During the first decade of this millennium Germany’s largest ethnic minority—Turkish Germans—began to enjoy a new cultural prominence in German literature, film, television and theater. While controversies around forced marriage and “honor” killings have driven popular interest in the situation of Turkish-German women, popular culture has played a key role in diversifying portrayals of women and men of Turkish heritage. This book documents the significance of marriage in 21st-century Turkish-German culture, unpacking its implications not only for the cultural portrayals of those of Turkish background, but also for understandings of German identity. It sheds light on the interactions of gender, sexuality and ethnicity in contemporary Germany. This book explores four notions of marriage in popular culture: forced marriage; romantic marriage; intercultural marriage; and gay marriage. Over five chapters, the book shows that in popular culture marriage is conventionally portrayed as little more than a form of oppression for Turkish-German women and gay men. The state of Turkish matrimony is seen as characterized by coercion, lack of choice, familial duty and “honor,” even violence. In German culture, by contrast, marriage stands for individual choice, love and equality. However, within comedy genres such as “chick lit”, “ethno-sitcom” and wedding film, there have been attempts to challenge the monolithic power of these gender stereotypes. This study finds that, in grappling with the legacy of these stereotypes, these genres reveal a yearning within German popular culture for the very kinds of “traditional” gender roles Turkish Germans are imagined to inhabit. The book provides a comprehensive account of the multiple ways in which the diverse portrayals of marriage shape views of Turkish Germans in popular culture, and are also revealing of the role of gender in contemporary Germany. It investigates some key genres—autoethnography, chick lit, ethno-sitcom, wedding film, “gay” Bildungsroman, documentary theater—within which questions of gender and cultural difference are “framed”. In new and innovative close readings of literary, filmic, television and dramatic texts, the work reveals the broad significance of cultural portrayals of Turkish-German intimacy.

The articles in this volume bear witness to the productive energy of the interplay between tradition and modernity, whether in theater, literature, or popular culture. At the same time, they emphasize the importance of cultural intermediaries, including translators. The volume thus illustrates that - despite (or precisely because of) political developments in Turkey and Germany, alike - a multitude of Turkish-German themes remain vital in both society and the academy, urging further consideration, investigation, discussion, and presentation.

Turkish German comedy culture and the lived realities of Turkish Muslims in Germany Comedy entertainment is a powerful arena for serious public engagement with questions of German national identity and Turkish German migration. The German majority society and its largest labour migrant community have been asking for decades what it means to be German and what it means for Turkish Germans, Muslims of the second and third generations, to call Germany their home. Benjamin Nickl examines through the social pragmatics of humour the dynamics that underpin these questions in the still-evolving popular culture space of German mainstream humour in the 21st century. The first book-length study on the topic to combine close readings of film, television, literary and online comedy, and transnational culture studies, Turkish German Muslims and Comedy Entertainment presents the argument that Turkish German humour has moved from margin to mainstream by intervening in cultural incompatibility and Islamophobia discourse. Ebook available in Open Access. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Contemporary television fictions allow the audience to experience the reality of everyday life in audio-visual spaces. Thus, controversial issues discussed in German society such as homosexuality, racism or ‘clashes of cultures’ are revisited in the social drama films produced for German television through a mixture of generic conventions such as tragedy, thriller and melodrama. Consequently, the audio-visual representations of the people, who are the focus of these discussions, represent an interesting area of research. The book deals with the audio-visual spatiality of the Turkish diaspora in Berlin in three contemporary TV films in this format; namely Wut (Range, dir. Zuli Aladağ, 2006), Die Neue (The Newcomer, dir. Buket Alakuş, 2015) and Nachspielzeit (Extra-Time, dir. Andreas Pieper, 2015). Therewith, it brings a spatial approach to the issue of ‘polemical belonging of the Turkish Diaspora to the German national space’ within the audio-visual context. The proposed spatial approach presents an alternative argument to the assumptions of German politicians, who celebrate ‘a common German history that bases on Christian-Jewish identity, democracy and enlightenment’.

