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.

The subject of immigrant soldiers during the American Civil War has recently received an increase of attention among historians. Military and social historians have examined such themes as nativism, Americanization, and national identity. Although historians have often examined homesickness among soldiers, none have done so from a migrant point of view. As the largest foreign-born group in the Union army, constituting ten percent, the focus of this paper will be on immigrants from Germany. By looking at letters immigrants wrote to their families, both in the United States and Germany, this paper will examine how both married and single immigrant men interacted with home and war. In many cases, soldiers sought to structure their military environments to resemble the homes, familiar faces, customs, and foods they had left behind. This study seeks to add greater understanding of both the American Civil War and the migrant experience during the nineteenth century.

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No / In the wake of the First World War, at a time marked by the rise of national self-determination and government based on majoritarian democracy, national minorities emerged as a controversial socio-political issue and significantsecurity challenge in Europe. Thisessay examines how leading statesmen and League of Nations officialconceptualised and shaped the international minority protection regime in Geneva, which extended primarily to the new states in Central and Eastern Europe. Equally, it addresses how “national minorities” understood their own position in Europe and their relationship to the League. Thecase is made that members of both minority and majority populations (the latter including statesmen and League officialsdid not inhabit the same psychological space in the 1920s, with the result being that the minority question remained a proverbial time bomb ticking at the heart of international relations.

The Volga Germans assert a particular ethnic identity to articulate their complex history as a multinational community even in the absence of traditional practices in language, religious piety, and communal lifestyle. Across multiple migrations and settlements from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the Volga Germans' self-constructed group identity served historically as a tool with which to navigate uncertain politics of belonging. As subjects of imperial Russia's eighteenth-century colonization project the Volga Germans held a privileged legal status in accordance with their settlement in the Volga River region, but their subsequent loss of privileges under the reorganization and Russification of the modern Russian state in the nineteenth century compelled members of the group to immigrate to the Midwest in the United States where their distinct identity took its full form. The Volga Germans' arrival on the Great Plains coincided with an era of mass global migration from 1846 to 1940, yet the conventional categories of immigrant identity that subsumed Volga Germans in archival records did not impede their drive for community preservation under a new unifying German-Russian identity. A contingent of Midwest Volga Germans migrated in 1881 to Albina, a railroad town across the Willamette River from Portland, Oregon where the pressures of assimilation ultimately disintegrated traditional ways of life--yet the community impulse to articulate its identity remained. Thus, while Germans are the single largest ethnic group in the U.S. today numbering forty-two million individuals, Portland's Volga German community nevertheless continues to distinguish itself ethnically through its nostalgia for a unique past.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-103). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A.)--Missouri State University, 2009. / "May 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-102). Also available online.

In this sociolinguistic study, qualitative interviews were used in examining discursive identity construction among Russian Germans. The interview group was composed of Russian German university students attending different universities in Germany. Based on the sociocultural perspective on language and identity, content analysis, turn-internal pragmatic and semantic as well as interactional approaches are used in the thesis. This thesis covers two major questions: What attitudes toward food Russian Germans construct during conversational interaction and what are the major linguistic resources and discursive strategies that these participants use to construct their cultural identities and how the attitudes towards the linguistic and social practices reflect German Russian identity and a particular Russian German space in German cities. The special situation of Russian Germans, that being the initial alienation in Russia due to their ethnic origin, followed by the attitude of local Germans towards Russian Germans after they relocated back to Germany, led to the situation where many of them feel to be in the position of ‘in-between’ (Kaiser 2006: 34). Due to the complexity of this special cultural position of Russian Germans, observations of how individuals negotiate Russian and German cultural spaces and construct their own space in everyday life provide insight to the research of cultural identity. At the same time, the creation of the Russian-German space by means of positioning also reveals the constructed identity of Russian Germans, which they create in discourse. The focus of the thesis lies on one particular practice, namely eating habits as a cultural practice. The analysis of food attitudes with the help of linguistic methods will contribute to the culture identity and the construction of a particular cultural space of Russian Germans. The interviews show how the attitudes towards food preferences and cooking habits serve as a basis for identity construction. By positioning themselves with the help of their attitudes towards eating habits, the participants create certain cultural spaces in German cities. Several domains of life such as private and public spheres, where the participants positioned themselves slightly differently from one another by drawing on different indexical meanings are covered in the interview. The work begins with the history of the Russian German migratory and studies made in relation to Russian Germans and their identity. It is followed by theoretical and methodological approaches. Content analysis, turn-internal pragmatic and semantic as well as interactional approaches are used in the thesis. The main body is devoted to the analysis of the qualitative interview data with the help of the theory and methodology described in the preceding section. In the end of the thesis the summary of the findings and the suggestions for the further research are presented.

This Master thesis deals with the topic of the German minority in the village Lenora. As the life in Lenora was very closely connected to the local glassworks, the thesis provides a brief history of glass in the Bohemian Forest and the glassworks in Lenora as well as the historical context in the country dating from the establishment of Czechoslovakia and the analysis of the life in Lenora. The thesis also describes the situation after the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia because many Germans stayed in Lenora even after the expulsion due to their employment in the glassworks. In addition to the history of Germans in Lenora, interviews with several contemporary witnesses were made. After the expulsion, the population in Lenora changed significantly, which was the reason for dedicating one chapter to the topic of remigration. The last chapter informs about the current state of affairs concentrating on the society Heimatkreis Prachatitz administered by Germans who lived in the district of Prachatice.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Southern California, 1994. / Adviser: Cornelius Schnauber. Includes bibliographical references.