I’m immensely grateful for this kind review of Beauty is in the Street by Stuart Jeffries. He writes:

“What is the legacy of these movements? On one hand, Häberlen rightly points out that, far from overthrowing capitalism, they helped it mutate and survive, since their anti-hierarchical ideas helped change work culture. Instead of offering keys to executive washrooms, companies now instil loyalty with putatively democratic beanbags and breakout zones.

And yet there is still something inspiring about the aspirations of much countercultural protest, argues Häberlen. Such as? “A world without sexist and racist discrimination, a world that protects and values nature rather than exploiting it for profit, a world in which residents have a right to their city, to affordable housing and public space.”

He has a point: imagine cities without locks on bikes, cars or front doors, with public spaces where you can take a seat without being required to buy stuff and where you might encounter people beyond your echo chambers. A dream, perhaps, but one that still sounds worth fighting for, even beautiful.”

Jeffries’s words speak to what I tried to accomplish with the book: I hope for it to inspire and encourage readers – to imagine alternatives, to struggle for them, to experiment, to risk failure, and to try again. No doubt, many of such experiments, as I’ve discussed in the book, did not quite yield what those engaged in them had longed for. All too often, activists reproduced the very power structures they had set out to overcome. There’s no reason to romanticize the history of protesting. And yet, there is, I believe, something deeply inspiring in these stories about struggling for a better world.

I’m immensely grateful for a very kind featured review of Citizens and Refugees: Stories from Afghanistan and Syria to Germany in Central European History by Christopher A. Molnar. The book, he writes, is “highly recommended to historians of modern Germany and scholars in a range of fields who work on migration and refugee studies. The accessible writing style also makes it suitable for advanced undergraduates.” I deeply appreciate these comments and recommendations, and of course hope that the book will be read in classes.

Molnar kindly quotes the final paragraph of my preface that also describes, roughly, how he felt about the book:

“This book, then, is certainly not a typical work of academic history, based on archival research and an intimate knowledge of a vast literature, but it is, emphatically, about history. At least I have learned something profound about history by listening to these stories, and not just about the history of the refugee crisis and what preceded it. For that, I’m immensely grateful.”

I want to use the opportunity of Molnar’s review to outline some the goals I hoped to accomplish with the book – what writing it and above all listening to the stories of its protagonists has taught me about history.

The conversations I had on which the book rests began with a seemingly trivial question: When does your story begin? It’s a question that frames the stories we tell. Posing this question to those who fled from Afghanistan and Syria to Germany yielded a range of answers that, collectively, challenge us – or at least challenged me – to rethink the framing of “the story.” They were not telling a history of the long summer of migration, even if that moment of 2015/16 functioned in a way as a nodal point. Their stories reached back much further, into the histories of Afghanistan and Syria; they deal with moments of hope – when US led forces ended the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, when Syrians started their revolution in 2011 – but also with bloody civil wars and bitter disappointments. Those are stories that happened outside the shores of Europe. They were not, at least not primarily, about the experience of fleeing and migrating; those were stories detailing difficult political struggles and courageous ways of acting as citizens in adverse circumstances. It’s indeed telling that Sabrina’s story with which the book opens and that inspired the entire project ends the very moment she became a refugee. Telling the stories of those who fled is then a plea against more histories of refugees and migration (even though “refugees” is part of the book’s title), against histories of the “long summer of migration,” and more generally for including the political histories of those who fled into our – and this is a very emphatic our – histories.

Writing the book also taught me something about the intimacy of history that is all too often lost, it seems to me, in scholarly accounts. The telling of history is not just our professional business, but what people do in countless everyday conversations. History has a profound personal meaning that is generated in such interactions. For me, this was a crucial lesson: we need to understand how history, as a narrative about the past, happens in a myriad of fractured ways when people talk to each other, and not just in whatever commemorative activities we usually investigate when thinking about forms of remembering. I don’t think history has ever been more meaningful, and a very personal level, than in those conversations over a cup of coffee or a glass of beer.

Most troubling and eye-opening were exactly those moments in which interlocutors did not say what I’d expect them to say, and I hope to have retold some of those moments. Molnar quotes one of them, when I shared a video of Syrian protestors with my friend Rahaf, and she responded: Do you know how many of the people singing in the video are dead by now? Of course, I didn’t; and I admit, there was nothing I had to say in response to her. I don’t think I had ever realized before how destructive violence can be; her comment shook me to the bones. (And I’m not sure I really convey that feeling in the book.) Listening to such stories was, for me, incredibly instructive.

