German Titles, Turkish Names: The Cosmopolitan Will
by Tom Cheesman and Deniz Göktürk

Writers of non-German background - what the novelist Kemal Kurt calls the 'Fifth Literature' - have become a noticeable feature of present-day German writing, as several books reviewed in the last issue of this magazine amply illustrated. Germany's largest 'ethnic minority' comprises over two million Turkish-Germans. What impact are they having on the literary market-place, there and elsewhere?

Ironically, the Turkish-German fictional character best known abroad is not the creation of a Turkish-German author. Kemal Kayankaya, the Frankfurt-based hard-boiled detective who can't speak Turkish in Happy Birthday, Türke (Happy Birthday, Turk, tr. Anselm Hollo, No Exit Press 1994) and other novels, is the creation of Jakob Arjouni, who has no Turkish ancestry. Nor does the noted novelist Sten Nadolny. But with Selim oder die Gabe der Rede (Selim, or the Gift of Speech), published in 1990, Nadolny created one of the most acclaimed Turkish-German protagonists. The novel tells the story of a friendship between a German writer and a Turkish guest worker, interwoven with a political history of the 1960s in the FRG. Selim is presented as a story-teller of genius - but it is the German author and narrator who speak for him in the novel.

But German Turks can of course speak and write for themselves, and indeed the diversity and range of voices in new Turkish-German fiction defies all categorisation. 'Gastarbeiter-Literatur' (guest worker literature) with its narrow range of concerns and styles has almost entirely disappeared. Turkish names now appear on German best-seller lists, such as Akif Pirinçci, with his highly original crime novels. Felidae, published in Germany in 1989 (tr. Ralph Noble, Fourth Estate 1994) had a cat as its detective, whose first case involved a nasty attempt at eugenic engineering. A later book, Der Rumpf (The Rump) published in 1992, featured a limbless man out to perpetrate the perfect murder. Turkish-German authors also appear as winners of the most prestigious literary prizes. Zehra Çirak won the Hölderlin Prize for poetry in 1994, Emine Sevgi Özdamar the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1991 for her novel Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus (Life is a Caravanserai), published in Germany in 1992. (An English translation by Luise von Flotow is due shortly from Middlesex University Press.) A fictionalised and poeticised account of the author's childhood in 1950s Turkey, this novel's 'hybrid' play with double language and its skilful enmeshing of private and public histories have prompted comparison with such other 'postcolonial' nomads as Gloria Anzaldua's La frontera /Borderlands. The sequel Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (Bridge of the Golden Horn) published last year, relates Özdamar's - or should one say, her protagonist's? - student years in the late 1960s. Set in both Germanies and in Turkey, it is a richly detailed, moving, irreverent, often disturbing account of a politicised, internationally mobilised generation.

Aras Ören has been a recognised force in German literature, with Berlin (particularly West Berlin) as his focus since the early 1970s, when he published his first Berlin poems. A recently completed cycle of novels 'In Search of Present Time', comprising Eine verspätete Abrechnung (Belated Reckoning) and Berlin Savignyplatz , 1995, Unerwarteter Besuch (An Unexpected Visitor), 1997, Granatapfelblüte (Pomegranate Blossom), 1998, and Sehnsucht nach Hollywood (Longing for Hollywood), 1999, traces the pathways of individuals from various social classes in the city during the years of the Cold War, interweaving 'migrant' with 'local' stories. Turkish migrants figure among a series of unreliable narrators and imaginative protagonists in a dizzyingly sophisticated game with memory, history, fiction and multiple identities.

Güney Dal also appeals to an interest in Berlin. His latest novel Teestunden am Ring (Teatime at the Ringside), 1998, imaginatively introduces a philosophically inclined boxing-instructor from Istanbul into the cosmopolitan fabric of the city in the interwar years. Both Aras Ören and Güney Dal write in Turkish, but their books form very much a part of German literature.

Among younger writers, Zafer Senocak has established a strong reputation for his trenchant essays on cultural and political relations between Germany and Turkey, Christianity and Islam, and 'the rest of the world'. (A selection of these, 'Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays, 1990-1998 'translated and with an introduction by Leslie Adelson, are being published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2000.) He is also a gifted writer of poetry and fiction. In his last novel Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (Dangerous Kinship), 1998, a writer of mixed German-Jewish and Turkish descent, recently returned from America, confronts his family's past and the vexed identity politics of Germany after 1989. The book forms a cycle with Die Prärie (The Prairie), 1997, and the forthcoming Der Erotomane (The Erotomaniac) and is a sparely, stylishly written treatment of the historical burdens and absences which impede recognition of multiculturalism among Germans and those whom officialdom labels 'foreigners'- including those who are (or feel) German.

This coupling of Turkish and Jewish minority identities in serious fiction reverberates through a number of recent books. In Dilek Zaptçioglu's Der Mond isst die Sterne auf (The Moon Eats the Stars), 1998, Turkish youths in Berlin negotiate complexities of identity and belonging by reading Heine. In the work of Feridun Zaimoglu, the Holocaust is directly invoked by several young, disaffected and internationally streetwise 'characters' who fulminate with marvellous cross-vernacular eloquence about German racism and its infuriating pendant, well-meaning paternalism.

