The Project

Our initial idea for an on-going engagement with multicultural Germany dates back to Berlin in 2000, when public debate was rife with tensions about immigration and integration. It struck us that postwar Germany’s rapid transformation from an ethnically homogeneous people to a multiethnic population in the past 50 years shifted the grounds for artistic production and challenged the very idea of a single German identity. For us, this moment signaled a crucial turning point, not only in German politics and culture, but also in the research parameters of our field of German Studies. The Multicultural Germany Project is part of this larger task of redefining our academic and curricular goals in more transnational terms.

Although “multiculturalism” arouses suspicion both in Germany and the United States, we decided to use this term in our project title as a shorthand for the ways in which multiple languages, cultures, and beliefs coexist and intersect within a society. These contact zones are volatile and sometimes violent, but they also produce new forms of expression in literature, media, and everyday life. Multiculturalism in Germany has also led to concrete debates about national belonging, human rights, religion, diversity, and the arts – debates that resonate far beyond the country’s borders.

A global campus like UC Berkeley is a unique place to launch a comparative exploration into the cultural effects of immigration. The Project has included workshops, an international conference, reading groups, a small research archive, and a student-edited Web journal Transit. A comprehensive sourcebook, Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005, was published by the University of California, Berkeley, in February 2007. It is the first book in any language to document the emergence of Germany as a multi-ethnic, multicultural nation.

We offer this Web site as a forum for further research and discussion on multicultural Germany. If you would like to contribute to this collaborative project, please contact us at mgp@berkeley.edu.