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TRANSIT 8.2: Foreword

We are pleased to announce the publication of the second installment of texts in our201213 volume, including a series of articles on Participatory Media and Public

Memory. The impetus for this volume was our conviction that changing mediascapesand forms of communication are increasingly challenging traditional conceptions of thearchive and the public sphere. However, our juxtaposition of the two categories in thevolumes title are intended not only to reflect the impact of new media on contemporarypractices of remembrance, but also to raise questions in migration and mobility studiesabout the relation of memory and media from historical and theoretical perspectives.

Jeffrey Jurgens A Wall Victim from the West: Migration, German Division, andMultidirectional Memory in Kreuzberg leverages Michael Rothbergs concept ofmultidirectional memory in order to examine the practices of commemorationsurrounding the death of etin Mert, the five-year-old son of a Turkish guest worker

family, in 1975. As Jurgens shows, the dominant representation of the incident against thebackdrop of Cold War politics intersected with competing memories of migration andimperialism around the site of the boys death. Hence, the question of who counts as aMaueropfer not only indicates an aporia in the dominant public memory of the BerlinWall, which long failed to recognize non-German migrants and their descendants. Thedynamics of remembering and forgetting Mert also presents some unexpectedpossibilities for re-thinking collective affiliations through practices of rendering the pastvisible or invisible.

Kaarina Nikunens Re-Imagining the Past in Transnational Online Communitiescompares the construction of the past in three different kinds of online sites: a Kurdishcollective-memory site, a German-Kurdish online community, and a German-Finnishonline community. Nikunens article complicates binary assumptions about the effects ofdiasporic media use, a form of connectivity that tends to be viewed as either leading toincreased isolation or enhancing a sense of hybridity and transnational community.Updating Jan Assmanns concept of communicative memory in light of research onnew media, Nikunen analyzes the tendency of these online memory sites to treat memoryas something open, procedural, and always subject to negotiation and revision, therebyhighlighting the necessity of allowing for differences and discontinuities in theconstruction of the past online.

Lizzie Stewarts Countermemory and the (Turkish-)German Theatrical Archive:Reading the Documentary Remains of Emine Sevgi zdamars Karagz in Alamania

(1986) shows how the understanding of the archive in literary studies can benefit fromfurther engagement with problems of documentation manifest in theatre history. If EmineSevgi zdamars well-studied writings present a form of countermemory to officialhistory (Azade Seyhan), thereby challenging the stability of a cultural archive, then thefragmentary photographic documentation of zdamars less-studied plays offers a furtherform of countermemory to the written records of the play. The aim of Stewarts paper,however, is not only to expand our understanding of the play through examination of

Transit: A Journal of Travel, Migration and Multiculturalism in the German-speaking World by the University of California, Berkeley. ISSN 1551-9627. http://german.berkeley.edu/transit/

http://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/stewart.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/stewart.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/stewart.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/stewart.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/nikunen.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/nikunen.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/jurgens.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/jurgens.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/jurgens.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/CFP/Participatory%20Media%20and%20Public%20Memory.pdfhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/CFP/Participatory%20Media%20and%20Public%20Memory.pdfhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/stewart.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/stewart.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/stewart.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/stewart.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/stewart.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/stewart.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/nikunen.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/nikunen.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/jurgens.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/jurgens.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/jurgens.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/jurgens.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/CFP/Participatory%20Media%20and%20Public%20Memory.pdfhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/CFP/Participatory%20Media%20and%20Public%20Memory.pdf

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images along with the written record, but even more significantly to raise questions aboutthe institutional and aesthetic contexts of theatrical production in Germany, a problemthat speaks to current debates about the function of the theatre as a public institution.

