The Unbearable Closeness of The East: Embodied Micro-Economies of Difference, Belonging, and Intersecting Marginalities in Post-Socialist Berlin

Abstract

This article examines the micro-politics of belonging in the post-socialist outskirts of Berlin, in Marzahn, one of many new urban immigrant settlement areas in Europe. More specifically, it focuses on what locals perceive as an acceptance-precluding conspicuous presence of nominally white immigrants of German ancestry from the former Soviet Union, the Aussiedler (resettlers). Long-term residents read and interpret these immigrants’ everyday embodiments by constructing what I call micro-economies of embodied difference in order to mark immigrants as non-belonging Eastern-European. In order to make sense of such practices and local antipathy towards the Aussiedler, I analyze the embeddedness of this suburban locality in the regional politics of belonging, showing how Marzahn and its long-time residents have themselves become post-wall Berlin's (and Germany's) internal Others, saturated with uncommodifiable traces of now-denigrated state-socialist Easternness. I suggest that in such a context these residents’ practice of ascribing the unwanted Easternness to recent immigrants works to deflect it in order to buttress their own claims to full membership citizenship in the unified Germany from which they have long been excluded. [Key words: belonging, immigrants, embodied difference, Othering, Easternness, Berlin.]

INTRODUCTION

“And so Marzahn became Little Moscow,” lamented Lena, a young Marzahner describing the transformation of her locality over the past 15 years by the settlement of about 20,000 Russian-speaking migrants of German origin in this community on the northeastern outskirts of Berlin. During this time Marzahn had become home to the largest concentration of these migrants, the so-called Aussiedler (resettlers/repatriates) in the territory of former East Germany. ² Their settlement here is a part of the broader trend of diversification of immigrant destinations beyond traditional immigrant gateways across 30 the Global North (e.g., Mahler, 2001; Zuniga and Hernandez-Leon, 2006; Fonseca, 2008; Massey, 2008). While in their effort to contribute to a more complex understanding of contemporary political landscapes of immigrant settlement in the U.S., many geographers have turned their attention to such new locations (e.g., Mahler and Foner, 1996; Trudeau, 2006; Veronis, 2006; Nelson, 2008; Nelson and Hiemstra, 2008; Walker and Leitner, 2011; Leitner, 2012), research in Germany continues to privilege traditional destinations, such as inner-city neighborhoods of West German cities. By examining one of the suburban, and specifically post-socialist milieus of immigrant reception in Germany, this article takes a parallel step by focusing on a less-examined European context.

I approach the examination of local responses to the arrival of immigrants in Marzahn through the concept of the politics of belonging, which centers on discursive processes through which any collective—with its attendant “we”—gets constructed (Yuval-Davis, 2011). The paper focuses on boundary-making practices, a crucial component of politics of belonging, unfolding most often through the construction of the “Other” (e.g., Favell, 1999; Leitner, 2012 ). Because local milieus are of the utmost importance for the actual prospects of immigrant inclusion (Leitner, 2004), this paper examines more specifically everyday local practices of Othering, or micro-politics of belonging. At the same time, however, particular places are also embedded in national and regional landscapes of belonging with their dominant discourses—rather than just institutionalized technologies of formal belonging such as citizenship laws—about who counts as a worthy member of the community and who does not. The ways in which citizen subjects understand and enact their belonging in particular places are then situated within such broader frameworks (e.g., Berdahl, 1999; Ehrkamp and Leitner, 2003). Yet, crucially, regions, cities, and neighborhoods are differently positioned within these landscapes, effectuating in turn place-based particularity of local negotiations over belonging. This paper then, secondly, examines the positionality of eastern Berlin in extra-local landscapes of belonging, allowing me to highlight how they continue to be animated by the legacies of the Cold War.

The paper unfolds in the following way. I first discuss the existing urban geographies of belonging, Othering, and embodiment, highlighting the neglect of nominally white immigrants and of non-visually discernible bodily practices in this scholarship. I then provide a brief outline of the role that the East and East Europeanness have played in the construction of European identity and that of unified Germany, followed by a more specific examination of the positionality and Othering of Marzahn in wider landscapes of belonging in Germany and post-wall Berlin. I then turn to the analysis of how local residents of Marzahn read and construct immigrants’ varied embodied everyday practices as signifying their Easternness. I argue that locals’ Othering works as a practice of deflection and displacement of Easternness, that they are themselves seen as saturated with, onto these newcomers in order to enhance their own claims for full belonging in Berlin and Germany. In the conclusion I reflect on the implications of this case for studying the politics of immigrant belonging in European cities.

The argument offered in this article draws on a variety of primary and secondary sources. Primary data were gathered in Marzahn between February and October 2007 as part of research on community integration projects, ³ during which I volunteered for two such initiatives: Meridian and Kieztreff. I draw here especially on the excerpts from focus groups conducted with 43 native German residents and Aussiedler, which inquired about participants’ experiences with migrants and their views about changes in Marzahn. The participants were recruited through flyers posted in neighborhood commercial and public spaces and with the help of the two community centers housing the integration projects. Some of the participants also worked or volunteered in these centers, which allowed me to get to know them better. ⁴ Crucially, the paper is equally strongly informed by the broader ethnography, namely participant observation and everyday informal conversations with residents I engaged with at casual meetings, neighborhood gatherings, and integrationrelated events. Finally, the paper also uses data from a few of the 25 expert interviews conducted with local integration practitioners, politicians, and urban planners.

