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 inAmerica, Turks in Germany Nedim Karahayali 37

Toward a "Minor Literature"? The Case ofAusliinderliteratur inPostwar Germany Rita Chin 61

Introduction: Turkish Migration to Germany-Forty Years After

Against Between: A ManifestoLeslie A. Adelson

1

19 perspectives onturkey

Turkish Youths in Berlin: Transnational Identification and DoubleAgency Sabine Mannitz 85

Ethnicizing the Media: Multicultural Imperatives, HomeboundPolitics, and Turkish Media Production in Germany

Kira Kosnick 107

Alevis in Germany and the Politics of RecognitionMartin Sokefeld 133

Alevist Movements at Home and Abroad: Mobilization Spaces andDisjunction Elise Massicard 163

Migration From Turkey to Germany: An Ethnic ApproachIbrahim Sirkeci 189

The World of Aziza A: Third Space in IdentitiesYesim. Burul 209

Turkish-German Traffic in Cinema: A Critical ReviewDeniz GoktUrk 229

H....-cHIYPOUNDATION

v28-29 Spring-Fall 2003

titb")'ts't\d&it' j' Nita

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEYNEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY

Special Issue: Forty Years of Turkish Migration to Germany

Guest editors: Ay~e (:aglar and Levent Soysal

Coordinating EditorsQaglar Keyder, SUNY-Binghamton

Aye Oncu, Sabanct UniversityNadir Ozbek, Bogaeici UniversityZafer Yenal, Bogazici UniversityBiray Kirh, Bogazici University

No. 28-29

ARTICLES

Spring-Fall 2003

Book Review EditorsResat Kasaba, University of Washington

Hakan Yilmaz, Bogazici UniversityIntroduction: Turkish Migration to Germany-Forty Years After

Against Between: A Manifesto

1

Editorial BoardFuat Keyman Koc University, Sevket Pamuk Bogazici University, Fik-ret Senses Middle East Technical University, Faruk.Tabak GeorgetownUniversity, Zafer Toprak Bogazici University, Insan Tunali KocUniversity.New Perspectives on Turkey is a series of research papers published bian-nually by the Economic and Social History Foundation of Turkey (TarihVakfi), Valikonagi Cad., Samsun Apt. No. 57, 34365 Nisantasi, Istanbul.See back cover for information regarding submissions and other corres-pondence.Correspondence relating to subscriptions should be sent to TugbaOzkan, Abonet: Tel: 0 212 210 01 10, Fax: 0 212 222 27 10, e-mail:abonet@abonet.net / www.abonet.net. Correspondence relating to ad-vertising, business matters should be sent to Sales and MarketingManager, Tarih Vakfl, Vali Konagi Cad., Samsun Apt. No. 57, 34365Nisantasi-Istanbul Ze-mail: pazarlama@tarihvakfi.org.tr.

www.npt.boun.edu.trwww.tarihvakfi.org.tr/npt

New Perspectives on Turkey is indexed and abstracted by:Sociological Abstracts, Historical Abstracts,

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, Social Services Abstracts

vPage Layout: Tarih Vakfi

Printed in Istanbul, December 2003 by Step AjansISBN 975-333-175-4

Leslie A. Adelson 19

Metamorphoses ofthe "Stranger": Jews in Europe, Polish Peasantsin America, Turks in Germany Nedim Karaleayali 37

Toward a "Minor Literature"? The Case of Auslanderlitcratur inPostwar Germany Rita CUn 61

Turkish Youths in Berlin: Transnational Identification and DoubleAgency Sabine Mannitz 85

Ethnicizing the Media: Multicultural Imperatives, HomeboundPolitics, and Turkish Media Production in Germany

Kim Kosnicl: 107

Alevis in Germany and the Politics of RecognitionAlartin S'cjJ,{'ti!(i 1:33

c\k,,-;

AGAINST BETWEEN: A MANIFESTOI

Leslie A. Adelson*

A world renowned author once described "a migrant's vision" in termsof a "triple disruption," one that occurs when migrants lose their placein the world, enter into a language that is alien to them, and find them-selves "surrounded by beings whose social behavior and codes are veryunlike, and sometimes even offensive to," their own. The author inquestion-let's call him X-then proceeds to explain how the creativework of a lesser known author-let's call him Y-is informed by such "amigrant's vision."

