After the arrival of more than one million Syrians in Germany in 2015–16, Berlin has become host to a thriving Arab arts, literature and theatre scene. Some artists and culture critics have even posited Berlin as a new capital of Arab culture. As the arts scene in Berlin has been both invigorated and transformed by the visibility of Syrian and Arab writers and artists, there has also been increased interest in curating, performing and attending both arts-based and academic events that touch on contemporary migration, especially the forced migration of the post-Arab Spring moment. Arabic theatre and literature in Berlin are negotiating these emergent social and artistic spaces, where creative and often collaborative and multilingual approaches coexist with, negotiate, and sometimes resist, dominant representations of the exile, refugee and forced migrant. In the process, writers and other cultural actors are creating experimental and speculative modes of writing and performance that upend expectations placed on migration literature and the figure of the refugee while imagining mobility and diaspora alongside the complex questions raised by forced migration.

In this chapter, I discuss the emergent Arabic literary, theatre and arts scene in Berlin and analyse several literary and theatre texts and performances that are defamiliarising migration in ways that create openings for transformative reflection. This discussion anchors Berlin’s collaborative, translational and internationalising ethos within a range of different institutions, cultural actors and efforts to define it. This new exile, what political sociologist Amro Ali calls ‘the new Arab exile body’, whose history, conditions and cultural institutions diverge significantly from the postcolonial centres of London and Paris, is being theorised in multiple spaces, including literature, theatre, the arts and in forums for critical inquiry, but also in the everyday lives and practices of those who are living and shaping it. In the chapter, I discuss the short stories from two collections by Rasha Abbas, a journalist and author from Syria who has been active in Berlin over the past few years. Her Kayfa Tamma Ikhtiraʾ al-Lugha al-Almaniyya (How the German Language was Invented), which was first published in German translation in 2016 as Die Erfindung der deutschen Grammatik (The Invention of German Grammar) is a collection of short stories, or vignettes, depicting life in Berlin from the perspective of a newly arrived refugee.