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Previous scholarship on the final installment in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Istanbul-Berlin trilogy has issued largely along two trajectories, pursuing questions of migration and transnationalism on the one hand and German memory politics on the other. What has been overlooked in the process is the text’s unique interplay of genres, voices, and spatial metaphors that turns the more traditional thematics of migration into a metaphorics of migration. This article argues that Özdamar’s novel represents migration neither as social question nor as existential dilemma, but rather as a grand metaphor for desire, and argues for a reading of Seltsame Sterne not as a migration story but as a love story. The narrative coalesces around the pursuit of an extravagant imagining of love in which the multiple valences of love become, through their very repetition, a guiding textual metaphor that both contains and exceeds the boundaries of personal emotions and experiences. This radical reframing of migration and exile through the prism of love and desire points toward an articulation of human experience more broadly—a provocation that constitutes nothing less than a reclamation of political subjectivity for those marked by explicit migration experiences. With the powerful assertion of self-presence provided by the intimacy of the diary form, the text stakes its claim to a place in the middle of the cultural, linguistic, and geographic lifeworld within which its author/narrator situates herself. Staging her autobiographical narrating subject as author of her own diaristic notes, living a life between and among the texts that surround her, Özdamar claims her own place as completely imbricated within the world of European letters. Ultimately, this twin presentation of cultural creation both as a narrative theme and as object asserts a uniquely re-situated “German” writing subject.

Graduate education in the humanities struggles with weighty traditions, constrained (fiscal) resources, and a legacy of elitism and cultural homogeneity. As the makeup of graduate students becomes ever more diverse in terms of income, ethnicity, sexuality, citizenship, and disability, graduate programs are working through the challenges and opportunities non-traditional students bring to light. An openness to rethinking the mission of German Studies at Michigan State University (MSU) -- a large Midwestern, land-grant institution -- has made possible a series of specific changes, including the hybrid dissertation, faculty-student research collaboration, uniquely transdisciplinary approaches, and explicit preparation for non-academic career pathways. In this conversation, a professor and a doctoral student in the German Studies program at MSU reflect on these reforms in their program, and embed them within a broader framework of questions facing graduate education more generally: (1) the changing face of the discipline of German Studies, and indeed of German culture as an object of our study, (2) issues raised by the phenomenon of globalization and the emergence of Global Studies as an area of critical inquiry, and (3) the changing needs, knowledges, and aspirations of students today. We close with a call to embrace the promise of change.

Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) Donna Harsch has produced a nuanced study of East [...]