Special Issue: Forty Years of Turkish Migration to Germany

Guest editors: Aye Qaglar and Levent Soysal

ARTICLES
new
Metamorphoses of the "Stranger": Jews in Europe, P...olish Peasants in
America, Turks in Germany
Nedim Karahayali 37
Toward a "Minor Literature"? The Case of Ausliinderliteratur in
Postwar Germany
Rita Chin 61
Introduction: Turkish Migration to Germany-Forty Years After
Against Between: A Manifesto
Leslie A. Adelson
1
19
perspectives on
turkey
Turkish Youths in Berlin: Transnational Identification and Double
Agency
Sabine Mannitz 85
Ethnicizing the Media: Multicultural Imperatives, Homebound
Politics, and Turkish Media Production in Germany
Kira Kosnick 107
Alevis in Germany and the Politics of Recognition
Martin Sokefeld 133
Alevist Movements at Home and Abroad: Mobilization Spaces and
Disjunction
Elise Massicard 163
Migration FromTurkey to Germany: An Ethnic Approach
Ibrahim Sirkeci 189
The World of Aziza A: Third Space in Identities
Yesim. Burul 209
Turkish-German Traffic in Cinema: A Critical Review
Deniz GoktUrk 229
H....-cHIYPOUNDATION
v
28-29 Spring-Fall 2003
titb")'ts't\d&it' j' Nita
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY
Special Issue: Forty Years of Turkish Migration to Germany
Guest editors: y ~ (:aglar and Levent Soysal
Coordinating Editors
Qaglar Keyder, SUNY-Binghamton
Aye Oncu, Sabanct University
Nadir Ozbek, Bogaeici University
Zafer Yenal, Bogazici University
Biray Kirh, Bogazici University
No. 28-29
ARTICLES
Spring-Fall 2003
Book Review Editors
Resat Kasaba, University of Washington
Hakan Yilmaz, Bogazici University
Introduction: Turkish Migration to Germany-Forty Years After
Against Between: A Manifesto
1
Editorial Board
Fuat Keyman Koc University, Sevket Pamuk Bogazici University, Fik-
ret Senses Middle East Technical University, Faruk.Tabak Georgetown
University, Zafer Toprak Bogazici University, Insan Tunali Koc
University.
New Perspectives on Turkey is a series of research papers published bian-
nually by the Economic and Social History Foundation of Turkey (Tarih
Vakfi), Valikonagi Cad., Samsun Apt. No. 57, 34365 Nisantasi, Istanbul.
See back cover for information regarding submissions and other corres-
pondence.
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New Perspectives on Turkey is indexed and abstracted by:
Sociological Abstracts, Historical Abstracts,
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, Social Services Abstracts
v
Page Layout: Tarih Vakfi
Printed in Istanbul, December 2003 by Step Ajans
ISBN 975-333-175-4
Leslie A. Adelson 19
Metamorphoses ofthe "Stranger": Jews in Europe, Polish Peasants
in America, Turks in Germany Nedim Karaleayali 37
Toward a "Minor Literature"? The Case of Auslanderlitcratur in
Postwar Germany Rita CUn 61
Turkish Youths in Berlin: Transnational Identification and Double
Agency Sabine Mannitz 85
Ethnicizing the Media: Multicultural Imperatives, Homebound
Politics, and Turkish Media Production in Germany
Kim Kosnicl: 107
Alevis in Germany and the Politics of Recognition
Alartin S'cjJ,{'ti!(i 1:33
c\k,,-;<j Movements at Home and Abroad: Mobilizat ion and
Disjunction Eflsc .\1(;."", c ra 163
:\IigLilion From Turkey to Germany: An Ethnic Approach
ihro/'ir/i .')/,i:t"(,' 189
Tr.; \\ "rid of Aziz a A,: Thini Space in Identities
Turk sh-Gerrnan Traffic in Cinema: A Critical Review
Deniz CoUI,rk 229
AGAINST BETWEEN: A MANIFESTOI
Leslie A. Adelson*
Aworld renowned author once described "a migrant's vision" in terms
of a "triple disruption," one that occurs when migrants lose their place
in the world, enter into a language that is alien to them, and find them-
selves "surrounded by beings whose social behavior and codes are very
unlike, and sometimes even offensive to," their own. The author in
question-let's call him X-then proceeds to explain how the creative
work of a lesser known author-let's call him Y-is informed by such "a
migrant's vision."
This is what the triple disruption of reality teaches migrants: that
reality is an artefact, that it does not exist until it is made, and that like
any other artefact, it can be made well or badly, and that it can also, of
course, be unmade. WhatY learned on his journey across the frontiers of
history was Doubt. Now he distrusts all those who claim to possess
absolute forms of knowledge; he suspects all total explanations, all sys-
tems of thought which purport to be complete. Amongst ... writers, he
is quintessentially the artist of uncertainty (Rushdie, 1991, pp. 277-80).
