National or cosmopolitan Europe?

Foreword

The case studies presented in this volume have emerged from empirical practices for students at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. I was inspired to develop these courses by my experience of incompatible discursive worlds that I encountered as a media consumer in Germany and Poland before the Iraq War in 2003. I arrived in socialist Poland in the mid-1970s as a participant in the 68 movement and have since lived as a transmigrant between Germany and Poland. Under such living conditions, I have understood foreignness as an opportunity to question my certainties and to comprehend the conditions of my thinking. This is the perspective from which I have read the German debate on European publicness. I would like to thank all the students who made this work possible, including those whose work was not selected for publication.