Questions about the ephemerality of the past and institutions of remembrance areintegral to Enis Baturs Lost: Black Briefcase, translated by Oya Erez. This short text,

whose title refers to the famous suitcases of Gyrgy Lukcs (eventually found) andWalter Benjamin (still lost), is an exploration of the forces governing the uncanny returnof artifacts and objects from the depths of history, an especially poignant phenomenon forscholars of Ottoman culture, as Batur describes it. Ultimately, the indiscriminate logic ofhistory may govern memory and forgetting, since history, as Batur puts it, forgets andmakes one forget one masterpiece in its entirety and another one in parts. But once in awhile, it cracks open its record book ever so slightly.

In the spirit of this observation, then, the topic of Participatory Media and PublicMemory will remain open for further contributions. We also invite further submissionson our recent topics of Vibrationshintergrund, Orienting Europe, or any of the other

topics that have been discussed in previous issues ofTRANSIT.We also continue to invite rolling submissions related to the themes of our journal and,

in this respect, are pleased to publish Yasemin Mohammads Alwans Quest of Home:Re-Mapping Heimat and the Nation in Hussain Al-Mozanys Der Marschlnder:BagdadBeirutBerlin. This close reading of Al-Mozanys novel makes a welcomecontribution to studies of transnational literature, which have tended to focus on Turkish-German protagonists, with its analysis of Iraqi-German literary production. AsMohammads analysis shows, the negotiation of belonging and nationhood in the novelindicates the intersection of transnational memory discourses, such as the memory of theHolocaust, Romantic nationalism, and the idea of the Iraqi exile and asylum-seeker.

These articles are complemented by three book reviews, which are intended tointroduce our readership to recent scholarship on migration and mobility, and to sparkfurther analysis of these topics: Priscilla Laynes review ofEuropean Others: QueeringEthnicity in Postnational Europe, by Fatima El-Tayeb; Christina Butlers review ofBeyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition, by Yasemin Yildiz; andLindsay Preseaus review ofKiezdeutsch: Ein neuer Dialekt entsteht, by Heike Wiese.

In putting together this volume on Participatory Media and Public Memory, webecame increasingly aware of a tension between theory and practice in terms of ourquestions about reading practices, copright issues, and questions of authorship, as well asassumptions about the finality of projects and the traditional publication format ofacademic journals. Our current thinking about the shape of TRANSIT has been animatedby recent studies in the Digital Humanities and, in this respect, we would like to drawfurther attention to Deniz Gktrks call for papers for the MLA: Artistic and ScholarlyPractice in the Digital Age (deadline: March 9).

We hope you enjoy the second installment of texts in our 201213 volume, and lookforward to continuing the discussion.

Erik Born and Alex Lambrow (University of California, Berkeley)

http://german.berkeley.edu/transit/Artistic%20and%20Scholarly%20Practice%20in%20the%20Digital%20Age.pdfhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/Artistic%20and%20Scholarly%20Practice%20in%20the%20Digital%20Age.pdfhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/Artistic%20and%20Scholarly%20Practice%20in%20the%20Digital%20Age.pdfhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/preseau.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/butler.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/layne.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/layne.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/layne.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/layne.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/layne.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/layne.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/mohammad.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/mohammad.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/mohammad.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2012/articles/ozdogan1.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2012/articles/ozdogan1.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2012/articles/orienting-europe.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2012/articles/orienting-europe.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/erez.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/erez.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/Artistic%20and%20Scholarly%20Practice%20in%20the%20Digital%20Age.pdfhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/Artistic%20and%20Scholarly%20Practice%20in%20the%20Digital%20Age.pdfhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/Artistic%20and%20Scholarly%20Practice%20in%20the%20Digital%20Age.pdfhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/Artistic%20and%20Scholarly%20Practice%20in%20the%20Digital%20Age.pdfhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/preseau.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/preseau.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/butler.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/butler.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/layne.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/layne.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/layne.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/layne.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/mohammad.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/mohammad.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/mohammad.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/mohammad.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/mohammad.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/mohammad.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2012/articles/orienting-europe.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2012/articles/orienting-europe.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2012/articles/ozdogan1.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2012/articles/ozdogan1.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/erez.htmlhttp://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2013/erez.html