Short Abstract

Taking everyday stories about the Deutsche Bahn as a fruitful starting point for analyzing political and societal atmospheres in contemporary Germany, this panel examines experiences of (im)mobility with DB through story-telling, (auto-)ethnographic accounts and theoretical analysis.

Long Abstract

‘Must I always be waiting on you?’ asks Jack Johnson in a song about a difficult romance. He could also be addressing the Deutsche Bahn (DB).

Few issues are as passionately debated in German news and everyday conversations as DB. Stories of endless delays for often bizarre reasons are shared among friends, colleagues and strangers who are stuck together on platforms or in trains. In these rich tales, one encounters powerful affects and radical political critique. Travelers despair and hope, sweat and freeze, mourn (or celebrate) missed appointments and opportunities. Through humor or hate speech, they comment on (im)mobility in uncertain times and contemplate the decline of an (imagined) Germany once known for punctuality, engineering, and efficiency. Sometimes, one hears love stories: of broken infrastructure creating unexpected connections through shared stuckedness. More often, however, the genre is drama or even crime; dark stories, in which waiting exacerbates tensions and fuels simmering violence, and in which failures in movement become emblematic of a deeper sense of ‘existential immobility’ (Hage 2009).

This panel combines story-telling with theoretical analysis, starting from the assumption that ‘DB stories’ offer rich material to analyze political and social atmospheres in Germany. It explicitly invites creative and autoethnographic writings that addresses the following questions: What can we learn from DB narratives about affects, politics, (im)mobilities and (dis)connections? What do they tell us about the socio-material fabric and (political) imaginaries of contemporary Germany? And how do tropes of stuckedness relate to, and reflect, more existential concerns in uncertain times?