On German Unity Day, it is worth thinking about how the German body politic has been reshaped after the Fall of the Wall, about questions of otherness, exclusion and belonging, about national identity and heritage, and about all this partly being negotiated through immigrants.

It is worth watching "Lola und Bilidikid" by Kutluğ Ataman, a queer love story in unified Berlin that addresses all these topics &more: transphobia; mesalliances across East and West Berlin, but also among white Germans& immigrants; and how migrants are excluded from German past.

Another good and forgotten one is "Ich Chef, du Turnschuh" (Me Boss, You Sneaker) by Hussi Kutluçan, a story of refuge and exclusion with practices of ethnic cross-dressing to perform Germanness. The film is a national allegory about all the troubled unified Germany.

In the 1990s, novels by Turkish-German writers addressed issues around memory&forgetting in unified Berlin. Check "Gefährliche Verwandtschaft" (Perilous Kinship) by Zafer Şenocak &the story of Sascha Muhteschem on intertwined German-Turkish-Jewish-Armenian hi/stories.

"Keloğlan in Alamania" (1991) by Emine Sevgi Özdamar's is one of her plays that remained unknown: a crisis of fiction and fiction on national crisis, about ethnic cross-dressing, displacements, putting on and off ethnic masks, and rewriting the canon for the sake of belonging.

Another work by Özdamar focusing on life in&between Istanbul, East&West Berlin is her triology "Sonne auf halben Weg: die Istanbul Berlin Trilogie", esp. part 2 "Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn" (The Bridge of the Golden Horn")

and part 3 "Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde" (Strange Stars Stare at the Earth. The two novels are actually part of Literature of East Germany. The novels are about the migrant's working day, women and labor, theatre and folk theatre in divided Berlin.

Divisions between East and West, right and left are a recurring theme in Zehra Çırak's poetry. The verses travel from Germany and Istanbul and back, or, between East and West Berlin. It is poetry about partitions.

Check "Fremde Flügel auf eigener Schulter" by Zehra Çırak

Alev Tekinay (*1951) is perhaps forgotten by now. Her writing features inbetweenness. The doppelgänger is a common figure in her writing, such as in her fantastic novel "Der weinende Granatapfel" (1990) playing between East and West with a recurring figure of delay.

Not sure if the novel can be read against the backdrop of unified Germany or not but it is also writing about partitions, same like in Tekinay's poem "Dazwischen" (In-Between".

I did not know that there was an adaptation of that poem as a clip until now: "Dazwischen - Alev Tekinay | Gedichtsverfilmung" via @YouTube