This is a conversation with Amro Ali, author of the essay “On the Need to Shape the Arab Exile Body in Berlin.” He is also co-president of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities, research fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin, and lecturer in sociology at the American University in Cairo (AUC).

The Fire These Times is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Anchor, Breaker, Amazon Music, Audible, Stitcher, Radio Public, Pocket Casts, Castro and RSS.

What we talked about:

• Moving from the centers to the peripheries
• Why Berlin? And not London, Paris, New York or Istanbul
• Berlin as an incomplete city and Germany’s past
• Germany and the Arabs
• The Koblenz trial, accountability in Germany (but not in the Arab world)
• January 25 and the legacy of the Arab Spring for the exile body
• Home as the place where all attempts to escape cease
• Valuing public spaces
• Survivor’s guilt and impostor’s syndrome
• Challenges faced by Arabs and other non-white people in Berlin
• Meeting other Arabs for the first time in Europe
• The need for a connection between Berlin and other capitals, such as Beirut or Tunis
• Politics of language and the use of Arabic in the diaspora

Recommended Books:

• City of Exiles: Berlin from the outside in by Stuart Braun
• Representations of the Intellectual by Edward W. Said
• Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin by Seyla Benhabib

Resources Mentioned:

• The Der Spiegel article: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/witness-defendant-deserter-case-in-germany-raises-questions-about-how-to-try-assad-s-atrocities-a-43d2817e-d85b-4378-b158-0c5001c345eb
• Branch 251 Podcast

Previous episodes mentioned:

• My Father and Syria’s Forcibly Disappeared (With Wafa Mustafa)
• Space Travel, Nostalgia, and Retrofuturism (With Nat Muller)
• That Cairo Concert, Mental Health and Growing Up Queer in Lebanon (With Hamed Sinno)
• Why I stopped writing about Syria (With Asser Khattab)
• Queerness, Literature and Revolution (With Saleem Haddad)