After the Berlin Wall: hip-hop and the politics of German reunification

Abstract

This essay examines they ways in which German reunification in 1990 signaled the emergence of a ‘new’ Germany through the policing of spatial and racial borders that constitute the ‘nation’. Marked by increased violence against racialized ‘others’, reunification made visible the ways that national belonging was predicated on the construction and exclusion of ‘strangers’. Articulating the Black German experience of being a ‘stranger in my own country’, the musical collective Brothers Keepers uses hip-hop to connect their struggles to that of others in the African diaspora while critiquing the violence that attends to the (re)making of a nation.

Keywords:

• Germany
• reunification
• racial profiling
• violence
• hip-hop
• Brothers Keepers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This is despite the Basic Treaty of 1971, which established a sort of separate-but-equal status of the two states. Scholars such as Ross have noted that West Germany paid ‘lip service’ to the idea of reunification – until the actions of East German citizens made it politically expedient to act.