Fremde: A Discourse on the Foreign, Vol. 23 Book

Gino Chiellino is a foreigner (an Auslander, a Fremder) -- an Italian living in Germany and writing in German. The experience of being foreign defines his life and his work, and it is the issue he addresses in this selection of essays. Yet Gino Chiellino is not just a foreigner; he is doubly estranged: in his texts there is no returning 'home', nor is it possible to ever arrive in the new culture. The essence of foreignness seems rather to derive from a critical distance on those who base their identity on some national state as well as on those foreigners who disdain assimilation. Chiellino explores the impact of this problematic debate on foreign artists and their (non)integration into the German cultural scene.