In
After Brexit things had quietened down a bit. The dimwits had taken hope, dreaming of a country inhabited by white people who could take their drink, of jobs, and a boom, of small cars and servants. They were dreaming of British music, and British films, and British food. And then what happened was – nothing. (
Berg was raised in the German Democratic Republic but now lives in Switzerland, and the concerns of her work, both as a creative writer and a public intellectual, reflect the border-crossing element in her biography. At the peak of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe, Berg’s
At first sight
As we aim to show in this article, Berg’s attempt to understand the contemporary world via an imagined post-Brexit Britain is transnational, translingual and transcultural. The novel is transnational because, although set in Britain, the issues it draws attention to – from racism, xenophobia and the anti-feminist backlash to the destabilization of democratic institutions through social media and digital surveillance – affect advanced industrial societies everywhere and thus cannot be dealt with on the national scale. It is translingual because, although written in German, it contains a large number of ad hoc lexical borrowings from English and experiments with more complex strategies of linguistic hybridization. It is, finally, transcultural in that its story world engages with various subcultures, and, more fundamentally, in that it represents an example of literary border-crossing that no longer fits the mould of what is found in established forms of postcolonial, multicultural, migrant or diasporic fiction – and thus participates in an international twenty-first century literary trend identified by Dagnino (
With grime, Berg’s novel makes substantial use of a subculture that originated in Britain but then became an international pop-culture success. At the same time, it engages with the global language of computer code.
These aspects will be further discussed in the subsequent sections of this essay. Section 2 elaborates on Berg’s use of Britain as a laboratory for a possible future: in particular, it shows how this future is connected with a specific structure of feeling and affect, which in turn motivates Berg’s use of grime as a music expressing resentment and rage. Section 3 argues that grime is not only a central topic of
A 2019
The novel does not aim at psychological or social realism, although its satire is rooted in real-world settings, events, and scandals – such as the Rochdale sex grooming gang who kidnapped young women and forced them into prostitution (as was revealed in 2012) or the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire. Such facts are introduced in a way that suggests that the author has done thorough research into the relevant background, but then developed it into sometimes bizarre caricatures of the characters, events and institutions represented. The resulting picture of Britain is distinctly negative, and it stands for a contemporary world that is complicit in its own destruction. The only redeeming feature that brightens the general mood of bleakness and cultural pessimism is a group of four adolescents, members of Generation Z and the second wave of digital natives (97), who are referenced as ‘the children’. They manage to draw consolation and inspiration from grime music.
In this spirit, the first part of
Apart from the fact that the children’s tormentors live there, London becomes, in the second part of the novel, the main site of Berg’s political dystopia and satire, where she locates her diagnosis of today’s retreat of democracy, the return of undisguised anti-feminism and racism as well as a digital world that reduces people’s intelligence and manipulates their lives. Before the start of the second part of the novel, the narrative is interrupted by two brief interlude sections – set in a simple and sober sans-serif type of the kind frequently used on our computer screens
With digitization and artificial intelligence as spectres in the background, the United Kingdom in the novel’s near future has lost much of its social cohesion. It is not even a kingdom anymore because the monarchy has been abolished as quickly as the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 (218). Digitization is the source of new inequality because it makes people redundant; even members of the former middle classes now live in impoverished circumstances and re-enact their old lives nostalgically in virtual reality rooms. The lower classes are despised and deprived of all forms of aid. With the help of social media, public feeling is mobilized against all ‘parasitic’ elements in society; homeless people become the object of violent raids. The new social elite is formed by IT specialists, represented by the right-wing ‘Programmierer’ and Thome, and IT is also essential for the secret services who monitor and manipulate the population, represented by the equally right-wing ‘MI5 Piet’. The people permit themselves to be chipped and tracked in all areas of their lives when the government promises a universal basic income. Eventually, surveillance, drugs (modelled on the ‘soma’ in Huxley’s
The novel’s text reflects this control over the population by introducing each new character with a profile based on their data.
