Cosmopolitan Anxieties by Ruth Mandel

Author:Ruth Mandel [Mandel, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2008-07-04T05:00:00+00:00

TOWARD A MINOR LITERATURE

Over the last decades a variously labeled literature produced by immigrants and their children—Guestworker-literature, Foreigner-literature, Migrant-literature, Literature-of-foreigners-writing-in-German—has been growing into a significant corpus. Fischer and McGowan have studied the genre and are critical of these labels: “All are either too narrow, potentially patronizing, or indeed racist (in implying that these texts are inferior appendages to some culturally homogeneous ‘real’ German literature)” (1996: 42).5

Among the most successful writers of the initial wave was Aras Ören, the first recipient of the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, with the publication of his Berlin Trilogy, What’s Niyazi Doing in Naunynstraße? (1973), The Fleeting Dream of Kağithane (1974), A Foreign Country is a Home Too (1980). In an analysis of Ören’s work, Chin (2002) juxtaposed his writing with the political manifesto of the German New Left. Thus, while the German avant-garde (Fassbinder, Wallraff, and Böll) ultimately began to include Turkish characters, emplotments, and issues within their own writing, cinema, and other artistic expression, it often did so by caricaturing the Turkish experience through the conventional tropes of abjection. By contrast, Chin argues, “Ören’s narrative… begins from within the multiethnic world of workers—giving them agency, even as he documented their exploitation—and envisions a radical transformation of society emerging from below in the form of a united Turkish-German proletariat” (27). While sharing with the New Left a belief in the revolutionary power of the proletariat, Ören complicates its models by articulating the experience of the workers from Turkey, questioning the “ethnic essentialism of exploited workers unable to recognize their common plight” (31). Ören gives agency to Turkish subjects without essentializing them as ethnically marked.

Other commentators have pointed out the extent to which Ören’s later publications shatter the dream of a multiculturally unified working class in the face of deteriorating economic conditions, rising unemployment, and ubiquitous xenophobia. Consequently, themes expressing melancholia, depression, and loneliness began to inhabit Ören’s literary landscape (Suhr 1989: 87). For Ören, the potential once invested in the bridge metaphor no longer sustained the cultural crossings; instead of linking together, the bridge served to separate. The utopian dream of uniting the two working classes was destined to collapse once the German working class dissociated itself from any identification with Gastarbeiter counterparts as Ören graphically describes.

Another theme follows from the shattering of the bridging dream metaphor in the consciousness of Turkish German intellectuals over the last decade. As Şenocak has observed, the sense of loss on the part of the younger generation of Turks must be reckoned with in order to understand the new conflicts and terrains of contestation open to Turkish intellectuals. Thus instead of cultivating new symbolic attachments to Anatolia, Turkish intellectuals and the youth in particular cannot cling “to the phantasm of the lost homeland” (Şenocak and Tulay 2000: 4). Instead they need to create a language in order to communicate their experience of living contemporaneously in a synthetic reality embracing multiple languages, cultural traditions, and landscapes. The contemporary Turkish youth “are writing an endless book of memories, using the shreds of childhood, in lost or not yet found languages, and the pages remain empty.

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