Intercultural storytelling cafés: A path to understanding and integration?

On what basis can transnational understanding be fostered? What form does testimony take in the context of wartime experiences? How can integration succeed? The "Café am Mittwoch", a storytelling café run by the Berlin-based association "südost Europa Kultur e.V."and its affiliated "Stiftung Überbrücken", creates a space through monthly discussions with eyewitnesses where people can share their wartime experiences. To this end, two eyewitnesses are invited to publicly recount their life stories from the perspective of their experiences of flight and expulsion during the war. The line-up consists of a German eyewitness who lived through the Second World War and another eyewitness from the former Yugoslavia, usually a Bosnian, who lived through the Bosnian War. Based on an understanding of the storytelling café as a hybrid format, this field research is thematically situated at the intersections between trauma management, transnational understanding and public remembrance.

Pages: 68, Paperback, Our Knowledge Publishing