Presented by Marjan Wardaki
Tuesday, May 19, 201511:30 AM - 2:00 PM
Bunche Hall 11377
Muslims in Weimar Germany were a small but well-off and socially integrated community, but their stories have been put on the sideline, as studies have focused on the masses of Muslim guest-workers that arrived to rebuild Germany after World War II. Within diasporic frameworks, women have been represented as the ones left behind by their spouses. Through a social analysis of gender, this presentation will highlight the role of intermarriages between German women and Afghan men. German interest in Afghanistan emerged out a Drang nach Osten, in which Germany dispatched a German-Ottoman delegation in 1914, in hopes of securing an economic and political position in the Ottoman Middle East, Persia, and Afghanistan. Once secured, a large number of German engineers, educators, health care providers, technicians and their respective wives and children moved into Afghanistan’s newly built “German colony.” Likewise, a counter-flow of Afghan students traveled to Germany after 1921, where they were guaranteed a fine education in social sciences, arts and humanities. Much to the German state’s dismay, the Afghan students often married German women, and traveled back and forth between Germany and Afghanistan. The goal of this presentation is to highlight ways in which circulation and travel allowed transnational families to carved themselves new legitimate roles in both places. This paper argues to consider the role of women as they functioned as meditators linking two distant parts of the world. A transnational approach will not only complicate national metanarratives about the development of an Afghan self and the nation, but will also bring into conversation two regions that have in historical and historiographical terms, only been discussed in diplomatic and international terms.