The National Thing: Fabricating a German Essence in Multikulti Berlin

At least since the country’s reunification, and with what has meanwhile become an almost ritualized repetition, panic has time and again hit Germany’s political discourse in the face of seemingly scandalous expressions of xenophobic ultra-nationalism – whether the violence of neo-Nazi street gangs, the bigoted propaganda of extreme right parties, or the odd statements of certain presumably respectable politicians. This, against the background of stormy debates about citizenship reforms, immigration laws, and asylum policies.

In this presentation, rather than looking at such blatant nationalisms, I examine instead the host of initiatives that have mushroomed under their shadow in Berlin as elsewhere to confront racism, to facilitate cultural integration, to promote intercultural tolerance, and in general to smoothen the interface between the national and its other(s). While presumably antithetical in their discourse and praxis to national essentializations, urban intercultural projects, often construed as pertaining to “civil society,” in fact reveal themselves as privileged locations for the staging of difference through encounters with and projections of otherness. Based on ongoing ethnographic research in several urban initiatives of intercultural integration, I ask how, in performing the labor of intercultural integration in Multikulti Berlin, the German national Thing is renegotiated, resignified, and refabricated. I reflect on the cultural and political stakes that animate this redrawing of a national imaginary and outline its emergent figuration.