Readers may be surprised to learn that world-renowned author X is
none other than Salman Rushdie, and "the artist of uncertainty" to
whom he ascribes "a migrant's vision" is Gunter Grass, Germany's
most widely published author of the postwar era.
* Professor of German Studies, Department of German Studies, Cornell
University.
1 This article has previously appeared in Unpacking Europe: Towards a
Critical Reading (2001), and in Zafer Senocak (2003). It appears with added in-text
citations and bibliography in this special issue of New Perspectives on Turkey by
permission of the author, who retains the copyright. The manifesto that comprises
the first half of the article was first presented at a conference in Berlin on a panel
entitled Orte des Denkens (Sites of Thought) (Adelson, 2000a). Portions of the sec-
ond half of the present article overlap with sections of my "Touching Tales of
Turks, Germans, and Jews: Cultural Alterity, Historical Narrative, and Literary
Riddles for the 1990s" (2000b). "Touching Tales" offers more detailed analytical
reflections on historical narrative and figural referentiality in Zafer Sonocak's lit-
erary prose, while the present manifesto focuses on different concepts of cultural
space and the competing methodologies they engender. Unless otherwise noted, all
translations in the present article are my own.
New Perspectives on Turkey, Spring-Fall 2003, 28-29, pp. 19-36
20
LESLIE A. ADELSON
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 21
Both names are undoubtedly familiar to many readers of this vol-
ume, but presumably not in the relationship in which they stand here.
This article begins with this odd inversion of predictable categories, not
because Grass merits celebration as the transnational or postcolonial
author par excellence, but because what is needed at the present junc-
ture is more doubt about existing forms of knowledge, more uncertain-
ty about what is presumed to be true, and more vibrant curiosity about
a unique historical moment in German culture. The comments that fol-
low revolve in particular around several critical questions. What does
it mean to contemplate the Turkish presence in German culture today?
What can German literature written by authors of Turkish descent
reveal about a tectonic shift, partly in the lives of Turkish immigrants,
but more importantly for European literary studies, in the ground of
German culture itself? What can the cultural labor of reading and writ-
ing literary texts achieve that political debates and demographic sta-
tistics can only obscure? Where can Turks be located on the map of
German culture at the onset of the twenty-first century?
In May 2000 the President of Germany gave a landmark speech in
Berlin's House of World Cultures, calling for a radical reorganization
of thought in all arenas of social and political life (Rau, 2000).2 This
call was issued in response to the changing face of the German nation-
even before the summer's furious debates about renewed right-wing
extremism. President Rau most likely did not have literature in mind
when he said this, but emergent literatures certainly are one impor-
tant site of cultural reorientation. More than a mere repository of trea-
sured or controversial works of art, a nation's culture is also an activi-
ty, a creative engagement with a rapidly changing present. It actively
seeks to negotiate changing values and attitudes toward a changing
world.3 This labor of culture is currently being undertaken, in ways
that have yet to be grasped, by authors usually presumed to be outside
German culture, even if they have somehow managed to reside on
German territory or acquire German citizenship. "Between Two
Worlds" is the place customarily reserved for these authors and their
texts on the cultural map of our time, but the trope of "betweenness"
2 The German verb umdenken connotes something conceptually akin to shifting
gears or changing direction: "Wir mussen in allen Bereichen des gesellschaftlichen
Lebens und des politischen und staatlichen Handelns umdenken."
3 See Agnes Heller's concept of the "present-present age" (1982, p. 44), and as
discussed in Adelson (1993, p. 24).
often functions literally like a reservation designed to contain,
restrain, and impede new knowledge, not enable it. For reasons that I
hope to make clear, then, this is my manifesto against betioeen.v
The notion that Turks in Germany are suspended on a bridge
"between two worlds" carries with it a number of misperceptions that
thwart understanding, even as they claim to promote it.
1. The "dialogue of cultures" that Johannes Rau and other public
figures call for may be useful, even necessary, in the socio-political
realm, but it fails completely, oddly enough, in the imaginative realm
of social production that is often taken to represent culture. Whoever
mines literary texts of the 1990s and beyond for evidence of mutually
exclusive collective identities in communicative dialogue with one
another is not reading this literature for its most significant innova-
tions. This is especially true for literature written in German by
authors whose cultural imagination has been profoundly influenced by
many years of living, working, studying, and dreaming in the Federal
Republic of Germany.
2. Despite wide recognition that political science and literary inter-
pretation rely on different terms, media, and analytical procedures, the
growing and diverse field of Turco-German literature may well be the
only sector in literary studies today where an entrenched sociological
positivism continues to hold sway. This positivist approach presumes
that literature reflects empirical truths about migrants' lives and that
authors' biographies explain their texts so well that reading the texts
themselves is virtually superfluous. This saves readers and critics a
good deal of time. Meanwhile, the literary elephant in the room goes
unremarked.
