This paper argues that questions of integration and containment were crucial to define the (West) German and European ghetto at two historical moments: The early 1970s, when the West German state implemented new policies to stop the 'guest-worker' programs of the 1950s and 1960s, and the year 2005, when German media reacted in a panic to the riots in the Paris banlieues. An intersectional analysis of media discourses of the ghetto explores the continuities and shifts, as well as the contradictions in these narratives of exclusion. In the twenty-first century the contested discussions about ghettos as racialised and sexualised spaces are an important part of a new formation of European narratives. Counter-narratives reveal the many ghettos of Europe and challenge notions of integration and containment.
This article traces the shifts in German discourses about multiculturalism and the failed experiment of multiculturalism from the early 1990s into the 21st century by analyzing anxieties about emerging ‘ethnic ghettos’ and ‘parallel societies’ in Europe. In these discourses, ‘Europe’ functions simultaneously as an example for the failures of multiculturalism and as a bastion of western values in need of protection. The second part of this article shifts to a discussion on creative political interventions that expose these tensions and contradictions and emphasize the historic dimension of racialized exclusion in Germany and the European context. They describe the effects of social exclusion and propose (often syncretic) translocal forms of solidarity and activism. In their irreverent, playful and performative interventions, activists and artists develop strategies to counter the essentialist culturalisms that underpin the debates about European integration, multiculturalism and the crisis of multiculturalism in the German context.
In North American universities, pop culture increasingly appears in the German Studies classroom to “spice up” the curriculum. But what is conveyed and taught and how is it inserted into the curriculum and into the US cultural context? This article explores three examples of popular culture in the German Studies classroom: representations of the Berlin Republic in Good Bye Lenin! and Das Leben der Anderen, Fatih Akin's Gegen die Wand, and songs of the band Rammstein. We argue for an approach that encourages students to explore the politics of national culture in a global context and emphasizes the tensions and contingencies in the materials presented.
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