![]() Without ignoring mainstream German films that deal with migration and racism from both the East and the West, it examines primarily fictional and documentary films made by migrants and non-Germans that tackle Germany’s politics of racialization and its function within German racial capitalism: from short films made by Black students visiting German film schools Turkish productions set in Germany, such as Almanya Aci Vatan (1979) films made by Jewish immigrants like Jeanine Meerapfel or those by exiled filmmakers such as Sohrab Shahid Saless, Kidlat Tahimik and Želimir Žilnik. These attempts build upon the groundwork developed by Black German feminists in the 1980s and on the ‘postmigrant turn’ in migration studies – a call to not merely study the social phenomenon of migration but to use migration as a perspective to shed new light on Germany’s history and culture at large.īuilding on these debates, this project employs a ‘postmigrant frame of reading’ (Moslund/Petersen) to interrogate film archives from the 1970s and 1980s and their construction and critique of Germany’s politics of difference. At the same time, attempts to counter racialized norms of Germanness and German Leitkultur have become increasingly visible over recent decades. When German pundits took pains to discuss questions of race and structural racism in the summer of 2020 – provoked, tellingly, by protests after the murder of George Floyd in the USA more than by the racist and antisemitic terrorist attacks in Halle and Hanau only a few months before – two interconnected phenomena were frequently commented on: the willful ignorance and helpless illiteracy expressed by many white Germans when it comes to questions of racism and the difficulties and complexities involved when adopting theories of race from an American academic context to Germany. ![]() Till Kadritzke, Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"
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