Zaimoglu is the enfant terrible of contemporary German letters. He has been dubbed Germany's Malcolm X, and the Irving Welsh of Kiel, by Newsweek among others. His 'characters' are based on real people living on the margins of society. They do not interact, but reveal their dissonant sense of self in often brilliant dramatic monologues and reworked interview notes, surely often collated from diverse sources (in many places invented) by the author. He has forged a new literary German, representing the creolised German-Turkish slang, and rap rhythms, used by many young people. Kanak Sprak (analogously 'Spik Speak'), 1995, and Kopfstoff (Headstuff), 1998, present self-narrations by two dozen young men and women of Turkish background respectively. These sometimes Joycean texts demand a great deal of the translator, especially a good knowledge of dialect and vernacular, from several German-speaking regions. But the novel Abschaum (Scum), 1997, uses a more straightforward, slangy prose to depict the brutal life of a junkie, a small-time villain and all-round loser, in the global language of post-industrial, edge-of-city despair and gallows humour. The feature film based on the book will soon be released under the title Kanak Attak - a title echoing a series of media-events initiated by rappers and other cosmopolitan hybrids in various German cities.

Osman Engin adopts Zaimoglu's strategy of reclaiming the racist epithet 'Kanak'. His satirical tour-de-force Der Kanaken-Gandhi, 1998, plays on the transformation of ethnic identities and features a Turk, a well established 'guest worker' of thirty years standing, who out of the blue receives an official letter addressing him as a rejected asylum seeker facing deportation. Despite his efforts to prove the contrary, he henceforth passes as Indian, an enforced disguise soon complemented by a turban-like bandage which he has to wear around his head after being attacked on a tram. A cabarettist turned novelist, Engin has created a wildly comical account of a perpetually victimised head of a Turkish-German family, a picaresque Candide-style journey through one week in one town in Germany.

Selim Özdagan appeals to the mainstream male adolescent and twenties market with slightly dreamy 'lifestyle' novels, set in contemporary Germany, and a fantasy USA based on the movies, in which a young man seeks life's meaning, friendship, and a way of remaining true to himself amid the spiritual desert of consumerism. His first Western-style road novel was titled Es ist so einsam im Sattel, seit das Pferd tot ist (It's So Lonely in the Saddle Since the Horse Died), 1995, followed by Nirgendwo & Hormone (Nowhere and Hormones), 1996. The protagonist of the latest, Mehr (More), 1999, is described as a citizen of Cologne whose family background is Turkish. But ethnicity plays a minimal role in the conflicts he experiences.

Renan Demirkan, a vivacious actress familiar from television and a prototype of successful integration, is another role-model for younger generations of Turks making a home for themselves in Germany. Her autobiographical narrative about growing up in Germany, Schwarzer Tee mit drei Stück Zucker (Black Tea with Three Pieces of Sugar), 1991, featuring her portrait on the cover, has sold well both in Germany and in Turkey, and is a studiously undramatic account of growing up in a middle-class migrant family in small-town Germany which largely avoids the rhetoric of being 'lost between two cultures'. Her second book Die Frau mit Bart (Woman with a Beard), 1994, moves away from the genre of migrant literature to tell the story of two women friends meeting on an island and talking about their lives.

Kemal Kurt has written the ultimate novel of twentieth-century world literature: Ja, sagt Molly (Yes, Says Molly), 1998, in which the librarians of Babel have decided to purge the stock of twentieth-century fiction of all but one title. The protagonists of modern world literature struggle to survive. The book is a witty cocktail of 'high' and 'low' literary styles from James Joyce to Agatha Christie, and a satire on the 'global literature promotion industry' which relegates many imaginative writers to the margins. It is a geographically generous homage to a century of creative imagination, a serious reckoning with the century's many horrors, bizarrely erotic into the bargain (Gregor Samsa, post-metamorphosis, brings Molly to a climax) and, finally, simply profound about the affirmative action that is love. The creations of the 170-odd authors featured, from Ivo Andric to Carl Zuckmayer, include more German and Turkish names than the average English-language reader may know: Kurt's ideal reader is better read than most of us. But the local colour of the setting is global: a composite world city of seven (and many more) bridges, from Galata to Frisco Bay and Sydney. This scintillating book is a triumph of the cosmopolitan will for the year 2000 and beyond.

At the turn of the millennium, it is high time for publishers and critics to catch up with writers in resisting territorially defined notions of belonging, or ghettoising concepts such as 'minority literature'. Itinerancy is central to our national literary canons which are in fact full of travelling writers and travelling books. Writers of migrant backgrounds appear in a horizon of 'world literature' for global readers of any language - just like canonised national writers such as Orhan Pamuk or Günter Grass.

Tom Cheesman is Lecturer in German at the University of Wales, Swansea. Deniz Göktürk is Lecturer in German and Film Studies at the University of Southampton.