3. The sociological thrust of this positivism is an epistemological
holdover from the late 1970s and 1980s, when an emergent "guest
worker" literature focused on the economic exploitation of and xeno-
phobic disdain for the underprivileged. These tropes still circulate in
the reception of migrants' literature today, especially when it is writ-
ten by someone presumed to represent the culture of Turkey. Aras
4 This manifesto is written as a pointed intervention in a particular field of
political and scholarly rhetoric in Germany at a particular historical juncture in
the development of contemporary German Studies on an international scale. The
trope of "betweenness" may well be useful in other contexts, but they are not the
author's present concern.
22 LESLIE A. ADELSON NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY
23
Oren and Cuney Dal are best known for their literary reflections on the
"guest worker" experience, for example, and they both continue to
write in Turkish despite their long-time residence in Germany. But few
people know that Oren explicitly conceived several of his novels from
the 1980s on as being Auf der Suche nach der gegenwdrtigen Zeit (In
Search of the Present), that is, as a pseudo-Proustian series ofliterary
reflections on the modernist legacy for an as yet uncharted, but shared,
Turco-German present. Even fewer people know that the narrator of
Guney Dal's tale of an industrial strike and a mutant migrant in the
mid-1970s characterized foreign laborers as "ein[en] Teil lebendiger
Erinnerung," a piece of "living memory" of Germans' own class histo-
ry.5 If the sociological tensions of this earlier period cannot be reduced
to an absolute cultural divide between things German and things
Turkish, they are even less useful for assessing the significance of a lit-
erature that has grown only more diverse since the two postwar
German states were united in 1990 and Cold War divisions began to
yield to the new Europe.
4. The imaginary bridge "between two worlds" is designed to keep
discrete worlds apart as much as it pretends to bring them together.
Migrants are at best imagined as suspended on this bridge in perpetu-
ity; critics do not seem to have enough imagination to picture them
actually crossing the bridge and landing anywhere new. This has to do
in turn with the national contours that are ascribed to these ostensible
"worlds" linked by a bridge of dubious stability. In this model, the
Federal Republic of Germany may change and the Republic of Turkey
may change (though this is usually dismissed in Germany as unlikely),
but what is not allowed to change is the notion that Turks and
Germans are separated by an absolute cultural divide. Where does this
leave Turco-German writers in Germany? It is absurd to assume today
that they always and necessarily and only represent the national cul-
ture of Turkey (Adelson, 2000c, p. xxiv; Senocak and Tulay, 2000, pp.
1-9).6 The Turkish diaspora and its lines of affiliation cannot be traced
5 Dal (1979, p. 92). For the Turkish original, see Dal (1976) and Adelson, (2004
[forthcoming]) for a discussion of differences between the Turkish and German ver-
sions. Oren's titles often list either Auf der Suche nach der gegenwiirtigen Zeit or
Aufder Suche nach der Gegenwart as a subtitle. See Oren (1981 [in English, Oren,
1992]), the precursor to this series, then (1988, 1995, 1997, 1998, and 1999). Many
of Oren's publications have appeared in Turkish as well.
6 For the German original of this second essay, see Senocak (1992, pp. 9-19).
or contained by the borders of the Turkish Republic, certainly not by
these alone. Beyond the Cold War, German culture is already forever
changed, and Turco-German literature is part and parcel of this cul-
tural transformation.
5. Zafer Senocak has called for "something like a negative
hermeneutic" that could perhaps heal "the wounds of communication"
inflicted by a public obsession, right and left, with Self and Other
(Adelson, 2000c, p. xxix; Senocak, 2000a, pp. 42, 68, and 82).7 Such a
negative hermeneutic, again in Senocak's words, "critically interrogates
what is presumed to be understood" (2000a, p. 82). In this sense we do
not need more understanding of different cultures if understanding
only fixes them as utterly different cultures. Instead of reifying differ-
ent cultures as fundamentally foreign, we need to understand culture
itself differently (Adelson, 2000c, p. xxxv). Cultural contact today is not
an "intercultural encounter" that takes place between German culture
and something outside it, but something happening within German cul-
ture between the German past and the German present. Turco-German
literature has been making forays into this unfamiliar territory for
some time now, but the imaginative complexity of this cultural endeav-
or has gone largely unrecognized to date.
6. In this context the spatial configuration of cultural labor also
needs to be understood in a radically different way. Creative writing
and critical thought certainly take reference to concrete places in the
world, where people and nations have loved, lost, struggled, and died.
These places haunt human imagination, but the imagined spaces of
cultural labor cannot be mapped or measured with surveyor's tools.
The discursive model that repeatedly situates Turks and other
migrants "between two worlds" relies too schematically and too rigidly
on territorial concepts of "home" (Heimat). Even the notion that "lan-
guage" becomes a "home" for those in exile or diaspora presupposes
that a territorial "home" is the place of authenticity, from which lan-
guage as "home" can only distinguish itself in sorrow or celebration.
