Abstract: Recent calls for social justice in Berlin have been fueled in part by the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the "official" acknowledgment of the Afropean population(s) through the Afrozensus, and calls to rename colonial references on buildings, street signs, and UBahn stations. Further, warped perceptions of risk grafted on political correctness enable a resistance to acknowledging racism. This article engages both autoethnographic and autotheoretical practices through a presentation of Nkwaethnography, an "Africancentered ethnographic research approach" (Allen-Handy). In this mixed genre of writing, I merge a firsthand account of experiences in Berlin in August 2023 with autotheoretical approaches, analyzing power negotiations, tokenism, and being perceived as a "model minority" in contemporary Berlin. The text exemplifies how Black women, through the example of an African American woman in a European context, are called (or confined) to occupy a certain perceived safe space where "well-meaning" White interlocutors can work through their prejudices, frustrations, and confusion.
Abstract: This essay partakes in the lively discourse around (peri-)menopause and explores the experience of (peri-)menopause in the pedagogical setting, but also approaches (peri-) menopause as a cultural phenomenon, still posing a taboo in literary studies, especially in German-language studies.
Abstract: Traditional Holocaust scholarship has often viewed survivors' testimonies through a falsely universalizing lens, assuming shared experiences among Jewish men and women. Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have contested this perspective by emphasizing gender-specific trauma. Yet gender remains underexplored in global contexts, especially among Jewish refugees outside of Europe. Women's experiences in wartime Shanghai remain critically understudied, exposing enduring Eurocentric biases. This article addresses these gaps by analyzing two memoirs by Russian-Jewish émigré women in Shanghai: Rena Krasno's Strangers Always (1992) and Liliane Willens's Stateless in Shanghai (2010). Though neither author fled Nazi Germany directly, both narratives reveal how antisemitism, statelessness, and survival were shaped by gender, race, and colonial geopolitics. Drawing from feminist trauma theory and Michael Rothberg's concept of "multidirectional memory," this article shows how these testimonies reframe Holocaust historiography. Focusing on non-European female perspectives, it challenges dominant male-centered narratives and advocates for an intersectional, transnational approach to Holocaust remembrance. These memoirs ultimately expand our understanding of feminist witnessing, complicate conventional trauma narratives, and call for the inclusion of marginal voices in global Holocaust studies.
Abstract: In his work on botanical metamorphosis Goethe attempts to retain gender-normative ideas that even in his time were regressive. He deploys a natalist logic that prescribes for women the role of mother. Beyond asserting conservative principles, his writing on plant metamorphosis retains these principles within a framework still amenable to the liberalizing transformations at the end of his time. Goethe's thinking developed during revolutions in embryology and genre theory and was affected by his own involvement in an infanticide trial. Accordingly, he differentiates biological ontogeny from phylogeny, ensuring an array of possibilities for the former but constraining the latter to a natalist principle of reproduction. His interests in this formula go beyond biology and are reflected in his social and aesthetic projects, including the justification for punishing women whose actions challenge the limits of his natalism. This essay retraces Goethe's conceptualization of living form, addresses its ambiguities, and proposes a counter-model that allows for more dynamic and reparative feminist readings of Goethe's oeuvre.