Intradiegetically, the most devastating effect of IT and AI is the way that they interfere with political decision-making and affect the core of democracy in a country that used to be considered the mother of modern democracies. The traditional upper-class elite try to retain their power by coalescing with IT. An ultra-conservative network of old men, led by Thome’s father, a member of the House of Lords, believes that they can reinvent Britain and get the country under control through fake news and ‘direct democracy’ (516) – processes for which Brexit is their model (223, 224). The main irony of the novel is, however, that the old men’s dream of power has been undermined by IT and AI in the first place. Thome and the ‘Programmierer’ have created an avatar that is elected – by digital plebiscite – as PM by the avatars of the electorate, and it is thus the AI and its algorithms that will rule the country in the future, a digital intelligence that is getting more and more independent from those that have programmed it. It will create a society in which humanity of a desired kind – a new stage in evolution (627–628) – will be restricted to a necessary minimum.
At the end of the novel, what the powers that be (including the AI) have achieved is control over people’s emotions and the overall structure of feeling in society. In particular, they first use, and then work against, a present-day climate which sociologists describe as that of the ‘nervous state’ or that of the ‘affective society’. The economist and sociologist William Davies (
It was the time of the mass spread of fake news, of mass manipulation. People got hooked on likes from people they didn’t know incredibly fast. And even faster than that, young people got dependent on a permanent sense of excitement that was made up of a mix of bullying, violence, sex, and bullshit.
It was the time when online cruelty was added to the physical brutality that humans were capable of.
When the yearning to understand turned into the rage of the ignorant. (6)
Feelings of anger and hatred are central to the experience of many of the novel’s characters – victims and perpetrators alike.
Grime culture is central to the novel in several respects. Berg’s sympathetic affiliation with grime preceded the writing of the novel and has been maintained after publication. Before and during the writing she spent extended periods of time in the settings of the novel as a participant observer. One fruit of this immersion experience, or even field research, is a promotional video released on Youtube in 2019 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, her German publishers.
Grime stands out as the one leitmotif which keeps the many issues raised in the novel together, from the title to the very last page. Grime emerged in East London in the early 2000s (
No British genre better highlights the effects of globalisation than Grime music: an amalgam of Garage, Jungle, Hip Hop and Dancehall which emerged from pirate radio stations in East London in the early 2000s. Through Grime, the artists (known as MCs), who are often youths from marginalised, multi-ethnic areas, discuss the hardships of their upbringing. (
Grime slang is rooted in Multicultural London English (MLE;
People of different language backgrounds have settled in already quite underprivileged neighbourhoods, and economic deprivation has led to the maintenance of close kin and neighbourhood ties. Castells (
In the local British context, the early grime movement sparked a lot of controversy, centred around performers’ controversial gangsta posturing, which was interpreted as uncritical celebration of an antisocial and self-destructive lifestyle of drugs, violent crime, and sexual promiscuity among young people. In 2006, for example, David Cameron MP, then leader of the Conservative opposition, blamed grime for increasing crime rates in British cities: ‘I would say to Radio 1, do you realise that some of the stuff you play on Saturday nights encourages people to carry guns and knives?’ (qtd. in
In spite of the occasional recognition that grime has received from the mainstream, however, it remains locally disconnected from large segments of English and British society, including the prosperous West End and suburbs of London. But as its multifarious global and postcolonial roots prove, it has always been globally connected and is now connected to segments of German and continental European youth culture. In Berg’s ‘German’ novel, grime is first mentioned in the character profile that introduces Don, one of the four young protagonists. Her interests are summarized as ‘Grime, karate, sweets’; her ethnicity is an ‘unclear shade of non-white [unklare Schattierung von nicht-weiß]’ (8), a racial and ethnic categorization that happens to fit many real-life grime performers and fans. (As pointed out above, vague ethnic categories are also applied to the other ‘children’.) Don’s name is modelled on Stefflon Don, a Birmingham-born female grime star of Jamaican heritage, whose pseudonym alludes both to London, the home of grime, and the tough gangsta image of the
In the novel, grime is shown to follow the trajectory of other forms of globally successful popular music – from the earliest stage, as creative expression and self-affirmation of an oppressed minority, through acceptance in the social mainstream and financial success in the entertainment industry to commodification and trivialization. This schematic trajectory is an obvious simplification and hides a constant tension between pride and profit at every stage of the unfolding plot, but it fits the satirical universe of
The wonderful drugs stopped most of the poor from throwing themselves out of the window or picking up the pitchforks and shouting: ‘What are you doing with our small short ridiculous lives? Are we really supposed to doze through this in a stinking hostel? Is there really no place for us, anywhere?’ (179)
Worst of all, resistance is stifled in the young generation. The ‘children’ develop a natural resentment against the system that makes their lives miserable. Although they are digital natives, they resist being chipped and eventually even bury their smartphones. This is when they meet a group of young people who have chosen another way to resist the system. The ‘friends’ are hackers (one of two such remaining organizations) who try to defeat the control of the AI, while remaining unaware of the fact that their activities are being monitored by the secret services. They recognize their defeat when their great coup – revealing to people via the big flatscreens that have been erected all over London to what extent their data is being collected – is thwarted by the people themselves. Instead of being outraged, they are enthused: ‘The people are over the moon. There they are, on the screens. Like on the telly. And the things you get to know about them. That’s better than reading horoscopes, better than getting likes. You can’t be swiped off and you’re just there’ (551).