Searching for traces of "home" in contemporary cultural production is
therefore a misguided venture. Creative thought is not bounded by geo-
7 Senocak's essay titles here are "The Poet and the Deserters: Salman Rushdie
Between the Fronts," "Which Myth Writes Me?" and "Beyond the Language of the
Land." The phrase "so etwas wie eine negative Hermeneutik" ("something like a
negative hermeneutic") appears in Senocak (1994a, p. 28); "Wunden del'
Verstandigung" ("wounds of communication") in Senocak (1996, p. 173).
24 LESLIE A. ADELSON
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 25
graphical or political borders. The Turco-German literary texts that
demand the most of their readers do not reflect Orte des Denkens (sites
of thought) in any predictably national or even ethnic sense. Instead
they are Orte des Umdenkens (sites of reorientation), that is to say,
imaginative sites where cultural orientation is being radically
rethought.
7. In a series of aphorisms called "Beyond the Language of the
Land," Zafer Senocak writes, "I am not in between, for I have lost my
sense of direction" (1996, p. 172).
8
Here the military language of
embattled camps-familiar to readers from Samuel Huntington's Clash
of Cioilizations (1996)-alternates with the disorienting language of
lyrical reflection: "Songs and salvos alternate" (Senocak, 2000a, p. 66).9
This disorientation that arises when familiar categories are left behind
becomes the very ground on which critical readers re-orient themselves
anew. Lest I be misunderstood: This is not a celebration of violent cir-
cumstances that deprive people of the homes, lives, and relations that
matter most to them. A postmodern embrace of "nomadic" fantasies is
not what I propose. What I do have in mind is an epistemological re-
orientation to which migrants' literature contributes at a crucial junc-
ture in an uncharted German present. It is surely no coincidence that
two of the most complex writers in this field, Zafer Senocak and Yoko
Tawada, cite the great wordsmith Paul Celan (1920-1970) as one of
their literary muses. For the Japanese-born Tawada, the "between" of
Celan's German-language poetry does not mark a border (Grenze)
between two distinct worlds but a threshold (Schwelle), a site where
consciousness of something new flashes into view. She describes a
poem by Celan as "Zwischenraum," a transitional space. This is not the
bridge "between two worlds" on which Turks are so often thought to be
suspended. For, as Tawada elaborates, "The space of transition is not
a closed room but rather the space under a gate... I began to regard
Celan's poems as gates and not, say, as houses in which meaning is
stored like possessions" (Tawada, 1996, pp. 129-130).1
0
For Tawada
reading Celan, the word is a site of opening, a threshold that beckons.
Turco-German literature too is a threshold that beckons, not a tired
8 For the English translation of this text, see Senocak(2000a, p. 67).
9 For the German, see Senocak(1996, p. 171).
10"Der Zwischenraum ist kein geschlossenes Zimmer, sondern er ist der Raum
unter einem Tor.lIch fing an, Celans Gedichte wie Tore zu betrachten und nicht
etwa wie Hauser, in denen die Bedeutung wie ein Besitz aufbewahrt wird."
bridge "between two worlds." Entering this threshold space is an imag-
inative challenge that has yet to be widely met, and much critical work
remains to be done.
How might such a manifesto inform applied literary analysis? Here
I must limit myself to a discussion of spatial relations, as sites ofreori-
entation, in two explosive publications from 1995: Feridun Zaimoglu's
Kanak Sprak: 24 MifJtone vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Kanak Talk: 24
Discordant Notes from the Edge of Society) and Zafer Senocak's Der
Mann im Unterhemd (The Man in the Undershirt). 11 German political
discourse of the 1980s and the post-unification citizenship debates of
the early 1990s were often fueled by the social, legal, and cultural
assumption that Turks entering and then claiming German space con-
stituted, if not an act of aggression, then at least an act of transgres-
sion. From this vantage point both authors might be considered sec-
ond-generation transgressors, since they were born in Turkey and
moved to the Federal Republic as very young children. In postcolonial
terminology they might be considered diaspora intellectuals, though
this all too convenient designation tells us little about the specific sig-
nificance of their work. Born in Ankara in 1961, Senocak has lived
since 1970 in (West) Germany, where he first established himself as a
poet in the 1980s. Co-editor of the international literary journal Sirene
and author of provocative essays on contemporary cultural affairs,
Senocak published his first collection of literary prose in 1995 as Der
Mann im Unterhemd. This was soon followed by three other titles: Die
Priirie (The Prairie) (1997b), Gefiihrliche Verwandtschaft (Dangerous
Relations) (1998), and Del' Erottomane (The Erottoman) (1999).1
2
His
works have been translated into a number of different languages,
11Subsequent citations are fromFeridun Zaimoglu's Kanak Sprak: 24 MifJtbne
vom Rande der Gesellschaft (1995), and Zafer Senocak'sDer Mann im Unterhemd
(1995). Senocak (1995) has also appeared in Turkish translation (Atletli Adam,
1997a). In mainstream German parlance Kanake is a derogatory term for Turks
that Zaimoglu has defiantly appropriated. For commentary on Kanak Sprak and
the social movementit has sparked, see Tom Cheesman(2002). AlthoughZaimoglu
coined the term "KanakAttack," the independent socialmovement that tookits cue
from him calls itself "Kanak Attak" (without the c).
