TRANSIT

Foreword by Co-Managing Editor, Ambika S. Athreya 

Dieser Essay folgt der wenig bekannten Erzählung „Die Reise ins Elfte Reich“ von Anna Seghers, den sie Anfang 1939 während ihres Pariser Exils in drei Teilen in der Zeitschrift Die Neue Weltbühne veröffentlichte. Darin übersetzt sie historische Tragödie von Flucht und der Angewiesenheit von Migrierenden auf Pässe und Visa in eine satirische Geschichte: die Einreise einer Gruppe von Emigrant*innen in ein utopisches weil passloses Land, das Elfte Reich. Die Erzählung entfaltet eine Mischung aus historischer Positionierung, politischer Kritik und phantastischer Erzählung, die einerseits dem Roman Transit gleichsam als Groteske historisch vorausgeht, andererseits in vielen Dimensionen in der von Migrationsbewegungen bestimmten Gegenwart widerhallt. Das Essay geht dem wohl unvollendet gebliebenen Text „Die Reise ins Elfte Reich“ selbst und seiner Geschichte nach, jedoch auch Konstellationen seiner Aktualisierung.

The provocative exhibition daHEIM – Einsichten in flüchtige Leben (daHEIM – Glances into Fugitive Lives) ran from 2016 to 2017 at the Museum of European Cultures in Dahlem, Berlin.[1] Conceptualized and curated by the artist collective KUNSTASYL, the exhibition reframes discourses around representations of migration in Germany, particularly but not exclusively those in museums, and asks: what is the difference between being at home and being accommodated? This article follows this question to demonstrate how key tropes—arrival, foreignness, violence, tokenization—that were endemic to earlier exhibitions about migration in Germany become dislodged through more complex depictions of community, collectivity, and authorship in temporary exhibitions on migration in the mid-2000s to late 2010s. Specifically, by analyzing the exhibition daHEIM – Einsichten in flüchtige Leben, I argue KUNSTASYL centers a practice of translocal activism which retranslates and satirizes contemporary ideas of nationalism. Through daHEIM – Einsichten in flüchtige Leben, the group proposes that collective artistic production and participatory curation prove transformative—as much for the curators as for the museum institution, visitors, and the broader representational landscape. Tracing the contours of daHEIM reveals this mode of translocal activism rooted in principles of collaboration, participation, and collectivity which imagines­—if not enacts—what it means to be ‘at home’ in contemporary Germany rather than simply housed or accommodated.

 
[1] English title as given by the museum.

Based on the author’s personal experience with physical migration across national boundaries, this paper explores the concept of migration as a metaphor for the crossing of other  boundaries in the learning and using of German and other languages: linguistic, cultural, epistemic, disciplinary, literary, and communicative. Key concepts in this migration are: translanguaging, transknowledging, symbolic competence, and literariness.  Developing a migrant mindset involves reinstating historicity and subjectivity to the foreign language educational enterprise. 

This article presents the life of Iranian screenwriter and director Sohrab Shahid Saless (1944-1998) and his transnational film work, which was created as a result of multiple exiles, i.e., in Iran, the Federal Republic of Germany and the former Czechoslovakia. Saless is an important auteur filmmaker, who was part of and a driving force behind the Iranian New Wave in the first half of the 1970s. After his exile to West Berlin in 1974, he, who spoke Persian, German, English, French, and later Slovak, became part of the New German Cinema and was able to make a total of 13 feature films and documentaries between 1975 and 1991. Despite numerous national and international awards and his admission to the Academy of Arts in West Berlin, Saless retained his position as an outsider in the West German film and television landscape.

This article is based on the three-part monograph Die langen Ferien des Sohrab Shahid Saless. Annäherungen an ein Leben und Werk (The Long Vacation of Sohrab Shahid Saless: Approaches to a Life and Work), published in German in 2023 by Iranian-born Germanist Behrang Samsami. His publication is part of a rediscovery and reappraisal of the “great unknown of New German Cinema” that has been underway since 2016. This process is multifaceted: not only are Saless’ films being restored and digitized, making them accessible to an interested audience, but retrospectives and conferences are also being held. Finally, a series of books is also being published. This article also discusses this positive development, which is taking place not only in Germany, but also in English-speaking countries and Iran.

Language is never neutral. In Germany, placement in DaZ classes (Deutsch als Zweitsprache) signals who belongs in mainstream education and who is marked as an outsider. I was exempted from DaZ, a privilege that shaped my schooling yet came at the cost of my family languages remaining largely inaccessible. Drawing on personal experiences and my work on the oral history project Dersim 1937/38, this essay examines how translation mediates memory, trauma, and power. The movement of testimonies across Zazakî/Kurdish, Turkish and German reveals that linguistic practice is inseparable from histories of displacement, repression and survival. Language, whether in the classroom or the archive, is never innocent; It is a marker of inclusion and a field where power operates both in visible and subtle ways.

