The Diasporist welcomes pitches from established and emerging writers about topics related to life in Germany. We publish micro-histories, ethnographies, close readings, takes that have lasting power beyond the immediate news cycle, literary reportage, fiction, and pieces that straddle the political at the same time as the cultural. Our areas of interest include (but are not limited to) diasporic communities, tactics of the German left, the rise of the far right, memory culture, international debates, and more. Above all, we want stories that are interesting, that take risks, and that have style.

We want pitches for:

• Pieces that engage with the politics, culture, and history of Germany from international perspectives
• Explorations of international debates that hold significance for conversations in the German context
• Cultural analysis with a political bent; political analysis that is capacious and curious
• Short pieces that evaluate the use and misuse of language in media and politics
• Oral histories, close readings, ethnographies, photo essays, and other eclectic forms
• Translations of works, timely and historical, that contribute to contemporary conversations
• Letters responding to, building upon, contradicting, or departing from other pieces we’ve published

We do not accept pitches for:

• Polemics and op-eds
• Reviews (with the exception of our Seifenblasen series)
• Fiction and poetry, and interviews (while we do run all three of these formats, they tend to come from commission rather than proposals)

Guidelines:

Please send a brief pitch of 1-2 paragraphs indicating what you want to write about, how you mean to engage with it, which language you plan on writing in, and why you think it is a good fit for the Diasporist.

We tend to run prose pieces between 1200-1500 words in length (or roughly 8000 – 10000 characters), but in exceptional circumstances we run pieces that are longer and shorter.

Please indicate in your message if the pitch is time sensitive or if it is being considered by other publications.

We do our best to respond to every pitch we receive within two weeks. If it has been longer than two weeks since you have submitted your pitch and you have not received a response, we encourage following up. 

Submissions (and pitches) are welcome in both English as well as German. Writers in other languages are also invited to share their work.