12 Senocak conceived Der Mann im Unterhemd, Die Priirie, and Gefiihrliche
Verwandtschaft as a trilogy. For an English translation of Gefiihrliche
Verwandtschaft, see Cheesman (2003). In addition to Atletli Adam, Turkish trans-
lations are to date available for only two volumes of poetry and one collection of
essays (Senocak, 1994b, 1997c, and 2000b).
26 LESLIE A. ADELSON NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY
27
including French, Hebrew, Spanish, Greek, Urdu, and Turkish; an
English translation of various essays from the first decade of unifica-
tion appeared as Atlas of a Tropical Germany (2000a).13 Three years
younger than Senocak, Zaimoglu moved to the Federal Republic at the
age of four in 1968. After studying art and medicine, he helped estab-
lish the Turkish literary journal Argos. Kanak Sprak was his first more
widely reviewed publication, one that propelled him to cult stardom as
the avant-garde of what he calls "Kanak Attack." One essay criticizing
the hypocrisies of German subcultures appeared in 1996 in
Mainstream der Minderheiten (Mainstream of the Minorities), and
other provocative publications such as Abschaum (Scum) (1997) and
Koppstof]: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Head Stuff:
Kanaka Talk from the Edge of Society) (1998) have sparked media
events, public debate, and film production.J''
If spatial relations have figured prominently in many discussions of
center and periphery, metropolis and margin, West and East, North
and South, and Self and Other, the prevalence of border metaphors
speaks to the need for a critical language that could explain how and
why it is that individuals, groups, nations, and cultures seem to rub
each other raw with the friction of difference. When these phenomena
and contexts literally share borders, the geographical trope seems
plausible enough.U' But how eagerly should the discourse of border
skirmishes be embraced when attention turns to the function of Turco-
German culture in the Federal Republic today, to a culture whose
perimeters can be neither easily defined nor readily localized? In the
aphorisms cited earlier "beyond the language of the land," Senocak
writes, "Thinking becomes a house, in which people gather and join
forces, and from which they sing and shoot together."16 If critical atten-
13 The English anthology contains several essays that are not included in the
German book that appeared with a similar title in 1992. The German versions of
some of these essays, including "Which Myth Writes Me?" and "Beyond the
Language of the Land" (see fn. 7 and fn. 8) have more recently been made available
in Zafer Senocak (2001).
14 Abschaum (1997) was filmed as Kanak Attack! (2000, directed by Lars
Becker). Zaimoglu's first novel appeared as German Amok (2002).
15 See Seyhan (2001) for an insightful comparison of Turkish-German litera-
ture and literature that derives its impetus from both real and metaphorical bor-
ders between the United States and Mexico.
16 For the German for this phrase, see Senocak, 1996, p. 171; for the English,
f;lenocak, 2000a, p. 66.
tion shifts away from borderlands and national boundaries to imagined
houses and other social spaces of Turco-German culture, what insights
flash into view?
The "discordant notes from the edge of society" that comprise
Kanak Sprak derive from interviews conducted with young Turkish-
German men whom, with few exceptions, neither a Turkish nor a
German mainstream would accept. Two rappers are represented, as
are a transsexual, a gigolo, a junkie in the process of shooting up, a
prostitute, a patient in a psychiatric hospital, and others. Short, dis-
parate, individual texts are linked, not by consistently delineated char-
acters that elicit reader identification, but by architectures or spaces of
transgression, especially those involving scatology, criminality, sexual-
ity, and gender.
Whereas Senocak's prose is pointedly literary and phantasmatic,
Zaimoglu claims to write in the spirit of "demystification," to point the
way to "a new realism" (p, 17) and to dismantle the xenophilic myth of
the loveable oppressed Turk, to decry the "'garbageman-prose,' which
defines the Kanak as victim" (p. 12). For Zaimoglu "Turk" is a deroga-
tory term reserved for those who are '''socially acceptable,'" capable of
integration. This is a group that does not interest him in the least, and
he proudly proclaims, "Here the Kanak alone has the say" (p. 18).