Much as the anger goes out of grime music, the ‘children’ eventually lose the rage that motivated them. All the individuals they wanted to be revenged on die not by their hand but by other causes. Like the hackers, the children resign themselves and become reconciled to the Brave New World. Karen embarks on a successful career as a scientist within the system, and Don wears smart, data-collecting glasses. The children’s perception and evaluation of grime reflects this development. When the young people meet a final time, Don attempts to rekindle the old spirit by rapping six lines from Skepta, which are rendered in the English original in the German text (626).
In the novel’s world, grime starts as the catalyst of rebellion against the system and ends as the muzak accompanying a moment of fake-sentimental remembrance. But the novel may invite an even worse conclusion, because the end of resistance among the human population paves the way for a world governed by artificial intelligence. It is one of the bitter ironies of the novel that this is not presented as a hostile coup but as a step in an evolution that humans have brought on themselves.
If we interpret the word
Indeed, the programming language Brainfuck is actually spoken in the latter parts of the narrative. This is, to a certain extent, a joke that the author plays on the readers, but it is also part of the novel’s dystopian message. Brainfuck is the medium in which the increasingly visible AI, Ex 2279, expresses itself, for example in a lengthy fourteen-line statement (479) whose first two lines are given below:
++++++++++[>+>+++>+++++++>++++++++++
<<<<-]>>>>++++++++.
All the symbols are part of the set of eight allowed in this esoteric programming language. Even if it is likely to be irrelevant to most readers’ experience of the novel, it is worth mentioning that Ex 2279 is not spouting mere gibberish here; the fourteen lines of code convey a meaningful message, in this case ‘letUsSaveTheWorld.quiet.oneIsListeningToUs’.
However, when we look at the novel in its entirety, grime as a language of subcultural resistance is more powerful than within the story world because grime permeates the novel’s entire structure and style. On the level of text, in the communication between author and reader, grime is thus not defeated but almost celebrated, including for its border-crossing translingualism and transculturalism. Indeed, the border-crossing element inherent in English-based grime is particularly acute in Berg’s novel because it involves complex crossings between English and German.
Salient features of grime – the use of slang, verbal aggression and staccato rhythms – characterize the lyrics of the songs as much as Berg’s writing style, which is rich in features of spoken language, such as use of colloquialisms, slang terms and sentence fragments. More specifically, it could be argued that the rhythms of grime are reflected in the unexpected line-breaks and irregular punctuation, as is the case in the following instances:
Don
Had music.
Grime seemed like it had been invented only for her. Don didn’t know by whom, nor from what elements – that was stuff for discussion by young men who endowed themselves with a kind of invincibility by using technical terminology –,
But Don knew that the music sounded the way she would like to feel. […] Don listened to grime in bed, in the bathroom or outside. The great Outside.
Well –
Outside her window a street lamp, rain or something like that, probably the windows were dirty. (11)
Her brother was moaning. Probably peeing his bed again. Don almost had a feeling
That she heard the urine run out of him and
Don was –
Furious. (12–13)
This strategy of syntactic fragmentation is most frequently used in transitions from one character to the other, with the character profiles adding an additional element of collage and sampling through their suggestion of social-media user profiles or secret-service surveillance protocols:
And Peter would be taken care of. He [the Russian oligarch] would take care of Peter. Perhaps off to a nice boarding school in a couple of days and then some time,
But –
Intended – if at all – only to fabricate children of his own. (83)
Note that
Even in Britain itself grime slang is an etymological mix, blending local working-class speech with elements from African American Vernacular English, Jamaican Creole and other sources. German followers of the movement take over part of the English slang and complement it with German elements. This is echoed in the ease with which English and German are blended in the novel’s text. Obvious examples are provided by recurrent slang terms from both languages:
The linguistic mixing is spontaneous and pervasive. Rochdale, Don’s depressing childhood ‘home’ described above, is introduced as ‘Fucking Rochdale’ (8), rather than ‘Scheiß-Rochdale,’ as would be expected in a German novel. Considerable degrees of mixing are also evidenced by the following variation on the WTF leitmotif: ‘um ja, fuck – keine Ahnung [uhm, yes, fuck – no idea]’ (483), and this piece of advice: ‘Don’t mess mit dem Untergrund, Fucker’ (487).
