ABSTRACT
In many ways, the sense of disorientation experienced in the face of evolving interconnected global processes of communication, circulation, production, consumption, displacement, wealth creation, and immiseration has provided a fertile ground for the internationalization of ethnonationalist and xenophobic politics. This is primarily because ethnonationalist nativist rhetoric provides a cognitive shortcut that both simplifies and distorts the complexities of these global flows. Similarly, the cruelty and violence of immigration policies taking place at the southern US-American border found a new frontier in our classrooms as international students were, for a moment, faced with an impossible choice of either risking their health by taking face to face classes during a pandemic or risking the certainty of deportation by opting to enroll in online classes. Lutes’ work chronicles the transformation of Berlin from a multicultural metropolis where intellectualism and liberal values thrive into an increasingly intolerant city that succumbs to fascism and ethnonationalism.