Zaimoglu presents his cast of characters as a kind of underworld a
substratum of reality that reflects a deeper truth about contemporary
German society. This topography of above and below coincides with a
discourse of transgressive bodies that foregrounds-and sometimes priv-
ileges-Dreck. Although this can refer to gross physical matter (such as
shit or filth) or to a metaphorical "Dreck am Stecken" (dirty conscience),
Zaimoglu's discourse links flesh, filth, dirt, shit, and history in curious
ways. The interviewee from the flea market disco complains that
Germans do not see him as a human being with a bodily presence:
"Da haun die tarife Hingst nimmer hin, dir kommt's vor, als warst du'n fraf
oder eher schon stinkiger abfall oder so ne blechdose, wo man wegkickt,
und's scheppert wie krawall. Schlimm is, daf die alemannen dich nischt fur
ne mude mark sehn, du bist gar nischt da, du kannst da antippen und
sagen: mann, mich gibt's schon seit ner urlangen zeit, faf man an, daf du
merkst, da is fleisch und knochen, fur die biste gar nischt, luft und weniger
als schnuppe luft, du hast eben kein sektor, wo man dich ordnen konnt, das
sieht denn aus, wie wenn ne aile leiche rumliegt, und die machen mit nem
28
LESLIE A. ADELSON
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 29
stuck kreide nen umriJ3. Im umriJ3 ist denn nix wenn se'n kadaver wegtra-
gen, da siehste 'n strichmanneken aus teppich" (pp. 118-19).
("The numbers just don't add up, you feel as if you were a piece of
meat or better yet stinky garbage or an old tin can that gets kicked
away and rattles like hell. The bad thing is that the alemannen don't
see you, not even for a tired mark, you're just not there, you can tap
them on the shoulder and say: man, i've been around forever, grab a
hold, get a grip, here's flesh and bones, to them you're nothin', air and
less than fairy air, you ain't got no sector where they could place you,
so it looks like when a moldy old corpse is lying around, and they make
an outline with a piece of chalk. In the outline there's nothin' when
they cart the cadaver away, you see a little stick man out of carpet.")
The gigolo, on the other hand, asserts that those Germans whom he
services see him only as "ne fleischbestellung" (an order of meat) (p.
70). Their fantasies about his flesh are a kind of dreck that he feels he
must keep from clinging to his soul: "sonst haltst du die sache mit del'
liebe fur ne infamie" (otherwise you think that that love thing is
infamy) (p.72). Prompted by his recollections of a German "christenla-
dy" (christ lady) who liked to call him "du mein schoner jude" (you my
beautiful jew) (p. 70), the gigolo expounds on his theory about German
fantasies and the Jewish undead:
"... hier's land ist bis zum letzten erdenfleck vollgesogen mit totem jude-
nunschuldsfleisch, das die arschgeigen gekillt haben und schnell man grob
innen graben geschmissen oder zu asche verwandelt und weggefegt. Also
racht sich's verscharrte fleisch und klumpt als geist und viele geister in den
lebenden, wo die man'n sprung wegkriegen oder'n komplex oder'n seele-
nausschlag, also sagt mir die theorie, daJ3 so ne lady, wo die man mich fick-
en tat, sich was geholt hat, ohne daJ3 sie's naturhch weiJ3, was geschnappt
vonner leiche tief unten im schlamm schlimm gemeuchelt" (pp, 71_72)17
("... down to the last speck of dirt this land is soaked with dead jew-
innocent-meat that the ass-horny violins killed and quick threw rude
in the ditch or switched to ash and swept away. So the meat dumped
on the sly gets even and clumps as ghost and lots of ghosts in the liv-
17 For more commentary on Kanak Sprah , see Adelson (2000b, p. 117), where
my English translations of these idiosyncratic passages first appeared.
ing, so they crack or get a complex or a rash on their soul, so my theo-
ry tells me that a lady like that, once she fucked me, picked something
up, only she doesn't know it, caught something from the corpse deep
down in the mud bad blood")
This theory is echoed by the poet in the book, who claims that
kanaken have "den blick fur das, was sich hinter den kulissen abspielt"
(an eye for what goes on behind the scenes) (p, 110). "Solange dieses
land uns den wirklichen eintritt verwehrt, werden wir die anomalieri
und perversionen dieses Landes wie ein schwamm aufsaugen und den
dreck ausspucken. Die beschmutzten kennen keine dsthetik" (As long as
this country denies us real entrance, we will suck up the anomalies and
perversions of this country like a sponge and spit out the shit. The sul-
lied ones know no aesthetic) (pp. 113-14). These images of transgres-
sive Turkish men as both occupying and theorizing the space of the
abject in German society complicate any merely sociological notion of
spatial hierarchies. Complex histories are as much at stake as social
conflicts in these discursive palimpsests.
The gigolo is positioned both as being dreck and as articulating the
meaning of dreck in contemporary German culture. Both functions rely
on the gigolo inhabiting the subspace of the kanake that Zaimoglu
ascribes to him. Senocak's literary reflections on Turco-German episte-
mologies, on the other hand, make hardly any pointed references at all
to being Turkish or German or to inhabiting any kind of delimitable
Turkish or German space. This is not to say that Der Mann im
Unterhemd is devoid of dreck. Yet Senocak's scenarios of fantasy,
desire, humiliation, torture, and lust do not highlight the gross physi-
cal matter connoted by dreck so much as the irrecuperable traces of
gross physical matter that haunt his prose.
