12 - Transnationalism Meets Provincialism: Generations and Identifications in Faserland, Kurz und schmerzlos, and Selam Berlin

Summary

East is no longer East, West is no longer West, and the past is not what it used to be either.

— Leslie Adelson

WHEN IT COMES TO GENERATIONAL MODELS, critics tend to analyze socalled “migrant literature” as part of a different cultural context and subject it to different systems of evaluation. Studies of minority and immigrant cultural productions often describe the tensions and confrontations depicted in “migrant literature” or by “minority filmmakers” as sites of cultural conflict and manifestations of the difficulties of living “between two cultures” or “between two worlds.” Such an approach to generational experience and cultural production reproduces social and political exclusions, is grounded in an essentialized concept of cultural identity, and fails to recognize more fluid models of identification as forms of cultural critique. Leslie Adelson has argued that Turkish-German art and literature need to be interpreted as performing “cultural labor” within the context of national and transnational political and cultural transformations. As agents in political negotiations over changing relationships to national and political identification, cultural productions describe, scrutinize, and — in some cases — challenge the new nationalisms that have developed in post-unification Germany.

Adelson describes Germany in the 1990s as a “dizzying decade of structural transformations”: Large-scale building projects in the soon-tobe- capital Berlin and across the former East, the continuing migration of East Germans and Eastern Europeans to the West, and an increasing diversification of migrant populations moving into and across Europe — from bohemian drifters, artists, and high-tech workers to political refugees and day-laborers — are just a few examples. The end of the Cold War, German unification, European integration, and an increasingly globalized economy posed particular challenges to German national and cultural identifications. However, the generation of writers and filmmakers coming of age in the 1990s was often seen at the time as depicting very different struggles. “Migrant literature” was seen to reflect the sense of being lost between two worlds; the last generation of children schooled in the GDR were suffering culture shock from having “lost” the world of their childhood and were either ostalgisch neo-yuppies or neo-Nazis; young West Germans were associated with the “Generation Golf,” a superficial and misanthropic generation focused on consumption, personal gain, and pleasure.