Contours of Identity: Navigating the Complexities of Belonging among the Armenians in Germany

This article examines how Armenians in Germany negotiate belonging within an internally diverse diaspora under conditions shaped by contrasting state-socialist and liberal-democratic institutional legacies associated with Germany's Cold War division. Drawing on forty-three biographical narrative interviews conducted in Halle (in the former German Democratic Republic) and Cologne (in the former Federal Republic of Germany) between 2017 and 2020, the analysis focuses on everyday practices of internal boundary work through which difference, continuity, and legitimacy are evaluated and negotiated under unequal institutional conditions. Building on Stuart Hall's conceptualization of identity as both being and becoming, the article approaches diasporic identity as a relational and historically situated process rather than a fixed attribute. Focusing on language and religion as key arenas of internal boundary making, the article shows that in East Germany, where Armenian communal life developed late and under conditions of institutional scarcity, linguistic competence and religious commitment acquired heightened symbolic and moral weight. In West Germany, by contrast, dense, church-centered institutions diffused evaluative pressure, normalizing multilingualism and plural modes of religious participation. Across both contexts, particular attention is paid to how respondents articulate distinctions of belonging through evaluative language often framed in terms of the “proper” Armenian. Rather than treating these formulations as stable criteria, the article analyzes such claims as situational, relational, and contested practices of differentiation.