Dr. Heike Berner is currently in the process of finishing an oral history project on second-generation Korean Germans. The overarching question she is looking at is how Korean Germans of the second generation locate themselves in Germany (and/or Korea).

For the project, she conducted 17 in-depth interviews with members of the second generation who were either born in Germany to one or two Korean parents or came to Germany at an early age.

The interviews were conducted as life histories, spanning from childhood to the present. The narrators are from different regions in Germany, and they are from various professional fields. Most of them are children from Korean immigrants who came to Germany in the only large wave of migration from (South-)Korea to (West-)Germany in the 1960s/70s.

The outcomes of the project will be published in two books: one will contain the oral histories, and the other is an analytical approach to the second generation in which the oral histories will be put in an interpretative context.