GEOGRAPHIES OF IMMIGRANT BELONGING, OTHERING AND EMBODIMENT

In the wake of news coverage of the radicalization of some immigrant youth and urban tensions involving immigrants in Western Europe, questions about immigrants’ belonging and social incorporation have moved into the political limelight. These public debates typically involve blaming immigrants for patterns of social exclusion, avoiding any discussion of the role of state and “host” society practices of marginalization. Patricia Ehrkamp and Helga Leitner (2006) emphasize that geographers who study urban migration are uniquely positioned to analyze the sociospatial relations between migrant newcomers and receiving societies, particularly the situated dynamics of everyday negotiations over claims of rightful belonging. Recent scholarship highlights how immigrants’ transformations of neighborhood landscapes can spark intense contestations (e.g., Ehrkamp, 2006; Trudeau, 2006; Mitchell, 2004). Others have shown how locals often racialize those parts of their towns most associated with immigrant presence in an effort to spatially fix and distance themselves from immigrants perceived and constructed as different (e.g., Hiemstra, 2010; Leitner, 2012). Such racialization unfolds through varied processes, including locals’ hierarchical interpretations of immigrant expressions of masculinity or femininity, as Ehrkamp (2008) analyzed in a “Turkish” neighborhood of the German city of Duisburg. Others have highlighted how different local histories of political mobilization and race relations result in geographical unevenness of immigrant-native landscapes of belonging (Winders, 2006; Nelson and Hiemstra, 2008). Much of this writing approaches the politics of everyday belonging as a micro-political process that involves negotiations over socio-cultural identifications within a context of uneven power relations. As Mee and Wright (2009, p. 772) have argued, such negotiations are “inherently geographic” because they pivot on boundary-making processes that are underpinned by competing conceptions about the appropriateness of certain bodies and practices in particular places and communities (see also Trudeau, 2006; Antonsich, 2010).

Drawing on the understanding of identities as relational and contingent, some of the research on immigrant belonging has focused more specifically on processes of Othering. In social constructivist approaches it is through such drawing of a difference between oneself and “the Other” that one's own identity is established and valorized. Geographers have additionally stressed how habitual national and regional media and state constructions of immigrants as non-belonging Others often provide a credible resource that the “natives” use in making sense of everyday life (e.g., Kastoryano, 2002; Pratt, 2005). In Germany, for example, state-sanctioned legal categorization of migrants as foreigners (Ausländer) contributed for a long time to a quotidian understanding of migrants as Germans’ Others (e.g., Vertovec, 1996; Ehrkamp, 2006), rather than potentially Germans-in-the-making.

Most scholarship on Othering has focused on the representations of Others, especially in media and literary cultural production (e.g., Dodds, 2003; Jansson, 2003; Ridanpää, 2007). As cultural geographer Michael Haldrup and his colleagues have argued, the extent to which exclusions from belonging through marking the Other have been effectuated through “banal, bodily and sensuous practices” of everyday encounters has been rather underestimated (2006, p. 173). Moreover, the work that has focused on such practices has often neglected the varied nature of embodied materiality in favor of “visual objectification of Others,” reinforcing the “methodological ocular centrism” of the social sciences (ibid., p. 182). While public visuality remains crucial to the processes of racialization and Othering (e.g., Ehrkamp, 2008), these other aspects of embodiment, in particular the auditory, are also highly salient to everyday politics, if in potentially more subtle ways (e.g., see Smith, 1997).

Finally, much migration writing on embodied encounters focuses on processes of Othering as they occur between white local residents and those immigrants conventionally understood as non-white—shortchanging the true analytical potential of whiteness studies (e.g., van Riemsdijk, 2010). Yet native residents also often read and construct nominally white immigrant bodies as different. In her discussion of Irish migrant women in London, for example, Breda Gray (2002) draws on Alison Bailey's (1998) notion of “whitely” scripts to highlight the contingent relationship between “whitely” performances and looking “white.” She especially points out how bodily and racial scripts are gendered: Irish women are perceived as failing to comply with the “lady-like,” reasonable, and “respectable” constructions of femininity associated with British white women; this failure then serves as the basis for their categorization as “un-British” and culturally inferior. Such differentializing practices are not limited to white subjects, as Robert Potter and Joan Phillips (2006) have shown in case of Barbadians. Here local residents stress such practices of second-generation black British-Barbadian returnees, like walking fast in public spaces, as marking their difference. Such varied bodily practices become a basis for what I call micro-economies of embodied difference: that is, ensembles of embodied micro-differences constructed and interpreted in hierarchical fashion in order to produce values of “authentic” belonging. Before I turn to examine the specificities of such micro- economies in the case of Aussiedler in Berlin-Marzahn, I first outline the role that Othering has played in the construction of Europe, and more specifically in post-wall Germany.

BELONGING IN EUROPE: OTHERING AND THE EAST IN A UNIFIED GERMANY

It is widely recognized that Europe's self-understanding developed through a particular kind of Othering: Orientalization. For several hundred years, “The East” has played a constitutive role in European identity construction, with an East/West divide of modernity replacing an earlier South/North divide (Wolff, 1994). As Edward Said (1979) has shown, (Western) Europe constructed its identity as the bearer of progress and Enlightenment modernity through the construction of “the East,” the Orient, as its inferior Other. This intellectual project focused geographically on the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, establishing a clear boundary that posited them as Europe's constitutive outside. Closer to home, the construction of territories east of the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire specifically as Eastern Europe unfolded through the same binary logic. Certainly, Eastern Europe did not become essentialized to the same degree as the classical Orient, which was imagined as steeped in barbarity and unreason. Still, through “demi-orientalization” Eastern Europe found itself cast as Europe's internal Other, at best forever lagging behind (Wolff, 1994, p.7). Due to close proximity to the Ottomans, the Balkans in particular came to be understood as geographically of but culturally outside Europe (Todorova, 1997; Hammond, 2007). Russia, posited as (West) Europe's pupil, as “just having been tamed, civil, civilized,” has also played a crucial role in European self-conception, including during the post-WWII division (Neumann, 1999, p. 110; see also Said, 1979). The Cold War era solidified Eastern Europe—an historically unstable conceptual formation—as the antithesis of the capitalist and democratic West of Europe (Kuus, 2004).

Germany found itself, as a divided country, in a very particular position within this broader geopolitical environment. Before the rise of the Nazi regime it had long considered itself a Central European nation par excellence, straddling the West and the East; but in the second half of the 20th century its self-understanding emphasized a cultural location within Western Europe (e.g., Palmowski, 2008). This was of course the case only for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Nevertheless, it was the FRG that portrayed itself as the legitimate representative of the entire German national and cultural community. And, crucially, it was the FRG and its geopolitical imaginary of Germany as firmly of Europe/ the West that became hegemonic after 1989. After all, the unification of the former West and East Germanies was the process of joining equal parts (that the term itself evokes) in name only. As Germany's leading public intellectuals forewarned, the unexpectedly speedy unification only exacerbated Cold War–era power differentials between the two (Habermas, 1998). Many in the East came to see unification as an experience of internal colonization (e.g., see Mandel, 2008).

