Editors' Introduction

Leafing through the last three volumes of Women in German Yearbook, we note the wide range of articles, interviews, and focus sections, while at the same time it is evident that common themes recur in each, namely, questions of identity, identity politics, and identity formation in post-Wall Germany in particular, and in today's globalized world in general.

We live in challenging times of profound geopolitical transformation. The forecast of a peaceful and relatively predictable "posthistorical" world, popular at the end of the Cold War, stands in stark contrast to our post-9/11 global realities, which include international terrorism and the economic shift of power from the West to the East. This shift was well under way when, in 2007, the housing bubble burst in the United States. The global financial and economic collapse that followed in 2008 brought about a severe debt crisis in the Western world. After more than six decades, in which the European Union's process of integration has steadily evolved, today its foundations are trembling and the eurozone's "democratic deficit" (Sivy) is threatening the EU's future. Germany, the EU's largest economy with its 2011 unemployment rate of 6.7 percent at a two-decade low, is the European "paymaster" (Czuczka and Talev). Chancellor Angela Merkel's tough stance on strict austerity measures in exchange for financial aid is simultaneously appreciated and loathed. During the G8 Summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, on 18-19 June 2012, Merkel told the press that the nations of the eurozone "now have the crisis-fighting tools and financial firewalls they need" to combat the problem (Czuczka and Talev).

Whereas Tom Friedman thought to identify a number of "flatteners" that would level the global playing field—linking the fall of the Wall and the demise of communist Europe to the rapid rise of digital technologies and the global expansion of e-commerce—walls are once again being erected to keep out who and what is undesirable and to keep in who and what belongs. In this vein, Professor Alain Supiot remarks:

In a situation when one can no longer express himself through democratic means in the economic field, the deep sense of social injustice perceived in all European countries can easily be diverted to hating each other and rejecting the foreigner. Originally of socio-economic nature, these conflicts become identity oriented.

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The reappearance of walls is rattling the core values of democracy; and despite the ever-increasing possibilities for interconnectedness on a global scale, the European financial crisis has had a negative impact on the still fragile notion of a European identity. In fact, the rift between the people from those EU states in economic turmoil (i.e., Greece, Ireland, Spain, Italy) and from those who finance the aid packages, in other words, the rift between the perceived haves and have-nots, is palpable as the newspaper article titled "From Nazi to Terminator, Europe's Media Target Merkel" documents (Chambers). Moreover, the EU debt crisis poses a significant risk to the American economy. On his campaign trail, President Barack Obama referred to it as "the cloud that's hanging over [the United States] from the Atlantic" (qtd. in Czuczka and Talev) and has the potential to derail his reelection in November 2012.

In light of these US presidential elections (and Merkel will stand for reelection in 2013), we are pleased to publish in this volume Angelica Fenner's perceptive interview of the filmmaker Branwen Okpako, who released her documentary The Education of Auma Obama (Die Geschichte der Auma Obama) in 2011. The subject of the film is President Obama's half sister Auma, who was born and raised in Kenya (she shares her father with the president) and studied film in Berlin during the early 1990s together with Branwen Okpako, whose father is Nigerian and whose mother is Welsh. Fenner's "The Hybrid Approach" provides answers not only to Okpako's making of this film and others but also to her and Obama's views on identity formation and questions of race and gender in today's globalized world with particular emphasis...