This is what the triple disruption of reality teaches migrants: thatreality is an artefact, that it does not exist until it is made, and that likeany other artefact, it can be made well or badly, and that it can also, ofcourse, be unmade. WhatY learned on his journey across the frontiers ofhistory was Doubt. Now he distrusts all those who claim to possessabsolute forms of knowledge; he suspects all total explanations, all sys-tems of thought which purport to be complete. Amongst ... writers, heis quintessentially the artist of uncertainty (Rushdie, 1991, pp. 277-80).

Readers may be surprised to learn that world-renowned author X isnone other than Salman Rushdie, and "the artist of uncertainty" towhom he ascribes "a migrant's vision" is Gunter Grass, Germany'smost widely published author of the postwar era.

* Professor of German Studies, Department of German Studies, CornellUniversity.

1 This article has previously appeared in Unpacking Europe: Towards aCritical Reading (2001), and in Zafer Senocak (2003). It appears with added in-textcitations and bibliography in this special issue of New Perspectives on Turkey bypermission of the author, who retains the copyright. The manifesto that comprisesthe first half of the article was first presented at a conference in Berlin on a panelentitled 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 ofTurks, Germans, and Jews: Cultural Alterity, Historical Narrative, and LiteraryRiddles for the 1990s" (2000b). "Touching Tales" offers more detailed analyticalreflections on historical narrative and figural referentiality in Zafer Sonocak's lit-erary prose, while the present manifesto focuses on different concepts of culturalspace and the competing methodologies they engender. Unless otherwise noted, alltranslations in the present article are my own.

New Perspectives on Turkey, Spring-Fall 2003, 28-29, pp. 19-36

20 LESLIE A. ADELSONNEW 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, notbecause Grass merits celebration as the transnational or postcolonialauthor 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 abouta unique historical moment in German culture. The comments that fol-low revolve in particular around several critical questions. What doesit mean to contemplate the Turkish presence in German culture today?What can German literature written by authors of Turkish descentreveal about a tectonic shift, partly in the lives of Turkish immigrants,but more importantly for European literary studies, in the ground ofGerman 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 ofGerman culture at the onset of the twenty-first century?

In May 2000 the President of Germany gave a landmark speech inBerlin's House of World Cultures, calling for a radical reorganizationof thought in all arenas of social and political life (Rau, 2000).2 Thiscall was issued in response to the changing face of the German nation-even before the summer's furious debates about renewed right-wingextremism. President Rau most likely did not have literature in mindwhen 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 activelyseeks to negotiate changing values and attitudes toward a changingworld.3 This labor of culture is currently being undertaken, in waysthat have yet to be grasped, by authors usually presumed to be outsideGerman culture, even if they have somehow managed to reside onGerman territory or acquire German citizenship. "Between TwoWorlds" is the place customarily reserved for these authors and theirtexts on the cultural map of our time, but the trope of "betweenness"

2 The German verb umdenken connotes something conceptually akin to shiftinggears or changing direction: "Wir mussen in allen Bereichen des gesellschaftlichenLebens und des politischen und staatlichen Handelns umdenken."

3 See Agnes Heller's concept of the "present-present age" (1982, p. 44), and asdiscussed 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 Ihope 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 thatthwart understanding, even as they claim to promote it.

1. The "dialogue of cultures" that Johannes Rau and other publicfigures call for may be useful, even necessary, in the socio-politicalrealm, but it fails completely, oddly enough, in the imaginative realmof social production that is often taken to represent culture. Whoevermines literary texts of the 1990s and beyond for evidence of mutuallyexclusive collective identities in communicative dialogue with oneanother is not reading this literature for its most significant innova-tions. This is especially true for literature written in German byauthors whose cultural imagination has been profoundly influenced bymany years of living, working, studying, and dreaming in the FederalRepublic of Germany.

2. Despite wide recognition that political science and literary inter-pretation rely on different terms, media, and analytical procedures, thegrowing and diverse field of Turco-German literature may well be theonly sector in literary studies today where an entrenched sociologicalpositivism continues to hold sway. This positivist approach presumesthat literature reflects empirical truths about migrants' lives and thatauthors' biographies explain their texts so well that reading the textsthemselves is virtually superfluous. This saves readers and critics agood deal of time. Meanwhile, the literary elephant in the room goesunremarked.