There are even instances of what in African American and postcolonial literature would be called ‘double voicing’,
Walcott explores ways of writing in a manner that can appear to be both standard English and creole at the same time, by revealing and exploiting unexpected points of coincidence. […] This “punning” effect is something like what happens when a composer of music designs a tune so that it can be harmonized in more than one key. (
In a similar fashion,
Hey, wow, was ist das, da sind Bäume, da ist Licht, man könnte – ja okay. Keine Idee. Also zurück. (472)
[Hey, wow, what’s that, there’s trees, there’s light, you could –yeah, okay. No idea. Well, then let’s go back.]
Als sie endlich in Rochdale eintrafen, sah es dort auch nicht besser aus als irgendwo. Als Liverpool. Einfach in Klein. Einfach in Regen gehüllt, der scheinbar nie aufhören wollte. Viktorianer. Saurier. Mein Arsch. (58)
[When they finally got to Rochdale, things didn’t look better than anywhere else, either. Than Liverpool. Just a small version. Just shrouded in rain that didn’t seem to stop falling. Victorians. Dinosaurs. My arse.]
The first example shows the fragmentary syntax of spontaneous speech, delivered in the staccato rhythms of a grime performance, mixing of English and German interjections – and genuine fusion of the two languages at
The striking degree of permeability which
Double voicing, language mixing and linguistic hybridization of this type are familiar from many postcolonial contexts, but not restricted to them. It is also a feature commented on in translation studies, where it is often referred to as ‘shining-through’.
In the context of the present argument, this detailed analysis of the novel’s translinguistic dimension is not an end in itself, but serves as a pointer to the nexus between the translinguistic, the transnational and the transcultural, which is impressively manifest in the grime movement, but also relevant in a more general way. Within the discipline of English Studies, it encourages us to reflect on the role of English as the currently dominant global lingua franca – a status that endows Anglophone cultural production with a high degree of visibility and accessibility in transnational and transcultural contexts. Global English transcends borders and increases connections. Trade, travel, migration and the media have intensified contact and exchange of all kinds throughout the world. This is demonstrated by the increased importance of the English language in practically all regions of the world, as well as by the presence of intensely multilingual enclaves in the major urban centres of the English-speaking world, such as – to mention obvious examples – London, New York, Toronto, Sydney and Johannesburg.
However, the fact that a world-encompassing network of transnational cultural contacts and connections exists does not imply that it is organized as a happy and egalitarian polyphony of voices. In the global cultural marketplace, the English language guarantees the largest audiences; the Anglosphere is often the centre, and the rest of the world forms the peripheries. Linguistic and cultural seepage from the Anglosphere into other languages and communities will be massive, whereas the reverse influences will be more limited. For an obvious illustration of this power differential we need look no further than Berg’s novel: a German novel set in England and built around grime has been successful in a way that is difficult to imagine for a potential English counterpart (i.e. an English novel set in Germany and built around a German sub-cultural movement).
Note that this situation is historically new. A little more than a hundred years ago, at the height of the political power of the British Empire, the English language was not the undisputed default choice as international lingua franca, as it is today, but one of several competing world languages.
As used in the structural and stylistic makeup of Berg’s novel, grime retains its integrity as the voice of resistance and protest, in contrast to the way it loses its subversive power within the novel’s story world. The novel performs grime within its text, even if it can only offer a superficial imitation of the richness of grime as live performance: with lyrics that absorb influences from many dialects and languages and with performers who are as much individual creators as they are members of crews with whom they affiliate and ‘enemies’ of other performers and crews with whom they ‘clash’. Speaking of clash, it is worth noting that Berg’s gesture of protest against a digitized society is not restricted to grime. More subtly and high-culturally, critique of the digital is also expressed through the design and materiality of the hardback cover with which the novel originally appeared. It was designed with great care by the artist Claus Richter, a friend of the author, combining early twentieth-century art-deco motifs with stylized representations of a circuit on a computer chip and using embossing in order to add a haptic dimension to the reader’s experience.