The celebratory moment of unification quickly gave way to deep disappointment among the former subjects of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Nominal equality was juxtaposed with pervasive media accounts of differences between East and West Germans—more specifically, of how Easterners differed from Westerners in ways that posited the latter as “proper” citizens to be emulated by the “newcomers.” Reflecting the domination of the German media and political landscape by the West, such differences were then “constructed hierarchically,” allocating “German ‘genealogical heritage’” to the (former) West—in turn producing East German marginalization (Hörschelmann, 2001, p. 986). Such region-based Othering, embedded in particular geopolitical histories, is pervasive in many countries (e.g., see Jansson, 2003 and Ridanpää, 2007 on South-North differentiation in the United States and Finland, respectively). What is of importance in the German case is the role that Easternness, reflecting a broader Europe-making project, played, and, as I show, continues to play, in the hierarchization of German citizenship today.

Unification brought a number of peculiar developments, including the birth of an Ossi. Ossi, an old pejorative term for Easterners derived from the German word for East (Ost), came to connote former GDR citizens in a widespread national discourse. Ossis came to be continuously constructed also in everyday encounters, including the Wessi’s interpretation of East Germans’ bodily practices (e.g., Berdahl, 1999). ⁵ Evidence suggests that a “mental wall” persists and has recently intensified, including among youth (e.g., Schroeder, 2006). The Social Democratic Party (SPD) spokesman for immigrant integration in Marzahn, a university student in his mid-twenties, was blunt in our interview: “Even between the West Germans and the East Germans here in Berlin, even if they live close to each other … this imaginary wall, this border still exists for many people. I belong to that generation, too” (GL, male, 20–30). Many former East Germans continue to feel like second-class citizens, homeless and out of place in a unified Germany whose establishment was defined by the denigration of “all things East German” (Berdahl, 1999; Boym, 2001; Hörschelmann, 2002). Additionally, I suggest that Marzahners’ position from which they negotiate their belonging in Berlin and in Germany is doubly interesting: in addition to their socialist experience shared with other former GDR subjects their very place of residence, Marzahn, has by now become constructed as the constitutive Eastern outside of the new, putatively united Berlin. I now elaborate on this proposition, first briefly touching on the contested position of the East and Easternness in the new Berlin, and then introducing at length the locality of Marzahn with a focus on its construction as the remnant of the undesirable East.

MARZAHN AS BERLIN'S REMNANT OF THE EAST

The fall of the wall, accompanied by the 1991 relocation of the capital from Bonn, certainly opened up the opportunities for socio-political and cultural re-integration of the previously divided city. Yet city planners and politicians concentrated rather on the attraction of investment and capital in their quest to make Berlin into a “global city” on par with other (West) European metropolises (Krätke, 2001; Raiser and Volkmann, 2003; Cochrane, 2006). Post-wall Berlin's relation to the East has proved ambivalent at best. Local political elites initially hoped for an economic capitalization of Berlin as a “bridge” between Western Europe and the newly opened Eastern bloc (Cochrane and Jonas, 1999; Mandel, 2008). Yet when migrants from post-socialist countries crossed the figurative bridge, the city quickly reacted with discourses bemoaning the “Eastern Europeanization” of Berlin (Rada, 2001).

Concrete place- and image-making processes after 1989 also made clear the undesirability of Eastern Europeanness in the city. Compared to other post-socialist cities, the material legacies of state socialism were excised from Berlin's landscape in a particularly speedy and obsessive manner (Colomb, 2007). The decision to replace the GDR parliament building with a replica of the 18th century Royal Palace epitomized the city's attempt to define its post-1989 identity as a smooth continuation of its pre-1933 history as a “traditional” (West) European metropolis (ibid.). The state-socialist, East European past was seen as an aberration, and was confined to a few localized sites readied for tourist consumption.

These trends have been reinforced as the new Berlin has been (re)presented as a hip mecca of internationalism (Vertovec, 1996). While politicians often focus on inner-city districts such as Kreuzberg or Wedding as problematic localities in need of special management because of the high concentration of impoverished residents of Turkish and Arab origin, these once devalued margins of West Berlin have simultaneously become associated with the image of cool “Multi-Kulti” Berlin (Düspohl, 2005; Kil and Silver, 2006). Similarly some eastern parts of the city, such as Prenzlauer Berg or Friedrichshain have been included in this post-modern cosmopolitan urbanity as they turned into desired places of residence and entertainment for young professionals and artists (e.g., Levine, 2004). Not so Marzahn, which is routinely dismissed as “not the real Berlin” by so many of the Berliners I engaged with.

Marzahn's marginality in present-day Berlin constitutes a striking reversal of its pre-1989 fortunes. One of the five localities of the district of Marzahn-Hellersdorf on the eastern side of the Berlin metropolitan region, it was developed at the end of the 1980s as a part of the GDR's push to relieve nation-wide housing shortages (Castillo, 2001). Before 1989 such housing estates were rather coveted residential areas: the towers offered modern, family-sized accommodation with amenities far superior to the dilapidated inner-city apartments from which came nearly half of Marzahner (Hübner and Rank, 1999). Marzahn also had an abundance of green space. After unification, however, such prefabricated housing estates came to represent “inhuman modernism, concretized collectivism, and the ghettos of tomorrow” (Kil and Silver, 2006, p. 111). Marzahn, as the largest of these estates, home to almost 200,000 people in its heyday in the late 1980s (Hübner and Rank, 1999), became the quintessential “object of contempt” (Kil and Silver, 2006, p. 101).