Der Mann im Unterhemd provides no master narrative of twenti-
eth-century German spaces, but neither does it comprise the victim
narrative that much migrants' literature has been presumed to be.
Neither the narrating voices of the text nor the narrated figures func-
tion as characters inviting reader identification. Instead they function
as elusive personae-"keine Person" (no person), "nur ein Bild" (just an
image) ( p. 48). The body that might otherwise be said to occupy space
is dissolved into less tangible but nonetheless visceral components. "Es
beginnt in der Haltlosigkeit der Nacht-die Umsetzung der Zeit in
Fleisch, die Auflosung des Fleisches in seine Bestandteile, Angst und
Lust" (It begins in the disorientation of night-the transformation of
30
LESLIE A. ADELSON NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY
31
time into flesh, the dissolution of flesh into its components, fear and
desire) (p. 74). While fear and desire propel Senocak's tales, these
affects cannot be attributed to individual characters, ethnic groups, or
national communities. Instead they function as ubiquitous but non-
specific atmospheric elements that lend a disquieting texture to the
spaces of the narrative.
Der Mann im. Unterhemd confounds the analytical imagination.
Senocak writes against a facile notion of Turkish spaces in German
history and culture, spaces that xenophobics and xenophilics all too
glibly demarcate as distinct from properly German spaces of the late
twentieth century. This is a book about the riddle of "invisibility" (p. 7),
about the hidden nooks and crannies of cultural imagination. The
book's many references to the bridges and canals of Berlin-and to the
murders, suicides, and other sorts of deaths associated with
them-highlight structures that define urban spaces but also allow
those spaces to exceed their structural limits. The canals, we read, owe
the dead "Gedachtnisgriiber" (memory graves) (p. 36).
Die Kanale aber tun so, als ware nichts passiert, als lagen noch heute nicht
die Spiegelbilder verzweifelter Gesichter auf ihren Wassern, den Ratten
sich ZUlli Frail anbietend. Aber auch Ratten konnen die Gcschichte nicht
tilgen. Sie nagen an den Korpern, nicht an ihren Schatten (p. 36).
(But the canals act as if nothing had happened, as if the mirror
images of desperate faces were not lying on their waters, even today,
offering themselves to the rats for food. But even rats cannot expunge
history. They gnaw on the bodies, not their shadows.)
The shadow that exceeds the body of the dead, the shadow that even
rats cannot devour, signifies a dilemma that is epistemological and his-
torical. This is not about ethnic identity politics. This dilemma is how
to tell transnational, transgenerational time. How does Senocak render
a transnational Turco-German history intelligible in such a way that 1)
Turks in Germany are recognized as having history and 2) they are not
seen as having only or even primarily an ethnic or national history?
Although none of the personae in these texts are characters in the
conventional literary sense, two figures are attributed with familial
genealogies. The masochistic prostitute of 1932, whose morphine-
addicted lover is one of the canal dead, murdered by brown shirts, has
a granddaughter who is a cane fetishist and Artaud admirer in the pre-
sent. Grandmother and granddaughter bear the same name, as do
almost all the named female personae in the text. The male persona of
the writer has in one story an Ottoman grandfather who does his own
writing in Arabic script on the streets of Istanbul and only later
retreats into "das kleinste und hinterste Zimmer ini Parterre des
Hauses" (the smallest and farthest room on the ground floor of the
house) (p. 133). This dark and nearly windowless room is called "the
blind room" by the children of the household. The grandson who will
become the writer of the text plays at imitating his grandfather's script
in the elder's attic, but he dreams of being locked in "the blind room"
and forced to write (pp. 132-133). Inasmuch as the grandfather's note-
book is "das Haus seiner Worter" (the house of his words), the adult
grandson who inherits the notebooks inherits not just a room, but a
house of words.
Both genealogies concern elusive, at times forbidden, fantasies
rather than predictable linear histories or discrete cultural traditions.
It is on the level of the phantasmatic that these genealogies touch. The
site of these encounters is invariably spatialized without the space of
the phantasm being in any way delimited as national or ethnic. The
house of words that the writer inherits does not coincide with the actu-
al family homestead in Istanbul. One piece begins, "Es ist eine dumme
Angewohnheit von Schriftstellern, von dem Haus zu erziihlen, in dem
sie wohnen" (Writers have a dumb habit of talking about the house in
which they live) (p. 23). A later text distinguishes between the writer's
house of residence and "das verbrannte Haus in seinem Kopf' (the
burned house in his head) (p. 78).
Such distinctions between referential and phantasmatic spaces of
history make it all the more difficult to sustain the fiction of in-
betweenness as which critics have been wont to celebrate Turkish-
German literature. Even the one story that situates a dark Turkish
criminal element at the bottom of a spatial hierarchy in Berlin toys
with readerly notions of ethnic identity or sociological referentiality. In
this instance the narrating persona occupies an apartment on the sec-
ond floor of a multi-story building that he describes as "ein ordentlich-
es Haus" (an orderly house) (p. 29) where even the stairwell is
"regelmafsig geputzt" (regularly cleaned) (p. 30). The Turco-German
narrator lives across the hall from a "Superdeutsche" (Super German)
who speaks badly of the dark criminals who reside on the ground floor
beneath her because their language-Turkish-is one she wants rather
32
LESLIE A. ADELSON
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY
33
fiercely to forget (p. 24). As the building rises above and on top of the
Turkish smugglers, the residents get progressively lighter.