As we have shown, Berg’s novel crosses borders of language and culture in multiple ways and challenges expectations that German readers might have regarding a German-language novel about contemporary Britain. Berg’s elaborate use of grime, a style that originated in London but has an international dimension, suits a novel that uses contemporary Britain for a diagnosis of twenty-first-century societal, political and cultural trends, and as a worried writer’s laboratory for the future of Western society.
If influences from a wide range of British popular music are relevant for contemporary German youth culture in general, grime – like other Black and multi-ethnic traditions such as reggae and hip hop – holds specific additional attraction for Afro-Germans. Germany has a considerable history of immigration from Africa (
Concepts of Black citizenship as they have been implemented in the United Kingdom, France or in the Netherlands can provide examples for us here in Germany. Ensuring social participation of Afro-German residents and other communities of People of Color represents a further crucial factor. (Eggers, qtd. in
In this connection it is worth mentioning a number of Black and Asian British expatriate intellectuals who have moved to Germany and are actively participating in local cultural and literary life. Best known among them is Sharon Dodua Otoo. Born in London in 1972 to Ghanaian parents, she first came to Germany in 1992 and currently lives in Berlin. In 2016 she won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Award for a short story written in German (see
Inspired by the encounter with grime and her experience of cultural immersion in the British grime scene, Berg has written a transcultural novel in German. While this is not quite the same as a colonial or post-colonial encounter with Britain, we would argue that there are sufficient parallels to make the text rewarding to analyse in the context of British Studies. Berg and her audience have opened up a ‘transnational cultural space’, which we define in analogy to Jürgen Osterhammel’s notion of ‘transnational social spaces’ opened up by migrant communities:
[S]ociological and ethnological studies of migrants in the present-day world have shown how it is possible to lead a life in a kind of permanent transgression of boundaries between persisting national cultures. People and communities ‘in between’ do not necessarily live in the rarefied world of a rootless cosmopolitanism, nor are they lost in a no-man’s land. […] there is also the possibility of multiple identities, bilingualism, and the flexible enacting of roles. For this third type of cases, the concept of ‘transnational social space’ seems to offer an adequate solution. (
We hope that the ‘transnational cultural space’ opened up by
the
The fact that some of Berg’s work is available in English translation in the UK shows that she is capable of surmounting this general obstacle. As for
An English translation of the novel is in progress but has not yet appeared. All translations in this article are ours. The original German of the cited passage reads: ‘Nach dem Brexit war ein wenig Ruhe gewesen. Hoffnung war bei den Dummköpfen eingezogen. Sie träumten von einem Land, das von weißen, trinkfesten Menschen bewohnt wird, von Arbeit und Aufschwung, von Kleinwagen und Bediensteten. Von britischer Musik und britischen Filmen und britischem Essen träumten sie. Und dann ist – nichts passiert.’ © 2019, Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln/Cologne. We thank the publisher for granting permission to quote from the German original.
The word
‘Am Beginn von GRM Brainfuck stand der Wunsch, all die unterschiedlichen, teils als bedrohlich empfundenen Entwicklungen unserer Zeit in eine Ordnung zu bringen. […] Ich wollte verstehen.’
‘Es ging mir während des Schreibens unglaublich gut, denn jede Seite bedeutete etwas mehr Ordnung in meinem etwas zu voll gewordenen Verstand. Ich hatte ja vor Beginn zwei Jahre lang geforscht, mit Wissenschaftlerinnen geredet, fast coden gelernt, mich in England aufgehalten, es war einfach als ob man einen Stöpsel aus der Wanne zieht.’
For discussions of this fiction see, for example, Eaglestone (
Other German examples include Zoë Beck’s thriller
Indeed, direct links between Britain and Germany in
The same typographic marker is used for the artificial intelligence in Gibson’s
Compare also surveillance documents used in Eugen Ruge’s
‘Es war die Zeit der massenhaften Falschmeldungsverbreitung, der Massenmanipulation. Die Menschen wurden unglaublich schnell süchtig nach den Likes ihrer Unbekannten. Die Jugendlichen wurden noch schneller abhängig von einer Erregung, die aus der Mischung von Mobbing, Gewalt, Sex und Bullshit entstand./Es war die Zeit, in der zur realen Grausamkeit der Menschen noch die virtuelle hinzugefügt wurde./In der die Sehnsucht nach Verständnis zu einer Wut der Unwissenden wurde.’ We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing out that this might be an echo of Charles Dickens’s
One finds a diagnosis of anger and rage also in British novels about contemporary Britain; see, for example Jonathan Coe’s
See ‘Buchtrailer GRM-Brainfuck. Der neue Roman von Sibylle Berg’ at
A similarly ambivalent standpoint is evident in the author’s attitude towards social media in general: a novel that presents a relentless critique of social media’s negative impact on people is marketed through a well-designed and presumably highly efficient social-media based marketing campaign.