Marzahn's initial negative image in post-wall Berlin as a particularly gloomy and crime-ridden Eastern periphery (Rueschemeyer, 1993) triggered a spiral of decline, as better-off residents started leaving en masse in the mid-1990s. ⁶ This outmigration was especially severe in northern and central Marzahn. Northern Marzahn lost 35% of its population between 1995 and 2002 (Buhtz and Gerth, 2003; Overmeyer, 2007). ⁷ Outmigration and rising unemployment combined to intensify the concentration of Marzahn's socio- economically precarious and welfare-dependent populations, further reinforcing the district's image as the place for the “losers of unification.” Marzahn's notoriety also became part of the national discourse among political figures and popular culture icons—with derogatory remarks by, for example, the prominent comedian Ilka Bessin. Residents and officials in Marzahn are keenly aware of their locality's negative reputation, and find the caricatures deeply insulting and hurtful. During my research residents and interviewees would raise the topic without solicitation on a regular basis, often starting our first conversation by inquiring about my impressions of Marzahn, as if to probe whether I subscribed to the dominant imaginary.

When Berlin designated northern Marzahn in 1998 as the first housing-estate area to be included in the federal “Socially Integrative City” program designed to arrest social and economic decline of Germany's poorest urban areas, many of Marzahn's officials and residents opposed the measure: given the program's association with high-poverty problem areas, the designation would only stigmatize Marzahn further. ⁸ Northern Marzahn was designated an “area with special need of development,” and received additional funding for local improvement projects. One of the projects funded was a promotional campaign designed to improve the image of northern Marzahn across the city. The campaign's first priority was to target Marzahn's association with undesired Easternness, and the initial promotional materials purged all traces of grey high-rises—instead presenting northern Marzahn as a colorful, small-scale residential area resembling the built environment typically found in the West (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. The colorful logo of Marzahn-Northwest: “Colorful Neighborhood.” Source: http://www.marzahn-nordwest-quartier.de/templates/qm/elements/banner2.jpg

Marzahn's landscape has indeed changed somewhat over the past decade, as some apartment blocks were retrofitted with new facades while others were scaled down (Fig. 2). ⁹ Yet the image presented in the promotional campaign remains highly selective: most of Marzahn's buildings remain in their original state (Fig. 3). The second round of the campaign brought an even more explicit attempt to erase Marzahn's Eastern associations. The campaign's signature mental map, for example, invites the viewer to see Marzahn not only as part of Western Europe, but as an integral part of a broader iconic “West” represented by New York City. Despite the aggressive promotion, however, Marzahn remains Berlin's internal Eastern Other; as one of Berlin's foremost integration experts concluded, Marzahn falls short of Berliners’ “elevated perception” of themselves. ¹⁰

Fig. 2. An example of a former high-rise apartment building on Ahrensfelder Street in northern Marzahn after the removal of the top seven floors and an addition of new balconies through the program Urban Redevelopment East. Photo by author.

Fig. 3. Unrenovated apartment buildings in central Marzahn. Photo by author.

A central part of Berlin's contemporary self-image is defined by an embrace of multicultural urbanity. Yet Marzhan has been sidelined from Berlin's multicultural iconography, despite gaining a substantial influx of immigrants over the past two decades. Territorial and economic marginalization cannot fully explain this exclusion: we must also consider the cultural-political interpretation of immigration in the dominant framework of commodifiable multiculturalism. Marzahn's immigrant landscape is dominated by Aussiedler, with the second largest immigrant community—Vietnamese newcomers—comprising only about 2,000 people (Augustin, 2008). Marzahn has then almost none of the non-white minority populations that tend to be associated with Berlin's contemporary image of multicultural diversity. Meanwhile, Marzahn's Aussiedler represent an obsolete image of Germanness to be overcome: for the progressive advocates of multicultural Germany and immigrant cultural and political inclusion, Aussiedler are irrelevant. Aussiedler were not conceived by the German state as immigrants, thanks to their German heritage, but instead were historically constructed as extra-territorial members of the German national community with a constitutionally guaranteed right to immediate naturalization and full legal equality with native-born (West) Germans. As a German national minority they were thus not a part of the multiculture “carried” by immigrants. And while the state and in many cases the public have started treating post-unification Russian-speaking Aussiedler as de facto immigrants—due to their similarly high unemployment rates and insufficient

German language skills ¹¹ —post-Soviet Jewish immigrants have recently been more easily accepted as part of Berlin's cosmopolitan imagination. Finally, Marzahn's embodiment as undesirable Easternness has been reinforced by the image of Marzahner themselves as xenophobic and hostile to Berlin's newly desired multicultural urbanity (Dorsch et al., 2001 in Bauder and Foertsch, 2003).

East Europeanness, then, sits rather uneasily within the dominant imaginaries of what it means to be a proper Berliner and a proper German after unification. For Germans, the proximity and territorial inclusion of post-socialist East German subjects—especially those living in marginalized sites like Marzahn—is a disconcerting destabilization of Germanness from the inside. Unlike immigrant subjects with easily-established social distances defined by somatic difference, Marzahn's Ossis upset the norm by claiming commensurate Germanness. I suggest that the similar danger of territorial closeness of Aussiedler as Eastern Europeans who claim Germanness—in conjunction with the sheer size of their community—also underlies their becoming the primary target of Marzahners’ resentment. Neither the non-white bodies nor public use of foreign language by Vietnamese residents, for example, seemed to elicit the same kind of strong reactions by native-born Germans during my research; special resentment is reserved for Aussiedler. Indeed, the local-born Marzahner I spoke with often expressed more positive views towards non-German immigrants, whom they see as quiet, family-oriented residents committed to education and economic mobility (although there are the predictable complaints about new arrivals’ poor German language skills). When locals express concerns about the “problem” of immigrant settlement in their neighborhoods, they almost always mean Aussiedler. And it was these immigrants’ alleged embodied conspicuousness (Auffälligkeit) that was regularly raised in conversations as an obstacle to their integration and a marker of their non-belonging in Marzahn and in Germany. I now turn to practices of Othering pertaining to such embodied micro-differences of Aussiedler in Marzahn, and the ways in which locals use them to construct these immigrants’ Easternness.

