“Berlin feels like a refugee camp” : counter-memory, political expression, and Palestinian resistance in Berlin

Grounded in ethnographic research in Berlin, this thesis demonstrates how Palestinians actively reshape the political, spatial, and emotional contours of diaspora life. While Berlin hosts the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe and is often seen as a place of refuge, the city is also characterised by a distinctive landscape of state repression. I conceptualise this repression as a transnational articulation of settler-colonial logics—understood as settler coloniality– and deeply entangled with Germany's anti-Palestinian racism and institutionalised memory politics. This framework legitimises surveillance, censorship, racialised policing, and the deployment of high-tech state power against Palestinian activists. This moral and political framework is closely linked to Germany’s postwar identity, where state-sponsored memory culture presents the nation as a redeemer of historical injustice. In this context, Palestinian grief and political expressions are often left unspoken, as their articulation is seen as a threat to the sanctity of Holocaust remembrance and the moral legitimacy of the German state. However, repression does not silence political activity; instead, it generates new forms of dissent and collective mobilisation. Tracing acts of protest, political activism, visual and spatial interventions such as graffiti, legal navigation, and everyday practices of homemaking, through which Palestinians cultivate diverse counter-memory practices that sustain collective belonging and political imaginaries. These practices do more than resist state power: they reconfigure public space, assert narrative agency, and preserve histories and identities that the German dominant memory regime seeks to marginalise and erase. By examining these dynamics, the thesis reveals how counter-memory practices challenge racialised memory culture, unsettle state-sanctioned narratives, and confront broader structures of white supremacist power that shape contemporary European politics