Empowering Memory and Movement: Thinking and Working across Borders

2. Resident Alien/Dual Citizen

2 Resident Alien/Dual Citizen Crossing borders also always means becoming displaced and becoming a stranger.1 It means critically questioning our own culture and nationality. Because of the complexity of the topic I will try to elucidate the fragmentary and ambivalent character of any national identity, be it German or otherwise, and I will do so through several biographical starts. My first concern is not with individual German identity; rather I am trying to problematize “national identity” which is not sufficiently problematized in feminist identity discourses and I will try to do so through a critical confrontation with my own experiences. What feminist theory as well as studies of racism and nationalism have pointed out about notions of race, class, and gender holds true also for national identity. I agree with Helma Lutz that the concepts of “race” and “gender” [are] not real existing phenomena, but social constructions that point to a social process of establishing meaning. This means that people do not belong “by nature” to a particular “race,” “ethnicity,” or social “gender,” but that their associated meanings are assigned to individuals and groups. These meanings are also not absolutely fixed. . . . It depends on the particular social relations of domination whether and how these constructions expanded, radiate, change, and are regarded as acceptable.2 1. First published as “Resident Alien: Dazugehören und doch fremd bleiben,” in Zwischen-Räume: Deutsche feministische Theologinnen im Ausland, edited by Katharina von Kellenbach and Susanne Scholz, 69–84. Theologische Frauenforschung in Europa 1. Münster: Lit, 2000. I want to thank Rev. Dr. Linda Maloney for a basic translation of this article. 49 Hence a critical feminist the*logical analysis seeks to question how the social and religious meaning of national identity is produced and to reflect critically on the “social process” of the feminist the*logical production of meaning on the basis of systematically reflected experience.3 A German Feminist The*logy? Xenophobia, white racism, and anti-Semitism are obvious, but they are insufficiently problematized in feminist the*logy and women’s studies, where dogmatic questions such as Christology are often the focus. Add to this that the need for a German feminist the*logy in the wake of the New Right and the identity politics of emancipatory movements seems to be increasing. Since the German reunification, hostility to foreigners, racism, and right-wing extremism have risen sharply. Until the late 1980s, I was convinced that such a crass nationalism as experienced every day in the United States was no longer possible in Germany. But in the 1990s I learned better. The uninhibited revival of Nazi prejudices among the German public, for example, was drastically demonstrated for me in 1997 when I traveled with my daughter, who was very interested in her Jewish-German history, from Berlin to visit monuments to Jewish victims in the former DDR. In Stralsund, the memorial for the victims of the Shoah had been defaced. The Hebrew memorial text had been smeared over with big letters reading “Juden Raus! [Jews out!],” and over the German translation was lettered “Türken Raus! [Turks out!].” When we asked the guide about it he shrugged his shoulders and said: “It’s no use removing the graffiti; they’ll just be put back again.” The reunification of Germany, which I followed excitedly day and night on television in the United States, was a miracle to me. I had never believed that there would ever again be an undivided Germany. But while I, like many other white Christian Germans, celebrated this “miracle,” black and Jewish Germans4 2. Helma Lutz, “Sind wir immer noch fremd? Konstruktionen von Fremdheit in der weissen Frauenbewegung,” in Entfernte Verbindungen: Rassismus, Antisemitismus, Klassenunterdrückung (ed. Ika Hügel et al.; Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1993), 143. 3. For the concept of experience in feminist biographical research and in feminist the*logy, see Monika Maassen, Biographie und Erfahrung von Frauen: Ein feministisch-theologischer Beitrag zur Relevanz der Biographieforschung für die Wiedergewinnung der Kategorie der Erfahrung (FrauenForschung 2; Münster: Morgana Frauenbuchverlag, 1993). 4. See Mari T. Baader, “Zweierlei Befreiung,” in Nach der Shoa geboren: Jüdische Frauen in Deutschland (ed. Jessica Jacoby, Claudia Schoppmann, and Wendy Zena-Henry; Berlin: Elefanten, 1994), 11–20. 50 | Empowering Memory and Movement fearfully foresaw that German unity would go hand in hand with a revival of nationalist right-wing extremism in large parts of the population. The AfraGerman May...