MARZAHNERS’ OTHERS: RUSSIANIZING AUSSIEDLER

In Russia we were Germans, and now [in Germany] we are Russians. (Pfetsch, 1999, p. 1)

Visual Economies of Difference

If there is a single figure that most clearly epitomizes the differences that trouble native Marzahner, it is the babushki—Russian for grandmothers, and more broadly, elderly women. Babushki are mentioned frequently in everyday conversations with Marzahner when discussing how immigrant settlement has changed the district's neighborhoods. Elderly female Aussiedler are indeed a familiar presence in Marzahn, sitting on benches in front of the apartment blocks or in parks during the day. Sometimes they sit alone, but usually in pairs. They typically wear darker-colored clothes—often, knee-long puffed-up skirts with apron-like adornments on top, and small headscarves tied underneath their chins. In one of the focus groups, this figure representing Aussiedler Otherness appeared with particular vehemence:

With older people it's noticeable that they're 200 years behind, in part, and that they're still shaped by their cold homeland, with their headscarves, or whatever, with their apron dresses, with their so on and so on, sitting outside. No one would run around here like that … Can someone tell these people something? That they should maybe go around differently here, so that they don't attract attention right away? “Oh, it's them again!” They stick out right away and one can see‚ Oh, here they come from their cold homeland. (Andreas, male, 50–60)

These old women in particular were seen as changing Marzahn's landscape with their bodies, occupying the space in a fashion inconsistent with that of a modern German urbanite. As a mode of embodiment it was associated with an imagined geography of a cold, peasant Russian East. In Andreas's description, these elderly women seemed to be especially clear embodiments of visible difference: a conventional German expression he used, “die fallen sofort ins Auge,” means “they immediately fall into one's eye.” Blame for being seen and noticed is assigned to the immigrants. While another focus group participant, Heike (female, 50–60) commented on how terrible it was to judge people by their appearance, others stepped in to confirm the validity of Andreas's unease:

The question is where the threshold is. You can say what you want, it all sounds nice, but when you don't know the person that you come across and his appearance says nothing to you, you react differently to him than to someone who's standing next to you and whose appearance is familiar to you. (Hanna, female, 50–60)

That's natural. (Heike, female, 50–60)

Clothes make a man. (Felix, male, 20–30)

I think that, just like in other countries, they should adjust here a little bit. (Sophie, female, 30–40)

If reminded that these old women in headscarves were in the first place just a tiny minority of Aussiedler, locals would point out other ways in which they saw Aussiedler women as different from German ones:

With women one can tell from for example the earrings … I mean, even when they're so stylishly dressed, you can always find a little spot that lets you know exactly that that's an Aussiedler woman … For example, it's the red gold, we have yellow gold and the Russians have more red gold … and you also see it from the way they are made up … this whole fairy-tale style, this ballerina-like make-up, this ostentatious style … (Heike, female, 50–60)

One notices perhaps other traditions from the Russian culture, like ladies wearing a lot of gold. We don't have that any more. (GL, male, 20–30; SPD immigrant integration spokesman for SPD in Marzahn, emphasis added)

These excerpts point to the extent to which visually based Othering of Aussiedler bodies in Marzahn is strongly gendered. As in Breda Gray's (2002) study of Irish women in Britain, in Marzahn it was also primarily a different kind of corporeal way of being a woman, and specifically of feminine fashion aesthetics, that formed the pivotal point of its visual micro-economy of difference. Certainly, native Marzahner noted also Aussiedlers’ other, visually observable bodily practices without any particular reference to gender. They highlighted, for example, how Aussiedler moved through public space in a slouched, uncertain manner of walking that made the Aussiedler body visible and different. It is also likely that such body-reading practices include scanning for what counts as “typical” somatic features associated with Slavic people; even if only one local resident ever explicitly mentioned (some) Aussiedlers’ “Slavic features, like those big cheekbones” (GL, male, 20–30; SPD immigrant integration spokesman in Marzahn). ¹² Still, as in the focus groups highlighted above, locals I engaged with in everyday conversations often focused on women's bodily practices to delineate the Aussiedlers’ difference.

Such bodily practices marked a lack of Aussiedler women's conformity with the dominant bodily scripts of German women that Marzahn's women saw themselves as embodying in these local encounters. Much of Aussiedler women's bodily aesthetics was seen as expressing culture that is different, and more specifically, not on par with German postindustrial modernity. Habitual remarks about Aussiedler women's skirt- rather than trouser-wearing were usually explicitly tied to gender norms deemed traditional and outdated. This is not to suggest that such assertions about gender norms among Aussiedler were made primarily on the basis of observations of women's clothing styles. Interpretative frameworks for visually observed and constructed differences of Aussiedler, like in any other contact, drew on other kinds of observations—experiences and micro-knowledges about these immigrants that the subject had gained previously. One of the focus group participants, Florian (male, 40–50) drew, for example, on such a personal experience as being derided by an Aussiedler man for doing “women's work” when he helped serve food and clean up during a social event for Aussiedler at Kieztreff where he was volunteering. Such anecdotal experiences and knowledges then joined each other in the practice of reading and interpreting specific bodily practices, just as these were, in turn, used to buttress a broader assessment of Aussiedler gender norms as backward.

Gender practices are seen as only one expression of a broader, wholesomely conceived Aussiedler culture—foreign and characteristic of a less-developed Eastern Europe, and Russia in particular. Other practices within familial circles—or an overall “simpler way of life” as Katja (female, 50–60) put it—fit within a framework associating Aussiedler with the past. Aussiedler culture is defined as the unfinished, failed project of industrial modernity in the Russian/Soviet East. As Hanna (female, 50–60) explained, Aussiedlers’ strong orientation toward extended family in Germany: “The thing with the extended family is also a question of time. Industrialization means that it eventually doesn't exist [here] anymore and the same thing will happen to Russians.”

