Vol. 21 · No. 2 · Issue 67 · Summer 2003

John S. Brady

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Abstract

Riva Kastoryano, Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrants in France and Germany, trans. Barbara Harshav (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)

Zafer Senocak, Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture, 1990-1998, trans. and ed. Leslie Adelson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000)

One charge often made about minority politics in Germany is that it consists mostly of Stellvertreterpolitik-that is, the politics of intermediaries. Members of the country's various minority communities lack, so the critique goes, direct access to the Federal Republic's public sphere; instead of having a public voice, they must content themselves with letting others speak for them: union representatives, charity officials, and government figures. Given such mediated political participation, the suspicion is that the real needs and concerns of these communities, when they in fact reach the wider public, do so only at a muted volume and in diluted form.