This paper examines how Feo Aladağ's Die Fremde (2010) simultaneously perpetuates and undermines stereotypes of Turkish-German gender constructs and in doing so engages in a form of othering that, drawing on a long-established discourse in Turkish-German cinema, conflates the Other in terms of gender with the Other in terms of ethnicity and culture. Lauded for eschewing well-worn clichés of traditional Turkish-Muslim patriarchy, Die Fremde represents diasporic identity construction and with it clashes of culture among firstand second-generation Turkish migrants in Germany. Does Aladağ manage to escape the binary economies implied by tropes such as the oppressed Turkish woman, the German saviour and the Turkish oppressor; and do the filmic devices she uses subvert a ghettoization of those values that deviate from the Leitkultur of the majority culture? With the stigmatization of Muslim men emerging as the flipside of female oppression, Die Fremde, I will argue, goes beyond recreating earlier stereotypes and instead shines a critical light on how such othering is an integral part of German national postwar narrative.

This article focuses on the negotiation of borders in Anna Seghers ' novel Transit (1944) and Christian Petzold's film of the same name (2018). Seghers' Exilroman, set in the 1940s, describes the torment of a nameless refugee from Germany waiting to escape Marseille, one of the last open ports in a Europe ravaged by National Socialism. Seventy years later, Petzold's film delves into the history of displacement and nationalism in Europe by setting the fascist persecution in the 1940s amongst the refugee "crisis" in the present day. Drawing on a trans-period approach which is already present in Seghers' book, the Berlin School director presents expulsion and migration as timeless phenomena, grounding his film in the historical movement of populations across borders. Both authors construe the crossing of borders as a loss of identity and alienation, but offer different solutions, if any, to what they perceive as an existential as well as a political predicament. After providing some background to each work and author, I will analyse Petzold's diachronic adaptation of Seghers' novel before demonstrating that he deploys an understanding of migration inherent in the earlier text. Considering both authors' representation of displacement as the loss, not only of the home, but also of the self, I will then examine how their coping strategies involve creating and sharing narratives, yet diverge in fundamental ways: Seghers' selfreliance and international solidarity is juxtaposed with Petzold's submitting to the absurdity of the transit space. Finally, I will argue that the state of crisis experienced by Seghers' and Petzold's protagonists is tied to the enforcement of borders both within and around Europe, making this an enduring humanitarian as well as artistic issue which needs to be addressed in order to protect the rich yet contested multicultural community which has historically shaped, and continues to shape, this continent. Negotiating Borders in Anna Seghers' and Christian Petzold's Transit Interfaces, 47 | 2022Set in France after the German invasion of 1940, Seghers' novel is the story of an unnamed narrator who has successively escaped a German and a French camp, and has resorted to living with false papers. He is asked to deliver important letters to a Parisbased exiled writer by the name of Weidel. Weidel, it turns out, has taken his own life, leaving behind a beautiful ex-wife, a visa for Mexico and an unfinished manuscript. Having appropriated the documents, the narrator moves on to Marseille, a town full of people like himself, desperate to flee from the Nazis. He decides to assume Weidel's identity in order to secure his escape route out of Europe. When he comes across the writer's estranged wife Marie, now with a new man, a doctor, the narrator falls deeply in love with her. Without disclosing her husband's demise, he tries to arrange matters so that she can leave with him, whilst concealing that he has taken over the other man's identity and visa. After many trials and tribulations, just as they are abo...

This article focuses on Julie Paucker and Robert Schuster's ‘MALALAI – Die afghanische Jungfrau von Orléans’ (2017), paying special attention to the constructions and contestations of gender and nation in this recent re‐working of Schiller's Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801). Paucker radically re‐configures Schiller's play, whose engagement with the concept of nation allowed subsequent interpretations to view it as a nationalist text depicting a symbolic figure for a German nation that did not as yet exist, by centring on nineteenth‐century Afghan folk hero Malalai of Maiwand and placing her in dialogue with her Franco‐German counterpart. Set against past and present conflict in Afghanistan, migration to Europe, and the ‘refugee crisis’ in Germany, ‘MALALAI’ engages two geographically and culturally disparate myths. Whilst Paucker's version of Schiller's text elaborates an intertextual negotiation with the past, her transnational adaptation of a national narrative undermines and transcends the nationalism and Eurocentrism which have marked much of modern Jeanne d'Arc‐reception to date. Through its multilingual and multinational politics of performance, ‘MALALAI’ resists re‐writing Schiller's Jungfrau as an example of a major literature, positing instead a centre/periphery shift as a way of attending to historical and political development on a global level.

This article will examine the representation of religion in Anna Seghers’ radio play Der Prozess der Jeanne d'Arc zu Rouen 1431 (1937) and Bertolt Brecht's subsequent adaptation of this text for the stage (1952). While religiosity is central to the identity of the medieval heroine, Seghers chooses to communicate this feature to modern audiences in a ‘lacunary’ way that sees Jeanne refusing to elaborate on the details of her belief throughout the play. The protagonist's faith creates a distance from contemporary listeners and spectators as well as from characters within the text, but when absolute commitment to her private belief results in Jeanne's execution, this moves the people at large to rebel against their oppressors. Thus Seghers’ Jeanne emerges as a figure of political resistance who draws on her private faith to bring about social change. In Brecht, the voices that move Jeanne to withstand oppressive forces are revealed to be those of the people rather than an expression of the divine. For Seghers and Brecht, the twentieth‐century relevance of Jeanne's characteristic religiosity, depicted differently by each author, lies in the political transformation which it can inspire both within the text and outside it.

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