That Aussiedlers’ reliance on extended family networks might have been a coping strategy with migration-induced loss of other social capital is besides the point. After all, such a “veridical deficit” is not the main issue with Othering and orientalizing discourses (Isin, 2005, p. 32). My point here is that such a spatio-temporal Othering of Aussiedler subjects’ cultural practices that Marzahner claim not to practice any more posits these immigrants as culturally out-of-time and out-of-place. Aussiedler are temporally and spatially Othered, displaced from the modern Germany to which Marzahn itself seeks membership.

Audible Economies of Difference

The audible practices of Aussiedlers also played a strong role in everyday constructions of difference. Marzahner complained regularly about Aussiedler youth:

They're making noise, or shall I say they roar as they drag down the Schwarzburger street, loud, they have to speak loud, loud! They have to be heard … I say to myself, man, that's impossible, they are elsewhere now, not somewhere in Kazakhstan, in that wide-open space! There they can do it, the life went on outside the house there anyways, they only slept inside. (Andreas, male, 50–60)

While these residents disapproved also of local German youth drinking outdoors late at night, Aussiedler youth were singled out as appropriating public space in a loud, improper, and almost savage way. Locals often tied the charge of an inappropriately loud self-expression of Aussiedler to an imagined pre-migration socialization of these immigrants in the wide-open steppes of Russia.

The geographic imaginary of Russia, including the Central Asian territories it once ruled, portrays a vast, cold steppe with extended families living in rural, backward dwellings. This spatial imagination is instrumental in a common charge against Aussiedler as auditory invaders of the private spaces of locals’ apartments and buildings. Aussiedler were begrudged, as other immigrants often are, for increasing levels of noise due to their overcrowding—perceived as a long-formed, environmentally-conditioned “habit”:

There's 10 to 12 of them living in an apartment for 2 people, really great housing … they know it from back then, [having had] only one room. Even when they had more rooms at their disposal they never used them, they only stayed in one room, huddling together. (Lena, female, 20–30)

While such allegations of overcrowding have no real basis (e.g. Augustin, 2008), I want to emphasize here the locals’ culturalist—rather than economistic—reasoning. Cultural explanations were underpinned by and further perpetuated the imaginary of Aussiedler as immigrants hailing from the Russian East diametrically different from Marzahn.

For their part, migrants themselves also shared many stories regarding conflicts with their local German neighbors over noise—cases involving active or crying children, latenight talks, or renovations of their apartments. Sometimes Aussiedler seized onto the concept of a boisterous Russian in order to disparage local residents, positing them in turn as cold and lacking in care for others:

We needed to put a nail into the wall, and there he went, he called the police. In the [Soviet] Union we got used to talking loudly, and here—whispering. Please, write this down, Germans are born quietly, get married quietly, and die quietly. In Russia (u nas), we have jolly marriages, births, baptisms and deaths, too. We celebrate it all. But here … they like dogs more than people. (Irina, female, over 60)

Several exchanges later however, Irina, along with several other participants, pleaded with her peers to decrease their audible conspicuousness by speaking quieter in public. The issue became of utmost importance in particular in relation to the Aussiedler youth, whom the parents and grandparents roundly criticized for intentionally speaking Russian loudly, “getting back” at the local Germans reluctant to accept them as Germans.

Allegations of loud behavior involve a crucial subtext: it is not just any foreign language spoken by Aussiedler. During the previous two generations, Russian had become the first language for the vast majority of Aussiedler. Linguistic assimilation in the Soviet Union reflected a loss of cultural autonomy (e.g., rights to German-language schooling) as well as intermarriage following mass deportations of German settlers from culturally autonomous regions on the Volga during the World War II (Münz and Ohliger, 1998). The continued preference of post-Soviet Aussiedler for Russian as their everyday language reinforces their “Russification” in Germany—as Pfetsch (1999, p. 1) poignantly observes, “In Russia we were Germans,” and now in Germany “we are Russians.” As Russians they are the essence of Easterners, culturally distant from the Marzahner aspiring to the center of (Western) European identity. As Tobias (male, 40–50) expressed it: “The Russian culture is very distant for me. I describe myself as a European and European roots come from somewhere else, from the Mediterranean, which has … culturally nothing to do with the East.”

THE RETURN OF/TO THE SOCIALIST EAST

Large settlement of Russian-speaking Aussiedler provoked strong negative reactions from local residents as it has represented for them a renewed implantation of the East in their midst; not of any kind of East, but precisely the post-socialist, Soviet-connected East that precludes Marzahners’ own full inclusion in the new Germany:

And then came the Wende … we were so to speak Russian-free, Soviet-free. But boy, not long afterwards, I open the window, look outside, and hear it. What is going on here? Russian is being spoken again, here in our streets! I thought we had become sort of, so to speak neutral. But now we have here this wave of these Lordships, they are being flown in here again! And slowly a Russian-speaking space develops here. I think to myself, that's not possible! Where have I ended up?” (Andreas, male 50–60)

Andreas's consternation pivots around his interpretation of the German state-socialist regime as an imposition of a foreign political and cultural system over Germany's East. In particular he drew direct ties between the Russian-speaking Aussiedler and the presence of the Russian language in socialist East Germany, for example in schools, where learning Russian was mandatory. This allusion to the Cold War-era presence of Russian in Marzahn creates an impression of Marzahn's everyday streets at that time as materially occupied by Russian-speaking Soviet bodies in a similar way as they are today. Yet this was not the case before 1989. Prior to unification, as Tobias observes, there were few opportunities for everyday encounters with Soviet citizens in Germany:

All of us here I'd say were socialized in the GDR and there we had the German-Soviet friendship. Now that's something, state-sanctioned friendship, right? A heavy topic for us. Well, in hindsight we're actually having our first contact, the so to speak everyday contact [with people from the former Soviet Union] only now, with the Aussiedler.” (Tobias, male, 40–50)

