12 - Turkish-German fiction since the mid 1990s

Summary

By the mid 1990s, Turkish-German fiction, always more than the unsophisticated literature of labour migration in which guise it first appeared on the German literary scene, had become thematically and aesthetically at least as diverse and irreducible to ethnic generalisations as the Turkish-German population at large. At the inevitable risk of ethnic essentialism, ‘Turkish-German literature’ is taken here to mean texts by writers of Turkish origin significantly associated with Germany by birth, residence or citizenship, and published in German. This does not prescribe a given text's themes, techniques, registers or literary ambitions: some have clearly ethnic perspectives, others apparently avoid them completely; some are as easily consumed as the most lightweight popular reading, others are as stubbornly anti-hermeneutic as any in German literature. By the mid-1990s, this writing had left the ‘Pappkoffer’, the cardboard suitcase, emblem of the migrant worker's social exclusion and transitory status, firmly behind in favour of a striking plurality of themes and forms and a polyphony of narrative voices, only some of which can be examined here. It is a literature, too, which lends itself to being viewed through the lenses of a wide range of contemporary theories, which this chapter can only touch on.

The very ambiguity of Turkish-German writing, at once inside the (German) nation, ‘outside the nation’ and superseding the nation, is its potential strength.