3. The sociological thrust of this positivism is an epistemologicalholdover from the late 1970s and 1980s, when an emergent "guestworker" literature focused on the economic exploitation of and xeno-phobic disdain for the underprivileged. These tropes still circulate inthe 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 ofpolitical and scholarly rhetoric in Germany at a particular historical juncture inthe development of contemporary German Studies on an international scale. Thetrope of "betweenness" may well be useful in other contexts, but they are not theauthor'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 towrite in Turkish despite their long-time residence in Germany. But fewpeople know that Oren explicitly conceived several of his novels fromthe 1980s on as being Auf der Suche nach der gegenwdrtigen Zeit (InSearch of the Present), that is, as a pseudo-Proustian series ofliteraryreflections on the modernist legacy for an as yet uncharted, but shared,Turco-German present. Even fewer people know that the narrator ofGuney Dal's tale of an industrial strike and a mutant migrant in themid-1970s characterized foreign laborers as "ein[en] Teil lebendigerErinnerung," a piece of "living memory" of Germans' own class histo-ry.5 If the sociological tensions of this earlier period cannot be reducedto an absolute cultural divide between things German and thingsTurkish, they are even less useful for assessing the significance of a lit-erature that has grown only more diverse since the two postwarGerman states were united in 1990 and Cold War divisions began toyield to the new Europe.

4. The imaginary bridge "between two worlds" is designed to keepdiscrete 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 themactually crossing the bridge and landing anywhere new. This has to doin turn with the national contours that are ascribed to these ostensible"worlds" linked by a bridge of dubious stability. In this model, theFederal Republic of Germany may change and the Republic of Turkeymay change (though this is usually dismissed in Germany as unlikely),but what is not allowed to change is the notion that Turks andGermans are separated by an absolute cultural divide. Where does thisleave Turco-German writers in Germany? It is absurd to assume todaythat 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 orAufder 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). Manyof 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 bythese alone. Beyond the Cold War, German culture is already foreverchanged, and Turco-German literature is part and parcel of this cul-tural transformation.

5. Zafer Senocak has called for "something like a negativehermeneutic" 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 anegative hermeneutic, again in Senocak's words, "critically interrogateswhat is presumed to be understood" (2000a, p. 82). In this sense we donot need more understanding of different cultures if understandingonly fixes them as utterly different cultures. Instead of reifying differ-ent cultures as fundamentally foreign, we need to understand cultureitself differently (Adelson, 2000c, p. xxxv). Cultural contact today is notan "intercultural encounter" that takes place between German cultureand something outside it, but something happening within German cul-ture between the German past and the German present. Turco-Germanliterature has been making forays into this unfamiliar territory forsome 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 alsoneeds to be understood in a radically different way. Creative writingand critical thought certainly take reference to concrete places in theworld, where people and nations have loved, lost, struggled, and died.These places haunt human imagination, but the imagined spaces ofcultural labor cannot be mapped or measured with surveyor's tools.The discursive model that repeatedly situates Turks and othermigrants "between two worlds" relies too schematically and too rigidlyon territorial concepts of "home" (Heimat). Even the notion that "lan-guage" becomes a "home" for those in exile or diaspora presupposesthat 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 istherefore a misguided venture. Creative thought is not bounded by geo-

7 Senocak's essay titles here are "The Poet and the Deserters: Salman RushdieBetween the Fronts," "Which Myth Writes Me?" and "Beyond the Language of theLand." The phrase "so etwas wie eine negative Hermeneutik" ("something like anegative 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 thatdemand the most of their readers do not reflect Orte des Denkens (sitesof thought) in any predictably national or even ethnic sense. Insteadthey are Orte des Umdenkens (sites of reorientation), that is to say,imaginative sites where cultural orientation is being radicallyrethought.

