After the Berlin Wall: hip-hop and the politics of German reunification Sonya Donaldson* Department of English, New Jersey City University, Jersey City, NJ, USA This essay examines they ways in which German reunification in 1990 signaled the emergence of a ‘new’ Germany through the policing of spatial and racial borders that constitute the ‘nation’. Marked by increased violence against racialized ‘others’, reunification made visible the ways that national belonging was predicated on the construction and exclusion of ‘strangers’. Articulating the Black German experience of being a ‘stranger in my own country’, the musical collective Brothers Keepers uses hip-hop to connect their struggles to that of others in the African diaspora while critiquing the violence that attends to the (re)making of a nation. Keywords: Germany; reunification; racial profiling; violence; hip-hop; Brothers Keepers In a March 2012 ruling, an administrative court in Koblenz, a city in the western part of Germany, made racial profiling legal. The court ruled that officers of Germany’ s federal police were allowed to inspect travelers on rail routes that serve foreigners to check for unauthorized entry or violations of the Residence Act. The court further ruled that police were not prohibited from also selecting travelers on the basis of their outward appearance. The ruling stemmed from a two-year-old case in which a 25-year-old Afro-German architecture student traveling by train from Kassel to Frankfurt, refused to show police his identification when he was asked to do so. The police provided no reason for the request, forced the man from the train, ‘like cattle’ (his words) and searched his belongings (asking him, in the process, if he had stolen the chocolate bar they found in his bag). He later produced the ID. The police officers, nevertheless, filed charges against him. They accused the young man of slander because he alleged racism in the arrest, likening their treatment of him to the Nazi SS; the man was later acquitted of slander charges and proceeded with a lawsuit against the officers. In court, the officers admitted that they frequently singled out individuals for profiling if they appeared to be ‘foreigners’. They also noted this was common practice (Spiegel Online, March 29, 2012). In a 2 November 2012 Spiegel Online interview, the student noted that he had been targeted for ID checks on numerous occasions – at least ten times in the two years prior – and he believed it was because he was black. ‘Apparently it is difficult for some police to accept that black Europeans are no longer a rarity’, he added. Following the Koblenz ruling, Afro-German individuals and groups such as ISD (Initiative Schwarze Deutsche und Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland) in major cities across Germany took to the main train stations in protest and in July 2012 launched a campaign to stop racial profiling and identity checks, which included an online petition. *Email: sadonalds@gmail.com African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 2015 Vol. 8, No. 2, 190–201, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17528631.2015.1027326 © 2015 Taylor & Francis