Historically, we have understood home and travel as antitheses: to travel is to be away from home. What happens when home becomes travel, when the difference between home and travel is sublated? Franke's paper explores the contemporary tropes of home and travel in German film as they transform under the influences of Europeanization and globalization. Images of home, offering a sense of belonging have always been crucial to representations of identity. In the wake of well-analyzed displacements brought about by globalization, one can observe the transformations of images of home and a concomitant increased search for identity as a central motif of significant German films in the past 20 years. With respect to the European idea, it has simply become more complicated to draw rigid borderlines on the European map, and accordingly, between genres in European national cinema as well. Awarded an EU Dissertation Fellowship by the European Union Center of Excellence in the Summer of 2012, Franke's paper discusses selected German road films that visualize socio-political transformations in Europe from a German or cross-cultural perspective.
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