7. In a series of aphorisms called "Beyond the Language of theLand," Zafer Senocak writes, "I am not in between, for I have lost mysense of direction" (1996, p. 172).8 Here the military language ofembattled camps-familiar to readers from Samuel Huntington's Clashof Cioilizations (1996)-alternates with the disorienting language oflyrical reflection: "Songs and salvos alternate" (Senocak, 2000a, p. 66).9This disorientation that arises when familiar categories are left behindbecomes the very ground on which critical readers re-orient themselvesanew. Lest I be misunderstood: This is not a celebration of violent cir-cumstances that deprive people of the homes, lives, and relations thatmatter most to them. A postmodern embrace of "nomadic" fantasies isnot 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 thattwo of the most complex writers in this field, Zafer Senocak and YokoTawada, cite the great wordsmith Paul Celan (1920-1970) as one oftheir literary muses. For the Japanese-born Tawada, the "between" ofCelan's German-language poetry does not mark a border (Grenze)between two distinct worlds but a threshold (Schwelle), a site whereconsciousness of something new flashes into view. She describes apoem by Celan as "Zwischenraum," a transitional space. This is not thebridge "between two worlds" on which Turks are so often thought to besuspended. For, as Tawada elaborates, "The space of transition is nota closed room but rather the space under a gate... I began to regardCelan's poems as gates and not, say, as houses in which meaning isstored like possessions" (Tawada, 1996, pp. 129-130).10 For Tawadareading 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"DerZwischenraum ist kein geschlossenes Zimmer, sondern er ist der Raum

unter einem Tor.lIch fing an, Celans Gedichte wie Tore zu betrachten und nichtetwa 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 workremains to be done.

How might such a manifesto inform applied literary analysis? HereI must limit myself to a discussion of spatial relations, as sites ofreori-entation, in two explosive publications from 1995: Feridun Zaimoglu'sKanak Sprak: 24 MifJtone vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Kanak Talk: 24Discordant Notes from the Edge of Society) and Zafer Senocak's DerMann im Unterhemd (The Man in the Undershirt). 11 German politicaldiscourse of the 1980s and the post-unification citizenship debates ofthe early 1990s were often fueled by the social, legal, and culturalassumption 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 andmoved to the Federal Republic as very young children. In postcolonialterminology they might be considered diaspora intellectuals, thoughthis all too convenient designation tells us little about the specific sig-nificance of their work. Born in Ankara in 1961, Senocak has livedsince 1970 in (West) Germany, where he first established himself as apoet in the 1980s. Co-editor of the international literary journal Sireneand author of provocative essays on contemporary cultural affairs,Senocak published his first collection of literary prose in 1995 as DerMann im Unterhemd. This was soon followed by three other titles: DiePriirie (The Prairie) (1997b), Gefiihrliche Verwandtschaft (DangerousRelations) (1998), and Del' Erottomane (The Erottoman) (1999).1 2 Hisworks have been translated into a number of different languages,

11Subsequent citations are from Feridun Zaimoglu's Kanak Sprak: 24 MifJtbnevom 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 Turksthat Zaimoglu has defiantly appropriated. For commentary on Kanak Sprak andthe socialmovementit has sparked, see Tom Cheesman(2002). AlthoughZaimoglucoined the term "Kanak Attack," the independent socialmovement that took its cuefrom him calls itself "Kanak Attak" (without the c).

12 Senocak conceived Der Mann im Unterhemd, Die Priirie, and GefiihrlicheVerwandtschaft as a trilogy. For an English translation of GefiihrlicheVerwandtschaft, see Cheesman (2003). In addition to Atletli Adam, Turkish trans-lations are to date available for only two volumes of poetry and one collection ofessays (Senocak, 1994b, 1997c, and 2000b).

26 LESLIE A. ADELSON NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 27

including French, Hebrew, Spanish, Greek, Urdu, and Turkish; anEnglish translation of various essays from the first decade of unifica-tion appeared as Atlas of a Tropical Germany (2000a).13 Three yearsyounger than Senocak, Zaimoglu moved to the Federal Republic at theage of four in 1968. After studying art and medicine, he helped estab-lish the Turkish literary journal Argos. Kanak Sprak was his first morewidely reviewed publication, one that propelled him to cult stardom asthe avant-garde of what he calls "Kanak Attack." One essay criticizingthe hypocrisies of German subcultures appeared in 1996 inMainstream der Minderheiten (Mainstream of the Minorities), andother provocative publications such as Abschaum (Scum) (1997) andKoppstof]: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Head Stuff:Kanaka Talk from the Edge of Society) (1998) have sparked mediaevents, public debate, and film production.J''