While Andreas's pronouncement exhibited a particularly visceral reaction to the Aussiedler, it provides insights into a broader tendency to conflate the Aussiedler as Russian-speakers with the Soviets—ignoring the German minority's highly problematic relationship with the Soviet regime. In this post-socialist encounter of subjects shaped by the state-socialist experience, Aussiedler have been drawn into the relation of equivalence with “Homo Sovieticus.” As such these immigrants have become associated particularly closely with state socialism, unlike the unwilling former East Germans on whom state socialism is seen as having been more or less imposed. The idea that post-Soviet Aussiedler are more “natural” state-socialist subjects resurged also in locals’ popular explanations about their settlement in Marzahn. Marzahn residents often suggest that the concentration of Aussiedler in Marzahn implied their natural inclination for this kind of environment— for uniform, grey socialist-era high-rises evoking memories of home. Aussiedler's purported attraction to Marzahn is contrasted with local German residents who moved away (or who wished to do so). Local Germans’ reasoning involves a geographic imaginary that naturalizes Russian speakers’ ties to Soviet-era urban landscapes. Focused as it is upon Soviet cities, of course, this imaginary directly contradicts the idea of the rural Russian steppes that supposedly explain Aussiedlers’ loud behavior. Yet both images effectively re-inscribe Aussiedlers’ belonging as resting firmly with the Russian East—the home of state socialism.

To some degree, the anxieties created by the Russian-speaking presence in Marzahn can be traced to Marzahners’ experience as East German subjects in the state-socialist years. In one of the focus groups participants reflected on how present-day tensions reflect historical grievances—for instance, the obligatory participation in state-socialist practices like the institutionalized “Soviet-German Friendship.” As Hanna recounts:

… And because it was some kind of an obligation … people also positioned themselves mentally against it, said to themselves “It's not really my thing.” And that remains still somewhat entrenched. It lasted 40 years here, right? And that it created certain aversion against the Russians themselves is quite normal. At least that's the way it is with me, that it really stems from the old times. Of course there were some conformists who really enjoyed doing it. But amongst the normal people who were obliged for example to march on May 1st … it spurred an aversion that just won't disappear from one day to another, even though it's certainly partially also unjust. But the aversion's there. (Hanna, female, 50–60)

Others elaborated on how the requirements imposed on GDR citizens—mandatory Russian language training and scores of other daily practices—fostered inner resistance towards the regime. Some, including Hanna, openly admit that the antipathy now redirected towards Aussiedler might be “unfair.” Yet is seen as deeply embedded amongst citizens of the former East Germany. The aversion sticks and proves hard to overcome.

Those who claimed lack of any such aversion, like Heike (female, 50–60), were accused of “having truly believed in the system.” Such accusations point to the fact that while the antipathy towards the Soviets, and by extension to the Russian language and its speakers, might have certainly been a part of the experience of many GDR citizens, present-day interpretations of former East Germans’ relation to the regime have been also strongly shaped by the negative appraisal of the East German state-socialist experiment in the context of unified Germany. Present-day interpretations of former East Germans’ relation to the regime are deeply conditioned by attitudes toward the state institutions of East German state socialism in the context of a newly unified Germany. Marzahn today continues to be suffused with resentments against an enduring post-unification banishment of East Germans—their collective as well as individual knowledge, experience, and achievement—from the “true” contemporary German identity. In our conversations about immigrant integration, local Marzahner often redirected the discussion to bemoan the denial of their own integration and full acceptance in post-1989 Germany. As subjects marginalized from contemporary national identity as well as Berlin's post-unification landscapes of multicultural belonging, Marzahners feel marginalized as undesirable, entrenched remnants of the East. Marzahners thus Other the Aussiedler as Russians—the true Eastern subjects—in order to displace a socialism-tainted Easternness onto another people and thus establish their own European identity to bolster their claims to first-class citizenship as “proper” Germans.

CONCLUSION

Europe's contemporary urban landscapes of immigrant settlement are defined by migrants’ dispersal to smaller cities and suburbs, and by increasing ethnocultural, racial, and religious heterogeneity. These trends have diversified the varied forms of contestation of belonging, including new dynamics of spatial segregation and cross-cultural contacts conditioned by racism and prejudice (Vertovec, 2007). Most research nonetheless continues to focus on the largest non-white minority populations, which dominate national imaginaries of difference and belonging—not least because “host” society acceptance remains conditional upon newcomers’ invisibility (Fortier, 2005; Ehrkamp, 2008; Valentine, 2010).

Yet visibility is at least partly defined by context at regional, urban, and local scales. As white-bodied subjects, Aussiedler are less visible and less likely to be construed as a “problem” when compared to Berlin's migrants of Turkish or Kurdish origin. Yet in Marzahn, Aussiedler are at the center of struggles over the everyday politics of belonging. Aussiedlers’ difference is constructed through local residents’ everyday reading and interpretation of bodies, dress, speech, and any behavior that is deemed to depart from the accepted norm of (West) Germanness. While public visibility is important in identifying bodies “out of place,” auditory practices also constitute a prime marker of belonging. As Anne-Marie Fortier (2003) notes, in specific time periods these kinds of everyday cultural markers can rival somatic differences in the Othering of migrants.

As is clear from the case of Marzahn, the significance of such markers is circumscribed by the specificity of local contexts in concrete places. This specificity includes, crucially, geopolitical legacies of relations between the countries of origin and settlement, which impinge on the conditions of immigrant settlement (Fortier, 2000, 2003; Nagel, 2002). In Germany and Berlin, the legacies of Cold War division and subsequent inequitable unification permeate local experiences of belonging and exclusion. Marzahn exemplifies how people and place can be cast into a position of internal Other—not quite new Berliner nor proper German—because they are tainted by the residue of state-socialist Easternness that undermines today's dominant conception of Germanness. The sizeable, everyday presence of Russian-speaking migrants in the post-socialist suburb of Marzahn has become a source of special resentment among locals: the Aussiedlers are seen to reinforce the locality's problematic association with an obsolete Easternness. Paradoxically, the territorial closeness of the immigrants’ white, East-associated bodies makes their presence even more threatening: racial-ethnic criteria cannot be used to challenge Aussiedlers’ claims to authentic Germanness. Locals thus mark Aussiedler as authentically Eastern, displacing Marzahn's haunting residual Easternness onto the migrants—constructing them as the embodied subjects in whom the East resides.

