, the author argues that the central metaphor of the brass purchase, which Brecht used to illustrate the appropriation and repurposing of artistic means of production, provides insight into the political aesthetics of Fassbinder's attempt to use the popular TV format of the family series for utopian ideological ends. Brecht's theoretical fragment, which Fassbinder most likely never read, provides an analytical tool for understanding mass media formats and illuminates both the possibilities and limitations of Fassbinder's ambition to infiltrate and influence bourgeois households via the West German public broadcasting system.
In this article, we ask how to engage with Indigenous stories non-extractively from our own positioning as German scholars within the German university system. Taking guidance from the methodological work of Stó:lō and St’at’imc scholar and storyteller Jo-ann Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem and Wiradjuri author, critic, and academic Jeanine Leane, we engage with representations of German settler figures in Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild and Ellen van Neerven’s Sate in order to think through the implications of reading as an invader, tourist, or visitor (Leane).
This article explores the need to decolonize the teaching of Grimms’ fairy tales by incorporating Indigenous storytelling traditions and methodologies into the curriculum. Fairy tales, and specifically the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1857), are tied to colonial and nationalistic discourses that offer opportunities to critically re-evaluate the genre. By drawing on Jo-ann Archibald’s Indigenous storywork framework and the concept of Two-Eyed Seeing, the author advocates for pedagogical practices that move beyond Eurocentric narratives to create more inclusive, place-based, and social-justice-oriented learning environments.
This intervention deals with the engagement of public anthropology in current decolonization processes in Berlin’s urban space. Current struggles over colonial street names are examined as acts of postmigrant citizenship.