If spatial relations have figured prominently in many discussions ofcenter and periphery, metropolis and margin, West and East, Northand South, and Self and Other, the prevalence of border metaphorsspeaks to the need for a critical language that could explain how andwhy it is that individuals, groups, nations, and cultures seem to rubeach other raw with the friction of difference. When these phenomenaand contexts literally share borders, the geographical trope seemsplausible enough.U' But how eagerly should the discourse of borderskirmishes be embraced when attention turns to the function of Turco-German culture in the Federal Republic today, to a culture whoseperimeters can be neither easily defined nor readily localized? In theaphorisms cited earlier "beyond the language of the land," Senocakwrites, "Thinking becomes a house, in which people gather and joinforces, and from which they sing and shoot together."16 If critical atten-

13 The English anthology contains several essays that are not included in theGerman book that appeared with a similar title in 1992. The German versions ofsome of these essays, including "Which Myth Writes Me?" and "Beyond theLanguage of the Land" (see fn. 7 and fn. 8) have more recently been made availablein Zafer Senocak (2001).

14 Abschaum (1997) was filmed as Kanak Attack! (2000, directed by LarsBecker). 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 imaginedhouses and other social spaces of Turco-German culture, what insightsflash into view?

The "discordant notes from the edge of society" that compriseKanak Sprak derive from interviews conducted with young Turkish-German men whom, with few exceptions, neither a Turkish nor aGerman mainstream would accept. Two rappers are represented, asare a transsexual, a gigolo, a junkie in the process of shooting up, aprostitute, 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 oftransgression, 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 theway to "a new realism" (p, 17) and to dismantle the xenophilic myth ofthe loveable oppressed Turk, to decry the "'garbageman-prose,' whichdefines the Kanak as victim" (p. 12). For Zaimoglu "Turk" is a deroga-tory term reserved for those who are '''socially acceptable,'" capable ofintegration. This is a group that does not interest him in the least, andhe proudly proclaims, "Here the Kanak alone has the say" (p. 18).

Zaimoglu presents his cast of characters as a kind of underworld asubstratum of reality that reflects a deeper truth about contemporaryGerman society. This topography of above and below coincides with adiscourse of transgressive bodies that foregrounds-and sometimes priv-ileges-Dreck. Although this can refer to gross physical matter (such asshit or filth) or to a metaphorical "Dreck am Stecken" (dirty conscience),Zaimoglu's discourse links flesh, filth, dirt, shit, and history in curiousways. The interviewee from the flea market disco complains thatGermans 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 frafoder eher schon stinkiger abfall oder so ne blechdose, wo man wegkickt,und's scheppert wie krawall. Schlimm is, daf die alemannen dich nischt furne mude mark sehn, du bist gar nischt da, du kannst da antippen undsagen: mann, mich gibt's schon seit ner urlangen zeit, faf man an, daf dumerkst, da is fleisch und knochen, fur die biste gar nischt, luft und wenigerals schnuppe luft, du hast eben kein sektor, wo man dich ordnen konnt, dassieht 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 ofmeat or better yet stinky garbage or an old tin can that gets kickedaway and rattles like hell. The bad thing is that the alemannen don'tsee you, not even for a tired mark, you're just not there, you can tapthem on the shoulder and say: man, i've been around forever, grab ahold, get a grip, here's flesh and bones, to them you're nothin', air andless 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 makean outline with a piece of chalk. In the outline there's nothin' whenthey cart the cadaver away, you see a little stick man out of carpet.")

The gigolo, on the other hand, asserts that those Germans whom heservices 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 hemust keep from clinging to his soul: "sonst haltst du die sache mit del'liebe fur ne infamie" (otherwise you think that that love thing isinfamy) (p.72). Prompted by his recollections of a German "christenla-dy" (christ lady) who liked to call him "du mein schoner jude" (you mybeautiful jew) (p. 70), the gigolo expounds on his theory about Germanfantasies 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 grobinnen graben geschmissen oder zu asche verwandelt und weggefegt. Alsoracht sich's verscharrte fleisch und klumpt als geist und viele geister in denlebenden, 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 geschnapptvonner 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 rudein the ditch or switched to ash and swept away. So the meat dumpedon 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), wheremy 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 somethingup, only she doesn't know it, caught something from the corpse deepdown in the mud bad blood")

This theory is echoed by the poet in the book, who claims thatkanaken have "den blick fur das, was sich hinter den kulissen abspielt"(an eye for what goes on behind the scenes) (p, 110). "Solange diesesland uns den wirklichen eintritt verwehrt, werden wir die anomalieriund perversionen dieses Landes wie ein schwamm aufsaugen und dendreck ausspucken. Die beschmutzten kennen keine dsthetik" (As long asthis country denies us real entrance, we will suck up the anomalies andperversions 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 theabject in German society complicate any merely sociological notion ofspatial hierarchies. Complex histories are as much at stake as socialconflicts in these discursive palimpsests.