So-called “artificial intelligence” (AI) brings forth a new category of memory which recursively generates texts, speeches, images and sounds that can resemble “authentic” documents. In the automation of expression and representation using the massive data accumulated on the Web, the question of the arts, far from being anecdotal, has become consubstantial with the effects of current statistical models. What emerges is a new realism that destabilizes both past archives and future perspectives. The counterfactual nature of this alien realism unsettles the foundation upon which we previously established our relation to truth. The political consequences of this evolution have been successfully exploited by fascists forces. Progressive movements need a better understanding of counterfactual realism in order to stop losing battles. 

Translation of excerpt from Alexander von Humboldt's Examen critique 

Translator's introduction to Alexander von Humboldt’s Examen critique de l’histoire de la géographie du Nouveau Continent et des progrès de l’astronomie nautique aux quinzième et seizième siècles (1836-1839)

Translation of Anna Seghers' "Reise ins Elfte Reich" by Ambika S. Athreya

Translator's Introduction to "Journey to the Eleventh Reich" 

Translation of Rafik Schami's "The Book of the Future" and "Enrichment"

A brief introduction to the English translation of Rafik Schami's "The Book of the Future" and "Enrichment"

Translation of "The Inheritance" by Safae el Khannoussi

Translator's Introduction to "The Inheritance" by Safae el Khannoussi

Moving beyond familiar critiques of multiculturalism, Zambon shows how model minority figures—particularly racialized athletes, entertainment professionals, and public personalities—are instrumentalized to affirm a Judeo-Christian-coded version of a German Leitkultur, while displacing structural questions of race, belonging, and power. Integration here emerges as the central object of critique, a biopolitical regime of disciplinary sites that demand affective loyalty, individual productivity, and public visibility without extending full national recognition.

This article explores Maryan S. Maryan’s experimental film Ecce Homo (1975), as both a site of Holocaust remembrance and a radical intervention into the aesthetics and ethics of witnessing. Positioned against the backdrop of canonical Holocaust representations—from early documentaries to Shoah—Maryan’s film emerges as a self-initiated, transnational memory work that anticipates key features of the memory film. Through re-enactment, fragmented narrative, and visual collage, Ecce Homo aligns with Stella Bruzzi’s concept of approximation, presenting history not as fixed truth but as open to rupture and reinvestigation. At the same time, the film functions as an activist document that extends its testimonial impulse beyond the Holocaust, forging links with global histories of violence and oppression. The article situates Maryan’s translingual voice and diasporic biography within broader debates about trauma, documentary form, and the politics of visibility.

In seiner Monographie Rundfunk als Hörkunst (1936/1979) attestiert Rudolf Arnheim dem Rundfunk ein miteinander zusammenhängendes ästhetisches und pädagogisches Potential: Zwar stimmt es, wie die Forschung verschiedentlich unterstrichen hat, dass er damit parallel zu Bertolt Brecht die erzieherische Möglichkeit des Rundfunks betont, die Zuhörer:innen zu aktivieren und zur Selbsttätigkeit anzuregen. Allerdings blieb bislang unbeachtet, dass es Arnheim dabei in entscheidender Differenz zu Brecht nicht darum geht, Hörer:innen in Beziehung zueinander zu setzen. Stattdessen verfolgt Arnheim, so die These des vorliegenden Beitrags, im Gegenteil ein pädagogisch-ästhetisches Programm der Isolation. Darüber hinaus fallen bei Brecht Aktivierung und Aktion bereits in der Rezeption des Hörspiels zusammen, wie dies am Beispiel seines Stückes Der Lindberghflug darzulegen sein wird, während bei Arnheim jede Form der Aktion der Zuhörer:innen erst nach der Rezeption des Rundfunkbeitrags erfolgen soll. Der Beitrag möchte damit nicht nur Differenzen zwischen Arnheims und Brechts Überlegungen zum Rundfunk herausarbeiten, sondern darüber hinaus auch die in der Forschung vertretene Lesart von Arnheims Bewertung des passiven Hörens korrigieren. Dieses wird bei ihm nämlich weder als gut noch als ambivalent, sondern grundlegend als schlecht beurteilt. Damit rückt ein interessanter Aspekt in Arnheims Radiotheorie in den Mittelpunkt: Der Rundfunk, so gilt es darzulegen, schafft für Arnheim eine Rezeptionssituation, in der jedes Subjekt im Selbstversuch Aufschluss darüber erlangen kann, ob es über ein Mindestmaß an Autonomie verfügt. 

Drawing on New Materialism this paper explores the materiality of bodies in Terézia Moras Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (2009) and the question of agency. As New Materialists emphasize, the construction of material bodies is related to the interaction between the material and discursive. This paper suggests that the body functions as an experimental space in the Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent where the extremes of reality and virtuality, acceleration and stagnation within modern capitalism, as well as between the inner and real world, come into play. Taking into account the new developments in the global market and technology, the novel shows how material and discursive interactions contribute to the social and communicative constraints faced by individuals in a neoliberal society.