Where Foreignness Begins

Wellershaus grew up in the middle-class district of Hamburg-Volksdorf with her white mother and her white grandparents. Her father had lived on a cocoa plantation in Equatorial Guinea as a child, and moved to the Costa del Sol in the 1960s. As a Black German woman splitting her time between Hamburg and Malaga, and between her parents’ lives, she came to perceive foreignness as a complex construct. She went to university in London and then became a journalist, living with her traditional nuclear family in the gentrified part of Berlin’s Pankow district. Today she belongs to the privileged middle class, and simple narratives of belonging no longer apply. In her book, Wellershaus looks at contexts in which foreignness does not reveal itself at first glance – friendships, family, working relationships, relationships between neighbours – at first hand. She writes about undecided biographies and complex identities, and links other people’s perceptions of the world with her own. This enables her, in inimitable fashion, to broaden the horizons of contemporary identity politics.

*‘A family life split between Hamburg, Malaga and Malabo: in between is the place where my self combines with the complex experiences of others.’

*An important broadening of the horizons of contemporary identity politics

*About the various forms of exclusion in our super-diverse society – and what binds us together in spite of them

*For readers of Alice Haster’s ‘Was weiße Menschen nicht über Rassismus hören wollen…’ and Kübra Gümüşay’s ‘Sprache und Sein’