The gigolo is positioned both as being dreck and as articulating themeaning of dreck in contemporary German culture. Both functions relyon the gigolo inhabiting the subspace of the kanake that Zaimogluascribes to him. Senocak's literary reflections on Turco-German episte-mologies, on the other hand, make hardly any pointed references at allto being Turkish or German or to inhabiting any kind of delimitableTurkish or German space. This is not to say that Der Mann imUnterhemd 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 ofgross 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 victimnarrative 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 functionas elusive personae-"keine Person" (no person), "nur ein Bild" (just animage) ( p. 48). The body that might otherwise be said to occupy spaceis dissolved into less tangible but nonetheless visceral components. "Esbeginnt in der Haltlosigkeit der Nacht-die Umsetzung der Zeit inFleisch, die Auflosung des Fleisches in seine Bestandteile, Angst undLust" (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 anddesire) (p. 74). While fear and desire propel Senocak's tales, theseaffects cannot be attributed to individual characters, ethnic groups, ornational communities. Instead they function as ubiquitous but non-specific atmospheric elements that lend a disquieting texture to thespaces of the narrative.

Der Mann im. Unterhemd confounds the analytical imagination.Senocak writes against a facile notion of Turkish spaces in Germanhistory and culture, spaces that xenophobics and xenophilics all tooglibly demarcate as distinct from properly German spaces of the latetwentieth century. This is a book about the riddle of "invisibility" (p. 7),about the hidden nooks and crannies of cultural imagination. Thebook's many references to the bridges and canals of Berlin-and to themurders, suicides, and other sorts of deaths associated withthem-highlight structures that define urban spaces but also allowthose spaces to exceed their structural limits. The canals, we read, owethe dead "Gedachtnisgriiber" (memory graves) (p. 36).

Die Kanale aber tun so, als ware nichts passiert, als lagen noch heute nichtdie Spiegelbilder verzweifelter Gesichter auf ihren Wassern, den Rattensich ZUlli Frail anbietend. Aber auch Ratten konnen die Gcschichte nichttilgen. Sie nagen an den Korpern, nicht an ihren Schatten (p. 36).

(But the canals act as if nothing had happened, as if the mirrorimages of desperate faces were not lying on their waters, even today,offering themselves to the rats for food. But even rats cannot expungehistory. They gnaw on the bodies, not their shadows.)

The shadow that exceeds the body of the dead, the shadow that evenrats cannot devour, signifies a dilemma that is epistemological and his-torical. This is not about ethnic identity politics. This dilemma is howto tell transnational, transgenerational time. How does Senocak rendera transnational Turco-German history intelligible in such a way that 1)Turks in Germany are recognized as having history and 2) they are notseen as having only or even primarily an ethnic or national history?

Although none of the personae in these texts are characters in theconventional literary sense, two figures are attributed with familialgenealogies. The masochistic prostitute of 1932, whose morphine-addicted lover is one of the canal dead, murdered by brown shirts, hasa granddaughter who is a cane fetishist and Artaud admirer in the pre-

sent. Grandmother and granddaughter bear the same name, as doalmost all the named female personae in the text. The male persona ofthe writer has in one story an Ottoman grandfather who does his ownwriting in Arabic script on the streets of Istanbul and only laterretreats into "das kleinste und hinterste Zimmer ini Parterre desHauses" (the smallest and farthest room on the ground floor of thehouse) (p. 133). This dark and nearly windowless room is called "theblind room" by the children of the household. The grandson who willbecome the writer of the text plays at imitating his grandfather's scriptin 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 adultgrandson who inherits the notebooks inherits not just a room, but ahouse of words.

Both genealogies concern elusive, at times forbidden, fantasiesrather than predictable linear histories or discrete cultural traditions.It is on the level of the phantasmatic that these genealogies touch. Thesite of these encounters is invariably spatialized without the space ofthe phantasm being in any way delimited as national or ethnic. Thehouse of words that the writer inherits does not coincide with the actu-al family homestead in Istanbul. One piece begins, "Es ist eine dummeAngewohnheit von Schriftstellern, von dem Haus zu erziihlen, in demsie wohnen" (Writers have a dumb habit of talking about the house inwhich they live) (p. 23). A later text distinguishes between the writer'shouse of residence and "das verbrannte Haus in seinem Kopf' (theburned house in his head) (p. 78).