In den oberen Etagen wohnen nur Weilie. Je hoher man steigt, desto weilier
werden sie. Unterm Dach wohnt ein Albinoehepaar (p. 28).
(Only whites live on the upper floors. The higher up you go, the
whiter they get. A married albino couple lives under the roof.)
This seeming allusion to racialized hierarchies and sociological ref-
erentiality is belied by the text's concluding emphasis on the smug-
glers' dreams. The Turkish "Super German" above them is convinced
that they dream of raising donkeys in Berlin for a sausage factory.
Here the narrator intervenes:
Die Goschafte der Dunklen sind die Traume der Wei Ben und umgekchrt,
dcnke ich mir. Die Phantasie ist cin windgcschiitzter Umschlagplatz fur
ungedeckte Wechsel, ausgestellt auf ein Datum nach dem Tod des
Traurners. Aber keine noch so kostspielige Sanierung wird die Farbordnung
in unserem Haus vcrandern (p. 30).
(The business of the dark ones is the stuff of dreams for the whites
and vice versa, I think. Protected from the wind, fantasy is a trading
place for illicit exchange, valid for a date after the death of the dream-
er. But no renovation, no matter how expensive, will alter the color
scheme in our house.)
This house of words is a phantasm about phantasms. Yet I have
tried to argue that Der Mann im Unterhemd is also about the spaces of
historical narrative. How can this be? Specific references to identifiable
persons or events in either German or Turkish history are infrequent
and indirect. Although we encounter the German grandmother just
before the onset of the Third Reich, the allusion to brown shirts hints
at a larger national history. Elsewhere the text refers to the national
unification of 1990 as something that has driven real smugglers even
farther underground, precisely because the language of secrets is trad-
ed like a commodity on the open market (pp. 27-28). The Ottoman
grandfather in Istanbul who bequeaths his notebooks to the writing
persona of the text suggests a historical divide of sorts between the
Ottoman Empire and the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923
and Atatiirk's sweeping language reform that followed. The narrator
also invokes a more recent historical referent when he recalls a class-
mate disappeared by soldiers (p. 123), a riddle of invisibility that leads
the narrator to reflect, "Ich begreife, wie etwas durch Verschwinden
uiiich.st" how something grows by disappearing) (p. 125).
These minimal references to decisive phases of German and Turkish
national histories at best stake out a loose framework for conjuring the
o.f history without telling a story that moves in any pre-
dictable fashion from one space or time to another.
The spaces of Senocak's phantasms range from the domestic to the
urban, from island brothels to torture cellars, from thresholds to win-
dows, bridges to stairs. His convoluted mapping of domestic and urban
spaces situates this work in a transnational history of modernity and
modermsm. As Anthony Vidler has remarked elsewhere:
the has provided a site for endless representations of haunting, dou-
blmg, dismembering, and other terrors in literature and art. On another
level, the labyrinthine spaces of the modern city have been construed as the
source of modern anxiety, from revolution and epidemic to phobia and alien-
ation (1992, p. ix),
':hereas Vidler is concerned with the ways in which postmodern
architecture strips the classical bourgeois body of its privileged place in
constructed spaces (p. xii), one could extrapolate from Vidler to suggest
that Senocak's phantasmatic architectures of transgression cannot be
read reductively in terms of sociology, ethnicity, or national identities.
The house of words that we move through here diverges significantly
from the more familiar trope of language as Heimat or homeland that
shaped much of the discussion on Turco-German literature to date.
ThIS of words is both particular and transnational. The ph an-
tasmatio space of this German culture suggests analytical alternatives
to t,he presumption of an all too rigid Turkish-German divide. Seno-
configuration of transnationalism is less about national and eth-
than it is about the textures and architectures of chang-
Thi hlstoncal experience, which is no less imagined than it is lived.
.hIs"work breaks the spell that an obsession with multicultural iden-
tity between two worlds" continues to cast on cultural studies of the
Other.
34
LESLIE A. ADELSON
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY
35
-
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NOTICE TO CONTRIBUTORS
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BOOK: Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
JOURNAL: Kag,.t91bal?l, Cigdem. 1986. "Status of Women in Turkey:
Cross-Cultural Perspectives," International Journal of Middle East Stu-
dies, 18(4) November, pp. 485-499.
COLLECTION: Benedict, Peter. 1976. "Aspects of Domestic Cycle in a
Turkish Provincial Town," in Peristiany, Jean G. (Ed.), Mediterranean
Family Structures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 243-
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