Two of our current PhD students, Thomas Fuhr and Wojtek Gornicki, have contributed to a set of Translations of Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum/Your Homeland Is Our Nightmare. The essays from the 2019 book have appeared in Transit Journal, housed at Berkeley. See below for a word from the editors, Jon Cho-Polizzi and Elizabeth Sun. Congratulations, Thomas and Wojtek!
It is our privilege to present the full English-language translation of the collection Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (Ullstein fünf, 2019)—Your Homeland is Our Nightmare. This publication represents the culmination of more than two years of collaboration between authors, editors, and translators, and was anticipated by the initial publication of eight translated essays from the collection in TRANSIT 12.2: Landscapes of Migration.
The current publication contains republished versions of these eight translations along with a revised Foreword to the Collection by the German-language editors Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, the original Translators’ Introduction by Jon Cho-Polizzi and Michael Sandberg, as well as a new Foreword to the Translations and six previously untranslated essays from Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum.
This open-access, digital publication makes these essays available to a wide, English-language readership—providing an introduction to the works of a number of important, contemporary German-language authors, many of whom are quickly becoming household names.
Previously published translations in this collection include works by Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Fatma Aydemir, Deniz Utlu, Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, Olga Grjasnowa, Vina Yun, Max Czollek, and Simone Dede Ayivi, some of which have been revised since the previous publication with input from both authors and translators.
New translations include essays by Sharon Dodua Otoo, Enrico Ippolito, Mithu Sanyal, Nadia Shehadeh, Margarete Stokowski, and Reyhan Şahin.
TRANSIT Journal is pleased to make this contribution toward ongoing conversations around contemporary German-language literature, and to facilitate access to this literature among a broader readership. We are grateful for the work of our translators—Lou Silhol-Macher, Be Schierenberg, Jon Cho-Polizzi, Adrienne Merritt, Jonas Teupert, Michael Sandberg, Didem Uca, Elizabeth Sun, Allison García, Thomas B. Fuhr, and Wojtek Gornicki—as well as our many editors and readers. This project was made possible through the generous cooperation of Ullstein fünf and UC Berkeley’s Department of German.