Such distinctions between referential and phantasmatic spaces ofhistory 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 Turkishcriminal element at the bottom of a spatial hierarchy in Berlin toyswith readerly notions of ethnic identity or sociological referentiality. Inthis 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-Germannarrator lives across the hall from a "Superdeutsche" (Super German)who speaks badly of the dark criminals who reside on the ground floorbeneath 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 theTurkish smugglers, the residents get progressively lighter.

In den oberen Etagen wohnen nur Weilie. Je hoher man steigt, desto weilierwerden sie. Unterm Dach wohnt ein Albinoehepaar (p. 28).

(Only whites live on the upper floors. The higher up you go, thewhiter 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 convincedthat they dream of raising donkeys in Berlin for a sausage factory.Here the narrator intervenes:

Die Goschafte der Dunklen sind die Traume der WeiBen und umgekchrt,dcnke ich mir. Die Phantasie ist cin windgcschiitzter Umschlagplatz furungedeckte Wechsel, ausgestellt auf ein Datum nach dem Tod desTraurners. Aber keine noch so kostspielige Sanierung wird die Farbordnungin unserem Haus vcrandern (p. 30).

(The business of the dark ones is the stuff of dreams for the whitesand vice versa, I think. Protected from the wind, fantasy is a tradingplace for illicit exchange, valid for a date after the death of the dream-er. But no renovation, no matter how expensive, will alter the colorscheme in our house.)

This house of words is a phantasm about phantasms. Yet I havetried to argue that Der Mann im Unterhemd is also about the spaces ofhistorical narrative. How can this be? Specific references to identifiablepersons or events in either German or Turkish history are infrequentand indirect. Although we encounter the German grandmother justbefore the onset of the Third Reich, the allusion to brown shirts hintsat a larger national history. Elsewhere the text refers to the nationalunification of 1990 as something that has driven real smugglers evenfarther underground, precisely because the language of secrets is trad-ed like a commodity on the open market (pp. 27-28). The Ottomangrandfather in Istanbul who bequeaths his notebooks to the writingpersona of the text suggests a historical divide of sorts between theOttoman Empire and the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923and Atatiirk's sweeping language reform that followed. The narratoralso invokes a more recent historical referent when he recalls a class-

mate disappeared by soldiers (p. 123), a riddle of invisibility that leadsthe narrator to reflect, "Ich begreife, wie etwas durch Verschwindenuiiich.st" ~I ~nderstand how something grows by disappearing) (p. 125).These minimal references to decisive phases of German and Turkishnational histories at best stake out a loose framework for conjuring thep~antasms 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 theurban, from island brothels to torture cellars, from thresholds to win-dows, bridges to stairs. His convoluted mapping of domestic and urbanspaces situates this work in a transnational history of modernity andmodermsm. As Anthony Vidler has remarked elsewhere:

the hou~e has provided a site for endless representations of haunting, dou-blmg, dismembering, and other terrors in literature and art. On anotherlevel, the labyrinthine spaces of the modern city have been construed as thesource of modern anxiety, from revolution and epidemic to phobia and alien-ation (1992, p. ix),

':hereas Vidler is concerned with the ways in which postmodernarchitecture strips the classical bourgeois body of its privileged place inconstructed spaces (p. xii), one could extrapolate from Vidler to suggestthat Senocak's phantasmatic architectures of transgression cannot beread reductively in terms of sociology, ethnicity, or national identities.The house of words that we move through here diverges significantlyfrom the more familiar trope of language as Heimat or homeland that

ha~ shaped much of the discussion on Turco-German literature to date.ThIS h~use of words is both particular and transnational. The ph an-tasmatio space of this German culture suggests analytical alternativesto t,he presumption of an all too rigid Turkish-German divide. Seno-

c~k ~ configuration of transnationalism is less about national and eth-~IC "I~enti~ies"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 theOther.