Given my personal involvement in gathering these stories, as interlocutor rather than interviewer, there was no way of writing the book without weaving myself into the story, but, I hope, without making it all about myself. And as important a strong, argumentative voice is, I also hope to give readers a sense of how much I questioned myself and my assumptions in the process of producing the book. In that sense, the book was also an attempt to write history in a more, as it were, intimate way.

As always, if you’re interested in having me talk about the book to students or at a research colloquium, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’d also be happy to arrange conversations with some of its protagonists!

Beauty is in the Street is out in print – available by early October

In times when it seems like there are no alternatives, when people find it impossible to imagine better futures and are driven by a kind of “nihilistic rage” to vote for parties on the extreme right, I hope the book will inspire readers to do exactly this: imagine a better a world, have the courage to struggle for that world, to try, to risk failure, to learn, and try again. It’s a profoundly hopeful book.

If you’re interested in me discussing my book Citizens and Refugees: Stories from Afghanistan and Syria to Germany, its making and main arguments regarding narratives of migration and fleeing, please feel invited to get in touch! I’m happy to talk to students, educators, academic colleagues, and anyone else interested, virtually or (if possible) in person. Even more importantly, some of the book’s protagonists, people who fled from Syria and Afghanistan to Germany, would be keen to talk about their stories and experiences.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch. For more information about the book, see the here.

I’m honored to share a review by Felix A. Jiménes Botta of my book in German History. He writes:

“By recounting their lives before becoming refugees, their journeys and their struggles and successes in Germany, Häberlen demonstrates that refugees are subjects with agency. This book is a highly original and important contribution to the rapidly expanding field of German migration studies, and to the critical scholarship on human rights and humanitarianism.”

“Häberlen’s book is highly relevant to understanding contemporary German society. … The accessibility of the writing will make it a useful resource for educators of college undergraduates and high school students. Moreover, Citizens and Refugees is a methodologically innovative book that will enrich graduate methods courses.”

I’ve added a new menu, “Songs for a Better World,” where I will offer brief reflections on historical and contemporary protesting songs, some of which I have discussed in my forthcoming book For a Better World. The first one is a the Song for Equality from the Iranian protests in September / Fall 2022.

This week, in August 2022, I finally received the print copies of Citizens and Refugees: Stories from Afghanistan and Syria to Germany. I wrote the book, roughly speaking, between the summer of 2019 and the summer of 2020, though its origins go back to what became known as the “long summer of migration” in 2015. It was a time when I myself was deeply involved in supporting people who had fled from Afghanistan and Syria to Germany. This summer of migration is only seven years ago, and yet it somehow feels like old history, a distant past. I recall the last interview I did for the book, just a few days before the first Covid-19 lockdown in early 2020. There had been protests about the violent repulsion of refugees at the Greek-Turkish border. The “refugee crisis” was anything but over. But when the pandemic hit, the situation of refugees rapidly disappeared from the news. An era, it felt, came to an end. And with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which again made millions of people flee, hundreds of thousands coming to Germany, the conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan seem even less relevant. On a more personal level, most people I met in 2015 have moved on with their lives, they have settled down, found jobs or are studying, and many of them are in the process of becoming German citizens. All these developments indeed seem to make the summer of 2015 history, an issue of the past no longer relevant to our present; it makes the book I just received feel strangely outdated. It’s stunning how quickly this can happen.

And yet, when I turn to the stories the book is telling, they still speak to our present. For once, while the situation in Afghanistan and even more so in Syria receives little attention in most media, the violence there continues: in Syria, the dictatorial regime of Assad is still in power, and is still bombing the last holdout of the opposition in Idlib; in Afghanistan, where the Taliban have taken over after retreat of the international forces in the summer of 2021, millions are threatened by starvation. There are still reasons to flee these countries; it just has become much more difficult due to European border regimes. If anything is changing, then it is the slow fading away of hopeful memories of the revolution in Syria, of building a better society in Afghanistan. The future certainly looms dark.

And yet, this is exactly why the stories Citizens and Refugees is telling still matter, I believe. These are stories about people acting as citizens, for the common good, for a better future, in dire circumstances. They are about hopes, and disappointments; they are about belonging, and what makes belonging so difficult. And not least, these stories – histories, in the plural – overcome boundaries, they connect “our” political world of “the West” with what lies outside “our” borders. They introduce political voices still worth listening to. For these reasons, I still hope the book speaks to our present, even if the summer of 2015 might sometimes feel like a distant past.

As I’m leaving my academic position at the University of Warwick, I’m starting this blog to provide updates about my work as a historian and writer. I’ll post news about upcoming publications, provide additional material about them, and from time to time reflections on history & politics. I might even consider joining Twitter. If you’re interested in my work, please follow me here.