The practice of buttressing an identity of (West) Europeanness through Eastern Othering has been a defining feature in the unstable cultural constructions of post-1989 Europe (Wolff, 1994; Kuus, 2004). When Polish and Slavic elites resurrected the category of “Central Europe” in their drive to join the European Union and NATO—a project conceived as a “return to Europe”—it marked those countries farther to the East (such as Ukraine) as more clearly “Eastern European” and hence unfit for full membership (Agnew, 2001; Haldrup et al., 2006). Eastern states in turn used the strategy toward neighbors farther east (Neumann, 1999; Neofistos, 2008; Bakic-Hayden, 1995). While the trope of Easternness was most pronounced in the decade after 1989, it remains crucial—and as shown in this study, it also suffuses the quotidian negotiations of belonging among white European subjects constructing micro-economies of embodied difference that reproduce hierarchical citizenship.

The case of post-socialist East Berlin may be somewhat unique, due to the persistence of Cold War cleavages in belonging and citizenship. Yet this specificity is analytically valuable, for it exposes the myth of an integrated society—both at an urban and national scale—that immigrants encounter and in which they are thought to strive for acceptance and inclusion. While Marzahner as Germany's post-socialist subjects explicitly tied their own lack of cultural and socio-economic integration and inclusion within the unified Germany to that of Aussiedler, similar axes of differentiated belonging run through any society. Citizenship, after all, is a codification of belonging, and is based only in part on formal exclusion of those deemed foreign because they lack formal citizenship status. In any given polity, some citizen-status bearers are considered more valuable than others, notwithstanding the putative equality in liberal citizenship. The multiple axes of differentiation—class, race/ethnicity, region, religion, etc.—align in distinctive ways in specific cities and particular neighborhoods. In other words, multiple, differentially scaled contexts of marginality work themselves into everyday landscapes of social relations lived, navigated, and constructed by the interaction of immigrants and long-term residents. Understanding longer-term residents’ interactions with varied populations of immigrants in European cities, therefore, requires a sensitivity to the internal politics of citizenship and belonging in the landscapes of everyday life. In Marzahn's case such a consideration serves, as I hope it is clear, not to excuse many of its residents’ anti-Aussiedler attitudes but rather to avoid pitfalls of simply reinforcing the West-dominated discourses about xenophobic Ossis that seek in turn to underline Wessis’ superiority as tolerant multicultural European moderns.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant 0726769, Graduate Research Partnership Program grant from the University of Minnesota Graduate School, and Hella Mears Graduate Fellowship. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Finally, I would like to thank all my informants for sharing their experiences and ideas with me.

Notes

²The Aussiedler comprise between 11 and 17% of the local population in northern and central Marzahn, the areas of research focus, respectively (Augustin, 2008). By 2003 the cumulative migration flow of Aussiedler into Germany numbered 2,995,000 people, including family members (Oezcan, 2004). An additional 100,000 to 200,000 resettlers has arrived since then, based on the data of the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Statistisches Bundesamt) and are now the second largest migrant group, after Turks, in the country.

³The project focused on integration projects developed locally over the past decade in response to increased tensions between migrants and native Marzhaner. These projects are usually funded for one to three years by grants available through various partnerships between local, regional, or federal governments and foundations. They offer a variety of services and activities, including free individual consultation and translation services, native-language lectures on issues such as the German health-care system, or the German and Russian languages. Most projects also incorporate social and cultural activities, such as intercultural dinner “cook-ins,” weekend dance evenings, or weekly breakfasts that are intended to improve local-immigrant relations through increased interactions.

⁴Each group discussion lasted about 1.5 hours and took place in the main communal room of the community cen- ter of the Meridian housing project. As the overall project focused primarily on middle-aged residents, the largest proportion (39%) of the participants were between 50 and 60 years of age; 28% were between 40 and 50, 14% were between 30 and 40, and 12% were over 60. Only 3 (7%) of the participants were under 30. Native German groups were especially gender balanced, with 55% of participants being women. About one-third of participants had college degrees, and one German participant was pursuing graduate studies at the time. With the exception of three native German subjects, all the other participants experienced de-skilling/underemployment after 1989 or following their settlement in Germany, as well as precarious employment and in some cases also long-term unemployment (lasting more than six months).

⁵In the early 1990s, this process involved bodily markers such as “pale faces, oily hair, poor dental work, washed- out formless jeans, generic gray shoes, and acrylic shopping bags” as well as perceived olfactory differences such as body odor (Berdahl, 1999, p. 167). These were gradually supplanted by more subtle contrasts in body language or perceived shortcomings of “cultural fluency in consumption” (ibid., p. 159).

⁶This reflects a broader trend of post-1989 suburbanization and exurbanization in eastern Germany. While its population declined 5.1% between 1995 and 2005, the amount of land devoted to urban uses increased by 12% (Schmidt, 2011).

⁷For comparison, the entire district of Marzahn-Hellersdorf lost about 16% and the locality of Marzahn about 20% of their residents during the same period. While the population decline has slowed since 2002 to about 1.8% annually in the north and 1.4% in central Marzahn, these rates are still more than double the average for the whole district (Augustin, 2008; Stadtteilporträt Marzahn-Mitte, 2008; Stadtteilporträt Marzahn-Nord, 2008).

⁸Author's interview with Ms. Cornelia Cremer, Head of UrbanPlan Ltd., which administered the program, in July 2007.

⁹This transformation has unfolded through the federal program Urban Redevelopment East, established in 2001 (Kabisch et al., 2004).

¹⁰Interview with Ms. Tatjana Forner, Director of Club Dialog, e.V., July 2007.

¹¹Despite introduction in 1996 of the requirement of passing a German language examination as a pre-condition for Aussiedler settlement in Germany, the German language skill proficiency of the newly arriving resettlers has decreased over time as the proportion of migrants of German ancestry (in comparison to their Russian relatives) within this migration stream decreased—from 74% in 1993 to 31% in 1998 (Dietz, 1999).

¹²Reflecting a general trend of racialization, one focus group participant also attempted to read an immigrantassociated somatic marker into Aussiedler bodies, stating that “some are somewhat darker“ before immediately retracting this observation as not really applicable to this group of immigrants.