34 LESLIE A. ADELSON NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 35

-

REFERENCESAdelson, Leslie A. 1993. Making Bodies, Mahing History: Feminism

and German Identity. Lincoln and London: U. of Nebraska Press.2000a. "Thinking Beyond Between: A Manifesto," paper presentedat a conference entitled, "Where and What is Home in the 21stCentury?" [Wo und was ist Heimat im 21, Jahrhundert?"j convenedby the Haus del' Kulturen del' Welt [House of World CulturesJ inBerlin, June.2000b. "Touching Tales of Turks, Germans, and Jews: CulturalAlterity, Historical Narrative, and Literary Riddles for the 1990s,"New German Critique 80, pp. 93-124.2000c. "Coordinates of Orientation: An Introduction," in ZaferSenocak, Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics andCulture, 1990-1998 (trans. and ed. Leslie A. Adelson). Lincoln andLondon: U. of Nebraska Press, pp. xi-xxxvii.2001. "Against Between: A Manifesto," in Hassan, Salah andIftikhar Dadi (Eds.), Unpacking Europe: Towards a CriticalReading. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, pp. 244-55.2003. "Against Between: A Manifesto," in Cheesman, Tom andKarin E. Yesilada (Eds.), Zcfer Senocah: Cardiff: U. of Wales Press,pp. 130-43.2004 (forthcoming). "Migrants and Muses," in Wellbery, David E. etal. (Eds.), The New History of German Literature. Cambridge, MA:Harvard U. Press.

Cheesman, Tom. 2002. "Ak

36 LESLIE A. ADELSON

2000b. Tasa ve Kemige Yazilidir: Siirler (trans. Menekse Toprak).Istanbul: Iyi Seyler Yaymevi.2001. Zungenentfernung: Bericht aus der Quarantdnestation,Essays. Munich: Babel.

Senocak, Zafer and Bulent Tulay. 2000. "Germany-Home for Turks?" inAtlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture, 1990-1998. Lincoln and London: U. of Nebraska Press, pp. 1-9.

Tawada, Yoko. 1996. Talisman. Tubingen: Konkursbuch.Vidler, Anthony. 1992. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays ui the

Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT.Zaimoglu, Feridun. 1995. Kanak Sprak: 24 Miiitone vom Rande der

Gesellschaft. Hamburg: Rotbuch.1996. "sicarim suppkulturunuze, zuppelerl/Ich scheiBe auf eureSubkultur, ihr Schmocke!" in Holert, Tom and Mark Terkessidis(Eds.), Mainstream der Minderheiten: Pop in der Kontrollgesellsc-haft. Berlin/Amsterdam: Edition ID-Archiv, pp. 86-95.1997. Abschaum: Die wahre Geschichte von Ertan Ongun.Hamburg: Rotbuch.1998. Koppstof]: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft. Ham-burg: Europaische VerlagsanstaltlRotbuch.2002. German Amok. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch.

NOTICE TO CONTRIBUTORS

Manuscripts of articles and communications should be sent to:

Nadir Ozbek, Editor, NPT, Bogaziei Universitesi, Ataturk Enstitusu,Bebek, Istanbul, 80815 Turkey / e-mail: npt@boun.edu.tr

or in North America to:

Resat Kasaba, Editor, NPT, University of Washington, JSIS ThomsonDR-05, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.

NPT publishes manuscripts in English only. The text including foot no-tes and bibliography, should be double spaced. The first page of the ma-nuscript should contain: (i) the title; (ii) the nameis) and institutionalaffiliation(s) of the author'(s); (iii) an abstract of no more than 100words.

In-text references should be denoted by parentheses, with commas sepa-rating the author, year and-if needed-page number. Multiple referen-ces should be separated by a semicolon. This reference format should beused in footnotes as well. Example: (Said, 1979, p. 122, Kag,.tpbal?l,1986, pp. 490-2).The full details of the references should be listed only at the end of thetext in a separate section entitled REFERENCES. The author(s) shouldmake sure that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the names(years) in the text and those on this list. Sample formats: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 ofMiddle East Stu-dies, 18(4) November, pp. 485-499.COLLECTION: Benedict, Peter. 1976. "Aspects of Domestic Cycle in aTurkish Provincial Town," in Peristiany, Jean G. (Ed.), MediterraneanFamily Structures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 243-260.

sc000293a5sc000293a501sc000293a502sc000293a503sc000293a504sc000293a505sc000293a506sc000293a507sc000293a508sc000293a509sc000293a510sc000293a511