Inclusive National Belonging Intercultural Performances in the “World-Open” Germany Bruce Snedegar Burnside Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2020 © 2020 Bruce Snedegar Burnside All Rights Reserved Abstract Inclusive National Belonging Intercultural Performances in the “World-Open” Germany Bruce Snedegar Burnside This dissertation explores what it means to belong in Berlin and Germany following a significant change in the citizenship laws in 2000, which legally reoriented the law away from a “German” legal identity rooted in blood-descent belonging to a more territorially-based conception. The primary goal is to understand attempts at performing inclusive belonging by the state and other actors, with mostly those of “foreign heritage” at the center, and these attempts’ pitfalls, opportunities, challenges, and strange encounters. It presents qualitative case studies to draw attention to interculturality and its related concepts as they manifest in a variety of contexts. This study presents a performance analysis of a ceremony at a major national museum project and utilizes a discursive analysis of the national and international media surrounding a unique controversy about soccer and Islam. The study moves to a peripheral neighborhood in Berlin and a marginal subject, a migration background Gymnasium student, who featured prominently in an expose about failing schools, using interviews and a text analysis to present competing narratives. Finally it examines the intimate, local view of a self-described “intercultural” after- school center aimed at migration-background girls, drawing extensively on ethnographic interviews and media generated by the girls.These qualitative encounters help illuminate how an abstract and often vague set of concepts within the intercultural paradigm becomes tactile when encountering those for whom it was intended. Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………….……ii Dedication……………………………………………………………………………………..…iv Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 2: Humboldt Forum………………………………………………………………….….43 Chapter 3: A Fatwa for German Soccer……………………………………………………….…77 Chapter 4: Narratives of Neukölln…………………………………………………………..…113 Chapter 5: MÄDEA: After-School Center……………………………………………………..165 Chapter 6: Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….…210 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………227 Appendices: A. Methods………………………………………………………….……………………….…245 B. Map of Central Berlin…………………………………………………………………….…256 C. Berlin Boroughs Map……………………………………………………………………..…257 D. Fatwa for the Soccer Player - Arabic Version……………………………………………….258 E. Fatwa for the Soccer Player - German Version……………………………………………… 260 i Acknowledgments I would like to thank all the many people in Germany who participated in my study. I am grateful because they shared their time, perspectives and patience with me. Their willingness to speak with me and share their stories and lives made this dissertation possible. Thank you to the Humboldt University’s European Ethnography department and Technical University of Berlin’s Center for Metropolitan Studies for welcoming as a guest and offering me suggestions and support. I am deeply grateful to my advisor Dr. Katherine Ewing for her guidance and knowledge over the course of this project. It was her work which originally helped inspire me to become an anthropologist and I have endeavored to live up to that dream. I thank Dr. Hervé Varenne for sharing his knowledge with me and his leadership in our program. Thank you to Dr. Lesley Bartlett for her mentorship during my first years at Teachers College. I would also like to thank Dr. Petra Kuppinger for sharing her insights with me and showing me a corner of Stuttgart. I would also like to thank Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod and Dr. Claudio Lomnitz for their guidance as I took my first steps as a graduate student and their on- going support as I continued. Thank you to Dr. Paige West for her critical support of me as a teacher at Barnard College. I am also grateful to Dr. Hope Leichter and Dr. Nicholas Limerick for their thoughtful readings of this manuscript. I am fortunate to have had many readers and supporters. Thanks to Jill Siegel for hearing out my ideas and offering her feedback through the many iterations of this project. Thank you to ii Sarah Montgomery-Glinski, Darlene Dubuisson, and Prashanth Kuganathan for their support in and out of the classroom. Thank you to Melanie Hibbert, Damian Harris, and my parents, Barbara and Robert, for their unwavering support and enthusiasm. Thank you most of all to my wife Julie, it would not have been possible without her. iii For Julie, Nader, and Gwendolyn Marie iv Chapter 1: Introduction The Mitte neighborhood of Berlin, Germany has the happy fortune of containing many of the nation’s most distinguished and famous museums: the Bode, the Altes and Neues Museums, and the Pergamon as well as the construction site of future Humboldt Forum (a topic of this study). However, in the northern reaches of the quarter where it borders the neighborhood of Wedding one can visit the humble Mitte Museum. It is a museum devoted to the borough itself. Since Mitte combined with its smaller sister neighborhoods of Wedding and Tiergarten in 2001 into the larger super borough (also known as Mitte)1, the museum graciously includes all of these neighborhoods in its subtitle and, of course, in its exhibits and collections. During the early days of my fieldwork in a Wedding after-school center (which features in the final chapter), I was getting to know the neighborhood and visited the small museum. It is located on the busy Pankstrasse in a former nineteenth-century yellow-brick school building, somewhere between austere and charming. Though the museum was very much devoted to the Mitte borough (with its newer additions), it was a borough that had been located relatively recently in the crossroads of history. The Berlin Wall ran a few blocks away (the school building was located on the Western side, within Wedding), which alone left the small museum with no shortage of material and ideas to display to the public. The old Mitte neighborhood had sat within the communist German Democratic Republic and Soviet sphere. However, its newer additions of Wedding and Tiergarten belonged to the Federal Republic and the Allies. In its current super form, it includes the massive 1 Please see Appendix A and B for maps of central Berlin and its boroughs. 1 Tiergarten park, the federal government borough, the Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden, Potsdamer Platz and even Checkpoint Charlie at its southern edge. All the same, the schoolhouse neighborhood museum remained relatively restrained. It dutifully displayed its collections of swords, scythes, Prussian helmets and black and white photos of long-destroyed buildings that originated in its days as a so-called Heimat, or hometown, museum. It even reserved a room as a mock-up of one of the building’s former classrooms with wooden desks and charming pedagogical wall-hangings of a Chinese tea farm operation and a North African oasis. Nevertheless, it also could not resist the occasional lengthy textual explanation of the borough to its inhabitants and visitors. One such text was titled “Immigration” (Zuwanderung), which drew me in, as immigrants were what had drawn me to the after-school girls center in the neighborhood initially and remained a keystone as I moved through different case studies considered throughout this work. The text, running to a couple of thousand words, made some expected and unexpected claims. In the expected column, it began with the platitude that “Berlin is a city of immigrants” and continued by pointing out that “about 26% of the residents [of the enlarged Mitte Borough] were as of December 2000 of foreign heritage.” This proportion was within the well- acknowledged statistics of Berlin’s make-up. However, it was tinged with slightly awkward politically (somewhat)-correct language, with its reclassification of a quarter of its residents from the charged status of “foreigner,” as might be found elsewhere, to the slightly more palatable of “foreign heritage.” However, the next two sentences of the text are unexpected. We learn that “those not born locally [Nicht am Ort Geborene] always played a significant role in Berlin. Even the city’s 2 founders were Rhenish or Flemish merchants.” This assertion referring to the late 12th-century founding of the city by merchants is hardly controversial, but positioning them as the first “immigrants” is an unexpected strategic maneuver. The presumably German-speaking merchants are (according to the text’s logic) merely the beginning of a cascading cast of arrivals from elsewhere. The text goes on in its eleven paragraphs to describe the arrival of “immigrants” through the centuries, including “Hollanders,” “Jews,” “Huguenots,” “Flemings” (again), “Hollanders” (again), Bohemians,” “Swiss.” Others came from the “German regions” of Wurttemberg, Saxony and Mecklenburg, Vogtland, Brandenburg, Silesia, Pomerania, Saxony (again), and also Russian Poland and Austrian Galicia. The October Revolution gave “immigration” from Russia a new boost with the arrival of 360,000 refugees, and “immigration” had always included many “Jews” from other parts of the country and abroad. The “National- Socialist dictatorship” brought slave labor (not “true immigration” in the text’s wording)