Given her Jamaican heritage and her use of Jamaican patois in her songs, the word
Strictly speaking, not all the music which proves inspirational for the four young people comes from grime or is British. Don is also inspired by Justice, a French electro duo, and by Young M.A., a Brooklyn-born female rapper of mixed Jamaican-Puerto Rican heritage (102), but the constant influences are the stars of British grime.
‘Diese Bewegung, die zum Kommerz geworden ist. Der die Wut entnommen und durch Gucci ersetzt worden ist.’ – ‘Es läuft Grime. Im Mainstream angekommen. Wieder eine Revolution, die gekauft worden ist. […] Selbst Grime wirkt plötzlich lieb. Sanft, nicht mehr wütend. Wütend ist da keiner mehr.’
‘Die wunderbaren Medikamente machten, dass die meisten Armen sich nicht aus dem Fenster stürzten oder zu den Mistgabeln griffen und brüllten: “Was macht ihr mit unserem einen kleinen kurzen lächerlichen Leben? Sollen wir das wirklich verdämmern in einer stinkenden Unterkunft? Gibt es wirklich keinen Platz für uns, nirgends?”’
‘Die Menschen sind begeistert. Da sind sie, auf den Screens. Wie im Fernsehen. Und was man alles über sie weiß. Das ist besser als Horoskope lesen, besser als Likes bekommen. Das ist nicht weggewischt werden können und da sein.’
For the full text of Skepta’s ‘King of Grime,’ see
We would like to thank Mr Fatlum Sadiku for running the code and pointing out a redundancy in the first two lines, which suggests that the AI shares at least one human trait, namely prolixity. The more parsimonious paraphrase of the two lines is:
++++++++++[>+++>+++++++>++++++++++ <<<-]>>>++++++++
The symbols “>+” have been removed after the opening square bracket in the first line, and one set of angled brackets has been removed from the second.
‘Don / Hatte Musik. / Scheinbar nur für sie war Grime erfunden worden. Don wusste nicht, von wem, auch nicht aus welchen Bestandteilen – das war Diskussionsstoff für junge Männer, die sich mit Fachbegriffen eine Art von Unbesiegbarkeit verleihen konnten –, / Don wusste nur, dass die Musik so klang, wie sie sich gerne fühlen würde. […] Don hörte Grime im Bett, im Bad oder draußen. Dem tollen Draußen. / Also – / Vor dem Fenster eine Laterne, Regen oder etwas Ähnliches, vermutlich waren nur die Fenster schmutzig.’
‘Der Bruder wimmerte. Vermutlich pinkelte er wieder ins Bett. Fast meinte Don, / Den Urin aus ihm laufen zu hören und / Don war – / Aufgebracht.’
‘Und für Peter wäre gesorgt. Er würde für Peter sorgen. Vielleicht in einigen Tagen ein schönes Internat und dann irgendwann, / Aber – /
For discussion of double voicing in a wider sense that ultimately goes back to Bakhtin, see Baxter (
See, for example, Teich (
See Northrup (
See de Swaan (
We would like to give credit for this formulation to Ms Ulla Brümmer, of Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Berg’s publishers, who also helped with the other explanations.
See also Korte and Mair (
See, for example, Davis et al. (
‘Konzepte einer Schwarzen Staatsbürgerschaft, wie sie in Großbritannien, Frankreich oder in den Niederlanden umgesetzt werden, können hier Beispiele liefern für unsere Situation in Deutschland. Die gesellschaftliche Beteiligung der afro-deutschen Bevölkerung und anderer Communities von “People of Color” stellt einen weiteren wichtigen Faktor dar.’
‘Was würden Sie denn denken, wenn jetzt ein Engländer über die Schweiz schreiben würde?’
The authors have no competing interests to declare.