TRANSIT

I’m used to being solicited as a Jewish author. Or as I prefer to call it: a Jew-author. And now I’m already in the thick of things. Because in this text, I’ll be investigating how normalized understandings of belonging and the return of rightwing thought are intertwined. I contend that these understandings are manifest in the demand for integration whose all-but-universal presence is the reason I describe this as an integration paradigm. And I’d like to explain why I believe that Gegenwartsbewältigung [overcoming the present][1] is an appropriate counterstrategy. This text, then, is a kind of assembly kit for the construction of an alternative to the integration paradigm. But it’s up to you, dear reader, to make something out of it.

[1] A play on the much-lauded German (World War 2-related) memory culture of “overcoming / coming to terms with the past” [Vergangenheitsbewältigung].