Stereotypes are dangerous, especially when they are used by demagogues. Slogans, which remind the historian of darker times in human history, however, reappear again in a growing number. As companions of the rise of right wing forces in Europe they make up ground in more and more regions and gain momentum in the political debate. It consequently seems to be more than important to focus on and closer analyze the interrelationship between stereo types and violence in modern societies. The fourth volume of Global Humanities tries to achieve such a broader analysis and provides reading in the fields of history, political science, gender and media studies. The authors show and emphasize in which ways the two above named factors are interacting with each other and influencing the popular opinion in modern nation states. Topics that are covered include Anti-Italian riots in Zurich at the end of the 19th century, a discussion of the interrelationship of racism and violence in Germany since the 1980s, and an analysis of gender based violence in Serbia. In addition, the persistence of stereo types in entertainment is closely studied by taking a look on Sinti and Roma depictions in current European films.

The first book to offer a cutting-edge discussion of contemporary travel writing in German, Anxious Journeys looks both at classical tropes of travel writing and its connection to current debates. The rich contemporary literature of travel has been the focus of numerous recent publications in English that seek to understand how travel narratives, with their distinctive representations of identities, places, and cultures, respond to today's globalized, high-speed world characterized by the dual mass movements of tourism and migration. Yet a corresponding cutting-edge discussion of twenty-first-century travel writing in German has until now been missing. The fourteen essays in Anxious Journeys redress this situation. They analyze texts by leading authors such as Felicitas Hoppe, Christoph Ransmayr, Julie Zeh, Navid Kermani, Judith Schalansky, Ilija Trojanow, and others, as well as topics such as Turkish-German travelogues and the relationship of comics to travel writing. The volume examines how writers engage with classic tropes of travel writing and how they react to the current sense of crisis and belatedness. It also links travel to ongoing debates about the role of the nation, mass migration, and the European project, as well as to Germany's place in the larger world order. Contributors: Karin Baumgartner, Heather Merle Benbow, Anke S. Biendarra, John Blair and Muriel Cormican, Nicole Coleman, Carola Daffner, Christina Gerhardt, Nicole Grewling, Gundela Hachmann, Andrew Wright Hurley, Christina Kraenzle, Magda Tarnawaska Senel, Monika Shafi, Sunka Simon. Karin Baumgartner is Professor of German at the University of Utah. Monika Shafi is Elias Ahuja Professor of German at the University of Delaware.

Even in the harsh conditions of total war, food is much more than a daily necessity, however scarce—it is social glue and an identity marker, a form of power and a weapon of war. This collection examines the significance of food and hunger in Germany’s turbulent twentieth century. Food-centered perspectives and experiences “from below” reveal the social, cultural and political consequences of three conflicts that defined the twentieth century: the First and Second World Wars and the ensuing global Cold War. Emerging and established scholars examine the analytical salience of food in the context of twentieth-century Germany while pushing conventional temporal frameworks and disciplinary boundaries. Together, these chapters interrogate the ways in which deeper studies of food culture in Germany can shed new light on old wars.

Sexuality in Modern German History offers both a detailed survey of this key subject and a new intervention in the history of sexuality in modern Germany. It investigates the diverse and often contradictory ways in which individuals, activists, doctors, politicians, artists, church leaders, reform movements and cultural commentators have defined 'normal' or 'natural' sexuality in Germany over the past two centuries. Katie Sutton explores how these definitions have been used to shape identities, behaviours, bodies and practices, from norms of heterosexual, marital, reproductive sex to ideas around the policing and categorisation of 'unnatural' or 'deviant' bodies and practices. Covering a range of crucial themes, including birth control, prostitution, queer and trans rights and heterosexual intimacy, this important text comes with 30 illustrations and a wealth of primary source extracts and secondary literature, helpfully integrated to enable further insight and analysis. This is a vital volume for all students and scholars with an interested in modern Germany or the history of sexuality in modern Europe.

In the last five years of the twentieth century, films by the second and third generation of the so-called German guest workers exploded onto the German film landscape. Self-confident, articulate, and dynamic, these films situate themselves in the global exchange of cinematic images, citing and rewriting American gangster narratives, Kung Fu action films, and paralleling other emergent European minority cinemas. This, the first book-length study on the topic, will function as an introduction to this emergent and growing cinema and offer a survey of important films and directors of the last two decades. In addition, it intervenes in the theoretical debates about Turkish German culture by engaging with different methodological approaches that originate in film studies.

An incisive study of the impact of American culture on modern German society