Tag Archives: multiculturalism
Beyond Berlin: London and other transplants
This past week, I visited a good friend who, like me, is an American transplant, now living in East London – a place where the corner store owner greets you in an upbeat banter and the sign to a ‘Carolina Fried Chicken’ joint dances in the light from the neighboring gastropub. Multicultural, maybe. But London’s multiculturalism has a few faces and facades. And, in the end, it’s the people that matter more than the cultural installation, many themselves transplants with open-ended expiration dates… [Read more!]
Interview: Three Dimensions of Integration
It’s easy (and admittedly amusing) to reduce expats to stereotypes, as if we all neatly fall into one or the other category based on which country we hail from, what we do for a living, or where we party and eat brunch. Reality is always more nuanced and multi-dimensional. Dare we even say, interesting?…[Read more!]
Lens: An Ode to the Maybachufer
From Berlin’s “problem district” to more expensive than spießig Charlottenburg: Kreuzberg’s made quite the transformation over the decades, but migration continues to shape its identity and reputation as a district. The bulk of Kreuzberg’s diversity stems from the ’50s and ’60s, when guest workers were recruited by West Germany to fill labor shortages after World War II*. Kreuzberg’s dilapidated housing became home to guest workers, primarily from Turkey…[Read more!]
Beyond Berlin: Difference in the Wet Country
For nearly a month this holiday season, I explored the social fabric surrounding my US origins with a German national, who had never before been to the land of plenty. Through the fresh eyes of ‘the foreigner’, I saw my part of America unfold under a curious and critical lens. America is a country that defines itself by historical narratives of migration and manifest destiny. What one encounters on the road in its northwestern corner, however, is a bit more mundane. At closer glance, emptiness and the prosaic everyday give food for thought, in regards to locating and valuing difference wherever it bubbles up…[Read more!]
Lens: With Wings, Roots, and Sweaty Hands
“Punctual. Exact. Productive. Closed off. Careful. Inflexible. Humorless.” And some “Goethe” and “Einstein” thrown in for good measure. Was this really all a group of seemingly well-educated professionals had to say about German identity? No wonder the facilitator had started to draw sad faces on the list…[Read more!]
Multiculturalism, Diversity, and the Big City
With my back to them at the street-side café I felt like a judge on “The Voice“, straining my neck for any hint of where they were from or what they looked like, resisting the urge to swirl around and start dancing on my chair. Truth be told my ears had perked up as soon as the trio plopped down at the table behind me, switching between topics like gentrification in Kreuzberg and the cultural difference between Kaffee and “coffee” as quickly as they were switching between German and English…[Read more!]
Reviewing the Rave: “We are the We”
We’re so used to talking all the time that words tend to lose their effect. Especially when the talking is predominantly happening in one direction, as it so often does in immigration discourse. The Migrantas organization is unleashing an alternate voice within immigrant women in Germany that is arguably just as powerful: their artistic creativity…[Read more!]
Whose Multikulti is it? The elusive definition of Multiculturalism
The various meanings of the German word Multikulti are just as ‘multi’ as the differences the word aims to describe. Take the Multikulti breakfast, for example. Apparently, a “Multikulti breakfast” is eating Vegemite with maple syrup. Or is it? [Read more!]
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